The document-leaking web site Wikileaks announced Tuesday that it would release 500,000 alphanumeric pager messages sent on September 11, 2001. I'm brewing coffee and preparing to "live" blog the more interesting of these half million intercepts as they are released over the next 24 hours.
Did you buy extra ammunition after Barack Obama was elected President, and are you still concerned that he might ban your guns? Are you concerned that the economic crisis could devolve into a depression, or worse? Do you think the federal government has overstepped its authority under the Constitution? If so, the government thinks you're a right-wing extremist and a potential terrorist threat.
You haven't done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." The United States doesn't hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.
A congressionally mandated study released Wednesday found that the U.S. national security system is outdated and needs major restructuring.
A Brooklyn jury has found Emmanuel "Toto" Constant guilty of mortgage fraud and grand larceny. Constant is the former founder and leader of FRAPH, the Haitian paramilitary group that in the early 90's systematically tortured and murdered thousands of supporters of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Are you an American terrorist sympathizer but don't know how to strike back at the Great Satan? Afraid of getting arrested while your plot to blow up something or other is still half-baked? You don't have to worry anymore. Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency want to hire you.
One of the requirements for a totalitarian police state is a system of kangaroo courts, star chambers which operate in secret and in parallel to the existing judicial system to convict political prisoners of pretended crimes against the state, which could never survive in the regular courts. And former judge Michael Mukasey, nominee for U.S. Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzales, has proposed that the United States adopt such a system of courts.
Here at Homeland Stupidity, no government cow is sacred. Waste, fraud, abuse, plain incompetence, and bad policy are all fair game. As a result, government officials in the higher pay grades tend to be displeased with what they read here. As a general rule, the higher the pay grade, the more displeased.Therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear that high-ranking officials in the U.S. Marshals Service were upset with Sunday's published story regarding their Office of Protective Intelligence. I was, however, surprised to spot two surveillance teams while going about my business Tuesday night.
Satire became reality Friday afternoon when half a dozen armed federal agents wearing body armor showed up at this author's home and detained everyone in the house for nearly 90 minutes to determine who might pose a threat to the government.
A Justice Department audit of the government's master list of known and suspected terrorists found errors and inconsistencies which would have allowed terrorists to enter the country undetected and would mistakenly identify innocent Americans as terrorists.
In December of 1998, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wrote in an internal Central Intelligence Agency memorandum that "We are at war" with Osama bin Laden and that he wanted "no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [Intelligence] Community."But a 2005 report from John L. Helgerson, the CIA's inspector general, parts of which were declassified this week, found that Tenet failed to follow through and create a plan for countering the terrorist threat posed by bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
Last weekend the Bush administration pushed through Congress a law to bolster the government's ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners and other "persons reasonably believed to be outside the U.S." without a court order.
Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier conducted an extensive interview with Transportation Security Administration head Kip Hawley, and asked him, in essence, when is airport security going to start making sense?
This makes yet another year I didn't make it to DEFCON, the longest-running hacker conference now in its 15th year. Which is unfortunate, because I really would have loved to have been at the opening speech at the Black Hat Briefings, held just prior to the main event this weekend, and at which the National Security Agency got up and asked the hacker community for help.
In late 2001, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing a controversial National Security Agency program, and on Tuesday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell revealed that the executive order authorized not only the "terrorist surveillance program" whose existence was revealed in 2005, but a series of other programs as well.
The legacy of the Central Intelligence Agency is one not simply of an omnipotent spy agency which can learn anything from anyone and pull off covert operations with ease. The true legacy of the CIA, according to a new book, is its sheer incompetence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reported to have launched a criminal investigation into FBI employees' alleged misuse of national security letters to obtain information on Americans.
The more than 40 local and regional intelligence fusion centers created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to improve information sharing between the federal government and state, local and tribal law enforcement, are failing to accomplish their mission of protecting the homeland.
On April 27, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate intelligence committee that Congress should renew the USA PATRIOT Act, saying that there had "not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse."But six days earlier, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent Gonzales a report which said otherwise.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include spying, spying and more spying.
A new audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of national security letters to gain access to information about domestic phone calls, e-mails and personal financial information revealed over 1,000 cases where agents may have violated the law or regulations governing the use of the letters.
