Dados dos cidadãos são vendidos livremente na Alemanha!! Espionagem em larga escala faz Daniel Dantas parecer Inspetor Clouseau!!

Escândalos de comércio ilegal de dados eclodem na Alemanha
DW, 19.08.08

Comércio de dados de clientes toma proporções escandalosas na Alemanha. Associações de defesa do consumidor alertam que dados de empresas privadas no país são cada vez mais inseguros.
Especialistas alertam: negócios ilícitos envolvendo o comércio de dados se tornam cada vez mais freqüentes na Alemanha. A Confederação das Centrais de Defesa do Consumidor deu início a um debate, depois de ter conseguido, por meros 850 euros, comprar dados relacionados a 6 milhões de pessoas que vivem no país.
Envolvimento de call centers
O presidente da Confederação, Gerd Billen, deverá entregar um DVD e dois CDs contendo esses dados à Justiça. Também no estado de Schleswig-Holstein foi descoberto um CD com mais de 130 mil registros, colhidos por call centers no país. Aproximadamente 60 mil destes continham dados bancários, arquivados por companhias lotéricas e de telefonia.
De posse de tais dados, é possível às empresas sacar dinheiro de contas alheias. As associações de defesa do consumidor acreditam que casos de acesso ilícito a contas bancárias podem estar associados ao comércio de dados: nos últimos tempos, foram registrados vários casos de pessoas que se negaram, por telefone, a participar de rifas ou similares e tiveram os valores em questão retirados de suas contas. Isso sem que tenham fornecido quaisquer dados, exceto os próprios nomes.
Aliança contra abusos – Organizações de defesa do consumidor, aliadas a organismos de proteção à privacidade, ao encarregado do governo para o assunto e à polícia do país, selaram uma aliança pelo combate ao comércio de dados e em prol de punições mais severas para infratores. Billen afirmou em Berlim que a “fúria pelo acúmulo de dados” tem que ser cessada.
Bernd Carstensen, presidente da Federação dos Policiais, alertou para o fato de que “o comércio de dados privados envolve bilhões de euros e dispõe de estruturas mafiosas”. Peter Schaar, encarregado do governo federal para a proteção de dados, salientou que “tais dados só deveriam ser usados para fins de propaganda e marketing quando isso for explicitamente permitido pela pessoa em questão”.
Os principais suspeitos de comércio ilegal de dados no país são call centers. Segundo informações veiculadas pela televisão alemã, uma empresa do ramo de Bremerhaven teria tido acesso a dados de clientes da companhia telefônica Deutsche Telekom e repassado adiante. As proporções dos dados comercializados ainda não foram apuradas.
Verdes pedem legislação mais rigorosa - Renate Künast, líder da bancada do Partido Verde no Bundestag, sugeriu a criação de um apoio jurídico para que todo cidadão tenha o direito de saber e determinar o que acontece com os dados a seu respeito. “Tanto no direito civil quanto no empresarial precisamos nos abrir para o desenvolvimento tecnológico do século 21 no que diz respeito à proteção à privacidade”, diz Künast.
Vários escândalos - No decorrer dos últimos dias, foram vários os escândalos no país envolvendo a proteção de dados. Segundo informações divulgadas pela mídia, o informante que enviou anonimamente à Associação de Proteção ao Consumidor de Schleswig-Holstein um CD-Rom com informações pessoais (nome, endereço, telefone e contas bancárias) de aproximadamente 17 mil cidadãos, estaria em posse de aproximadamente 1,5 milhão de dados similares.
O tal informante, de 36 anos de idade, teria trabalhado, segundo o semanário Der Spiegel, em um call center da cidade de Lübeck, cuja direção permitia o acessos dos funcionários aos dados. A revista Focus informou que também no estado da Renânia do Norte-Vestfália um comerciante de dados ofereceu no mercado negro, há pouco, 50 mil nomes, com endereço, telefone e número de conta bancária. Os preços para a aquisição do material iam de 5 cents de euro a 1 euro por registro.
Agências/DW (sv)
E mais:

Descoberto comércio ilegal com dados de 17 mil pessoas

Serviços de proteção de dados e ao consumidor da Alemanha registraram comércio ilegal com informações pessoais em grande estilo. A Central do Consumidor do estado de Schleswig-Holstein interceptou um CD com nomes, datas de nascimento, endereços e números telefone de contas de banco de 17 mil cidadãos do país. Segundo primeiras informações, o CD era vendido por uma firma da Renânia do Norte-Vestfália a outras empresas. Os dados aparentemente provêm de uma operadora de loteria do sul do país. (av) – 12.08.08

Espionagem empresarial preocupa especialistas

Vários empresários de médio porte na Alemanha não têm consciência do risco que correm: espionar o know-how tecnológico alheio para produzir no próprio país vem sendo prática cada vez mais comum. – 06.11.07

Apocalípticos americanos vêem a "Mão da Besta" em lei que obriga fazendeiros a implantarem sistema de rastreamento em suas criações ( Em inglês )

Farmers fear a barnyard Big Brother

A federal database of animals to fight disease outbreaks is a threat to privacy and family operations, critics say.
By Nicole Gaouette, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2008

CONTEST: Brandi Calderwood and her steer were disqualified at the Colorado State Fair because she had not registered in the ID program. “It’s just way too much Big Brother,” her mother said.

