Killing Democracy One File at a Time: Justice Department Loosens FBI Domestic Spy Guidelines

While the Justice Department is criminally inept, or worse, when it comes to prosecuting corporate thieves who looted, and continue to loot, trillions of dollars as capitalism's economic crisis accelerates, they are extremely adept at waging war on dissent.

Last week, The New York Times disclosed that the FBI "is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention."

Under "constitutional scholar" Barack Obama's regime, the Bureau will revise its "Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide." The "new rules," Charlie Savage writes, will give agents "more latitude" to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited "signs of criminal or terrorist activity."

As the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) recently pointed out, "When presented with opportunities to protect constitutional rights, our federal government has consistently failed us, with Congress repeatedly rubber-stamping the executive authority to violate civil liberties long protected by the Constitution."

While true as far it goes, it should be apparent by this late date that no branch of the federal government, certainly not Congress or the Judiciary, has any interest in limiting Executive Branch power to operate lawlessly, in secret, and without any oversight or accountability whatsoever.

Just last week, The New York Times revealed that the Bush White House used the CIA "to get" academic critic Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog was highly critical of U.S. imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The former CIA officer and counterterrorism official who blew the whistle and exposed the existence of a Bush White House "enemies list,", Glenn L. Carle, told the Times, "I couldn't believe this was happening. People were accepting it, like you had to be part of the team."

Ironically enough, the journalist who broke that story, James Risen, is himself a target of an Obama administration witchhunt against whistleblowers. Last month, Risen was issued a grand jury subpoena that would force him to reveal the sources of his 2006 book, State of War.

These latest "revisions" will expand the already formidable investigative powers granted the Bureau by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

Three years ago, The Washington Post informed us that the FBI's new "road map" permits agents "to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities" and can pursue "each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization."

Accordingly, FBI "assessments" (the precursor to a full-blown investigation) already lowered by the previous administration will, under Obama, be lowered still further in a bid to "keep us safe"--from our constitutional rights.

The Mukasey guidelines, which created the "assessment" fishing license handed agents the power to probe people and organizations "proactively" without a shred of evidence that an individual or group engaged in unlawful activity.

In fact, rather than relying on a reasonable suspicion or allegations that a person is engaged in criminal activity, racial, religious or political profiling based on who one is or on one's views, are the basis for secretive "assessments."

Needless to say, the presumption of innocence, the bedrock of a republican system of governance based on the rule of law, like the right to privacy, becomes one more "quaint" notion in a National Security State. In its infinite wisdom, the Executive Branch has cobbled together an investigative regime that transforms anyone, and everyone, into a suspect; a Kafkaesque system from which there is no hope of escape.

Under Bushist rules, snoops were required to open an inquiry "before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database," the Times reported. In other words, somewhere in the dank, dark bowels of the surveillance bureaucracy a paper trail exists that just might allow you to find out your rights had been trampled.

But our "transparency" regime intends to set the bar even lower. Securocrats will now be allowed to rummage through commercial databases "without making a record about their decision."

The ACLU's Michael German, a former FBI whistleblower, told the Times that "claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse."

Such abuses are already widespread. In 2009 for example, the ACLU pointed out that "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as 'low level terrorism'."

As I reported in 2009, citing a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Bureau's massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), is a data-mining Frankenstein that contains more "searchable records" than the Library of Congress.

EFF researchers discovered that "In addition to storing vast quantities of data, the IDW provides a content management and data mining system that is designed to permit a wide range of FBI personnel (investigative, analytical, administrative, and intelligence) to access and analyze aggregated data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse."

Accordingly, "the FBI intends to increase its use of the IDW for 'link analysis' (looking for links between suspects and other people--i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and to start 'pattern analysis' (defining a 'predictive pattern of behavior' and searching for that pattern in the IDW's datasets before any criminal offence is committed--i.e. pre-crime)."

Once new FBI guidelines are in place, and congressional grifters have little stomach to challenge government snoops as last month's disgraceful "debate" over renewing three repressive provisions of the USA Patriot Act attest, "low-level" inquiries will be all but impossible to track, let alone contest.

Despite a dearth of evidence that dissident groups or religious minorities, e.g., Muslim-Americans have organized violent attacks in the heimat, the new guidelines will permit the unlimited deployment of "surveillance squads" that "surreptitiously follow targets."

In keeping with the Bureau's long-standing history of employing paid informants and agents provocateurs such as Brandon Darby and a host of others, to infiltrate and disrupt organizations and foment violence, rules governing "'undisclosed participation' in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant" will also be loosened.

The Times reports that the revised manual "clarifies a description of what qualifies as a "sensitive investigative matter"--investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars."

According to the Times, the manual "clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs."

In other words, if you don't have the deep pockets of a corporate media organization to defend you from a government attack, you're low-hanging fruit and fair game, which of course, makes a mockery of guarantees provided by the First Amendment.

As I reported last month, with requests for "National Security Letters" and other opaque administrative tools on the rise, the Obama administration has greatly expanded already-repressive spy programs put in place by the previous government.

Will data extracted by the Bureau's Investigative Data Warehouse or its new Data Integration and Visualization System retain a wealth of private information gleaned from commercial and government databases on politically "suspect" individuals for future reference? Without a paper trail linking a person to a specific inquiry you'd have no way of knowing.

Even should an individual file a Freedom of Information Act request demanding the government turn over information and records pertaining to suspected wrongdoing by federal agents, as Austin anarchist Scott Crow did, since the FBI will not retain a record of preliminary inquiries, FOIA will be hollowed-out and become, yet another, futile and meaningless exercise.

And with the FBI relying on secret legal memos issued by the White House Office of Legal Counsel justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during "national security" investigations, political and privacy rights are slowly being strangled.

The Fire This Time. Pentagon Ramps-Up Cyberwar Plans

As the Obama administration expands Bush-era surveillance programs over the nation's electronic communications' infrastructure, recent media reports provide tantalizing hints of Pentagon plans for waging cyberwar against imperialism's geopolitical rivals.

On May 31, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Pentagon now asserts "that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force."

One sound bite savvy wag told journalist Siobhan Gorman, "if you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."

Also on May 31, The Washington Post reported that America's shadow warriors have "developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary's critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare."

That "classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months," with the approval of "other agencies, including the CIA." Post reporter Ellen Nakashima informed us that this "sensitive program ... forms part of the Pentagon's set of approved weapons or 'fires' that can be employed against an enemy."

Not to be left in the dust by their U.S. and Israeli allies, The Guardian reported that the "UK is developing a cyber-weapons programme that will give ministers an attacking capability to help counter growing threats to national security from cyberspace."

Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey told The Guardian that "action in cyberspace will form part of the future battlefield" and will become "an integral part of the country's armoury."

It appears that Western military establishments are in the grips of a full-blown cyber panic or, more likely, beating the war drums as they roll out new product lines with encouragement from corporate partners eager to make billions developing new weapons systems for their respective political masters.

And why not? As Bloomberg News reported back in 2008, both Lockheed Martin and Boeing "are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace."

Bloomberg averred that military contractors and the wider defense industry are "eager to capture a share of a market that may reach $11 billion in 2013," and "have formed new business units to tap increased spending to protect U.S. government computers from attack."

Linda Gooden, executive vice president of Lockheed's Information Systems & Global Services unit told Bloomberg, "The whole area of cyber is probably one of the faster-growing areas" of the U.S. budget. "It's something that we're very focused on."

As part of the new strategy to be released later this month, the Post reports that the military needs "presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later."

However, when it comes to espionage or other activities loudly denounced as illegal intrusions into the sacrosanct world of government and corporate crime and corruption, the "military does not need such approval."

We're told such "benign" activities "include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate."

"Military cyber-warriors," Nakashima writes, "can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses," an "unnamed military official" told the Post.

But wait, aren't those precisely the types of covert actions decried by politicians, media commentators and assorted experts when they're directed against the heimat? Is there a double standard here? Well, of course there is!

Along with a flurry of Defense Department leaks designed to ratchet-up the fear factor and lay the groundwork for billions more from Congress for giant defense firms servicing the Pentagon's unquenchable thirst for ever-deadlier weapons systems--cyber, or otherwise--"threat inflation" scaremongering described by researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins in their essential paper, Loving the Cyber Bomb?, take center stage.

