The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.

The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant communication via the Internet exist but have not yet been widely implemented or bundled together in a single, user-friendly system.

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf was asked in a recent interview whether there was technical solution to a government shutdown of the Net. The Internet “is controllable by the government, [so] it’s possible to turn off the Internet,” he said. The solution, mesh networking, “can be done without benefit of things like routers provided by Internet Service providers.”

Mesh networking makes each device on a network capable of routing data to any other device, with the ability to rapidly change paths in the event of an interruption or blockage.

A current project of Cerf’s, the Interplanetary Internet, designed to overcome the delays and interruptions to communications during space exploration, could also be adapted to handle a partial shutdown of Net communications by an authoritarian government during a political crisis.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and software freedom advocate, first proposed the Freedom Box – a tiny device that could provide private, secure, fault-tolerant Internet access using mesh networking – at an Internet Society of New York event in February 2010. He has since founded the Freedom Box Foundation, has some early prototype software and expects to have a fully working device available for under $100 in twelve months. Another project, diaspora, was inspired by Moglen’s proposal and is developing a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook. The Freedom Box and diaspora both use a decentralized, peer-to peer model for improved security and to give the user more control.

On February 15, Hillary Clinton’s gave her second annual Net Freedom Speech, which denounced the Egyptian government for its Net shutdown. The State Department now has a number of initiatives and grants for the development of Internet censorship circumvention technologies.

But governments often have different agendas and policies for different situations. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek was viewed as a “force of moderation” before he became a “dictator” when the geopolitical winds shifted. As Clinton was making her speech, Wired reported that the FBI Pushes for Surveillance Backdoors in Web 2.0 Tools and an antiwar protestor in Clinton’s audience was roughed up when he turned his back to her. Would he have been unscathed if he had tweeted his protest?

Even with the best intentions, high-profile Internet freedom initiatives by nation-states can have unexpected consequences. Evgeny Morozov says of Clinton’s speeches:

Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don’t talk about promoting Internet freedom.

The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the United States.

Today, foreign governments … are now seeking “information sovereignty” from American companies … Internet search, social networking, and even email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from foreign control.

The U.S military has developed open source software for secure, private communication on the Internet, however. The Tor project, which develops Tor, a tool for private, encrypted communication on the Internet, is used by many dissidents in authoritarian countries, as well as by Wikileaks, and was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

But not every such project has been as successful. The Haystack program, designed to help Iranian dissidents, actually endangered them because it was easily intercepted by the Iranian authorities due to flaws in its design. It received a huge amount of hype but the developer, Austin Heap, refused to allow security experts to examine it. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury Department granted Heap an Office of Foreign Assets Control license to export the software to Iran, in effect endorsing it. By the time it the software bugs became publicly known, the damage had been done.

Open source software advocate and cyberliberties activist Eric Raymond was also helping Iranian dissidents connect to the outside world at that time. He reflects:

… to protect your network, and yourself, you have to accept that you are going to have relatively little information about what your network partners are doing and what their capabilities are …. my rationally-chosen ignorance left me unable to form judgments about whether people in my network were lying to me. More subtly … it left me unable to form judgments about whether they were lying to themselves.

I don’t mean to excuse whatever lies Austin Heap may have told, but I do mean to suggest he may well have been his own first victim.

Open source software, where the inner workings of a program are available for public scrutiny, is essential when developing tools for secure communication in a highly insecure environment.

But open source is not a panacea. Take the case of OpenBSD, an open source operating system bundled with thousands of applications, which has been optimized for security by a team of the world’s best security experts. OpenBSD is sponsored by a nonprofit foundation and many of the programmers volunteer their time.

At one point the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) gave OpenBSD a grant, then rescinded it when OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt made remarks critical of the Iraq war.

In December 2010, de Raadt received an email alleging the FBI had paid some OpenBSD ex-developers to insert backdoors into the software. He was skeptical but immediately made the email public and invited an independent review of the relevant program code. A few bugs were fixed but no evidence of a backdoor was found. So even though the allegations turned out to be false, they succeeded anyway – as an act of psychological warfare – by destroying trust in the OpenBSD project.

George Orwell said:

… ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance…. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

At first it would seem that a social networking service like twitter, recently used by many protesters in the Middle East, would fit Orwell’s definition of a “simple weapon” that “gives claws to the weak”. But in fact the situation is much more ambiguous. Twitter is a for-profit corporation which must maintain large data centers and a complex infrastructure. And they are subject to many financial, legal and political pressures.

Internet freedom initiatives must be independent of political connotations, run on a decentralized infrastructure, and use technology that is subject to public review by security experts. Most importantly, users must have complete trust in the skills and integrity of the people providing those tools and services.