WASHINGTON – After days of parading around her beefy black steer in the dung-scented August heat at the Colorado State Fair, Brandi Calderwood made the final competition. For months, the 16-year-old worked from dawn well past dusk, fitting in the work around school, to feed, train and clean her steer. But just before the last round, when the animals are sold, fair officials disqualified her.They alleged that Brandi had not properly followed a new and controversial rule that required children to register their farms with a federal animal tracking system [ OBS: Grifo do blog ]. After heated words, the Calderwoods were told to leave. A security guard trailed Brandi and her mother, even to the restroom.

TAGGED: The 15-digit code identifies the calf and helps keep track of its activities. (Nathan W. Armes / For The Times) November 30, 2007

“Emotionally she went through the wringer and didn’t get the honor of showing in the sale. For a 16-year-old, that’s a big deal,” said Cathy Calderwood, Brandi’s mother.

A Bush administration initiative, the National Animal Identification System is meant to provide a modern tool for tracking disease outbreaks within 48 hours, whether natural or the work of a bioterrorist. Most farm animals, even exotic ones such as llamas, will eventually be registered. Information will be kept on every farm, ranch or stable. And databases will record every animal movement from birth to slaughterhouse, including trips to the vet and county fairs.

But the system is spawning a grass-roots revolt.

Family farmers see it as an assault on their way of life by a federal bureaucracy with close ties to industrial agriculture. They point out that they will have to track every animal while vast commercial operations will be allowed to track whole herds.

Privacy advocates say the database would create an invasive, detailed electronic record of farmers’ activities. Religious farming communities, such as the Amish and Mennonites, fear the system is a manifestation of the Mark of the Beast foretold in the Book of Revelation.

And despite the administration’s insistence that the program is voluntary, farmers and families, such as the Calderwoods, chafe at the heavy-handed and often mandatory way states have implemented it, sometimes with the help of sheriff’s deputies.The result is a system meant to help farms that many farmers oppose.”It’s totally ridiculous,” said Joaquin Contente, who oversees 1,700 Holsteins on his Hanford, Calif., dairy farm. Contente said existing regulations in California and other states meant his cows and their movements were well-documented.

“We already have a good paper trail. It will be more of a burden for the small-to-average producer,” said Contente, who worries about the expense for an average-size farm like his.

Run by the Department of Agriculture, the system is meant to help combat threats such as avian flu and mad cow disease.”Right now, we have six different disease-eradication programs, and they don’t always communicate with each other, and they’re paper intensive,” said Bruce Knight, a USDA undersecretary. “That worked fine in the last century, but that isn’t the way to run a rapid response system in the 21st century.”Cattle groups were working on a registration system when, in 2003, a mad cow disease scare in Washington state set the industry on edge. A diseased Canadian cow entered the U.S. with 81 other cows, but only 29 could be found. More than 250 animals from 10 different herds were destroyed in the investigation.

Foreign beef trade stopped immediately, with industry losses estimated at $2 billion to $4 billion. Trade still has not fully recovered.Within the cattle industry, the database is seen as essential to restore U.S. exports in the international market. There are more than 100 million beef cattle and about 10 million dairy cows in the United States. The world’s largest beef consumer, the European Union, is sensitive to mad cow disease because of outbreaks in Britain.The first stage of the animal ID system involves free registration of the “premises” where livestock are kept. That seven-digit number is stored by the federal government, which had registered 440,997 farms as of last week, out of 1.43 million.The second stage, now under way, involves identifying animals with a microchip or a plastic or metal ear tag containing a 15-digit code.

Federal officials aim to register cattle, bison, poultry, swine, sheep, goats, deer, elk, horses, mules, donkeys, burros, llamas and alpacas. Household pets are not included.

The third stage, not yet in effect, would require farmers to report animal movements to the database within 24 hours.

