Where's the River of Snot?

A senior US law enforcement official asked me if I noticed anything strange about the video footage of the UC Davis incident.

I told him that I had only seen the famous still photo in the press.  I hadn't seen any video.

"You've been exposed to pepper spray before haven't you?", he asked.  I recounted for him the time that I was responsible for a minimal AD from a large canister of the stuff inside a moving vehicle. 

He reached for his IPad and clicked on the first YouTube video he could find.  "What isn't right about this scene?", he asked.  I answered, "the protesters aren't hauling ass out of there. They aren't acting like they have been pepper sprayed."

"Where is the River of Snot?" He continued, "Before riot cops use pepper spray they mask-up.  Do you see any of the cops standing there wearing gas masks?  The stuff that they are spraying is marker.  They are identifying the protesters that they are intending to arrest.  Look right there, that other cop is standing in the mist with no effect."

He got no argument from me there.  That wasn't pepper spray.

"Then why aren't the cops coming to their own defense?," I asked.

Timing is everything.

Serious Business -- RDX/HMX Implants

Body Bombs Added to America’s Air Security Concerns

If this were true, then NFW would we be seeing this:

Representatives for several European airlines said that they had learned about the new security recommendations only from a reporter’s inquiry.

[We're talking about Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways - not just some random fly-by-night commuter lines - as well as BAA, which operates Heathrow Airport, and Airports Council International Europe being in the dark about this threat.]

Although some slippage in the timely dissemination of warnings is not unheard of in the intel business, the smart money here is that bullshittery is afoot.

Of course, this all could just be water-softener.
 
Can't help suspecting that they are also paving the way for more contractor boondoggling. Money seems to expand to fill any gaps in coverage of the most lunatic terror threat fantasy that the most cracked mountebank can pull out of his yuck-pasty ass.

They are starting to credit "chatter" (see SMC Maxim) from AQAP for the "warning". Serious business. LMAO

CATCH-ALL Revisited

From an important new Jane Mayer piece:

When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls. “It was my brainchild,” he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.” He said that although he was not “read in” to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they told me, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ ”—logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ ”

(Our insights went even further - scarfing everything - is still too hot for anyone else but SMC to have discussed.)

Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.

...

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Arizona

At the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, I knew to within an hour or so when the bombs were to begin falling = "shock and awe."

I and a very few others I knew went thermo-short - assuming the Middle East was going to go apeshit. (You can check the tape.) As soon as war broke out, the market rallied like a mother, and I was creamed for days (if not longer) until I threw in the towel.

Later, people I knew were saying "of course the market rallied, the market always loves war." I knew that the market had no idea what a fuckup it was, but it rallied because it thought we had won a clear victory.

Oh well.

And - vis-à-vis the unrest, the PTB is really spinning the narrative that the AZ shooter was not political.  What nonsense.  But it seems to be working.  They are conducting BDA-type assessments of their work - polling - and the American people are answering as they have been instructed.  They do not believe that the fucktard was a wingnut.

Worry not.  Gov has this under control.

At least until the next incident.

Whiff of Zeitgeist - Rising Civil Unrest in America

Narrowly avoided cock-a-hoopyness well intent on devoting post to civil-unrest. Afterall, some geek dared accuse us of nailing the if & when of tipping point de Bangkok's shindig. So in spirit of Tiger Woodsean modesty: here instead a nice piece--found most significant by the esoteric weight per origin that it lends to a gathering zeitgeist of sorts.

Before things get completely out of hand, it's time to examine what is happening in American society today. [...] It goes beyond Joe Stack and his plane flying into a building housing the IRS in Austin Texas.

Clearly, we have entered a new era in American society. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post makes the point that the Hutaree cannot be "Christian" because of their intent to murder.

The arrests of members of a Michigan-based "Christian" militia group should convince doubters that there is good reason to worry about right-wing, anti-government extremism -- and potential violence -- in the Age of Obama. I put the word Christian in quotes because anyone who plots to assassinate law enforcement officers, as a federal indictment alleges members of the Hutaree militia did, is no follower of Christ.

But the Hutaree aren't the full story. According to Professor Jeff Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at the St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, this marks a significant change in the landscape of domestic terrorism. It has been nearly fifteen years since the attacks on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

"This is the first far right wing, anti-government terrorism case since the 1990s. That's at least 15 years," Addicott said.

One of the important questions is whether the Hutaree are a radical right wing militia, a conservative Christian movement or a group of "citizens" calling for change in America? Of course when Brittany Bryant , who is engaged to David Stone Jr., son of the Hutaree's leader , one of the Hutarees arrested in Michigan says, "that if group members had had plans for violence, they would have done it already" it places a cloud of the ominous onto the situation. After all, the Hutaree are accused of threatening use IEDs to kill local law enforcement officers. Like the lady said, they were harmless:

Going after a group like the Hutaree can be dangerous, ABC News consultant and former FBI agent Brad Garrett said. "This crowd tends to be heavily armed and they are all conspiracy theorists that the government is trying to take over," he said. "And so you have to be very careful and cautious when starting arresting people like this because you can walk right into an ambush."

Of course, then you need to consider the Guardian of the Free Republics, a group that compares themselves somehow to Gandhi and mailed ominous letters to governors. They actually sent letters to over 30 governors that in essence told them to "Straighten up and fly right" and without specifically threatening them, the letters clearly concern the F.B.I. who believe that the letters could prompt violence.

The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group's call to remove governors from office could provoke violence. The group called the Guardians of the Free Republics wants to "restore America" by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site. It sent letters to governors demanding they leave office or be removed.

It is pretty hard to misconstrue the intent of "leave office or be removed."

And finally, we are faced with the threats made against Congressman Eric Cantor by Norman LeBoon who has already been declared incompetent to stand trial.

Threats against Congressmen, White supremacists, "constitutionalists," tax protesters and religious soldiers determined to kill people to uphold "Christian" values. We have a problem. Indeed, this is as Eugene Robinson wrote, "The Age of Obama." But it is more than that because some of this has been building for some time. There is high unemployment, while others find themselves following the rules and paying their bills, yet watch as people who are defaulting on their mortgages and facing foreclosure are being bailed out. We are even about two weeks away from the airing of a news special by MSNBC's "The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist."
[...]