Just last week, former Democratic party congressional hack, current CIA Director and Obama's nominee to lead the Defense Department, Leon Panetta, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples America's electrical grid and its security and financial systems," The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Cripple the financial system? Why greedy banksters and corporate bottom-feeders seem to be doing a splendid job of it on their own without an assist from shadowy Russian hackers, the People's Liberation Army or LulzSec pranksters!

However, the Pentagon's propaganda blitz (courtesy of a gullible or complicitous corporate media, take your pick) is neither meant to inform nor educate the public but rather, to conceal an essential fact: the United States is already engaged in hostile cyber operations against their geopolitical rivals--and allies--and have been doing so since the 1990s, if not earlier, as journalist Nicky Hager revealed when he blew the lid off NSA's Echelon program in a 1997 piece for CovertAction Quarterly.

Botnets and Root Kits: What the HBGary Hack Revealed

When The Wall Street Journal informed readers that the "Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy ... represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military," what the Journal didn't disclose is that the Defense Department is seeking the technological means to do just that.

Implying that hacking might soon constitute an "act of war" worthy of a "shock and awe" campaign, never mind that attributing an attack by a criminal or a state is no simple matter, where would the Pentagon draw the line?

After all as The Guardian reported, with the "underground world of computer hackers ... so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service," will some enterprising criminal acting as a catspaw for his/her U.S. handlers, gin-up an incident thereby creating Panetta's "cyber Pearl Harbor" as a pretext for a new resource war?

While fanciful perhaps, if recent history is any guide to future American actions (can you say "Iraq" and "weapons of mass destruction"), such fabrications would have very deadly consequences for those on the wrong side of this, or some future, U.S. administration.

But we needn't speculate on what the Pentagon might do; let's turn our attention instead to what we know they're doing already.

Back in February, The Tech Herald revealed that the private security firms HBGary Federal, HBGary, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies were contacted by the white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams on behalf of corporate clients, Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber on Commerce, to "develop a strategic plan of attack against Wikileaks."

The scheme concocted by "Team Themis" was to have included a dirty tricks campaign targeting journalists, WikiLeaks supporters, their families and the whistleblowing group itself through "cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics."

But when the CEO of HBGary Federal boasted to the Financial Times that he had penetrated the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous, the group struck back and pwned ("owned") HBGary's allegedly "secure" servers, seizing a treasure trove of some 70,000 internal emails and other documents, posting them on the internet.

As I reported earlier this year, Team Themis looked like a smart bet. After all, HBGary and the other firms touted themselves as "experts in threat intelligence and open source analysis" with a focus on "Information Operations (INFOOPS); influence operations, social media exploitation, new media development."

Palantir, which was fronted millions of dollars by the CIA's venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel, bragged that they could deliver "the only platform that can be used at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels within the US Intelligence, Defense, and Law Enforcement Communities," and that they can draw "in any type of data, such as unstructured message traffic, structured identity data, link charts, spreadsheets, SIGINT, ELINT, IMINT and documents."

In other words, these firms subsisted almost entirely on U.S. government contracts and, in close partnership with mega-giant defense companies such as General Dynamics, SRA International, ManTech International and QinetiQ North America, were actively building cyber weapons for the Defense Department.

In the aftermath of the HBGary sting, investigative journalist Nate Anderson published an essential piece for Ars Technica which described how HBGary and other firms were writing "backdoors for the government."

"In 2009," Anderson wrote, "HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as 'Task B.' The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge."

HBGary's CEO Greg Hoglund's "special interest," Anderson reported, "was in all-but-undetectable computer 'rootkits,' programs that provide privileged access to a computer's innermost workings while cloaking themselves even from standard operating system functions. A good rootkit can be almost impossible to remove from a running machine--if you could even find it in the first place."

The secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence published HBGary's 2008 paper, Windows Rootkit Analysis Report. Amongst the nuggets buried within its 243 pages we learned that Hoglund suggested to his secret state and corporate clients that "combining deployment of a rootkit with a BOT makes for a very stealth piece of malicious software."

Readers should recall that back in 2008, an article published in the influential Armed Forces Journal advocated precisely that.

Col. Charles W. Williamson III's piece, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," advocated "building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic."

It would appear that the project envisioned by HBGary and General Dynamics would combine the stealthy features of a rootkit along with the destructive capabilities of a botnet.

One can only presume that defense firms are building malware and other attack tools for the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Agency and USCYBERCOM, and that they constitute the short list of "approved weapons or 'fires'" alluded to by The Washington Post.

A 2009 HBGary contract proposal released by Public Intelligence, DoD Cyber Warfare Support Work Statement, disclosed that the "contract will include efforts to examine the architecture, engineering, functionality, interface and interoperability of Cyber Warfare systems, services and capabilities at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, to include all enabling technologies."

The firm proposed an "operational exercise design and construction," as well as "operations and requirements analysis, concept formulation and development, feasibility demonstrations and operational support."

"This will include," the proposal averred, "efforts to analyze and engineer operational, functional and system requirements in order to establish national, theater and force level architecture and engineering plans, interface and systems specifications and definitions, implementation, including hardware acquisition for turnkey systems."

Under terms of the contract, the company will "perform analyses of existing and emerging Operational and Functional Requirements at the force, theater, Combatant Commands (COCOM) and national levels to support the formulation, development and assessment of doctrine, strategy, plans, concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques and procedures in order to provide the full spectrum of Cyber Warfare and enabling capabilities to the warfighter."

In fact, during an early roll-out of the Pentagon's cyber panic product line five years ago, Dr. Lani Kass, a former Israeli Air Force major and acolyte of neocon war criminals Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and who directs the Air Force Cyber Space Task Force under Bush and Obama, submitted a provocative proposal.

During a 2006 presentation titled, A Warfighting Domain: Cyberspace, Kass asserted that "the electromagnetic spectrum is the maneuver space. Cyber is the United States' Center of Gravity--the hub of all power and movement, upon which everything else depends. It is the Nation's neural network." Kass averred that "Cyber superiority is the prerequisite to effective operations across all strategic and operational domains--securing freedom from attack and freedom to attack."

Accordingly, she informed her Air Force audience that "Cyber favors the offensive," and that the transformation of a militarized internet into a "warfighting domain" will be accomplished by "Strategic Attack directly at enemy centers of gravity; Suppression of Enemy Cyber Defenses; Offensive Counter Cyber; Defensive Counter Cyber; Interdiction."

In the years since that presentation such plans are well underway.

In another leaked file, Public Intelligence disclosed that HBGary, again in partnership with General Dynamics, are developing "a software tool, which provides the user a command line interface, that will enable single file, or full directory exfiltration over TCP/IP."

Called "Task Z," General Dynamics "requested multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options, and this quote contains options for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)."

As I reported last year, the Obama administration will soon be seeking legislation that would force telecommunications companies to redesign their system and information networks to more readily facilitate internet spying.

And, as the administration builds upon and quietly expands previous government programs that monitor the private communications of the American people, The New York Times revealed that our "change" regime will demand that software and communication providers build backdoors accessible to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Such "backdoors" will enable spooks trolling "encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype" the means "to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages."

These are precisely the technological "fixes" which firms like HBGary, General Dynamics and presumably other defense contractors are actively building for their secret state security partners.

The Fire This Time

While denouncing China, Russia and other capitalist rivals over cyber espionage and alleged hacking escapades, the deployment of digital weapons of mass destruction against selected adversaries, Iran for one, is an essential feature of Pentagon targeting profiles and has now been fully integrated into overall U.S. strategic military doctrine.

This is hardly the stuff of wild speculation considering that evidence suggests that last year's attack on Iran's civilian nuclear program via the highly-destructive Stuxnet worm was in all probability a joint U.S.-Israeli operation as The New York Times disclosed.

Nor should we forget, that U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), the Pentagon satrapy directed by NSA Director, Gen. Keith Alexander, is "a sub-unified command subordinate to U. S. Strategic Command," the lead agency charged with running space operations, information warfare, missile defense, global command, control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), global strike and strategic deterrence; the trigger finger on America's first-strike nuclear arsenal.