The military desperately needs Arabic linguists in order to provide translation services in the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But at least one Navy linguist is no longer providing those much-needed services, because, for some in the Pentagon, there's a war more important than the war on terror.
A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
New research conducted at Texas A&M University casts doubt on the decades-old analysis of the bullet fragments which the government used to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
For those who doubted that Rep. Ron Paul was a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the debate Tuesday night in South Carolina put all doubts to rest. Paul stirred up a firestorm of controversy for suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security made national security even more inefficient after September 11 than before, and especially for his assertion that U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades contributed to the rise of Islamic terrorism.But viewers at home responded, putting Ron Paul in second place in FOX's own tamper-proof viewer poll.
If you're an American reading this, then under expansive definitions being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several states in their counterterrorism training, you just might be a domestic terrorist.
An officious bureaucrat with the U.S. Army has tried to intimidate the Federation of American Scientists into removing from its Web site a copy of the Army's recently updated regulation on operational security. And FAS government secrecy project director Steven Aftergood told the bureaucrat in no uncertain terms to get lost.
Noah Shachtman reported Wednesday at Wired News that new Army regulations would severely restrict soldiers' ability to maintain web logs and send personal email, requiring them to clear every single post with a commanding officer. The Army says that's just not true and that nothing has changed for soldiers on the ground.
"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free." Those were the words of one victim of post-9/11 anti-terrorism hysteria to a Congressional committee on Wednesday. So we got national security letters, a terrorist surveillance program, and probably many other programs, but instead of stopping terrorists, these programs have targeted ordinary Americans.
The United States Census Bureau turned over names and addresses of American citizens of Japanese descent to the Secret Service during World War II. How dare those supposedly patriotic Americans not turn themselves in to their designated concentration camps!
In case you haven't noticed, there haven't been any posts here in several days. This is primarily because I've been wrapped up with another project which has taken up virtually all of my time since the last post. To make it up to you, I'm just going to give you links to several interesting items in my unread list for you to enjoy.
Being forced by the government to spy on your own neighbors, customers, friends and family. It's coming. And it will be brought to you by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose national security letters have recently attracted national attention due to findings of abuse and lawbreaking by FBI agents.
REAL ID, that bitter pill which will further centralize identification of virtually every American, not to mention cost you untold billions of dollars, is so tough to swallow that many states are balking at it. But one state is eagerly accepting REAL ID after the Department of Homeland Security held out a carrot along with its sharp stick.
The master list the federal government keeps of known and suspected terrorists, from which other government agencies derive their own watch lists, already hundreds of thousands of names large, is growing out of control, filling with "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes just flat-out wrong" information, a top counterterrorism official said.
"Soccer teams, family reunions and Civil War re-enactors" are in danger of being misidentified as terrorists from a data-mining program the Department of Homeland Security is testing which may have already violated privacy laws.
The Department of Homeland Security had previously objected to having state and local participants in a group meant to send them relevant and useful threat information, saying it would cause "unnecessary confusion." But state and local governments have long complained that DHS doesn't share information with them in a timely manner, nor does it always share the information that they need.
We already know that the Department of Homeland Security just doesn't want to play well with others. In this case, others are state and local governments. DHS also doesn't want to share, and what it doesn't want to share is critical threat information.
The Bush administration will stop conducting warrantless surveillance on Americans with suspected ties to terrorism, and will give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court jurisdiction over the so-called terrorist surveillance program run by the National Security Agency since shortly after 9/11 and first disclosed in December 2005.
The Department of Defense will remove some personal information about high school students from a military recruiting database and shorten the amount of time it keeps the information, a civil liberties group announced last week.
The National Security Agency has provided assistance to Microsoft and Apple in securing their Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, according to a report published Tuesday.
On Saturday, a source in the Army in Baghdad was able to find a computer with functioning e-mail and sent out eight shocking images of U.S. troops doing unspeakable things to Iraqi citizens. After carefully reviewing the images, I am convinced there is a compelling public interest in publishing the images.Parents are cautioned that these images, as the source who obtained the photos said, "are graphic and may cause a physical reaction."
In June, the Future of Freedom Foundation will host Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, a four-day conference examining the intersection of these two burning issues, with an eye to restoring the limited-government principles on which the U.S. was founded.There's just one small problem.