And MORE:

Farmers Protest Livestock Tracking Initiative
A U.S. plan to guard against the spread of disease by registering and tracking all domestic livestock is facing significant opposition among small farmers, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 21, 2007).
The National Animal Identification System aims to track natural or bioterrorism-related disease outbreaks within 48 hours by cataloging the movement of all U.S. livestock from the point of birth to the place of death, including county fair trips and veterinary checkups. It would also maintain information on all farms, ranches and stables.
Two of three stages of the plan are already under way.
Some small farmers have attacked the program as an attempt by the federal government to give large agribusiness an advantage over family farms.
Critics have noted that major industrial farming operations would be permitted to track herds of livestock as a single unit while small farmers must report the movements of individual animals. Privacy advocates said the extensive database the program would create would encroach on the privacy of farmers.
“It’s totally ridiculous,” said Joaquin Contente, a dairy farmer in Hanford, Calif. “We already have a good paper trail. It will be more of a burden for the small-to-average producer.”
The Amish and other religious farming communities are also alarmed. Mary-Louise Zanoni, an attorney who volunteers to represent the farmers, said they are concerned about the “Mark of the Beast” prediction in the Bible’s Book of Revelation that an evil entity such as a government or another outside force would require a numbering system for the purchase or sale of items.
“We feel the [the plan] is an act of the Antichrist,” a group of Old Order Amish farmers told Wisconsin agriculture officials in a letter (Nicole Gaouette, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 14).

FBI não paga conta, e empresa de telefonia corta a linha da agência, sem perdão. ( !!! )

Telecom corta escuta do FBI por não pagamento

Sexta-feira, 11 de janeiro de 2008

WASHINGTON – Uma empresa telefônica cortou uma escuta internacional do FBI depois que a agência deixou de pagar sua conta em dia.
A auditoria, conduzida pelo inspetor geral do Departamento da Justiça, disse que o FBI é culpado de mau uso do dinheiro utilizado em investigações clandestinas, e que essas práticas tornam a agência vulnerável a roubos e problemas no pagamento de faturas.
O estudo apontou o caso de uma escuta instalada sob autorização da lei de vigilância externa, que rege o uso de recursos eletrônicos para espionar suspeitos de terrorismo e de delitos internacionais, que terminou cortada devido ao não pagamento de uma conta.
“Os atrasos de pagamento levaram operadoras de telecomunicações a efetivamente desligar linhas telefônicas instaladas como escuta pelo FBI, o que resultou em perda de provas, incluindo um caso no qual a distribuição de informações interceptadas nos termos da lei foi suspensa devido ao atraso no pagamento”, afirma o relatório.
Cynthia Schnedar, porta-voz da inspetoria da Justiça, disse que não era possível fornecer detalhes adicionais sobre a escuta prejudicada.
O FBI reconheceu “alguns poucos casos” nos quais o atraso no pagamento de contas de telefone causou perturbação na vigilância, e acrescentou que “essas interrupções foram temporárias e, de acordo com nossas avaliações, nenhum desses casos foi afetado de maneira significativa.”
A American Civil Liberties Union disse que o relatório destaca a hipocrisia das operadoras de telefonia, que desejam que o Congresso lhes conceda imunidade contra processos por cooperação com certas escutas, sob a alegação de que estão agindo a serviço do país.
Boa parte do relatório continha informações sensíveis sobre questões de policiamento e segurança, e diversos detalhes foram retidos.
O programa de vigilância internacional do governo, denunciado como inconstitucional e invasivo em excesso pelos oponentes, está sendo debatido pelo Congresso com vistas a uma possível renovação.
Os legisladores chegaram a um impasse quanto ao escopo do programa e às proteções contra processos para as operadoras telefônicas que participaram de um programa de escutas domésticas iniciado pelo presidente George W. Bush depois dos ataques de 11 de setembro.
Reuters, publicado em Info Online

Bush Goes Private to Spy on You ( em inglês e eu não vou nem tentar traduzir… )

By Tim Shorrock, CorpWatch. Posted December 6, 2007.

The Bush administration is launching a new government agency that will rely heavily on private security contractors to conduct surveillance in the U.S.