Will the next crisis trigger an onslaught against an adversary's civilian infrastructure? The Washington Post informs us that an unnamed U.S. official acknowledged that "'the United States is actively developing and implementing' cyber-capabilities 'to deter or deny a potential adversary the ability to use its computer systems' to attack the United States."

However, while the "collateral effects" of such an attack are claimed to be "unpredictable," one can be sure that civilian populations on the receiving end of a Pentagon cyber attack will suffer mass casualties as water and electrical systems go offline, disease and panic spreads and social infrastructures collapse.

Welcome to America's brave new world of high-tech war crimes coming soon to a theater near you (3D glasses optional).

They Call This Justice. Supreme Court Gives CIA Torturers, Boeing a Free Pass

On May 16, in another shameless capitulation to the Executive Branch, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lawsuit brought by victims of CIA torture, handing Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of defense giant Boeing, a free pass for services "rendered" as the Agency's booking agent.

In 2007, the American Civil Liberties filed a landmark lawsuit, Mohamed et. al. vs. Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc., on behalf of five victims of the Bush administration's so-called "extraordinary rendition" kidnap and torture program.

The five men, Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed Agiza, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah and Bisher al-Rawi, claimed with copious evidence to back their assertions, that their "rendition" and torture was facilitated by the Boeing subsidiary.

Not a single plaintiff was ever charged with a so-called "terrorism" offense let alone convicted of a crime in open court. That didn't stop America's shadow warriors from kidnapping, drugging and then whisking them away--aboard aircraft provided by Jeppesen--to CIA "black sites" or the dungeons of close U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East.

In 2006, the firm's filthy role in CIA torture programs was exposed by investigative journalist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

Indeed, one Bob Overby, Jeppesen's managing director, said during a breakfast for new hires in San Jose, Calif., "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights--you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."

Technical writer Sean Belcher blew the whistle on the firm and told Mayer that Overby, extolling the virtues of the corporatist bottom line, said: "It certainly pays well. They"--the CIA--"spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about cost. What they have to get done, they get done."

Another recipient of the CIA tender mercies was Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, who was kidnapped while on vacation in 2004 by the Agency after attempting to cross the border between Serbia and Macedonia.

According to The New Yorker, Masri charged in court papers that "Macedonian authorities turned him over to a C.I.A. rendition team. Then, he said, masked figures stripped him naked, shackled him, and led him onto a Boeing 737 business jet."

"Flight plans, Mayer reported, "prepared by Jeppesen show that from Skopje, Macedonia, the 737 flew to Baghdad, where it had military clearance to land, and then on to Kabul. On board, Masri has said, he was chained to the floor and injected with sedatives. After landing, he was put in the trunk of a car and driven to a building where he was placed in a dank cell. He spent the next four months there, under interrogation."

The CIA claimed it was all a case of "mistaken identity" when he was finally released, and dumped penniless, along the side of a road in the former Yugoslavia.

Mayer disclosed that after delivering their human cargo up to torture, "the American flight crew fared better than their passenger. Documents show that after the 737 delivered Masri to the Afghan prison it flew to the resort island of Majorca, where, for two nights, crew members stayed at a luxury hotel, at taxpayers' expense."

As a corporate entity directly profiting from the CIA's torture programs by planning and facilitating Agency ghost flights, Jeppesen bears equal responsibility for serious breeches of U.S. and international law. As a co-conspirator with the CIA, Jeppesen was complicitous in the Agency's illegal kidnapping and disappearance of "terrorism" suspects into CIA black sites across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

While American "justice" is now a euphemism for impunity for the ruling rich and a maximum security prison cell for the poor, others are far less squeamish when it comes to pointing the finger, and naming names.

As the Council of Europe reported back in 2007, "The Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee now considers it factually established that secret detention centres operated by the CIA have existed for some years in Poland and Romania, though not ruling out the possibility that secret CIA detentions may also have occurred in other Council of Europe member states."

The Council "earnestly deplores the fact that the concepts of state secrecy or national security are invoked by many governments (United States, Poland, Romania, 'the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia', Italy and Germany, as well as the Russian Federation in the Northern Caucasus) to obstruct judicial and/or parliamentary proceedings aimed at ascertaining the responsibilities of the executive in relation to grave allegations of human rights violations."

"The Committee also stresses," human rights rapporteur Dick Marty wrote, "the need to rehabilitate and compensate victims of such violations. Information as well as evidence concerning the civil, criminal or political liability of the state's representatives for serious violations of human rights must not be considered as worthy of protection as state secrets."

Not that any of this mattered to the U.S. government. Shortly after the ACLU's suit was filed, Bush's Justice Department intervened, claiming that the case could not go forward and asserted the "state secrets privilege," arguing that evidence presented by the plaintiffs in court detailing their horrific treatment would undermine U.S. "national security."

Never mind that these programs were hardly secret and had been disclosed by multiple investigations by journalists and human rights organizations. Shortly after taking office in 2009, this position was defended by Barack Obama's discredited "change" regime, claiming that the entire case was a "state secret."

During arguments before the Ninth Circuit in early 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter told the court in a thinly-veiled warning that "judges shouldn't play with fire."

However, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said during oral arguments "that the supposedly ultra-secret rendition program is widely known." Wizner noted "that Sweden recently awarded $450,000 in damages to one of the plaintiffs, Ahmed Agiza, for helping the CIA transport him to Egypt, where he is still being held and allegedly has been tortured."

"The notion that you have to close your eyes and ears to what the whole world knows is absurd," Wizner told the court.

Winding its way through the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel overturned the District Court's dismissal of the suit, ruling that the government cannot dismiss the case and that the "state secrets privilege" can only be invoked after specific evidence is presented. The three-judge panel went further however, and stated forcefully in their opinion:

At base, the government argues ... that state secrets form the subject matter of a lawsuit, and therefore require dismissal, any time a complaint contains allegations, the truth or falsity of which has been classified as secret by a government official. The district court agreed, dismissing the case exclusively because it "involves allegations about [secret] conduct by the CIA." This sweeping characterization of the "very subject matter" bar has no logical limit--it would apply equally to suits by US citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on US soil, not just abroad. According to the government's theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.

But there's the rub: the secret state had no intention of ever presenting evidence that the plaintiffs' treatment was "legal," and in fact, sought to cover their tracks and those of their defense industry partners in the hope of completely erasing this case, and others, including those involving the government's illegal warrantless wiretapping programs which most certainly "cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny," effectively expunging evidence of government crime from the public record.

Undaunted, the Obama administration appealed the decision before a full panel of 11 judges, and in September 2010, that panel reversed the Ninth Circuit's earlier ruling by a 6-5 vote.

Last December, the ACLU petitioned the Supreme Court to review the lower court's decision dismissing the lawsuit, but the Court declined.

"With today's decision, Ben Wizner, the litigation director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a press release, that "the Supreme Court has refused once again to give justice to torture victims and to restore our nation's reputation as a guardian of human rights and the rule of law."

Decrying the court's refusal to review the case against Jeppesen, Wizner said that "to date, every victim of the Bush administration's torture regime has been denied his day in court. But while the torture architects and their enablers have escaped the judgment of the courts, they will not escape the judgment of history."

Last month's dismissal of the ACLU's petition is all the more ironic considering that the Court, in an 8-1 ruling, permits police to conduct searches of private homes without benefit of obtaining a warrant if they believe an "exigent [emergency] circumstance" prevails.

In other words, we're to meekly submit to the further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections and can no longer seek relief from the courts simply because police, whom we know never lie or frame criminal defendants, have reason to "suspect" that illegal behavior is taking place behind closed doors!

But as the World Socialist Web Site points out, "a host of recent decisions, all of which in one way or another purport to show 'deference' to the executive, whether for reasons of 'national security,' 'state secrets,' or the 'exigencies' of police work, the Supreme Court is abandoning any effort to restrain the exercise of executive power."

Socialist critic Tom Carter writes, "These decisions, taken together, effectively relegate a US judge to the same role as a judge in a police state, who functions merely as an after-the-fact rubber stamp for executive decisions," and "should be taken as a warning of things to come."