Last month President Bush, in one of his infamous signing statements, claimed the authority to open Americans' mail without a warrant to collect foreign intelligence or in "exigent circumstances."
The Department of Homeland Security defended its use of a controversial passenger screening system Wednesday, saying the system uses link analysis techniques of the kind which would have caught the 9/11 hijackers had they been employed and that the program "does not pose a threat to privacy."
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is one frustrated bureaucrat. You can hear it in his voice, even when you are only reading his words.The Department of Homeland Security is under fire from lawmakers and privacy advocates who are outraged at last month's news of the Automated Targeting System, which assigns a terrorism risk score to international travelers, and saying the program is illegal.
The White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created to advise the President on privacy and civil liberties concerns in the war on terrorism, met in public for the first time Tuesday to hear from experts in the field. And did they get an earful.
Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Bassem Youssef has, in his 18 year career, gotten "rave reviews" and even the intelligence community's highest honor for his counterterrorism work. Yet, after September 11, the FBI moved him as far away from the front lines of counterterrorism as it could, even though it needed all the help it could get from people just like him.
The Department of Justice Inspector General will conduct an internal review of how the department handled information gained from President Bush's controversial terrorist surveillance program, but will not review whether the program is actually legal, officials said Monday.
Federal agents arrested private investigator Steven Rambam on July 22 on trumped-up charges, just before he was scheduled to give a talk on privacy at the HOPE Number Six conference in New York City, and attendees who had hoped to hear him speak about the intersection of commercial and government databases and the resulting loss of privacy left disappointed, confused and more than a bit fearful.But on November 16, he returned and gave a three-hour presentation to a standing room only audience at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J.
If you disagree with the policies of the U.S. government, or are a member of a group or association which expresses disagreement with government policies, an agent of the federal government is likely reading your web site and subscribed to your mailing list.Undercover officers of the Federal Protective Service subscribed to the mailing lists and monitored Web sites of peaceful anti-war groups, and contributed information about those groups' activities to a military intelligence database, according to Pentagon documents released Tuesday.
Wage and earnings data held at the Social Security Administration has been used in terrorism investigations since September 11, 2001. But few if any of those investigated have been brought up on terrorism charges.Federal prosecutors don't actually bring terrorism charges if they can find any lesser charges which will result in a deportation and preserve national security secrets, officials said.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday agreed to hear arguments from the government as to why a lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged cooperation in a terrorist surveillance program should be dismissed due to state secrets.
The Department of Homeland Security is recording all of your international travel, and much more information about you, and using it to determine how much of a "risk" you pose of committing a terrorist act. And it will keep all this information on file for up to 40 years, keep it secret from you, and refuse to allow you to challenge it if it's wrong.Good information or bad, if your "risk profile" is too high, you could be denied travel to and from the U.S. -- even if you're a U.S. citizen holding a valid passport.
Google released a brief statement Thursday denying that it was providing information about its users to the U.S. intelligence community.
The U.S. intelligence community now has its own top-secret wiki, modeled on the popular Wikipedia site, for the sharing of intelligence information.
Something strange happened over the weekend. A story I wrote over eight months ago about Google's quiet cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community suddenly got picked up all over the Internet.While I'd like to comment individually at all of the sites which have picked up the story, that would unfortunately be far too time-consuming. Even linking to them all would take too long at this point. So please consider this your response.
In the course of my reporting, I get far more stories than I have time to do anything about. Here are three of the silliest things I've heard all week.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new intelligence analysis system known as Tangram to search large, diverse sets of intelligence data looking to "connect the dots" and find previously unknown terrorist activity.Privacy experts are, of course, deeply concerned about the program's complete lack of privacy protection.
The military intelligence unit responsible for spying on Americans had to evacuate its Fort Meade, Md., offices Friday after a six-alarm fire broke out.
A peaceful anti-war protest conducted April 30, 2005, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was incorrectly listed in a Defense Department intelligence database as a potential terrorist threat, and the problems with the database corrected, a DoD spokesman said Thursday.
The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency can continue eavesdropping on Americans' overseas telephone calls and e-mail messages pending the outcome of the government's appeal of a district court decision which had ruled the program illegal.