-A Hacked & Jacked Jay Fraser @ ThreatsWatch,Org

CATCH-All Shadows

Cross-border communications intercepts are all the rage these days, both in terms of the publicity and public debate generated - and by measure of the flurry of international legislative activities in motion to retroactively cloak in legalese the amassing activities that have already been well in place for considerable time among our duteous SIGINT allies - and that as integral piecemeal part of that ol´ jig-saw puzzle we've oft & melodramatically referred to as our Catch-All program.

Of perhaps fleeting interest to some of our readers comes a feebly related judgment handed down by the European Court of Human Rights earlier this week in a case brought by Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and British Irish Rights Watch against the United Kingdom. The judgment found that UK surveillance laws had lacked the necessary clarity and accountability to prevent abuses of power when used to intercept cross-border communications.

According to the EHCR,

[it]does not consider that the domestic law at the relevant time indicated with sufficient clarity, so as to provide adequate protection against abuse of power, the scope or manner of exercise of the very wide discretion conferred on the State to intercept and examine external communications. In particular, it did not, as required by the Court’s case-law, set out in a form accessible to the public any indication of the procedure to be followed for selecting for examination, sharing, storing and destroying intercepted material. The interference with the applicants’ rights under Article 8 (the right to privacy) was not, therefore, “in accordance with the law.”

A puniest of victories for privacy advocates - a pebbly bump in the road for CATCH-ALL.

U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Report

From the new report [released yesterday] of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission [364-page pdf]:

• Several Chinese advances have surprised U.S. defense and intelligence officials, and raised questions about the quality of our assessments of China’s military capabilities.

• Chinese military strategists have embraced disruptive warfare techniques, including the use of cyber attacks, and incorporated them in China’s military doctrine. Such attacks, if carried out strategically on a large scale, could have catastrophic effects on the target country’s critical infrastructure.

• China has developed an advanced anti-satellite program consisting of an array of weapons that could destroy, damage, or temporarily incapacitate an adversary’s satellites. The use of high energy lasers to temporarily blind U.S. satellites in late 2006 and the use of a direct-ascent anti-satellite kinetic weapon to destroy an aging Chinese satellite in early 2007 demonstrate that China now has this capacity.

• The Chinese defense industry, while still lagging far behind that of the United States, has begun achieving noteworthy progress over the past ten years. New generations of warships, fighter aircraft, spacecraft, submarines, missiles, and other sophisticated weapon platforms are coming off production lines at an impressive pace and with impressive quality.

• The pace at which each of China’s defense industrial sectors is modernizing varies in direct proportion to its degree of integration in the globalized production and R&D chains, because such integration provides access to the most up-to-date technologies and manufacturing expertise.

• China is supplementing the technologies that its defense industry obtains through commercial transfers and direct production partnerships with an aggressive and large-scale industrial espionage campaign. Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies.

(...)


Mao Zedong said that maintaining control over information is as important to ensuring continuation of communist rule as maintaining control over the army. This belief still permeates the government of the People’s Republic of China. The obsession with controlling information is one of the cornerstones of China’s internal security strategy. In practice, it seeks to suppress public awareness of endemic corruption, income inequality, growing social instability, democratic ideals that are emerging in some places despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to extinguish them, and human rights violations committed by the government. Beijing hides these issues and substitutes messages that attempt to repress dissent and maintain control.

The Chinese government accomplishes this through a carefully crafted system whereby it owns and controls many of China’s media outlets, and oversees the content delivered by the remaining media outlets in China. Under the direction of the Politburo and the government’s Central Propaganda Department (CPD), China’s journalists and editors at every media level are instructed to avoid issues deemed ‘‘sensitive’’ by Chinese leaders, and instead are encouraged to paint positive pictures of life in China. Additionally, those foreign publications and websites that are permitted access to the Chinese market must avoid topics the Party has forbidden. Special filters are used to block Internet messages containing ‘‘undesirable’’ information and to keep Chinese users away from ‘‘unhealthy’’ foreign websites such as The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and this Commission’s website. Tens of thousands of ‘‘Internet police’’ monitor user activities and online content within China.

(...)

The PRC government has established a group of agencies that work together to manage China’s media content. This network oversees every aspect of China’s media—from television and radio to newspapers and the Internet—and operates under the explicit direction of the Politburo. This group of agencies is practiced and proficient in its censorship function. Journalists are subjected to a number of control mechanisms. Most Chinese reporters are required to participate in mandatory training sessions to indoctrinate them with political propaganda. If they do not attend, their reporting licenses are not renewed. ‘‘Propaganda Circulars’’ prepared by the Central Propaganda Department (CPD) are distributed to all media outlets in China to instruct editors and reporters how to handle developing issues and sensitive topics in their news stories.

(...)

According to a recent report by Dr. Anne-Marie Brady at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the CCP has divided its propaganda work into two categories: internal (for which the CPD holds primary responsibility) and external (for which the Office of Foreign Propaganda [OFP] holds principal responsibility). Dr. Brady found that both these ‘‘highly secret’’ organizations are very closely linked and coordinated. The OFP is supervised by the Foreign Propaganda Leading Small Group, consisting of a handful of senior CCP leaders led by Mr. Cai Wu, who also heads the State Council Information Office. In her report, Dr. Brady lists China’s guidelines for propaganda. They include (1) issue no bad news during holidays or on other sensitive dates, (2) demonize the United States, (3) do not promote the views of the enemy, and (4) use international news to mold public opinion on issues relating to China. She goes on to explain the guideline pertaining to use of international media:

Selective reporting on international news has proven to be a very effective means of molding public opinion on issues relating to China. Hence, throughout the 1990s, the Chinese media gave detailed coverage of the problems of post-communist societies, while ignoring success stories. Such stories helped to mold public opinion on the likely outcome if China [were] to become a multi-party state. Similarly, China reported factually, but without comment, on the difficulties North Korea faced throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. This served as a caution to those on the left who were critical of China’s market-oriented reforms.