While the three Ninth Circuit judges who slapped down the Obama administration's spurious claim of "state secrets" in the Mohamed vs. Jeppesen case believe that "the Founders of this Nation knew well ... arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a gross and notorious act of despotism," it should be abundantly clear by now that America's ruling class has no interest in defending basic democratic rights as the drift towards a police state under Bush and Obama has become a repressive tsunami.

(Image courtesy of Alex Constantine's Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia)

Back from the Dead: The Internet 'Kill Switch'

The American author William Faulkner once wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

And like a horde of flesh-eating zombies shuffling out of a parking garage to feast on what's left of our freedoms, the Obama administration has promised to revive a proposal thought dead by most: the internet "kill switch."

On May 12, the White House released a 52-page document outlining administration plans governing cybersecurity. The bill designates the Department of Homeland Security as the "lead agency" with authority to initiate "countermeasures" to protect critical infrastructure from malicious attacks.

But as with other aspects of U.S. policy, from waging aggressive wars to conducting covert actions overseas, elite policy planners at the Pentagon and at nominally civilian agencies like DHS hide offensive plans and operations beneath layers of defensive rhetoric meant to hoodwink the public.

The term "countermeasure" is described by the White House as "automated actions with defensive intent to modify or block data packets associated with electronic or wire communications, internet traffic, program code, or other system traffic transiting to or from or stored on an information system for the purpose of protecting the information system from cybersecurity threats, conducted on an information system or information systems owned or operated by or on behalf of the party to be protected or operated by a private entity acting as a provider of electronic communication services, remote computing services, or cybersecurity services to the party to be protected." (Section 1. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Authority, May 12, 2011, p. 1)

In other words, the proposal would authorize DHS and presumably other federal partners like the National Security Agency, wide latitude to monitor, "modify or block" data packets (information and/or communications) deemed a threat to national security.

It isn't a stretch to conclude that such "automated actions" would be predicated on the deployment of systems such as "Einstein 3" or the NSA's top secret "Perfect Citizen" program throughout the nation's electronic communications architecture.

NSA's Einstein 3 project we're told is designed to prevent malicious attacks on government systems and, controversially, private sector networks. Using NSA hardware and the signatures of previous attacks as a road map, Einstein 3 routes the internet traffic "of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks," The Washington Post reported.

According to multiple media reports, AT&T;, one of the Agency's private partners in Bush and now, Obama administration warrantless wiretapping programs variously known as "Stellar Wind," "Pioneer," its data-mining portion and "Pinwale," the agency's secret email collection program, was the Bush administration's choice to test the system. In fact, before agreeing to participate in the pilot project AT&T; attorneys sought assurances from the Justice Department "that it would bear no liability for participating," the Post averred.

Since 2009, under Obama, Einstein 3 testing has proceeded apace.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal revealed that NSA and a private corporate partner, the giant defense firm Raytheon, were standing up a new program known as "Perfect Citizen."

According to investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman, the black project "would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack."

An email from a Raytheon insider that the Journal obtained recounted that "the overall purpose of the [program] is our Government...feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security." It concluded with this ominous warning: "Perfect Citizen is Big Brother."

While NSA initially downplayed serious threats to privacy, claiming that "Perfect Citizen" is no more intrusive than traffic cameras on a busy street, The Register cautioned that "mission creep" was a distinct possibility, given that sensitive, private information could migrate "outside an infrastructure-security context."

How would such programs and proposals play out in the real world?

According to Government Computer News "proposed cybersecurity legislation released by the Obama administration earlier this month is similar to legislation now pending in the Senate, but it does not contain the explicit emergency powers contained in the bill introduced by Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan M. Collins (R-Maine)."

Pretty good so far? Not so fast! GCN reports, "instead, it seems to rely on a 77-year-old law that gives the president broad authority to shut down communications networks."

Got that? There's no need for a legislative fix to expand the president's power to pull the plug, only in the event of an unspecified "national emergency" of course, since the White House already possesses the means to do just that, the Communications Act of 1934.

The Act, amended in 1996, specifically empowers the president "during the continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged," control over media under circumstances determined by the Executive Branch. Accordingly, Section 706 [47 U.S.C. 606] authorizes the president "if he finds it necessary for the national defense and security, to direct that such communications as in his judgment may be essential to the national defense and security shall have preference or priority with any carrier subject to this Act."

But the law goes further and in fact authorizes the president "whenever in his judgment the public interest requires, to employ the armed forces of the United States to prevent any such obstruction or retardation of communication."

This would seem to open the door even further to intrusions into domestic affairs by the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, which after all are Pentagon combat support agencies, charged with carrying out electronic communications warfare.

In the event of a declared "national" or, in today's language, a "cyber emergency," the president "may suspend or amend, for such time as he may see fit, the rules and regulations applicable to any or all stations within the jurisdiction of the United States as prescribed by the Commission, and may cause the closing of any station for radio communication and the removal therefrom of its apparatus and equipment, or he may authorize the use or control of any such station and/or its apparatus and equipment by any department of the Government under such regulations as he may prescribe, upon just compensation to the owners."

Substitute the word "internet" for "radio" and "network" for "station" and it becomes all-too-clear that presidential authority for an internet "kill switch" is already a reality.

And in the context of America's "War on Terror," described by war criminal and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a conflict having "no known metrics" to determine its endpoint, "war time" powers to be exercised solely at the discretion of the president over the nation's communications infrastructure too, seem to be virtually limitless and without constraints imposed either by Congress or the federal judiciary as recent "state secrets" rulings readily attest.

Right-wing senator Collins cried foul, saying that Executive Branch authority under the Communications Act "is far broader than the authority in our bill," claiming that legislation she and neocon hawk Lieberman introduced would "carefully constrain" the president's power over the internet.

Sure, just as the War Powers Act "constrained" the president from carrying out preemptive wars against countries which haven't attacked the United States but have the singular misfortune of possessing valuable resources (can you say oil, Iraq and Libya), lusted after by American multinationals.

During last week's hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, outgoing DHS Undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, Philip R. Reitinger, told the Committee that the administration "would use the authority that [1934 law] brings to bear in the right way."

"Trust us," top Obama administration officials explain. We wouldn't do anything that threatens the free flow of information, not to mention privacy rights or civil liberties, would we?

This from a White House that's expanded the already formidable, and illegal, warrantless wiretapping programs of the previous regime while continuing to withhold secret legal memos cobbled together by the Office of Legal Counsel; memos justifying everything from the seizure of personal records to electronic communications by various intelligence fiefdoms under the Patriot Act, as I reported last week.

Reitinger, who'll leave his post next month, reportedly to "spend more time with his family," or more likely, before taking a plum position with one of the innumerable defense firms staking out the lucrative cybersecurity market, said that White House authority during a "cyber emergency," say a sudden revolt by outraged citizens against capitalist depredations like the ones which shook Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year or are currently exploding across Spain are "one of the areas that would need to be negotiated," GCN reported.

Of course, congressional grifters are not talking about political upheavals per se, although the response by repressive governments such as Egypt to citizens clamoring for more rights, no doubt with encouragement by certain three-lettered U.S. agencies, helped the former Mubarak regime reach their decision to flip the switch and cut off cell phone and internet access for a time.

As Washington's cyber scare gathers steam, one of the "more controversial elements of any new cybersecurity law," the right-wing Washington Times avers, are "what powers the president should have over the Internet in the event of a catastrophic attack on vital U.S. assets."

"Clearly, if something significant were to happen, the American people would expect us to be able to respond and respond appropriately," Reitinger said.

"Experts," according to the Washington Times, "say that in the event of a major cyber-attack, authorities might have only a short time to respond and might need to temporarily divert some Internet traffic or take it off-line."

Wringing her hands, Collins said she was "baffled" by administration plans to rely on the 1934 law.

Reitinger said that while presidential powers embedded in the Communications Act "were not designed with the current environment that we have in mind," he insisted "there are authorities there."

And where "authorities" exist, you can be certain that the National Security State will find the means to use them, or invent new ones, in secret and without disclosing the fact either to Congress or the public.

During hearings before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet, Obama administration officials "faced pointed questions" over White House proposals, the National Journal reported.

"Lawmakers," reporter Josh Smith wrote, "worried that the administration's plan provides too much government control in cybersecurity issues."