A Homeland Security data-mining program which will crawl the Internet looking for potential threats to the country has come under Congressional scrutiny for a lack of privacy protection, cost controls and program guidelines.
Four updates to news items previously covered at Homeland Stupidity focus heavily on immigration, border controls and terrorism, and include an update on the Western Hemisphere Travel-crippling Initiative, detention facilities for illegal immigrants, terrorism insurance, and intelligence.
A classified report prepared by the nation's intelligence agencies said that the war in Iraq has become the means by which Islamic extremists recruit the next generation of terrorists, and that the threat is increasing, not decreasing.
A Defense Department inspector general's report released Thursday said that there is no evidence to indicate that the Able Danger intelligence program run by the Pentagon had identified Mohammed Atta or any of the 9/11 hijackers prior to September 11. But the report drew sharp criticism for numerous "distortions."
Worried Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism officers are increasingly taking advantage of government-reimbursed insurance plans to help them in the event of their being sued. According to many fomer intelligence officials, increased usage of the program is representative of a growing fear among CIA officers, many of whom fear accusations of prisoner abuse, torture, human rights violations and other crimes.
For the past few weeks, the Central Intelligence Agency has been airing commercials on the Discovery Channel and other channels in an effort to recruit more scientists and engineers, and the commercial is terribly lame.Watch for yourself.
Last week the Senate Intelligence Committee released two heavily redacted reports on pre-Iraq war intelligence, but according to two Senators who had full access to the reports, the parts which remain classified were not classified for national security reasons, but to cover up wrongdoing.
If you've been reading here for a while, you know I collect large numbers of stories of government stupidity, and rarely have time to share all of them or treat them all with the depth they deserve. Some of the more noteworthy or interesting ones I collect into these "bits" postings.
The most haunting image I remember from September 11, 2001, is watching people prefer to jump to their deaths out the holes in the building made by the airplanes rather than be burned alive.Then I remember that Congress was quick to grant the President authorization to use military force against "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."But Congress didn't want to know who they were. For the longest time it resisted opening any sort of inquiry into what happened that fateful day.
Has anyone seen Osama bin Laden? The U.S. government can't seem to find him or his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.The trail has gone "stone cold," it seems, and the U.S. has no idea where they might be.
President George W. Bush on Wednesday confirmed the existence of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency which held terrorist suspects who have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and called on Congress to pass new legislation authorizing military tribunals for terrorists.In addition, the White House on Tuesday released its updated National Strategy for Combating Terrorism.
A coalition of national security whistleblowers says that Congress is finally set to pass important protections for whistleblowers who report internal threats to national security, but that the Department of Justice wants the desperately needed protections dropped.
Six men suspected of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia, were brought to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002. They remain imprisoned there even though the charges against them were dropped.
This short collection of news headlines from the past week bring together some of the dumb things I've seen and didn't have time to explore more fully.A few are updates to stories previously covered here.Enjoy the stupidity, and remember, this post is for unofficial use only.
A federal court judge ruled Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program conducted since shortly after September 11, 2001, is unconstitutional.
A U.S. court has sent seventeen lawsuits filed against telephone companies in various jurisdictions for allegedly breaking the law in assisting the government in domestic surveillance to San Francisco to join another lawsuit already in progress there.
In the so-called war on terror, the United States is preparing a new bureaucratic playbook to make it appear as though it's doing something about its ongoing intelligence failures.
The National Security Agency is running out of power at its Fort Meade, Md., complex, causing it to delay installation of new computer equipment and implement power conservation measures.
For three months, mysterious telephone numbers have been appearing on the Craigslist classified ad site which, when called, play recordings which sound much like shortwave numbers stations used by certain governments to communicate with intelligence agents in the field who are unreachable by other means. Now the secret behind these phone numbers stations has been revealed.
Now even I'm thinking this is some sort of game, or challenge, or even an elaborate prank. But I said I would continue following these numbers stations until someone figured them out.Last Tuesday, a message appeared on Lubbock Craigslist asking "For Mein Fraulein" to "Call me." You probably know where this is leading by now.
Your government is slow, inefficient and stupid. It's a miracle it ever manages to get anything done.I like it that way.