During the lead-up to the Iraq War the Chinese media [were] instructed by the Central Propaganda Department to bring the thinking of the Chinese people in line with that of the party centre, which held the view of opposition to the U.S. invasion. Coverage of the war was used as a means to attack the U.S. government’s position on human rights and other sensitive topics. Reporting on the war was strictly controlled; only officially designated Chinese journalists were permitted to travel to Iraq to report the war.

CATCH-ALL: Suck It Up - All Of It

As we recently boasted,

for over a year and a half, readers here have been treated to details of the CATCH-ALL program that are only now being uncovered by our intrepid news media.

An article hacked & jacked from today's business section of the Washington Post might be of some interest to our readers that have followed SMC's mumbling & fumbling exposition of the Catch-All saga from scratch.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn't worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about "turning in," as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government's warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.

"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.

The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

"That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room."

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said. "The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T's customers but everybody's."

One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.

"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything."

Another document showed that the NSA installed in the room a semantic traffic analyzer made by Narus, which Klein said indicated that the NSA was doing content analysis.

Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein's allegations. "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security," she said.

The NSA and the White House also declined comment on Klein's allegations.

Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts

Klein is urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.

Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World - Despots 2.0

A new Saban Center for Middle-East Policy (Brookings) report looks at the methods in which Arab regimes are dealing with the rising political expectations of their citizens.

Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World [40-page pdf]

“Tunisia is our model. Just look at them! They are much more repressive than we are, yet the West loves them. We need to figure out how they do it.” --Syrian political analyst.

(...)

What is emerging in the Arab world, ... is a hybrid form of authoritarianism. It combines tried-and-true strategies of the past—coercion, surveillance, patronage, corruption, and personalism—with inno­vations that reflect the determination of authoritar­ian élites to respond aggressively to the triple threat of globalization, markets, and democratization. These ef­forts are aimed at creating and sustaining an emerging “authoritarian coalition,” one that hinges on preserv­ing existing bases of institutional and social support while strengthening ties to or at a minimum buying off, groups that have been regarded by regimes as un­reliable, if not potentially antagonistic.

Five features stand out as defining elements of au­thoritarian upgrading. All of these elements are evident in varying combinations in major Arab states, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Tu­nisia, and Yemen. Indeed, elements of these features are ubiquitous throughout the Arab world, although the particular mix differs from case to case. The five features are:

1. Appropriating and containing civil societies;
2. Managing political contestation;
3. Capturing the benefits of selective economic reforms;
4. Controlling new communications technologies;
5. Diversifying international linkages.

(...)


Interestingly, ruling parties have also embraced the technological apparatus associated with elections in established democracies. High-tech “war rooms,” a term that has been imported in English into the po­litical vernacular in places like Egypt, have been estab­lished by the technocratic cadres of ruling parties in recent elections in both Egypt and Yemen. In the Egyp­tian case, the “war room” became the base for massive efforts to identify likely voters, track voter turnout, conduct survey research and focus groups, amass pho­tographs of polling stations throughout the voting to monitor traffic at the polls, and other practices asso­ciated with state-of-the-art election management.

(...)

[The] dramatic growth in access to media, telecommu­nications technologies, and the internet is among the most significant and tangible changes of recent decades. Compared to even the relatively recent past, when Arab media were marked by a stultifying, obsequious focus on political leaders, limited and poorly-produced state-approved programming, heavy-handed censorship, outmoded technologies, and tightly regulated access to the outside world, the Arab region has at last begun to experience the media and communications revolutions that for many are emblematic of what it means to be modern. Without question, literate Arab citizens today are more connected to global media flows and have bet­ter access to information about their own countries and the world than any previous generation.

(...)

To balance these pressures, Arab regimes are converg­ing on strategies to control and manage public access to new communications technologies along lines that reflect broader patterns of authoritarian upgrading. Governments now accept, however reluctantly, the spread of new communications and media technolo­gies. Arab leaders value the political and reputational gains associated with their self-proclaimed roles as champions of innovation. They also recognize the value of these technologies as steam valves: outlets that mitigate social pressures that might otherwise become politicized. At the same time, virtually every Arab re­gime has built up extensive systems of regulation, sur­veillance, oversight, and coercion that vastly limit the autonomy and privacy of users.

Typically, these systems begin with centralized con­trol of access to internet sites, with close attention to sites that carry political content but also pornography or other material deemed, for whatever reason, to be “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values” of a country. Controls also include reg­ulations requiring ministerial approval for opening an internet café; requirements that internet service pro­viders report the names of subscribers to government agencies; holding owners of internet cafés legally liable for their customers’ actions; holding website owners liable for the content of their sites; inspections and monitoring of internet usage by ministry personnel, internal security personnel, or the police; and systems requiring individual users to register for permission to establish internet access accounts from their homes.

(...)

As text-messaging grows in importance, regimes are honing their ability to monitor and censor this means of communication, as well. It is entirely like­ly that within the next year the use of text messages to mobilize participants in political rallies—a technique used by leaders of the Kifaya (Enough!) movement in Egypt among others—will no longer be possible.

(...)

In broad terms, therefore, what has emerged in the Arab world is a hybrid approach to the management of the internet and new media communications technologies that is characteristic of authoritarian upgrading. Regimes have become more open to and accepting of these technologies. They acknowledge their social, political, and economic benefits. Yet they also assimilate these technologies into authoritar­ian strategies of governance, using them to enhance and upgrade their own capacity to keep tabs on their citizens, and to surround them with a “multi-layered architecture of control.”

Nice One, Admiral

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has waded a second time into the political debate about the CATCH-ALL program, and this time appears to have stepped on his dick.

McConnell was pretty much forgiven when he lobbied Democratic lawmakers [with the White House on the other line] to accept the GOP bill last month that weakened FISA. However, there may be broad ramifications to his more recent mis-step.