A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the United States one of the world’s most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.
The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors, including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.
The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other key agencies is used within the United States during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting national security. The most critical intelligence will be supplied by the NSA and the NGA, which are often referred to by U.S. officials as the “eyes” and “ears” of the intelligence community.
The NSA, through a global network of listening posts, surveillance planes, and satellites, captures signals from phone calls, email and internet traffic, and translates and analyzes them for U.S. military and national intelligence officials.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the supersecret National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations where the NSA’s signals and the NGA’s imagery are processed and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be confined to foreign countries and battlefields.
The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S. intelligence operations had not been updated for the global “war on terror,” turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va., one of the largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to security within the United States. The Booz Allen study was completed in May of that year and has since become the basis for the NAO oversight plan. In May 2007, McConnell, the former executive vice president of Booz Allen, signed off on the creation of the NAO as the principal body to oversee the merging of foreign and domestic intelligence collection operations.
The NAO is “an idea whose time has arrived,” Charles Allen, a top U.S. intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007 after it broke the news of the NAO’s creation. Allen, the DHS’s chief intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, email and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved. “These [intelligence] systems are already used to help us respond to crises,” Allen later told the Washington Post. “We anticipate that we can also use them to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities.”
Donald Kerr, a former NRO director who is now the No. 2 at ODNI, recently explained to reporters that the intelligence community was no longer discussing whether or not to spy on U.S. citizens: “Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. ”I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”
What will the NAO do?
The plan for the NAO builds on a domestic security infrastructure that has been in place for at least seven years. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA was granted new powers to monitor domestic communications without obtaining warrants from a secret foreign intelligence court established by Congress in 1978 (that warrantless program ended in January 2007 but was allowed to continue, with some changes, under legislation passed by Congress in August 2007).
Moreover, intelligence and reconnaissance agencies that were historically confined to spying on foreign countries have been used extensively on the home front since 2001. In the hours after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, for example, the Bush administration called on the NGA to capture imagery from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon to help in the rescue and recovery efforts. In 2002, when two deranged snipers terrified the citizens of Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs with a string of fatal shootings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked the NGA to provide detailed images of freeway interchanges and other locations to help spot the pair.
The NGA was also used extensively during Hurricane Katrina, when the agency provided overhead imagery — some of it supplied by U-2 photoreconnaissance aircraft — to federal and state rescue operations. The data, which included mapping of flooded areas in Louisiana and Mississippi, allowed residents of the stricken areas to see the extent of damage to their homes and helped first-responders locate contaminated areas as well as schools, churches and hospitals that might be used in the rescue. More recently, during the October 2007 California wildfires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the NGA to analyze overhead imagery of the fire zones and determine the areas of maximum intensity and damage. In every situation that the NGA is used domestically, it must receive a formal request from a lead domestic agency, according to agency spokesperson David Burpee. That agency is usually FEMA, which is a unit of DHS.
At first blush, the idea of a U.S. intelligence agency serving the public by providing imagery to aid in disaster recovery sounds like a positive development, especially when compared to the Bush administration’s misuse of the NSA and the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) to spy on American citizens. But the notion of using spy satellites and aircraft for domestic purposes becomes problematic from a civil liberties standpoint when the full capabilities of agencies like the NGA and the NSA are considered.
Imagine, for example, that U.S. intelligence officials have determined, through NSA telephone intercepts, that a group of worshipers at a mosque in Oakland, Calif., has communicated with an Islamic charity in Saudi Arabia. This is the same group that the FBI and the U.S. Department of the Treasury believe is linked to an organization unfriendly to the United States.
Imagine further that the FBI, as a lead agency, asks and receives permission to monitor that mosque and the people inside using high-resolution imagery obtained from the NGA. Using other technologies, such as overhead traffic cameras in place in many cities, that mosque could be placed under surveillance for months, and — through cell phone intercepts and overhead imagery — its suspected worshipers carefully tracked in real time as they moved almost anywhere in the country.
The NAO, under the plan approved by ODNI’s McConnell, would determine the rules that will guide the DHS and other lead federal agencies when they want to use imagery and signals intelligence in situations like this, as well as during natural disasters. If the organization is established as planned, U.S. domestic agencies will have a vast array of technology at their disposal. In addition to the powerful mapping and signals tools provided by the NGA and the NSA, domestic agencies will also have access to measures and signatures intelligence (MASINT) managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal spying agency used by the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(MASINT is a highly classified form of intelligence that uses infrared sensors and other technologies to “sniff” the atmosphere for certain chemicals and electromagnetic activity, and “see” beneath bridges and forest canopies. Using its tools, analysts can detect signs that a nuclear power plant is producing plutonium, determine from truck exhaust what types of vehicles are in a convoy, and detect people and weapons hidden from the view of satellites or photoreconnaissance aircraft.)