In a replay of the repulsive FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the White House plan "would grant legal immunity to companies who cooperate with federal cyber investigations." North Carolina Democrat Melvin Watt was skeptical, saying that Obama's proposal was similar to FAA's retroactive immunity clause that handed out get-out-of-jail-free cards to telecom companies that collaborated with the secret state's driftnet spying operations.

Watt said, "these companies could then do something that's unconstitutional just because you say it's not. People get very uncomfortable with the idea that the government can just call up someone, demand information, and then provide them immunity."

And under the proposal, the federal courts would be barred from determining whether or not to grant immunity to cooperating firms accused of handing over the personal details of their customers to the government; that too, would be left to the Executive Branch.

As I have written many times (most recently here, here and here), the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, along with private partners who stand to make billions hyping the cyber threat, are driving U.S. policy.

During recent hearings, Richard J. Butler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy said that the "Defense Department is sharing cybersecurity information, capabilities and expertise with the Homeland Security Department," the Armed Forces Press Service reported.

According to Butler, cybersecurity requires a "whole government approach," and that the "Defense and Homeland Security departments already are doing that," citing last fall's Memorandum of Agreement between NSA and DHS that "laid the foundation for the collaboration ... to share operational planning and technical development."

"Since then," Butler said, "the collaboration has grown into joint coordination at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., and the sharing of information, capabilities, and employees."

Just how real is the threat?

In an essential paper published last month, Loving the Cyber Bomb?, George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins wrote that despite a "steady drumbeat of alarmist rhetoric coming out of Washington about potential catastrophic cyber threats," the rhetoric of "'cyber doom' employed by proponents of increased federal intervention, however, lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public."

"As a result," Brito and Watkins averred, "the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War."

"Additionally," the researchers cautioned, "a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well."

"The official consensus," Brito and Watkins wrote, "seems to be that the United States is facing a grave and immediate threat that only quick federal intervention can address."

As we have seen, most recently during rushed congressional votes that reauthorized expiring sections of the constitution-shredding USA Patriot Act, the Executive Branch will do everything in its power to continue hyping unverified threats, thus concealing just how far we've traveled along the road towards a National Surveillance State.

After all, as Wired reported last week, if "you think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens ... Sen. Ron Wyden says it's worse than you know."

The Oregon Democrat, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told journalist Spencer Ackerman that there's "a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says."

During testimony last March before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, the Justice Department's top national security official, Todd Hinnen, told congressional grifters that Section 215, the "business records" provision "has been used to obtain driver's license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like."

However, Hinnen testified that Section 215 has "also been used to support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations, on which this committee and others have been separately briefed," behind closed doors.

Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department will comment on what that secret interpretation of the law might entail. However, security and privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian averred that the secret state's "sensitive collection program" is likely "related to warrantless, massive scale collection of geo-location information from cellular phones."

"Clearly," Soghoian writes, "there are many unanswered questions--we do not know what kind of data collection is occurring, and why it is problematic enough to cause four senators to speak up publicly. However, given that four senators have now spoken up, this strongly suggests that there is something seriously rotten going on."

Commenting on the rush to pass Patriot Act legislation, CNET News investigative journalist Declan McCullagh averred: "It's true that exabytes upon exabytes of data could, in theory, be helpful in investigating terrorism and other crimes. This was the motivation behind the Total Information Awareness idea, after all. But it's also true that nobody in the U.S. Congress believed that they were giving the FBI such sweeping authority when enacting the law nearly a decade ago."

Magnify those concerns by a factor of ten or even a thousand when it comes to the formidable array of surveillance capabilities already deployed by the National Security Agency.

And if the interpretation of the Communications Act favored by top Obama administration officials gain traction in Congress then, as the ACLU recently warned "there are [cybersecurity] proposals out there that would permit information grabs that make the Patriot Act look quaint."

(Image courtesy of PrisonPlanet.com)

Protecting Us from Our Freedoms: Congress Set to Renew Patriot Act Spy Provisions

As night follows day, you can count on Congress to serve as loyal servants and willing accomplices of our out-of-control National Security State.

Last week, in another shameless demonstration of congressional "bipartisanship," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) forged a filthy backroom deal that reauthorizes insidious surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act for an additional four years.

"Like clockwork," the ACLU reports, Reid and McConnell "introduced a bill, S. 1038, that will extend the provisions until June 1, 2015." As of this writing, the text of that measure has yet to be published.

And, like a faint echo from the past when the Patriot Act was signed into law nearly a decade ago in the wake of the 9/11 provocation and the anthrax attacks, the ACLU tells us that "the Senate begins its debate on Monday with votes possible that same night."

But why not forego a vote altogether. After all, with the White House "skipping a legal deadline to seek congressional authorization of the military action in Libya" under the War Powers Act, "few on the Hill are objecting," the Associated Press reports.

Why not extend congressional "courtesy" to the White House over demands that their illegal spying on Americans continue indefinitely "as long as consultations with Congress continue"?

Consensus by congressional Democrats and Republicans over extending the provisions, the World Socialist Web Site reports, "meets the demands of the Obama administration and the Justice Department for a 'clean' extension, that is, one that does not make any concessions to concerns over the infringement of civil liberties, particularly in relation to the authorization to seize the records of libraries and other institutions."

"The idea," the Associated Press informs us, "is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government." (emphasis added)

While most of the surveillance powers handed the security apparat were permanent, three controversial provisions had expiration dates attached to the law due to the potential for serious civil rights abuses. Such suspicions were certainly warranted as dozens of reports by Congress and the Justice Department, media investigations and Freedom of Information Act and other lawsuits subsequently disclosed.

The provisions set for renewal include the following:

• The "roving wiretap" provision grants the FBI authority to obtain wiretaps from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under color of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its bastard stepchild, the FISA Amendments Act, which granted retroactive immunity to the government's telecommunications' partners. This section of the law allows the Bureau to spy on anyone of "interest" to the FBI during the course of a "national security" investigation, without identifying a specific target to be surveilled or which communication medium will be tapped. Anyone caught in the FBI's surveillance dragnet can themselves come under scrutiny, even if they were not named in the original warrant. Insidiously, under the "roving wiretap" provision, even if a warrant is executed by a judge in one jurisdiction, it can be made valid anywhere in the United States, solely on the say-so of the FBI. Essentially, this amounts to the issuance of a blank warrant that further marginalizes the Fourth Amendment's explicit requirement that warrants are only issued "particularly describing the place to be searched."

• Section 215, the so-called "business records" provision, allows FISC warrants for virtually any type of record or "tangible thing:" banking and financial statements, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, cell phone bills, medical histories, you name it, without government snoops having to declare that the information they seek has any connection whatsoever to a terrorism, espionage or "national security" investigation. The government does not have to demonstrate "probable cause." Government officials need only certify to a judge, without providing evidence or proof, that the search meets the statute's overly-broad requirements and the court has been stripped of its authority to reject the state's application. Surveillance orders under Section 215 can even be based on a person's protected First Amendment activities: the books they read, web sites searched or articles they have published. In other words, exercising free speech under the Constitution can become the basis for examining personal records. Third parties served with such sweeping orders are prohibited from disclosing the search to anyone. In fact, with built-in gag orders forbidding disclosure subjects may never know they have be scrutinized by federal authorities, thereby undercutting their ability to challenge illegitimate searches.

• The "lone wolf" provision, a particularly onerous and intrusive investigative device allows the federal government to spy on individuals not connected to a terrorist organization but who may share ideological affinities with groups deemed suspect by the secret state. The definition of who may be a "lone wolf" is so vague that it greatly expands the category of individuals who may be monitored by the security apparat.

After Congress passed several earlier extensions, the three provisions were set to "sunset" on February 28, 2011. But with the Obama administration and the FBI insisting that no new civil liberties protections be added that would undercut their domestic spying powers, a 90-day temporary extension was approved earlier this year and is now set to expire on May 27.

This temporary extension followed an embarrassing loss in early February by the House Republican leadership who had failed to win a two-thirds majority passage of the proposal which barred amendments. In fact, 26 newly-elected Republican members, including those self-identified with the so-called "Tea Party" caucus, joined 122 Democrats in opposition and defeated the bill.

While Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have urged Congress to extend the provisions, permanently if possible or for an extended period if not, because they allege short-term extensions have a deleterious effect on "counterterrorism investigations" and "increase the uncertainties borne by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies in carrying out their missions." Such mendacious claims however, are not borne out by the facts.