McConnell was trying to lay the plumbing in the press for legislation that would grant retroactive immunity for telecoms that participated in the extra-legal warrantless surveillance programs. He appears to have made an exploitable legal blunder in his PR outreach.

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality.

"[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times published Wednesday.

His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights, former Justice Department officials said. ...

An appeals court in San Francisco is weighing the government's argument that these cases should be thrown out on the grounds that the subject matter is a "state secret" and that its disclosure would jeopardize national security.

The government has repeatedly asserted that any relationship between the telecommunications firms and the National Security Agency's spy program is classified. The firms' alleged cooperation and other details of the program, government lawyers have argued, are so sensitive that they cannot be disclosed. The government has argued the lawsuits against the telecom firms must be dismissed.

"[D]isclosure of the information covered by this [state secrets] privilege assertion reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States," McConnell said in a sworn affidavit filed in a federal court in San Francisco in May.

David Kris, a former Justice Department official in Republican and Democratic administrations, said McConnell's admission makes it difficult to argue that the phone companies' cooperation with the government is a state secret. "It's going to be tough to continue to call it 'alleged' when he's just admitted it," Kris said. ...

A challenge for the plaintiffs is to make a case using only public facts, said Kris, co-author of a new book, "National Security Investigations and Prosecutions." McConnell has just added to "the list of publicly available facts that are no longer state secrets," increasing the plaintiffs' chances that their cases can proceed, Kris said.

McConnell's statement "does serious damage to the government's state secrets claims that are at the heart of its defenses," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology and an expert on state secrets privilege.

In his interview, McConnell also said that open discussion on matters such as these "means that some Americans are going to die."

But Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said that McConnell's disclosure shows that "an important element of a program can be discussed publicly and openly without endangering the nation."

Fein noted that in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon argued national security would be harmed if the Church Committee permitted hearings on government surveillance of civilians. "These Cassandran cries that the earth is going to fall every time you have a discussion simply are not borne out by the facts," he said.

Mr. McConnell made the remarks apparently in an effort to bolster support for the broadened wiretapping authority that Congress approved this month, even as Democrats are threatening to rework the legislation because they say it gives the executive branch too much power. It is vital, he said, for Congress to give retroactive legal immunity to the companies that assisted in the program to help prevent them from facing bankruptcy because of lawsuits over it. ...

Mr. McConnell ... put new information on the public record in the interview, on Aug. 14 while in Texas for a border conference.

Mr. McConnell said, for instance, that the number of people inside the United States who were wiretapped through court-approved warrants totaled "100 or less" but on the "foreign side, it's in the thousands." The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves national security wiretaps, told Congress it approved 2,181 eavesdropping warrants last year. The court and the administration have not been willing to break out how many Americans were in those orders. ...

Mr. McConnell also offered the administration's first public discussion about a classified series of rulings by the intelligence court that he said had restricted the agency’s ability to collect foreign intelligence.

He said one judge this year gave broad approval for the agency’s eavesdropping program. But another judge, he said, ruled in the spring that the administration would have to obtain a warrant for any "foreign to foreign" communications that passed through an American telecommunications center.

The administration obtained a stay of that ruling until May 31, he disclosed, but after that date he intelligence officials had "significantly less capability" to track foreign communications. The ruling sent the administration "in the wrong direction," he added.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has petitioned the intelligence court to make public its secret wiretapping rulings, expressed frustration on Thursday with the timing of Mr. McConnell’s comments.

"If this ostensibly sensitive information can be released now, why could it not be released two months ago, when the public and Congress desperately needed it?" asked Jameel Jaffer, director of the group's national security project.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said the interview "was quite striking because he was disclosing more detail than has appeared anywhere in the public domain."

"If we're to believe that Americans will die from discussing these things," Mr. Aftergood said, "then he is complicit in that. It’s an unseemly argument. He's basically saying that democracy is going to kill Americans."

Hint: It's Not About Fighting Terrorism

For over a year and a half, readers here have been treated to details of the CATCH-ALL program that are only now being uncovered by our intrepid news media.

A California appeals court will examine two cases this week that could impact the federal government's high-tech surveillance of Americans. The Wednesday hearings come after a new law that broadens intelligence officials' eavesdropping power.

The Bush administration wants the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the lawsuits, contending that they could jeopardize highly sensitive "state secrets." Because the privilege prevents litigants from obtaining classified data, the cases lack standing, the Justice Department argued.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1953 that the executive branch could bar evidence from court if it was deemed a national security threat, senior agency officials told reporters Monday. When the material in question is scrubbed from a case, the complaint may or may not fall apart, they said.

"We're not arguing that this means the judges should look at classified material secretly and rule in favor of the government on the merits of the claims," one staffer said. The government is simply pushing for "a decision that the case can't be litigated in light of national security interests involved."

In one case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation accused AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency in illegal spying on millions of customers. ...

In the AT&T case, EFF claims that the telecommunications firm provided the NSA a "dragnet" that collects "all or substantially all of the communications of U.S. citizens," a Justice official said. The second claim pertains to the alleged preservation of AT&T customers' call records.

Touché (but you have to wonder about the WaPo's capacity for embarrassment at how badly they were scooped):

So far, evidence in the case suggests a massive effort by the NSA to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other communications, which the government could sift and analyze for suspicious patterns or other signs of terrorist activity, according to court records, plaintiffs' attorneys and technology experts.

"The scale of these deployments is . . . vastly in excess of what would be needed for any likely application or any likely combination of applications, other than surveillance," says an affidavit filed by J. Scott Marcus, the senior Internet adviser at the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. Marcus analyzed evidence for the plaintiffs in the case. ...

Tomorrow's hearing will focus only on whether the two lawsuits should be dismissed on the basis of the government's assertion of a "state secrets privilege." The outcome could determine whether the courts will ever rule on the legality of surveillance conducted by the NSA without judicial oversight between 2001 and January 2007, when the Bush administration first subjected the program to the scrutiny of a special intelligence court.