Created by contractors
The study group that established policies for the NAO was jointly funded by the ODNI and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), one of only two domestic U.S. agencies that is currently allowed, under rules set in the 1970s, to use classified intelligence from spy satellites. (The other is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) The group was chaired by Keith Hall, a Booz Allen vice president who manages his firm’s extensive contracts with the NGA and previously served as the director of the NRO.
Other members of the group included seven former intelligence officers working for Booz Allen, as well as retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, the former director of the DIA and vice president of homeland security for L-3 Communications, a key NSA contractor; and Thomas W. Conroy, the vice president of national security programs for Northrop Grumman, which has extensive contracts with the NSA and the NGA and throughout the intelligence community.
From the start, the study group was heavily weighted toward companies with a stake in both foreign and domestic intelligence. Not surprisingly, its contractor-advisers called for a major expansion in the domestic use of the spy satellites that they sell to the government. Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, they said, the “threats to the nation have changed, and there is a growing interest in making available the special capabilities of the intelligence community to all parts of the government, to include homeland security and law enforcement entities and on a higher priority basis.”
Contractors are not new to the U.S. spy world. Since the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the modern intelligence system in 1947, the private sector has been tapped to design and build the technology that facilitates electronic surveillance. Lockheed, for example, built the U-2, the famous surveillance plane that flew scores of spy missions over the Soviet Union and Cuba. During the 1960s, Lockheed was a prime contractor for the Corona system of spy satellites that greatly expanded the CIA’s abilities to photograph secret military installations from space. IBM, Cray Computers and other companies built the supercomputers that allowed the NSA to sift through data from millions of telephone calls and analyze them for intelligence that was passed on to national leaders.
Spending on contracts has increased exponentially in recent years along with intelligence budgets, and the NSA, the NGA and other agencies have turned to the private sector for the latest computer and communications technologies and for intelligence analysts. For example, today about half of staff at the NSA and NGA are private contractors. At the DIA, 70 percent of the workers are contractors. But the most privatized agency of all is the NRO, where a whopping 90 percent of the work force receive paychecks from corporations. All told the U.S. intelligence agencies spend some 70 percent of their estimated $60 billion annual budget on contracts with private companies, according to documents this reporter obtained in June 2007 from the ODNI.
The plans to increase domestic spying are estimated to be worth billions of dollars in new business for the intelligence contractors. The market potential was on display in October at GEOINT 2007, the annual conference sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a nonprofit organization funded by the largest contractors for the NGA. During the conference, which took place in October at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio, many companies were displaying spying and surveillance tools that had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq and were now being rebranded for potential domestic use.
BAE Systems Inc.
On the first day of the conference, three employees of BAE Systems Inc. who had just returned from a three-week tour of Iraq and Afghanistan with the NGA demonstrated a new software package called SOCET GXP. (BAE Systems Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of the U.K.-based BAE, the third-largest military contractor in the world.)
GXP uses Google Earth software as a basis for creating three-dimensional maps that U.S. commanders and soldiers use to conduct intelligence and reconnaissance missions. Eric Bruce, one of the BAE employees back from the Middle East, said his team trained U.S. forces to use the GXP software “to study routes for known terrorist sites” as well as to locate opium fields. “Terrorists use opium to fund their war,” he said. Bruce also said his team received help from Iraqi citizens in locating targets. “Many of the locals can’t read maps, so they tell the analysts, ‘there is a mosque next to a hill,’” he explained.
Bruce said BAE’s new package is designed for defense forces and intelligence agencies but can also be used for homeland security and by highway departments and airports. Earlier versions of the software were sold to the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center, where it has been used to collect data on more than 12,000 square kilometers of Iraq, primarily in urban centers and over supply routes.
Another new BAE tool displayed in San Antonio was a program called GOSHAWK, which stands for “Geospatial Operations for a Secure Homeland — Awareness, Workflow, Knowledge.” It was pitched by BAE as a tool to help law enforcement and state and local emergency agencies prepare for, and respond to, “natural disasters and terrorist and criminal incidents.” Under the GOSHAWK program, BAE supplies “agencies and corporations” with data providers and information technology specialists “capable of turning geospatial information into the knowledge needed for quick decisions.” A typical operation might involve acquiring data from satellites, aircraft and sensors in ground vehicles, and integrating those data to support an emergency or security operations center. One of the program’s special attributes, the company says, is its ability to “differentiate levels of classification,” meaning that it can deduce when data are classified and meant only for use by analysts with security clearances.