Indeed, the Department of Justice's own Office of the Inspector General's (OIG) 2008 report found that "[t]he evidence showed no instance where the information obtained from a Section 215 order described in the body of the report resulted in a major investigative development."

True enough as far as it goes, but such snooping provided an unprecedented view of the comings and goings of citizens now subjects of scattershot data-mining, dossier building and ginned-up federal prosecutions.

In fact, the OIG demonstrated conclusively that widespread abuses by the FBI in their issuance of constitution-shredding National Security Letters, handed out without probable cause and attached with built-in secret gag orders, have been used by the Bureau to target innocent Americans.

While Barack Obama promised to curtail the worst abuses of the previous administration when he assumed office in January 2009, the Justice Department reported there has been a huge increase in domestic spying during the first two years of his administration.

As Antifascist Calling reported earlier this month, according to figures supplied by the Justice Department "in 2010, the FBI made 24,287 NSL requests (excluding requests for subscriber information only) for information concerning United States persons. These sought information pertaining to 14,212 different United States persons." Additionally, the FBI made 96 applications to the rubber-stamp FISC court in 2010 on 215 orders, a four-fold increase over 2009.

None of this should come as a shock to readers. As I have pointed out many times, the Obama administration has not simply extended the previous regime's assault on civil liberties and political rights but has greatly accelerated the downward spiral towards a presidential dictatorship lorded-over by the Pentagon and the national security apparat.

Justice Department Stonewall Continues

Moves to renew the Patriot Act's spy provisions follow closely on the heels of administration demands to expand the scope of National Security Letters. As The Washington Post reported last summer, the White House "is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation."

"The administration," the Post disclosed, "wants to add just four words--'electronic communication transactional records'-- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval."

"Government lawyers," the Post averred, "say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history."

Additionally, the White House is demanding that the manufacturers of electronic devices such as iPhones and Blackberries, as The New York Times revealed last fall, make their products "technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages." In other words, the state is demanding that government-mandated backdoors be built into the existing architecture of the internet in order to further facilitate driftnet spying.

Meanwhile, Obama's Justice Department continues to stonewall Congress and privacy advocates "demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) disclosed that the secret state satrapy that brought us COINTELPRO and employed Al-Qaeda triple agent Ali Mohamed as a "confidential informant," refuses to tell us what that authority is or how their abusive power-grab squares with rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

"A report released last year by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General," EFF attorneys write, "revealed how the FBI, in defending its past violations of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), had come up with a new legal argument to justify secret, unchecked access to private telephone records." The heavily-redacted report revealed that the "Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) had issued a legal opinion agreeing with the FBI's theory."

"The decision not to release the memo," McClatchy Newspapers reported last week, "is noteworthy because the Obama administration--in particular the Office of Legal Counsel--has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush administration was."

"By turning down the foundation's request for a copy," journalist Marisa Taylor writes, "the department is ensuring that its legal arguments in support of the FBI's controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone records will be kept secret."

"Even officials within the Justice Department itself are concerned that the FBI's secret legal theory jeopardizes privacy and government accountability, especially considering the FBI's demonstrated history of abusing surveillance law," averred EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston.

"The Justice Department has said it can't release the document for national security reasons," McClatchy noted, "but it hasn't elaborated on that assertion. At the same time, the department and the FBI have refused to comment on the legal position itself."

According to published reports, "the bureau devised an informal system of requesting the records from three telecommunications firms to create what one agent called a 'phone database on steroids' that included names, addresses, length of service and billing information."

The OIG later concluded, Taylor writes, "that the FBI and employees of the telecom companies treated Americans' telephone records in such an informal and cavalier way that in some cases the bureau abused its authority."

Last year the Inspector General's report asserted that "the OLC agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a qualifying emergency."

That report "A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records," revealed widespread abuses by the Bureau and their telecom partners.

So-called "exigent" or emergency letters were used by the FBI to illegally obtain the phone records of thousands of Americans. According to an earlier report by EFF, "while we had known since 2007 that the FBI improperly sought phone records by falsely asserting emergency circumstances, the report shows the situation inside the FBI's Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) degenerated even further, sometimes replacing legal process with sticky notes."

Senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote at the time that "employees of three telecoms," since identified as AT&T, Verizon and MCI, "worked directly out of the CAU office, right next to their FBI colleagues."

According to the Inspector General's report, Opsahl averred, "even exigent letters became too much work: an FBI analyst explained that 'it's not practical to give the [exigent letter] for every number that comes in.' Instead, the telecoms would provide phone records pursuant to verbal requests and even post-it notes with a phone number stuck on the carrier reps' workstations."

As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald writes, "the way a republic is supposed to function is that there is transparency for those who wield public power and privacy for private citizens."

However, "the National Security State has reversed that dynamic completely, so that the Government (comprised of the consortium of public agencies and their private-sector 'partners') knows virtually everything about what citizens do, but citizens know virtually nothing about what they do (which is why WikiLeaks specifically and whistleblowers generally, as one of the very few remaining instruments for subverting that wall of secrecy, are so threatening to them)."

"Fortified by always-growing secrecy weapons," Greenwald avers, "everything they do is secret--including even the 'laws' they secretly invent to authorize their actions--while everything you do is open to inspection, surveillance and monitoring."

"This is what the Surveillance State, at its core, is designed to achieve," Greenwald cautions, "the destruction of privacy for individual citizens and an impenetrable wall of secrecy for those with unlimited surveillance power."

As this filthy system continues to implode amidst an orgy of financial and political corruption that would make a Roman emperor blush, the capitalist oligarchy is hell-bent on shielding themselves from any meaningful oversight or accountability, thus ensuring that the secret state's war on democracy itself continues.

(Image courtesy of the ACLU)

As Whistleblower Prosecutions Rise, Government Withholds Spy Doc, Fears Lawsuits Against Telecom Partners

With Obama's Justice Department threatening to classify previously unclassified material during the upcoming trial of accused NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake, Secrecy News reports that prosecutors claim they can do so because "NSA possesses a statutory privilege that protects against the disclosure of information relating to its activities."

Never mind that security apparatchiks have carried out multiyear, illegal driftnet surveillance operations against the American people, or that the broad outlines of these illicit programs have been known for almost six years when they were first reported by The New York Times. Despite these inconvenient truths, our "transparency" president's minions are now asserting the right to erase well-known facts from the public record to win a conviction in a high-profile case.

And with a federal Grand Jury now meeting in Alexandria, Virginia to criminally investigate the WikiLeaks organization and its founder, Julian Assange, to determine whether they can be charged with violations of the draconian Espionage Act, the administration is pulling out all the stops by targeting individuals who expose government crimes and corruption.

Accused of leaking information that uncovered high-level corruption at the Pentagon's electronic intelligence satrapy, Drake is charged with serving as a source for a series of articles published by The Baltimore Sun that provided rich details on cosy relations between NSA officials and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

According to investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman, three years and $1.2 billion after choosing SAIC as the primary contractor for a failed digital communications project called Trailblazer, "SAIC did not provide computer experts with the technical or management skills to complete the project."

In subsequent reporting, the Sun revealed that "six years after it was launched, the Trailblazer program consists of little more than blueprints on a wall."

Drake's revelations of high-level cronyism at the agency which cost taxpayers billions of dollars were further amplified by other reporters. Writing for CorpWatch, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock disclosed that NSA "is the company's largest single customer, and SAIC is the NSA's largest contractor."

Shorrock tells us that "the company's penchant for hiring former intelligence officials played an important role in its advancement."

According to CorpWatch, "the story of William Black, Jr." is emblematic of the clubby, good-old-boy networks that constellate the National Security State. "In 1997," Shorrock writes, "the 40-year NSA veteran was hired as an SAIC vice president 'for the sole purpose of soliciting NSA business,' according to a published account. Three years later, after NSA initially funded Trailblazer, Black went back to the agency to manage the program; within a year, SAIC won the master contract for the program."