"If the courts take the position that the state-secrets privilege prevents the case from going forward, I think effectively there'll never be a decision about the legality of the program," said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director. ...

President Bush and his aides have confirmed that the NSA, beginning in late 2001, monitored electronic communications between the United States and overseas without warrants in cases in which one of the parties was believed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. But administration officials have recently acknowledged that the NSA program was broader, and intelligence sources inside and outside the government have described a vast effort to collect and analyze telephone and e-mail communications that were later scrutinized by the government for desired information. ...

Some of the evidence also suggests that the NSA efforts were not limited to overseas e-mail communications and included the collection of purely domestic traffic. ...

Marcus, the former FCC adviser, said in a legal declaration recently unsealed in the case that the operation described by Klein "is neither modest nor limited" and was far more extensive than needed if it was focused only on international communications or on tasks other than surveillance.

"I conclude that AT&T has constructed an extensive -- and expensive -- collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of [Internet protocol]-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well," said Marcus, a veteran computer network executive who worked at GTE, Genuity and other companies before joining the FCC.

James X. Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the evidence gleaned from the AT&T case appears to confirm that "there is a massive surveillance capability built into the network" by the federal government. But, Dempsey added, "the mere fact that the capability has been built and utilized still does not answer the fundamental question -- has it been exercised under constitutional parameters? That, in a way, is what these cases are trying to get to."

For a concise explanation of why the CATCH-ALL program is a fraud as advertized, see: Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining.

Hackers, Mil, and Feds Get Together in Vegas

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Defense and the FBI were among the spy, military and police agencies represented at DefCon, an international gathering of hackers in Las Vegas.

Hackers and computer security professionals made up the bulk of the more than 6,000 people that took part in the three-day conference which ended Sunday, according to founder Jeff "Dark Tangent" Moss.

Games, contests and seminars at DefCon are devoted to breaching computers, Internet websites, software programs and real-world locks.

Throughout the event money is raised for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a non-profit legal group that defends online rights and privacy cherished by hackers.

Lawyers from the foundation are spearheading litigation accusing the NSA of illegally snooping on e-mail and telephone communications.

NSA vulnerability analysis chief Tony Sager gave a talk at DefCon, saying the agency was increasingly sharing information with the public in the hope computer wizards wherever they may be become allies in cyber security.

"I'm not sure I can convince them to trust me," Sager told AFP.

"I think we are part of a larger community. In the old days it was about what we found was really precious, because what we had was all there was. Now, it's less important what we find and more important what everybody finds."

It takes the brightest technical minds to fight new-age crime and terrorism, and those people shun government paychecks for "big bucks" in private sector jobs, according to federal agents at DefCon. ...

Federal agents at DefCon said their technology "wish list" includes being able to identify who is responsible for what on the Internet.

"The NSA spent decades trying to do things themselves and that didn't work," (Hacker Roger) Dingledine said. "I'm happy they realize other people can help. I think they know better than to show up and say 'Trust us, we're the NSA'."

Sager said he is not sure how to resolve the conflict between public safety and Internet privacy.

"People don't come to the NSA because they want to fly black helicopters and deny people their liberties," Sager said.

"We happen to be in a time that is very volatile -- the whole issue around the war on terrorism and the loss of personal information. I'm not sure there is a logical path right now that will satisfy the majority of the population."

"I've Got Nothing To Hide"

From a new paper on government surveillance and data mining by George Washington University Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (25 page pdf):

Far too often, discussions of the NSA surveillance and data mining define the problem solely in terms of surveillance. To return to my discussion of metaphor, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. The NSA programs are problematic even if no information people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior, but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its exclusion of the protagonist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by bureaucracies – indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

One such harm, for example, which I call "aggregation," emerges from the combination of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information become much more telling about a person. For the person who truly has nothing to hide, aggregation is not much of a problem. But in the stronger less absolutist form of the "nothing to hide" argument, people are arguing that certain pieces of information are not something they would hide.

Aggregation, however, means that by combining pieces of information we might not care to conceal, the government can glean information about us that we might really want to conceal. Part of the allure of data mining for the government is its ability to reveal a lot about our personalities and activities by sophisticated means of analyzing data. Therefore, without greater transparency in data mining, it is hard to claim that programs like the NSA data mining program will not reveal information people might want to hide, as we do not know precisely what is revealed.

Moreover, data mining aims to be predictive of behavior. In other words, it purports to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity.

Another problem in the taxonomy, which is implicated by the NSA program, is the problem I refer to as "exclusion." Exclusion is the problem caused when people are prevented from having knowledge about how their information is being used, as well as barred from being able to access and correct errors in that data. The NSA program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, it was kept secret for years. This kind of information processing, which forbids people's knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent should the Executive Branch, and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government. ...

A related problem involves "secondary use." Secondary use is the use of data obtained for one purpose for a different unrelated purpose without the person's consent. The Administration has said little about how long the data will be stored, how it will be used, and what it could be used for in the future. The potential future uses of any piece of personal information are vast, and without limits or accountability on how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in the government's control.

Therefore, the problem with the "nothing to hide" argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems – the disclosure of personal information or surveillance – and not others. It assumes a particular view about what privacy entails, and it sets the terms for debate in a manner that is often unproductive.

It is important to distinguish here between two ways of justifying a program such as the NSA surveillance and data mining program. First is to not recognize a problem. This is how the "nothing to hide" argument works. It denies even the existence of a problem. The second manner of justifying such a program is to acknowledge the problems but contend that the benefits of the NSA program outweigh the privacy harms. The first justification influences the second, for the low value given to privacy is based upon a narrow view of the problem.

Showdown Coming Next Week Over NSA CATCH-ALL Document Subpoenas

President Bush has until Wednesday to decide whether the White House will wage a Constitutional war on two fronts, when subpoenaed documents about the scope and legality of the President's warrantless wiretapping program are due to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If Bush decides to buck the Senate's demands by asserting Executive Privilege, Senator Patrick Leahy -- the the sharp-tongued Vermont Democrat helming the committee, will likely initiate contempt proceedings, as is happening in the House, where the President has prevented testimony in the controversy over the politically-motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys.