These two products were just a sampling of what BAE, a major player in the U.S. intelligence market, had to offer. BAE’s services to U.S. intelligence — including the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center — are provided through a special unit called the Global Analysis Business Unit. It is located in McLean, Va., a stone’s throw from the CIA. The unit is headed by John Gannon, a 25-year veteran of the CIA who reached the agency’s highest analytical ranks as deputy director of intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Today, as a private sector contractor for the intelligence community, Gannon manages a staff of more than 800 analysts with security clearances.
A brochure for the Global Analysis unit distributed at GEOINT 2007 explains BAE’s role and, in the process, underscores the degree of outsourcing in U.S. intelligence. “The demand for experienced, skilled and cleared analysts — and for the best systems to manage them — has never been greater across the Intelligence and Defense Communities, in the field and among federal, state and local agencies responsible for national and homeland security,” BAE says. The mission of the Global Analysis unit, it says, “is to provide policymakers, warfighters and law enforcement officials with analysts to help them understand the complex intelligence threats they face, and work force management programs to improve the skills and expertise of analysts.”
At the bottom of the brochure is a series of photographs illustrating BAE’s broad reach: a group of analysts monitoring a bank of computers; three employees studying a map of Europe, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa; the outlines of two related social networks that have been mapped out to show how their members are linked; a bearded man, apparently from the Middle East and presumably a terrorist; the fiery image of a car bomb after it exploded in Iraq; and four white radar domes (known as radomes) of the type used by the NSA to monitor global communications from dozens of bases and facilities around the world.
The brochure may look and sound like typical corporate public relations. But amid BAE’s spy talk were two phrases strategically placed by the company to alert intelligence officials that BAE has an active presence inside the United States. The tip-off words were “federal, state and local agencies,” “law enforcement officials” and “homeland security.” By including them, BAE was broadcasting that it is not simply a contractor for agencies involved in foreign intelligence but has an active presence as a supplier to domestic security agencies, a category that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI, as well as local and state police forces stretching from Maine to Hawaii.
ManTech, Boeing, Harris and L-3
ManTech International, an important NSA contractor based in Fairfax, Va., has perfected the art of creating multiagency software programs for both foreign and domestic intelligence. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it developed a classified program for the Defense Intelligence Agency called the Joint Regional Information Exchange System. DIA used it to combine classified and unclassified intelligence on terrorist threats on a single desktop. ManTech then tweaked that software for the Department of Homeland Security and sold it to DHS for its Homeland Security Information Network. According to literature ManTech distributed at GEOINT, that software will “significantly strengthen the exchange of real-time threat information used to combat terrorism.” ManTech, the brochure added, “also provides extensive, advanced information technology support to the National Security Agency” and other agencies.
In a nearby booth, Chicago-based Boeing, the world’s second largest defense contractor, was displaying its “information sharing environment” software, which is designed to meet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s new requirements on agencies to stop buying “stovepiped” systems that can’t talk to each other. The ODNI wants to focus on products that will allow the NGA and other agencies to easily share their classified imagery with the CIA and other sectors of the community. “To ensure freedom in the world, the United States continues to address the challenges introduced by terrorism,” a Boeing handout said. Its new software, the company said, will allow information to be “shared efficiently and uninterrupted across intelligence agencies, first responders, military and world allies.” Boeing has a reason for publishing boastful material like this: In 2005, it lost a major contract with the NRO to build a new generation of imaging satellites after ringing up billions of dollars in cost overruns. The New York Times recently called the Boeing project “the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.”
Boeing’s geospatial intelligence offerings are provided through its Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which also holds contracts with the NSA. It allows agencies and military units to map global shorelines and create detailed maps of cities and battlefields, complete with digital elevation data that allow users to construct three-dimensional maps. (In an intriguing aside, one Boeing intelligence brochure lists among its “specialized organizations” Jeppesen Government and Military Services. According to a 2006 account by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, Jeppesen provided logistical and navigational assistance, including flight plans and clearance to fly over other countries, to the CIA for its “extraordinary rendition” program.)
Although less known as an intelligence contractor than BAE and Boeing, the Harris Corp. has become a major force in providing contracted electronic, satellite and information technology services to the intelligence community, including the NSA and the NRO. In 2007, according to its most recent annual report, the $4.2 billion company, based in Melbourne, Fla., won several new classified contracts. NSA awarded one of them for software to be used by NSA analysts in the agency’s “Rapidly Deployable Integrated Command and Control System,” which is used by the NSA to transmit “actionable intelligence” to soldiers and commanders in the field. Harris also supplies geospatial and imagery products to the NGA. At GEOINT, Harris displayed a new product that allows agencies to analyze live video and audio data imported from UAVs. It was developed, said Fred Poole, a Harris market development manager, “with input from intelligence analysts who were looking for a video and audio analysis tool that would allow them to perform ‘intelligence fusion’” — combining information from several agencies into a single picture of an ongoing operation.
For many of the contractors at GEOINT, the highlight of the symposium was an “interoperability demonstration” that allowed vendors to show how their products would work in a domestic crisis.