If they don’t the cure could prove worse than the disease.

Note: Wikipedia has a good list of other anti-censorship software.

Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty (particularly recent food price inflation) toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Mideast as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution.” But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents.

Egypt has cut all Internet access and most mobile phone service as huge protests threaten to topple that government. For a while the ISP Noor remained online — largely because it connects the country’s Stock Exchange and many offices of foreign companies to the outside world. Noor has now been cut off as well.

Interestingly, Egypt and Tunisia have some of the largest percentages of the population online in Africa. Egypt’s Communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, was secretary and co-founder of the global Internet Society’s Egyptian Chapter (which is no longer active). He is still listed as a member of the Board of Trustees on the Internet Society’s website. The Internet Society has strongly denounced the Internet shutdown.

Kamel is widely recognized as the person who brought the Internet to Egypt. He has publicly supported the open development of the Internet. His bio on the Internet Society’s website states that in the early years of the development of the Internet in Egypt, “Kamel’s work extended into liberalization issues such as a tax reduction for ISPs as well as a government/private sector partnership to serve the Egyptian Internet community. He has actively participated in the establishment of community centers in remote areas to bring the Internet to the have-nots.” His role in the shutdown is unknown, although he wasn’t among the cabinet members removed in the shakeup of the Egyptian government in the wake of the protests.

Cutting off most communication with the outside world for an extended period would be economic suicide for any modern, developed country, but temporary interruption — long enough to kill or imprison a large number of protesters without too much visibility for squeamish foreign allies — is viable for a poor country ruled by an elite supported by gifts of military technology from wealthier countries.

The protesters’ vulnerability is relying on highly centralized communication networks and services while fighting an overly centralized political system. The younger ones probably don’t have any memory of being without mobile phones and the Internet and may have taken them for granted.

To succeed in the face of violent repression and the shutdown of Internet and phone service, they must quickly develop low-tech strategies that are as fast and flexible as the ones that have been lost.

Another approach is to build communication services that cannot be intercepted or shut down. Human rights activists and hackers are already starting to do it with combination of low-cost commodity hardware and free open source software:

• Landlines still work in Egypt and a French ISP FDN offers free dialup Internet to Egyptians. Instructions to connect to foreign ISPs via dialup with a mobile phone are also being circulated for those who can use them.
• For Egyptians who are still able to use their mobile phones, there is Sukey, “a security-conscious news, communications and logistics support service principally for use by demonstrators during demonstrations.”
• Tech entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar put a call out on Twitter for volunteers to help construct self-configuring unblockable mobile ad hoc networks to prevent government caused blackouts during future protests worldwide.
• We Rebuild, a Europe-based group working for free speech and an open Internet is developing non-Internet modes of communication, including amateur, shortwave and pirate radio as well as a fax gateway, to assist protesters and humanitarian relief efforts. Information on these efforts can be found on their Telecomix news site.
• Remaining Internet activity is certainly being monitored. The Tor network of anonymous, encrypted proxies has seen a huge increase in Egyptian traffic.

Efforts like these could be the tipping point for the uprisings. In 1989 Czech student protesters received a gift of then state of the art 2400 baud modems from a mysterious man who may have been from the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. Modems were illegal but the most Czech police didn’t even know what they were. The students set up BBS systems to coordinate actions throughout the country and successfully overthrew the Soviet communist backed dictatorship.

If you think the problems people in Egypt have could never happen here, you might want to think again. In the U.S. the “Internet kill switch” bill in Congress would allow interruption of Internet services in a “national cyberemergency.” Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced the bill in the Senate, has described the Internet as a “dangerous place” and promised the bill would protect against “cyber terrorists.”

Some of our current political leaders, hanging on every word of their consultants and pollsters, and terrified of harsh criticism, might consider hostile online commentary more of an “emergency” than something trivial like say, a collision with an asteroid.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.” Today that vigilance means learning to build and modify the technology that we use rather than being passive consumers of it.

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question — if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

Thanks for being with us at The Liberty Conspiracy. In this production, we look at the newest threats to liberty in the US, threats that come in many forms. Stephen Smith of A Beginner’s Guide to Freedom talks to Gard about things like the Terrorist Expatriation Act, the new financial regulation bill and how it could monitor ALL of your electronic transactions, the Einstein data miner, the Enemy Belligerent Act, and more… All of them unconstitutional, and all of them very dangerous precedents for the US government…

We hope you’ll spread the word!

Be Seeing You!

Visit us at www.libertyconspiracy.com Join the Conspiracy!