Hardly surprising, given the fact that the so-called revolving door ushering former top intelligence officials into corporate board rooms is a tale oft-told, as the curriculum vitae of former NSA- and Director of National Intelligence, John Michael "Mike" McConnell, readily attests. After his two-year stint as President Bush's DNI (2007-2009), McConnell returned to his perch at the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton security firm as Senior Vice President where he currently manages that firm's cybersecurity portfolio.

Peddling his expertise as an intelligence insider, McConnell is one of the chief tricksters hawking the so-called "cyber threat," the latest front to have emerged from the highly-profitable "War on Terror."

Last year, in a widely-cited Washington Post op-ed, McConnell claimed that the United States needs "to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment--who did it, from where, why and what was the result--more manageable."

What should interest readers here, is the fact that while the Obama administration wages war on whistleblowers like Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning and others, who expose waste, fraud, abuse and war crimes, the architects and perpetrators of those offenses, high-level corporate and government officials, escape justice and continue to operate with impunity.

In the Drake case, Secrecy News analyst Steven Aftergood writes, "The NSA Act ... has never been used to exclude information in a criminal case."

That the administration has chosen to do so with Drake serves as an unmistakable warning that the federal government will crush anyone who challenges crimes perpetrated by the secret state.

Aftergood told NPR last week that the Obama regime's surge of whistleblower prosecutions is "a worrisome development."

"Leaks serve a very valuable function as a kind of safety valve," he said. "They help us to get out the information that otherwise would be stuck."

And with Congress, spearheaded by right-wing Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, seeking to go even further to persecute whistleblowers, the government is poised to choke-off what little remains of democratic oversight, thus ensuring that information remains "stuck."

As FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds points out, "every time when I think things couldn't possibly get any worse, I'm proven wrong and they actually do get worse."

"Our so called representatives," Edmonds writes, "are planning to increase the federal government's unchecked powers by giving them the right to strip national security whistleblowers of their pensions."

According to the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC), under Section 403 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, "the head of an employee's agency can simply accuse a whistleblower of leaking classified information and that whistleblower can automatically be stripped of their federal pension, even after they retire."

So draconian is this proposal that once stripped of their pensions, whistleblowers would be barred from accessing the federal courts to challenge their administrative punishment.

"Instead," NWC avers, "they will be forced to use the DNI's administrative procedures to try to defend themselves. In other words, the DNI will be the prosecutor, the judge and the jury to strip pensions from public servants."

Shielding Telecoms ... from their Customers

Meanwhile across the Potomac, the ACLU reported last week that in response to their lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the repulsive FISA Amendments Act and their Freedom of Information Act request "to learn more about the government's interpretation and implementation" of FAA, "the government released a few hundred pages of heavily redacted documents."

As readers recall, the FAA was a piece of legislative detritus passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2008 that authorized the secret state's driftnet surveillance of American's communications while providing retroactive immunity to NSA's private partners in the telecommunications' industry.

Just so we understand what it is Congress shielded, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein described how the firm and the NSA physically split and then copied global communications traffic flowing into their offices and then passed it along to the Agency. In his self-published book, Klein wrote:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." ...

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine... And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

"Two weeks ago," ACLU National Security Project staffer Alexander Abdo wrote, "as part of our FOIA lawsuit over those documents, the government gave us several declarations attempting to justify the redaction of the documents."

In the course of examining the documents, ACLU researchers "came across this unexpectedly honest explanation from the FBI of why the government doesn't want us to know which 'electronic communication service providers' participate in its dragnet surveillance program." On page 32 we are enlightened by the following nugget:

In this case, the FBI withheld the identities of the electronic communication service providers that have provided information, or are listed as potentially required to provide information, to the FBI as part of its national security and criminal investigations under authority granted by Section 702 of the FAA. Exemption (b)(4)-1, cited in conjunction with (b)(7)(D)-1, has been asserted because disclosure of the identities of electronic communication service providers would cause substantial harm to their competitive position. Specifically, these businesses would be substantially harmed if their customers knew that they were furnishing information to the FBI. The stigma of working with the FBI would cause customers to cancel the companies' services and file civil actions to prevent further disclosure of subscriber information. Therefore, the FBI has properly withheld this information pursuant to Exemption (b)(4), in conjunction with (b)(7)(D)-1. (Declaration of David M. Hardy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, in American Civil Liberties Union, et al v. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, et al, Civil Action No. 10-CV-4419 (RJS), April 25, 2011)

Got that?

While the federal government illegally spies on us, those who are sworn to uphold the Constitution and protect our rights are engaged in a massive swindle designed by Congress to shield private lawbreakers whose "competitive position" might be compromised should their filthy corporate practices be exposed.

Public harm, private profit; it doesn't get any clearer than this!

(Image courtesy of JoshuaDysart.com).

Secret State's Domestic Spying on the Rise

Despite last week's "termination" of America's bête noire, Osama bin Laden, the reputed "emir" and old "new Hitler" of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, Secrecy News reports an uptick in domestic spying.

Never mind that the administration is engaged in an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, or is systematically targeting antiwar and solidarity activists with trumped-up charges connected to the "material support of terrorism," as last Fall's multi-state raids on anarchists and socialists in Chicago and Minneapolis attest.

In order to do their best to "keep us safe," Team Obama is busily building upon the criminal legacy bequeathed to the administration by the Bush regime and even asserts the right to assassinate American citizens "without a whiff of due process," as Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out.

According to a new Justice Department report submitted to Congress we learn that "during calendar year 2010, the Government made 1,579 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (hereinafter 'FISC') for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and/or physical searches" on what U.S. security agencies allege are "for foreign intelligence purposes."

The April 29 missive, released under the Freedom of Information Act, documents the persistence of our internal security apparat's targeting of domestic political opponents, under color of rooting out "terrorists."

Secrecy News analyst Steven Aftergood comments that "this compares to a reported 1,376 applications in 2009. (In 2008, however, the reported figure--2,082--was quite a bit higher.)"

"In 2010," Aftergood writes, "the government made 96 applications for access to business records (and 'tangible things') for foreign intelligence purposes, up from 21 applications in 2009."

Also last year, America's premier domestic intelligence agency, the FBI, "made 24,287 'national security letter' requests for information pertaining to 14,212 different U.S. persons, a substantial increase from the 2009 level of 14,788 NSL requests concerning 6,114 U.S. persons. (In 2008, the number of NSL requests was 24,744, pertaining to 7,225 persons.)"

As I have pointed out many times, national security letters are onerous lettres de cachet, secretive administrative subpoenas with built-in gag orders used by the Bureau to seize records from third-parties such as banks, libraries and telecommunications providers without any judicial process whatsoever, not to mention the expenditure of scarce tax dollars to spy on the American people.

"Money for Nothing..."

With U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's February announcement that the Department of Justice will seek $28.2 billion from Congress in Fiscal Year 2012, a 1.7% increase, the FBI is slated to reap an $8.1 billion windfall.

We're told that the "administration supports critical national security programs within the department, including the FBI and the National Security Division (NSD)."

"The requested national security resources include $122.5 million in program increases for the FBI," including "$48.9 million for the FBI to expand national security related surveillance and enhance its Data Integration and Visualization System, as well as "$18.6 million for the FBI's Computer Intrusion Initiative to increase coverage in detecting cyber intrusions."

Rather ironic, considering that ThreatPost reported last month that a U.S. Department of Justice audit found that the FBI's ability to "investigate cyber intrusions" was less than adequate. The report disclosed that "fully 36% [of field agents] were found to be ill-equipped."

To make matters worse, "FBI field offices do not have sufficient analytical and forensic capabilities to support large scale investigations, the audit revealed." All the more reason then to shower even more money on the Bureau!

And with the FBI demanding new authority to peer into our lives, on- and offline, the FY 2012 budget would "address the growing technological gap between law enforcement's electronic surveillance capabilities and the number and variety of communications devices available to the public, $17.0 million in program increases are being requested to bolster the department's electronic surveillance capabilities."

One sure sign that things haven't changed under Obama is the FBI's quest for additional funds for what it is now calling it's Data Integration and Visualization System (DIVS). According to April congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller, DIVS will "prioritize and integrate disparate datasets across the Bureau."

Another in a long line of taxpayer-funded boondoggles, it appears that DIVS is the latest iteration of various failed "case management" and "data integration" programs stood up by the Bureau.