One scenario involved Cuba as a rogue nation supplying spent nuclear fuel to terrorists bent on creating havoc in the United States. Implausible as it was, the plot, which involved maritime transportation and ports, allowed the companies to display software that was likely already in use by the Department of Homeland Security and Naval Intelligence. The “plot” involved the discovery by U.S. intelligence of a Cuban ship carrying spent nuclear fuel heading for the U.S. Gulf Coast; an analysis of the social networks of Cuban officials involved with the illicit cargo; and the tracking and interception of the cargo as it departed from Cuba and moved across the Caribbean to Corpus Christi, Texas, a major port on the Gulf Coast. The agencies involved included the NGA, the NSA, Naval Intelligence and the Marines, and some of the key contractors working for those agencies. It illustrated how sophisticated the U.S. domestic surveillance system has become in the six years since the 9/11 attacks.
L-3 Communications, which is based in New York City, was a natural for the exercise: As mentioned earlier, retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, its vice president of homeland security, was a member of the Booz Allen Hamilton study group that advised the Bush administration to expand the domestic use of military spy satellites. At GEOINT, L-3 displayed a new program called “multi-INT visualization environment” that combines imagery and signals intelligence data that can be laid over photographs and maps. One example shown during the interoperability demonstration showed how such data would be incorporated into a map of Florida and the waters surrounding Cuba. With L-3 a major player at the NSA, this demonstration software is likely seeing much use as the NSA and the NGA expand their information-sharing relationship.
Over the past two years, for example, the NGA has deployed dozens of employees and contractors to Iraq to support the “surge” of U.S. troops. The NGA teams provide imagery and full-motion video — much of it beamed to the ground from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) — that help U.S. commanders and soldiers track and destroy insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. And since 2004, under a memorandum of understanding with the NSA, the NGA has begun to incorporate signals intelligence into its imagery products. The blending technique allows U.S. military units to track and find targets by picking up signals from their cell phones, follow the suspects in real time using overhead video, and direct fighter planes and artillery units to the exact location of the targets, and blow them to smithereens.
That’s exactly how U.S. Special Forces tracked and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the NGA’s director, Navy Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, said in 2006. Later, Murrett told reporters during GEOINT 2007, the NSA and the NGA have cooperated in similar fashion in several other fronts of the “war on terror,” including in the Horn of Africa, where the U.S. military has attacked Al Qaeda units in Somalia, and in the Philippines, where U.S. forces are helping the government put down the Muslim insurgent group Abu Sayyaf. “When the NGA and the NSA work together, one plus one equals five,” said Murrett.
Civil liberty worries
For U.S. citizens, however, the combination of NGA imagery and NSA signals intelligence in a domestic situation could threaten important constitutional safeguards against unwarranted searches and seizures. Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has likened the NAO plan to “Big Brother in the Sky.” The Bush administration, she told the Washington Post, is “laying the bricks one at a time for a police state.”
Some Congress members, too, are concerned. “The enormity of the NAO’s capabilities and the intended use of the imagery received through these satellites for domestic homeland security purposes, and the unintended consequences that may arise, have heightened concerns among the general public, including reputable civil rights and civil liberties organizations,” Bennie G. Thompson, a Democratic member of Congress from Mississippi and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in a September letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Thompson and other lawmakers reacted with anger after reports of the NAO and the domestic spying plan were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal in August. “There was no briefing, no hearing, and no phone call from anyone on your staff to any member of this committee of why, how or when satellite imagery would be shared with police and sheriffs’ officers nationwide,” Thompson complained to Chertoff.
At a hastily organized hearing in September, Thompson and others demanded that the opening of the NAO be delayed until further studies were conducted on its legal basis and questions about civil liberties were answered. They also demanded biweekly updates from Chertoff on the activities and progress of the new organization. Others pointed out the potential danger of allowing U.S. military satellites to be used domestically. “It will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites,” warned Jane Harman, a Democratic member of Congress from California, who represents a coastal area of Los Angeles, where many of the nation’s satellites are built. As Harman well knows, military spy satellites are far more flexible, offer greater resolution, and have considerably more power to observe human activity than commercial satellites. “Even if this program is well-designed and executed, someone somewhere else could hijack it,” Harman said during the hearing.
The NAO was supposed to open for business on Oct. 1, 2007. But the congressional complaints have led the ODNI and DHS to delay their plans. The NAO “has no intention to begin operations until we address your questions,” Charles Allen of DHS explained in a letter to Thompson. In an address at the GEOINT conference in San Antonio, Allen said that the ODNI is working with DHS and the Departments of Justice and Interior to draft the charter for the new organization, which he said will face “layers of review” once it is established.
Yet, given the Bush administration’s record of using U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. citizens, it is difficult to take such promises at face value. Moreover, the extensive corporate role in foreign and domestic intelligence means that the private sector has a great deal to gain in the new plan for intelligence sharing. Because most private contracts with intelligence agencies are classified, however, the public will have little knowledge of this role. Before Congress signs off on the NAO, it should create a better oversight system that would allow the House of Representatives and the Senate to monitor the new organization and to examine how BAE, Boeing, Harris and its fellow corporations stand to profit from this unprecedented expansion of America’s domestic intelligence system.