“People don’t know what fusion centers are,” says Catherine Bleish, who was the opening speaker at the 2010 New Hampshire Liberty Forum on March 19.

Fusion centers were created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way for local and state law enforcement agencies to share terrorism related information with the federal government, and vice versa. The idea quickly ran into problems, first among them the fact that there simply isn’t enough terrorist activity to justify the concept. Instead of shutting down as pointless, fusion centers gradually began expanding into sharing information about all crimes. Fusion center activity over the years has also raised concerns about government surveillance of legally protected political activity.

Bleish, who was led into becoming an activist by the 2008 Ron Paul presidential campaign, said she was informed of a report published by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, leaked in March 2009, which stated among other things that people with Gadsden flag and Ron Paul bumper stickers could be militia members or potential terrorists. Bleish, who is the executive director of the Liberty Restoration Project, spearheaded further investigation and activism, eventually leading to MIAC retracting the report.

“MIAC is a Department of Homeland Security fusion center,” she said during her speech. “These institutions are doing a lot of damage to the relationship between the general public and the law enforcement community.”

Bleish also runs Operation Defuse, a project to inform the public about the nature and activities of fusion centers and how those activities contribute to the federalization and militarization of law enforcement.

The New Hampshire Liberty Forum is an annual conference held by the Free State Project, a movement to bring 20,000 activists to New Hampshire to work toward reducing the size, scope and power of government and increasing individual liberty and responsibility. The project has signed over 10,000 participants, and over 800 have already moved. The Liberty Forum, and the project’s summer camping event, PorcFest, allow people undecided about the project to see the state firsthand and observe and participate in local activism.

["Big Brother is Watching" photo by Darren Tse/DA Creative Photography; CC BY-SA 2.0]

The document-leaking web site Wikileaks announced Tuesday that it would release 500,000 alphanumeric pager messages sent on September 11, 2001.

A notice posted on the site said that Wikileaks would release the pager message intercepts in “real time” beginning at 3 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday and continuing for 24 hours, corresponding to the same time of day on 9/11.

“Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity,” the site said prior to the release. “Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.”

Wikileaks did not identify its source for the pager messages, but said that it received them from “an organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11.”

Kevin Poulsen of Wired points out that pager traffic is not encrypted and trivially easy to intercept.

Alphanumeric pagers were popular in the 1990s but have declined in popularity as mobile phone text messages largely supplanted them.

“This is a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time,” the Wikileaks site said. “We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented.”

I was planning to sleep, but I came home tonight to this news and now 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.

2001-09-11 03:01:18 Metrocall [1064386] A ALPHA MONEY MARKETS FF__3.500 PR 6.500 EU$ 3.45/3.40/3.27 LIB 3.50/3.36/3.32 EIB4.301/4.242/114 REP 3.47/3.40/3.36 DCP 3.46/3.33/3.29 UBA 3.41/3.21/3.18 BBA 3.50/3.36/3.32 U

2001-09-11 03:29:58 Metrocall [1064378] C ALPHA TRICHET SEES EUROZONE GROWTH OF AROUND 2.0 PCT FOR 2001

So far a quiet night, not much going on except for sysadmins doing their usual nightly maintenance on the servers that keep the Internet and business operations going.

2001-09-11 03:30:44 Skytel [002402427] C ALPHA >PAC 03:23 9/11/01 FINAL AT&T VANTIVE SYSTEM WENT DOWN. ABLE TO ACCESS WHEN USING URL https://www.acss.att.com/Login. URL IS CASE SENSITVE. SERVER WAS REBOOTED BUT UNSURE IF THIS RESOLVED ISSUE. IMPACT: NO KNOWN. 18028 GMIR/92

2001-09-11 03:58:57 Skytel [004732386] A ALPHA wn@solutions.att.com|Tkt#0570912-CITICORP|MEXMONT-01-CU-DL3800-E1 up after manual restore-monitoring-GCSC 9194741488

At this time several men of Middle Eastern descent were reportedly seen entering the airport in Portland, Maine, where several 9/11 hijackers will fly to Boston and take a connecting flight, American Airlines flight 11, which they will then hijack.

2001-09-11 04:03:36 Skytel [003273267] A ALPHA julie.rodriguez@fritz.com||We have just been informed that Customs has gone manual as of 2:50am.

2001-09-11 04:29:57 Skytel [007509738] C ALPHA alert@msn.com||JDSU 6.19 -0.24 Merrill Lynch - Be Bullish

I need more caffeine. I’m usually going to bed by this time of night. But it’s very difficult to pull myself away from this traffic, mundane as most of it is.