Leahy subpoenaed the White House, the Vice President, the National Security Council and the Justice Department on June 27, seeking documents about the legal opinions justifying the spy program, spying agreements with the nation's telecoms and documents related to denying Justice Department investigators security clearances to look into the program.

According to the government's admission, the program, given the tautological moniker Terrorist Surveillance Program by the government, spied on Americans emails and phone calls when the National Security Agency believed that one of the parties to the conversation had links to terrorism and that one end of the conversation was outside the United States.

Given the administration is trying to squash suits against itself and against its alleged telecom partners in the warrantless snooping based on the notion, there's little chance the Administration will give their Democratic foe the documents he wants. Instead, they will likely find another way to re-send the message that Vice Presidet Cheney famously sent Leahy. But how will they do it? Turn over a limited number of almost blank papers? Flat out refuse to testify or give documents, citing executive privilege? A horse head in Leahy's bed? Will someone from the Administration eventually end up in Congress's little known jail cell?

The spying matter is now playing on the big screen both in Congress and the courts.

The president's spying program recently surmounted one legal challenge when an appeals court struck down a lower court decision that the program was illegal, ruling that the journalists and lawyers who sued couldn't prove they were spied on so had no standing to sue.

However, another suit now enmeshed in the Ninth Circuit may be able to evade that Catch-22, since the plaintiffs claim that the government accidentally gave them a document showing they were spied upon without a warrant.

For those of you who like to keep track, ACLU has a illustrated scorecard on who has been subpoenaed and what documents the group wants to see requested. The Administration is likely to signal its intentions prior to Wednesday's deadline, so start your popcorn maker now.

Would You Like To Swing On a STAR?

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is developing a computer-profiling system that would enable investigators to target possible terror suspects, according to a Justice Department report submitted to Congress yesterday [to the Senate Judiciary Committee].

The System to Assess Risk, or STAR, assigns risk scores to possible suspects based on a variety of information, similar to the way a credit bureau assigns a rating based on a consumer's spending behavior and debt. The program focuses on foreign suspects but also includes data about some U.S. residents. A prototype is expected to be tested this year.

Justice Department officials said the system offers analysts a powerful new tool for finding possible terrorists. They said it is an effort to automate what analysts have been doing manually. ...

STAR is being developed by the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, which tracks suspected terrorists inside the country or as they enter. ...

After STAR has received the names of persons of interest, it runs them through an FBI "data mart" that includes classified and unclassified information from the government, airlines and commercial data brokers such as ChoicePoint. Then it runs them through the terrorist screening center database, which contains hundreds of thousands of names, as well as through a database containing information on non-citizens who enter the country. It also runs the names against information provided by data broker Accurint, which tracks addresses, phone numbers and driver's licenses.

The report said access to STAR would be limited to trained users and that data would be obtained lawfully. Results would be kept within the FBI's terrorist task force, the report said.

The Relativity of Eavesdropping

Britain may have more CCTV cameras per head than anywhere else in the world but when it comes to electronic surveillance the country is way behind Italy, the Netherlands and even Sweden.

Official figures have revealed UK law enforcement agencies and other government bodies made 439,000 requests to monitor telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006, leading to comments that Britain led the world in spying on its citizens.

The UK figures might sound high but are dwarfed by interception statistics from other countries. According to figures from German scientific think-tank the Max Planck Society, Italy leads the world with 76 intercepts per 100,000 head of population, shortly ahead of the Netherlands (62), and with third-placed Sweden some way back (33). Germany comes in fourth with 23.5 intercepts per 100,000 head of population with England and Wales trailing on six intercepts per head of population.

The Netherlands came up with a standard for IP interception and championed a framework for electronic surveillance when it held the EU presidency in 2004, so it can be seen as an evangelist for technology its ready to apply on its own populace. Corruption inquiries are perceived as the reason why Italy tops the global wiretap league.

Electronic surveillance levels in US are roughly on par with those of the UK. Based on a Department of Justice intercept report to Congress, 1.2m requests to tap telephones and email addresses were made in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. Most involved requests to obtain historic lists of telephone calls with only 48,000 requests looking for real-time call data and 2,600 involving the interception of communications.

These official figures exclude so-called warrantless domestic wiretaps approved by the Bush Administration and also exclude the NSA's related and diligent efforts as part and parcel of CATCH-ALL.

For examples of rather mundane vendors making a buck by providing turn-key solutions for governments to hack into your life, take a peek at SS8 Networks , AQSACOM, and Bivio.
-Hacked & Addended Excerpt From The Register

US/EU Passenger Name Recognition Data Deal

EU and US negotiators have struck a deal on sharing information about transatlantic flight passengers.

No details are officially available*, but EU sources say data will be kept by US security agencies for 15 years.

Under agreements reached after the 9/11 attacks, European airlines must provide 34 pieces of information about passengers flying into the US.

The latest deal expires at the end of July. A replacement agreement must be approved by the EU's 27 member states.

Wednesday's deal was reached in talks between European Union Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

SOME THINGS US CUSTOMS KNOWS

• Your history of missing flights
• Your frequent flyer miles
• Your seat location aboard
• Your e-mail address
• The US and the EU have differed on ways to balance security needs with concern for passengers' privacy.

A previous deal lapsed last October. The two sides failed to agree on terms for a full renewal and only reached an interim agreement.

Earlier, EU officials approved a separate agreement giving US counter-terrorist investigators access to details of international money transfers processed by the Brussels-based Swift network.

Washington says it needs the information to track and block terrorist funding, but EU regulators ruled that the original arrangement broke the union's privacy laws.