See more stories tagged with: domestic surveillance, contractors, war profiteering
Tim Shorrock has been writing about U.S. foreign policy and national security for nearly 30 years. His book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence will be published in May 2008 by Simon & Schuster.

AlterNet

De olho no povo americano!!! FBI usa satélites para ver o que o americano faz quendo não tem ninguém olhando!!! ( em inglês, proletas! )

WASHINGTON POST

25/ 08/ 2007

Eye on the Homeland
A plan to use spy satellites for domestic purposes needs to be carefully managed.

POWERFUL intelligence satellites have been used domestically for years on an ad hoc basis — for example, to assess damage after a natural disaster, to help with security at major events or for scientific studies. The FBI called in spy satellite help when tracking the Washington area snipers. Now, the Bush administration is forming a unit within the Department of Homeland Security to enable more routine domestic use of satellite imagery — for purposes such as protecting the borders and helping local law enforcement.

The administration’s plan makes sense. But it is essential that these capabilities be used carefully, with due regard for Americans’ privacy concerns and with careful monitoring, including congressional oversight.

There is, we agree with civil libertarians, a creepy, Big Brother feel to the notion of an invisible eye snapping pictures from above. But this kind of technology is less invasive than surveillance cameras in public places, which proved their usefulness after terrorist bombings in London. The intrusive capacity of the spy satellites may be greater than that of the satellites that produce images used by Google Earth, but officials insist that they are nowhere near the detect-activity-through-walls powers imagined by producers of television dramas. “We’re not looking inside bunkers, we’re not looking inside houses,” Charles Allen, chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, told us. “The capabilities from space have their limitations of physics.”
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it makes sense to use satellite technology for domestic defense. A 2005 study, commissioned by intelligence officials, found “an urgent need for action because opportunities to better protect the homeland are being missed.”
The greater use of this technology must be accompanied, however, by robust protections for privacy and civil liberties. It must be carefully reviewed within the executive branch and by Congress. Some capabilities may need to remain classified, but a change this significant ought to be publicly debated to the fullest extent possible, and there should be continued public disclosure about how much surveillance is being conducted for what purposes. Administration officials say they fully briefed lawmakers about their plans, but in a sharply worded letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, complained that he had learned of the plan through media reports. That’s not a comforting start for a landmark change.

Governo Bush espiona o povo norte-americano !!!

COMUNICAÇÃO E CONTROLE

“O verdadeiro Big Brother”

Newton Carlos

“O volume global de comunicações em 2003 andou por volta dos 180 milhões de minutos. É a soma de telefonemas de todos nós, correios eletrônicos, faxes e etc. Os serviços de inteligência, sobretudo o enorme aparato dos Estados Unidos, à sua cabeça a National Security Agency, tratam de grampear cada impulso dessa movimentação supostamente privada, envolvendo trocas de informações. O argumento é a guerra contra o terrorismo, que será longa, vão logo dizendo, talvez uma nova guerra dos trinta anos. Ou mais NSA, CIA, FBI e outras agências do gênero do governo americano consomem 30 bilhões de dólares por ano. É uma tropa de choque de 30 mil pessoas, com a tarefa de bisbilhotar em operações que alcançam os quatro cantos do universo. Seus agentes trabalham com 115 línguas e dialetos diferentes. Não há forma de expressão que não seja entendida ou distância que escape de instrumentos de escuta e gravação que parecem rivalizar-se com a idéia de infinito. A intimidade eletrônica se torna coisa de um passado remoto, mesmo em seus níveis de mais baixa intensidade.
E o direito à privacidade, sagrado em democracias que se prezam?A escuta judiciária é autorizada por todas as partes. Mas é fenômeno recente. Na França, por exemplo, é regulamentada por uma lei de 1991. O grampo agora reivindica passe livre no campo de ‘segurança’, cuja abrangência, antes decidida em porões e não em tribunais, se alarga por meio de concessões legais. Alemanha e Dinamarca já o aceitam por motivos ‘estratégicos’. Canadá e Luxemburgo abriram as torneiras. O Conselho da Europa adotou soluções facilitando as escutas. Ainda discute condições.
O golpe mais profundo é nos Estados Unidos de Bush, com o chamado ‘Patriot Act’, aprovado depois dos ataques terroristas de setembro de 2001. O FBI ganhou poderes quase absolutos de quebra de privacidade. Pode até exigir acesso a arquivos de bibliotecas e livrarias, para saber o que ‘suspeitos’ lêem. O retrocesso é tão radical que mesmo os parlamentares republicanos, gente de Bush, hesitam em renovar a vigência do ‘act’ no ano que vem. É o plano interno. No externo, a NSA americana comanda o ‘controvertido’ sistema Echelon, com seis postos de captação da Europa e Pacífico, ampla rede de espionagem eletrônica, denunciada pelo parlamento europeu.
Diz-se que nada, por mais recôndito ou diminutivo que seja, escapa do Echelon. É o tema (e o título) de um livro por enquanto só disponível na Nova Zelândia, de autoria de Nicky Hager, um neolandês de 35 anos. O trabalho investigativo de Hager partiu do papel do Gesb (serviço secreto da Nova Zelândia) na rede cujo quartel-general está em Washington. Seus agentes, segundo Hager, passam os dias lendo correios eletrônicos, faxes e transcrições de conversas telefônicas de governantes, políticos e empresários de toda a área do Pacífico. Feita a triagem, o que é considerado ‘relevante’ vai para a NSA.
O Gesb, que forneceu as primeiras pistas, é pequena porção de gigantesca engrenagem. Fazem parte o ‘Defence Secutiy Department’ (DSD) da Austrália, o ‘Communication Secutiy Establishment’ (CES) do Canadá, o Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) da Inglaterra e o Gesb. Todo o universo fica na alça-de-mira desse quinteto, que dispõe do mais amplo e mais sofisticado sistema de satélites do mundo. A área latino-americana é controlada pelo Canadá. O Pacífico pela Austrália e Nova Zelândia. A Europa pela Inglaterra. O big brother, no comando geral, é a NSA americana.”

copyright Boletim AEPET, 13/05/04