2001-09-11 04:36:04 Arch [1026292] B ALPHA Backup@NYED.usco|Operator Attention|(Server: "NYEPSROGUE" Job: "Monday backup" Device: "HP 1") Please inser t overwritable media into the changer using the slot import command.

2001-09-11 04:59:45 Arch [1184785] A ALPHA From:PAERSCNHM01/SERVER/Prudential@PRUDENTIAL Subject:ServerWatch Notification - Server PAERSCNML25/SERVER/Prudential is Responding Body:Server PAERSCNML25/SERVER/Prudential is Responding or has been restarted.

By this time practically nothing’s talking except the computers. And the monkey.

2001-09-11 04:59:48 Metrocall [0300391] B ALPHA _01Z00_02A)_1B"n6_1A8_1C3_09Odd_1A5 but _1A8True_1A9_1B&a _1C1MONKEY SIGHTINGS: It's not `Planet of the Apes.' It's more like town of the monkey. About a dozen people in Danville, New Hampshire, report seeing a large monkey on the

2001-09-11 05:54:41 Metrocall [1543599] D ALPHA Remember morning medication.

As the country wakes up, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari breeze through security and board Colgan Air flight 5930 to Boston, which departs at 6 a.m.

2001-09-11 05:59:36 Skytel [005384638] D ALPHA oracle@hqfas14.desc.dla.mil|Errors found in routine alert file checkup of fest on hqfas14 at 09/11/01 06:00:00. Check /u001/app/oracle/admin/scripts/dba/data/monAlertLogErrors.fest.ERROR_LOG.110901_060000 for error message.|****************

2001-09-11 06:36:03 Metrocall [1064381] D ALPHA IRAQ SAYS IT SHOOTS DOWN U.S. RECONNAISSANCE PLANE

The five Flight 11 hijackers arrive at Logan Airport in Boston, the two from Portland and three more who drove to the airport. Flight training manuals are later found in the rental car they left behind. The Flight 175 hijackers also start arriving.

2001-09-11 06:47:03 Metrocall [0753507] A ALPHA Bill, check your WTC email for a message regarding Panacea.-Kent(x6137)

2001-09-11 06:56:47 Arch [0912340] B ALPHA Bomb Scare, ND, 700 W. 40TH Male caller stated a bomb in the bldg, set to go of at 0815. 7811 notified.

Flight 93 hijackers begin checking in.

Several hijackers are selected for additional security screening, but this only means that their bags are scanned for explosives and held off the plane until they board. No one had ever anticipated that a hijacker would blow up a plane while still on board.

2001-09-11 07:01:33 Arch [0911009] A ALPHA <opsosf @GlaxoWel|SYSTEM STATUS AS OF 7 AM|GOOD Morning! ALL TASKS THAT SHOULD BE UP NOW ARE UP!

2001-09-11 07:06:35 Skytel [003071916] D ALPHA alert@msn.com||Manhattan - Tuesday: Sunny (Clear at night) 80/60*Wednesday: Mostly Sunny 78/60*Thursday: Showers /

OK, I admit defeat. There’s much too much traffic here to read through and post in one sitting. At this rate it will take at least a week just to skim through it all. I’ll continue doing so throughout the holiday and post anything I find of interest.

Update: Declan McCullagh posted a much more interesting report on the contents of the pager traffic. As it turns out, the pager messages had been leaked on a file-sharing site before WikiLeaks could complete their release. I’ll be going through them as time permits over the next few weeks.

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.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis published an “analysis” of “right-wing extremists” in the United States in which it claims, quite vaguely, that: “Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

Naturally the document was leaked and has provoked a firestorm of controversy, with conservatives saying it unfairly paints their viewpoints as extremist. You’ll have to read it for yourself to see how far it goes in demonizing anyone who believes in individual rights and limited government. But here’s a sample:

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics are employed to draw new recruits into rightwing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen. . . .

(U//FOUO) Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. . . .

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists — including lone wolves or small terrorist cells — to carry out violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

That’s just the beginning.

Interestingly, the report draws a distinction between “right-wing extremists” and “law-abiding citizens,” as if good, honest, moral people could not possibly hold any of these viewpoints.

A DHS spokesman told FOX News that nothing was wrong with this assessment, citing a January assessment of left-wing extremists the department also issued.

DHS spokeswoman Sara Kuban said the April 7 assessment is one in an ongoing series published by DHS “to facilitate a greater understanding of radicalization in the United States.”

“DHS has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruitments by playing on their fears about several emerging issues,” Kuban said. . . .