An updated internal policy on news media contacts may require every National Security Agency employee to stop working on their core missions and spend time on looking instead for employees who might be talking to the press.
A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., investigating leaks of classified intelligence information to the press, has subpoenaed national security whistleblower Russell Tice, who has previously acknowledged being a source for the New York Times story on President Bush's terrorist surveillance program.
"President Bush's electronic surveillance program has been a festering sore on our body politic since it was publicly disclosed last December," wrote Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). His solution? Sweep the whole mess under the rug of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and out of the public eye.
On Thursday at 1:34 p.m., a message appeared on Milwaukee Craigslist asking "For Mein Fraulein" to "Call me." It is at least the seventh of a long line of such messages, each of which appear in a different city, over the last three months. Only in the last week, the pace has picked up considerably, with the last three messages appearing in the last eight days.However, one source says that there may be nothing to see here after all.
On Wednesday, a person unknown posted a mysterious message "For Mein Fraulein" on the popular Craigslist web site, asking "her" to call, and including a telephone number. This message follows five other such messages that, when the telephone number is called, play back a recording of music, followed by groups of numbers, reminiscent of shortwave numbers stations used during the Cold War and even today by governments to communicate with intelligence agents in the field.
Some federal air marshals are fabricating reports of suspicious activity on innocent people in order to meet a quota, causing them to be listed on terrorist watch lists, according to several marshals.
The Craigslist spy has struck again.On Wednesday night, a message appeared on Ottawa Craigslist Missed Connections "For Mein Fraulein," asking her to call. When one calls the number, a recording plays which is reminiscent of Cold War-era shortwave numbers stations. Only these stations are set up on Voice over Internet Protocol telephone numbers.
Within the next five years, the federal government will implode, losing up to half its workforce, and up to 70 percent of its most senior staff, to retirement, creating a significant "brain drain" all across the government.This is easily the best news I've heard all week.
The U.S. State Department said Tuesday that hackers from China and other areas of Southeast Asia broke into the department's computer network in June and stole files, resulting in the department shutting off Internet connectivity for several days.
The U.S. Air Force, completely bogged down with information overload trying to read every blog in the world, will pay $450,000 to Versatile Information Systems Inc. to have the company develop a means of sorting out the most important new information being posted to weblogs.
A National Security Agency program to provide advanced cryptography for use by the Department of Defense and other government agencies, begun in 1999, has been delayed to at least 2012, with most of the substantive security improvements being delayed as far as 2018, according to a Baltimore Sun report Sunday.
For almost two months, someone has been sending secret messages by a rather unusual method: setting up Voice over IP telephone numbers which, when called, play back a recording of long strings of numbers. The recordings evoke memories of shortwave numbers stations, which have been used for decades by intelligence agencies to communicate with agents under deep cover.On Monday, a fourth such telephone number and message appeared.
While the National Security Agency has collected a massive database of domestic telephone calls, BellSouth and Verizon do not appear to have participated in the program, according to a new USA TODAY report Friday.
A secret U.S. government program instituted shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks searched large databases of international bank transactions for terrorist activity. Publication of the program has drawn criticism from conservatives, while the program itself, believed to be secret, wasn't actually very secret after all.
The mysterious Craigslist spy, or whoever it is, has returned. On Tuesday, a fourth phone numbers station message appeared on Boston Craigslist.
In a nondescript building near the junction of Interstates 70 and 270 near Bridgeton, Mo., just outside of St. Louis, lies what appears to be the heart of AT&T's secret network surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government, former employees of the company said.
Total Information Awareness was a post-9/11 Defense Department research program, written about publicly when it was introduced, to sift through and analyze vast amounts of information looking for potential signs of terrorist activity. The program was even to include security against abuse and privacy protections. But when Congress got wind of it, it stopped authorizing funds for the program.That's when it went underground, so to speak, and the security and privacy protections were thrown out.
Over the past month or so, a person or persons unknown have posted three messages on the popular Craigslist web site with telephone numbers which, when called, played automated recordings of long strings of numbers reminiscent of numbers stations which had been heard on shortwave radio for decades.Many amateur cryptanalysts have tried their hand at cracking the code in these messages, and since they seem to be stumbling all over each other and missing things, I'm going to try to gather what I think is the best available information here.
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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