*"No details are officially available", but loyal SMC readers get the real scoop. According to the summary record of the relevent EU committee (pdf), these are the negotiated details:

Ministers Schauble and Secretary Chertoff have agreed on the following, which according to the Commission is fully consistent with the negotiating mandate adopted by the Council :

- Structure of the deal : an Article 24/38 TEU agreement would be concluded between the EU and the US, supplemented by an exchange of letters acknowledging the unilateral undertakings that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ready to adopt to protect the PNR data through a Statement of Record Notice (SORN). The precise nexus between the two is not agreed yet (the US side wants to avoid that the exchange of letters amounts to an agreement).

- PNR data would be kept for 7 years as "active" data and 8 years as "dormant" data.

- DHS would get access to PNR data and not only the Customs and Border Protection Department (CBP).

- The number of accessible data is reduced from 34 to 19.

- There would be a clear commitment to a PUSH system.

Many elements remain open though :

- Where to install the filters to delete the sensitive data (in the EU or in the US) ?

- The oversight mechanism : the Commission suggests to use the figure of the "eminent person" as in the SWIFT file.

- Reciprocity : the US wants to redefine the safeguards if a Member State or the EU were setting up a PNR system with more lenient safeguards.

FBI Ordered To Release Documents on PATRIOT Act Abuses

Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency's use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.

The order for monthly document releases commencing July 5 came in response to a government sunshine request by a civil liberties group, which sued in April over the FBI's foot-dragging on its broad request.

The April request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the FBI to turn over documents related to its misuse of National Security Letters, self-issued subpoenas that don't need a judge's approval and which can get financial, phone and internet records. Recipients of the letters are forbidden by law from ever telling anyone other than their lawyer that they received the request. Though initially warned to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans. Information obtained from the requests, which need only be certified by the agency to be "relevant" to an investigation, are dumped into a data-mining warehouse for perpetuity.

An Inspector General report in March found rampant errors in the small sample of NSLs examined and systemic underreporting of the powers usage to Congress. The report also found that agents issued more than 700 "expedited" letters, some containing materially false sworn statements. These letters had no legal basis and essentially asked companies to turn over data by pretending there was an emergency in order to get the data necessary to get a proper NSL. One former FBI agent says its clear the FBI violated the law.

Now the Justice Department must turn over 2,500 pages of documents a month to the EFF, including information on cozy surveillance contracts between the FBI and telephone companies and information on how data captured by NSLs were put into the FBI's massive data mining warehouse.

The Justice Department told the court that there were more than 100,000 potentially responsive documents and that ten people are working full time on filling the request for documents. Look out for a run on thick, black magic markers in D.C.

THREAT LEVEL can't wait to see:

1. All records discussing or reporting violations or potential violations of statutes, Attorney General guidelines, and internal FBI policies governing the use of NSLs, including, but not limited to:

A. Correspondence or communications between the FBI and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concerning violations or potential violations of statutes...

2. Guidelines, memoranda or communications addressing or discussing the integration of NSL data into the FBIís Investigative Data Warehouse; 3. Contracts between the FBI and three telephone companies [...] which were intended to allow the Counterterrorism Division to obtain telephone toll billing data from the communications industry as expeditiously as possible;

4. Any guidance, memoranda or communications discussing the FBI's legal authority to issue exigent letters to telecommunications companies, and the relationship between such exigent letters and the FBI's authority to issue NSLs under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act;

5. Any guidance, memoranda or communications discussing the application of the Fourth Amendment to NSLs issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act;

8. Copies of sample or model exigent letters used by the FBI's Counterterrorism Division;

9. Copies of sample or model NSL approval requests used by the FBI's Counterterrorism Division;

10. Records related to the Counterterrorism Division's Electronic Surveillance Operations and Sharing Unit (EOPS).

WASPy Insurgency - Countdown To G8 Von Heiligendamm

After the rather tumultuous results of creatively precipitous counter-insurgency activities run during the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, a decision was made that future summit games preferably be held in loci of relative obscurity.

Next week sees the 100 million dollar, 16000 police and 1200 soldier strong Securitate circus arriving in the kleine Kraut ville of Heiligendamm located but a few clicks west of Rostock - that jet set cold war Mecca of TIR truckers who couldn't get enough of those find-the-meat soups served from the city's armada of makeshift trailer-based soup kiosks.

Will the relative isolation of this years summit mean less Caucasian-on-Caucasian COIN action? Who knows, but here's an excerpt from a mindset of something not utterly without relevance.

By the Anti-G8 Action Faction
HatetheG8.blogspot.com
May 28th 2007

On their way to block the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, anti-capitalists from all over Germany and the world stop in Hamburg to confront the Asian-European Meeting (ASEM).

Finally, something was happening.

We were on the move again. It's been a while and we're a bit out of shape, but it's all coming back now. After linking arms in flanks for five hours straight in a huge, permitted march, we were getting antsy.

As the first major demonstration in the lead up to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, everyone wanted to start it off right. The city of Hamburg needed to send a message to the world that they have the "violent demonstrators" under total control. The cops must maintain discipline and it will all go smoothly. The protestors wanted to tear the city apart, to show the G8 leaders that they are not welcome here, and anyone who tries to host them will have to pay. With a thousand black clad anarchists in the front and thousands of others behind, the tension was thick. Screaming "fight the system, fight the state, fight capitalism, fight G8," the demonstrators were not willing to compromise either their vision or momentum. But who would provoke who first? Would the cops use the water canons? Would the anarchists break through the lines and go off the script?

Will the G8 2007 be the opening salvo of a new cycle of struggle against capital, perhaps the final one given the scope of the current ecological crisis? For two years the German autonomous movement in general and the Dissent Network in particular has organized across the world, from the USA to Turkey, for this coming week of action. The stakes have never been higher: until now the "War on Terror" has cast a pall over the movement, yet in Germany we anarchists and autonomists could again re-seize the stage of history by scoring a decisive victory against capital.

Move swiftly. Stop. Fight a bit. Grab something. Then Run. Turn around. Watch out for the Snatch Squad. Which ones are they? Wearing all black with red diamonds on their back. Shit, there they are. They're gonna try and grab us. Move! But who are those ones? Don't worry, it's just the green team. Green team? Yeah, green uniforms, they're like the national guard. They won't arrest you, they'll just tussle a bit. And them? Who? The darker green and dark blue. Oh them, well, they're here to stop you. Be careful.