As I reported last year, previous failed efforts by the FBI have included the Bureau's Virtual Case File (VCF) project. Overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), VCF cost taxpayers some $170 million dollars before it crashed and burned in 2006.

And when defense and security giant Lockheed Martin took over the case management brief, VCF, now rechristened Sentinel, also enjoyed a similarly expensive and waste-filled fate. A 2009 report by the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that despite some $450 million dollars showered on Lockheed Martin and assorted subcontractors, the Sentinel system "encountered significant challenges."

According to a notice quietly posted in August in the Federal Register, "DIVS contains replications and extractions of information maintained by the FBI in other databases. This information is replicated or extracted into DIVS in order to provide an enhanced and integrated view of that information."

Wait a minute! Isn't that what VCF and Sentinel were supposed to do? We're told that the "purpose of DIVS is to strengthen and improve the methods by which the FBI searches for and analyzes information in support of its multifaceted mission responsibilities to protect the nation against terrorism and espionage and investigate criminal matters."

(Dirty) Business as Usual

While the FBI and the Justice Department have failed to prosecute corporate criminals responsible for the greatest theft and upward transfer of wealth in history, not to mention the virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards handed out to top executives of the drug-money laundering Wachovia Bank, they're rather adept at trampling the rights of the American people.

As the San Francisco Bay Guardian recently reported, while corporate lawbreakers get a free pass, "San Francisco cops assigned to the FBI's terrorism task force can ignore local police orders and California privacy laws to spy on people without any evidence of a crime."

According to a Memorandum of Understanding obtained by the ACLU, "it effectively puts local officers under the control of the FBI," investigative journalist Sarah Phelan disclosed.

Civil rights attorney Veena Dubal told the Bay Guardian that during "the waning months of the Bush administration" the FBI "changed its policies to allow federal authorities to collect intelligence on a person even if the subject is not suspected of a crime. The FBI is now allowed to spy on Americans who have done nothing wrong--and who may be engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment."

"It's the latest sign of a dangerous trend: San Francisco cops are working closely with the feds, often in ways that run counter to city policy," Phelan writes. "And it raises a far-reaching question: With a district attorney who used to be police chief, a civilian commission that isn't getting a straight story from the cops, and a climate of secrecy over San Francisco's intimate relations with outside agencies, who is watching the cops?"

Apparently, no one; and in such a repressive climate the federal government has encouraged the FBI to target anyone deemed a threat to the new corporate order.

Earlier this year, an Electronic Frontier Foundation report revealed that the Bureau continues to systematically violate the constitutional guarantees of American citizens and legal residents, and does so with complete impunity.

As I wrote at the time, this was rather ironic considering the free passes handed out by U.S. securocrats to actual terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11, as both WikiLeaks and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds disclosed.

According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:

* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800 violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI's own statements regarding the number of NSL violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations. (Electronic Frontier Foundation, Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008, January 30, 2011)

But FBI lawbreaking didn't stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF revealed that the Bureau also "engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations" that included, "submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts," "using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas" and "accessing password protected documents without a warrant."

And just last week the civil liberties' watchdogs reported that "the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has revealed the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), taking the position that FOIA allows it to withhold information from the court whenever it thinks this is in the interest of national security."

The court sharply disagreed and asserted that "the Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court."

The Court held, following settled case law that goes all the way back to Marbury v. Madison (1803) that "Numerous statutes, rules, and cases reflect the understanding that the Judiciary cannot carry out its essential function if lawyers, parties, or witnesses obscure the facts."

Skewering the FBI, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that while "The Government contends that the FOIA permits it to provide the Court with the same misinformation it provided to Plaintiffs regarding the existence of other responsive information or else the Government would compromise national security ... that argument is indefensible."

Nevertheless, that court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals still held that despite the Bureau's obvious attempt to bamboozle the federal judiciary, thus subverting the separation of powers amongst the three co-equal branches of government as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution (Article III), "disclosing the number and nature of the documents the Government possesses could reasonably be expected to compromise national security." (see: Islamic Shura Council of S. California v. FBI.)

In other words, while the Bureau was chastised for withholding relevant documents from the court that might demonstrate their illegal surveillance of organizations and individuals who have never been indicted, or even charged, with so-called "terrorism offenses," the "national security" card trumps everything.

Electronic Surveillance

Late last month, EFF staff attorney Jennifer Lynch reported the group had "recently received documents from the FBI that reveal details about the depth of the agency's electronic surveillance capabilities and call into question the FBI's controversial effort to push Congress to expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) for greater access to communications data."

The documents were obtained under a FOIA request by EFF after a 2007 report published by Wired disclosed that the FBI had deployed "secret spyware" to track domestic targets.

According to Wired, "FBI agent Norman Sanders describes the software as a 'computer and internet protocol address verifier,' or CIPAV."

In a follow-up piece, investigative journalist Ryan Singel revealed that the FBI "has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device."

That surveillance system known as DCSNet, or Digital Collection System Network, formerly known as Carnivore, "connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies," Wired reported.

"It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected," Singel wrote at the time, a point underscored a year later when whistleblower Babak Pasdar blew the lid off the close relations amongst America's telecoms and the Bureau's illegal surveillance programs.

As Antifascist Calling reported at the time, a telecom carrier Pasdar worked for as a security consultant, subsequently named as Verizon by The Washington Post, said the company maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that allowed the Bureau and other security agencies "unfettered" access to the carrier's wireless network, including billing records and customer data "transmitted wirelessly."

While Verizon denied the report that the FBI has open access to its network, their mendacious claims were demolished when the secrecy-shredding web site Cryptome published the firm's "Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide" in 2010.

Amongst the "helpful hints" provided to law enforcement by the carrier, Verizon urges state spies to "be specific."

"Do not include wording such as 'any and all records'", we read. "The courts have traditionally ruled that this wording is considered overly broad and burdensome. Request only what is required." On and on it goes...

According to documents obtained by EFF, the technologies discussed by Bureau snoops, when installed on a target's computer, allows the FBI to collect the following:

* IP Address
* Media Access Control (MAC) address
* "Browser environment variables"
* Open communication ports
* List of the programs running
* Operating system type, version, and serial number
* Browser type and version
* Language encoding
* The URL that the target computer was previously connected to
* Registered computer name
* Registered company name
* Currently logged in user name
* Other information that would assist with "identifying computer users, computer software installed, [and] computer hardware installed" (Electronic Frontier Foundation, New FBI Documents Provide Details on Government's Surveillance Spyware, April 29, 2011)

According to initial reporting by Wired, the FBI may have infiltrated the malicious program onto a target's computer by "pointing to code that would install the spyware by exploiting a vulnerability in the user's browser."

Lynch comments that "although the documents discuss some problems with installing the tool in some cases, other documents note that the agency's Crypto Unit only needs 24-48 hours to prepare deployment."

Once the tool is installed, Bureau snoops aver "it stay[s] persistent on the compromised computer and ... every time the computer connects to the Internet, [FBI] will capture the information associated with the PRTT [Pen Register/Trap & Trace Order]."

The privacy watchdogs write that the Bureau "has been using the tool in domestic criminal investigations as well as in FISA cases, and the FISA Court appears to have questioned the propriety of the tool."

This is particularly relevant, and troubling, considering that the FBI and other secret state agencies such as the CIA and NSA already possess formidable surveillance tools in their arsenals and that private security outfits such as HBGary and Palantir--as well as hundreds of other firms--are busily concocting ever-more intrusive spyware for their state and private partners, as the massive disclosure of internal HBGary emails and documents by the cyber-guerrilla group Anonymous revealed.

With all the hot air from Washington surrounding claims by the FBI and other secret state satrapies that they'll "go dark" unless Congress grants them authority to build secret backdoors into America's communications networks, EFF revealed that documents "show the FBI already has numerous tools available to surveil suspects directly, rather than through each of their communications service providers."

"One heavily redacted email notes that the FBI has other tools that 'provide the functionality of the CIPAV [text redacted] as well as provide other useful info that could help further the case'."

What is clear from the latest document release is that it isn't the FBI that's "going dark" but the right of the American people to free speech and political organizing without the threat that government-sanctioned malware which remains "persistent" on a "compromised computer" becomes one more tool for building "national security" dossiers on dissidents.