The modern incarnation of the autonomous movement is distinctly anarchist, mostly young, and quite, quite punk. Even though the movement had been ebbing over the last few years, it appears the arrival of the G8 in Germany, combined with the police raids in early May on anti-G8 centers of activity, have united the often divided and self-critical Autonomen. To the chagrin of the police, the raids also backfired in the popular press, and now it appears that most of the media, and even much of the public, are on the side of the dissidents. Furthermore, in "Red Hamburg," the home of insurrections, pirates, and a famous anti-fascist football league, it is often hard to tell the locals from the Black Bloc while in the streets.

Shhhhhhh. What? Be quiet, they're looking for us. OK, hold it . . . hold it . . . NOW!

The police are nervous, very nervous. And rightfully so! For months, the cars of the officials have been burned, and now internationals are streaming into the well-run convergence center in Hamburg, the former theatre "Rote Flora" that has been squatted for nearly two decades. The dynamic of the police is Freudian to say the least: the police would like nothing better than to release their inner fascist and ruthlessly clear the streets of all protesters. Due to such factors as public opinion and their brutality backfiring on them in the courts, they simply cannot just beat the protesters without pretext. So, instead, the officers express their frustration with an anal-retentive attention to detail about the smallest of the rules regarding banner size, demonstrators masking-up, and so on; they often stop demonstrations for up to thirty minutes or more for the most minor of infraction of the "rules."

The bridge was a trap and everyone knew it. That's exactly where they wanted us to end up and there we were. Yeah some fireworks were shot off, rocks thrown, and a couple arrests, but come on, it was their turf. We had no chance. They've surrounded the Rote Flora. What? The convergence center, you know, that huge squat. Are they going in? Not likely, I think they'll get a beating if they try. Barricades are going up, let's get behind them. The water canons are coming out. Well, move. Down this alley way! Ok. Wait, are we all together?

This leads almost any march or demonstration to be an exercise in frustration, a chess game where both sides try to bend, but not break, the rules through a strict process of negotiation. Or at least until breaking the rules is advantageous. While marching, German anarchists more or less engage with the police in careful negotiations until the permitted demonstration gets as close to the desired location as possible (such as a financial district, a fascist demonstration, or in this case the EU-ASEM Summit meeting in the town hall), and then, all bets are off. The demonstration will then generally be aggressive towards police lines, attempting to wreck havoc by escaping off the official route as a bloc, or break into small affinity groups to build barricades and attack police cars. There is also an apparent tradition of regrouping the night of the action for even more fun in the streets.

I think I'm trapped. Don't panic. Look around. They're gonna do a mass arrest. Ok, black-clad cops over there. Try this. Nope, green cops. Damn, turn around. Fuck, the blue ones. Ok. Surrounded. Where's my group? Doesn't matter, I need to find a way out. Option 1: join the bloc and fight your way out. How many of us are there? Not enough. Option 2: act stupid and sneak by. Let's see if that works.

Police tactics in Germany seem to be a combination of psychological warfare and shows of overwhelming force, with the emphasis on "show," for they seem unable to act unless provoked and do not generally mass arrest protesters, but just surround the march on all sides to maintain "order." Police can be divided into distinct groups.

First, there are the local and federal police, who wear blue and green. Within this group there are inexperienced "barrack-based" police who can be identified by an "A" on their helmets. However, the real reason to be worried is the intensive surveillance done by the police (although unlike the UK, there are few CCTVs anywhere), who send undercovers to demonstrations to identify those who have broken laws, and have uniformed cameramen directly outside to tape protestors and identify them (using rather clever techniques like identifying Black Bloc members by their shoes).

There is also a special police snatch-squad unit, dressed all in black like stormtroopers, who will quickly and brutally move in and make arrests like sharks. However bad this sounds, it is important to note that the procedure German police use in crowd control is actually quite predictable, and as long as one stays in tight groups, one is unlikely to be snatched. The German police are far from invincible despite their pretensions, and a victory over them should be possible.

Close, too close. I know. We were gonna go back and get you. What? That's insane, they would've grabbed you too. Hey look, they're sending in more. Did they declare a state of emergency? I heard that too. Shit, there's waves and waves of them. Back to the Flora? No, its' not safe. Ok, then, disappear.

A massive thousand person Black Bloc at ASEM, cop cars destroyed, a skirmish in front of the convergence center - not bad for a day´s work. Now, there are many debates over what exactly to do over the next few days. The demonstrations are so decentralized and yet actively planned, that it is hard for even the German anarchists to predict where the sites of intense struggle will be: there are convergences in three cities, an anti-fascist counter-protest against a thousand fascists in the streets AND a huge rally in Rostock against the G8 on the same day, decentralized blockades of roads and airport blockades, as well as countless marches and demonstrations near Heiligdamm and in Rostock. Regardless of the particulars, the energy amongst anarchists in Europe has been built to a frenzied height, and if one thing can be assured over the next week- there will be a reckoning.

Thousands of us in the march. Hundreds rampaging in the streets. About eighty-five arrested. Not bad for a start. Nope, not bad at all.

.

Catching Up With CATCH-ALL - NSA Domestic Surveillance

Is the NSA's domestic surveillance program far greater in scope than anyone, save SMC, has admitted to?



We might just have caught an indirect glimpse of the behemoth SMC has referred to as CATCH-ALL by observing the interference pattern generated by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's cross-illuminated testimony in the Senate on May 15.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey claimed that the entire leadership of the Justice Department was prepared to resign over their disagreement with the White House, in particular with Cheney and his lawyer Addington - and specifically over circumstances pertaining to the NSA's domestic surveillance program.

What are these circumstances? Do they comprise the significant difference between what has hitherto been admitted and what SMC has long dubbed & described as CATCH-ALL?

For a moment last week we thought we might just have laid a morning misty eye on ol' Nessie coming up for air. Then she dove - if that was her at all.