“This is the job of DHS, to assess what is happening in this country, with regard to homegrown terrorism, and determine whether it’s an actual threat or not, and that’s what these assessments do. This is nothing unusual. These assessments are done all the time. This is about awareness,” the official told FOX News on Monday. — FOX News

You might be tempted to believe that if you hadn’t actually seen the left-wing extremist assessment, so I invite you to read it for yourself and contrast it to the right-wing extremist document. It’s much more clear about its definition of left-wing extremists and even gives examples of organizations it considers to be left-wing extremists (and they’re quite difficult to argue with, unfortunately for my more liberal readers).

As you’ll see, the left-wing document is narrowly focused on specific groups and activities while the right-wing document covers almost any belief to the right of, well, Barack Obama. It names no organizations as examples, and as one commentator pointed out, doesn’t even say there’s an actual threat! You right-wing extremist loonies are just a potential threat to the nation, and so the government is going to have to keep an eye on you.

This report smacks of profiling and harassing American citizens based on their political views, and specifically based on their opposition to the Obama administration’s proposals.

This used to be called “democracy” and “free speech” protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But under Obama, “Homeland Security” has become an instrument of oppression of opposing points of view. — WorldNetDaily

Oh, Bush would have done the same thing if he thought he could get away with it. Let’s not pretend this is a purely Democratic problem. The problem is that the institution of government allows people who disagree with each other to beat each other over the head with the world’s largest hammer, and whoever is out of power must suffer at the hands of whoever is in power. That whoever is in power can be changed every couple of years makes it no less of a problem; it just means that everyone gets a chance to wield the hammer, and to be hit by it, in turn.

Oops, that’s an antigovernment sentiment. I must be a right-wing extremist.

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.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal. Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.

A congressionally mandated study released Wednesday found that the U.S. national security system is outdated and needs major restructuring.

The 93-page preliminary report (PDF) from the Project on National Security Reform shows how the federal government’s national security apparatus, which is still largely geared toward a Cold War mentality, has failed to work together to combat terrorism, rogue states, natural disasters and other modern threats.

The report cites bureaucratic infighting, short-term crisis management rather than long-term planning, fast turnover of political appointees in top national security positions, and partisan politics in Congress as some of the major problems preventing the government from responding appropriately to threats.

Project member Thomas Pickering, a former Deputy Secretary of State and ambassador to the United Nations, said national security is not a partisan issue, and that the report’s findings will be valuable for the next administration.

“Our national security system is broken and needs fixing,” Pickering said. “Agencies need to cooperate rather than compete with each other as they work to protect the United States from a broad range of new dangers never imagined when the National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law.”

Government bureaucracies are quite unaccustomed to working together. Agencies are structured as stovepipes, which send information up and down a chain of command, but provide little means to share information between agencies. Whenever they do try to work together, the joint operations are almost always plagued by infighting as well as trouble actually sharing needed information.

The Project on National Security Reform is a non-partisan organization, partly funded by Congress, made up of former government officials with national security expertise. The project is scheduled to release its final report in October, including a list of recommendations for fixing the problems.

“Our study deals with issues vital to the protection of every American family,” said PNSR executive director James R. Locher III. “How will America respond to another major terrorist attack, even a nuclear one? How will we deal with future natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina at home and conflicts abroad? The way our national security system is structured plays an enormous role in the answers to these questions.”

John McLaughlin, the former deputy CIA director and a member of the group, told CNN, “The key message is that we have many impressive capabilities in national security — and they work well individually — but today’s complex problems require more integrated effort and agility than the current system can deliver.”

The report barely mentions the post-9/11 reforms already undertaken, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the office of the director of national intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center.

Locher said those changes are still works in progress and represent individual components of the overall national security system. This study, he said, focuses on the role of the highest level of government, the executive branch and Congress, where changes are needed to provide the strategic direction and management necessary for an integrated national security system. — CNN

I wish you good luck in restructuring the entire national security apparatus of the federal government. Such a restructuring promises to be even larger than that which created the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucracy still having trouble getting its act together, even within the department, five years after it was created. It will take even longer for the rest of the agencies involved in national security to get their act together, even after they get restructured.

Meanwhile, there are threats out there to be dealt with. Perhaps we should consider dismantling the federal government’s security stovepipes and doing security ourselves. We just might get it done faster and cheaper and more effectively.

Go Brooklyn. A jury in that fair borough has found Emmanuel “Toto” Constant guilty of mortgage fraud and grand larceny. Emmanuel 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. Gang rapes and mutilation by ax were FRAPH specialties. The majority of victims lived in Haiti’s slums. Aristide, a Catholic priest enamored of liberation theology, was prone to totalitarian temptation. Some say he dabbled in drug traffic. Still, he was democratically elected by a desperately poor populace.

Try telling that to the CIA.

During the Clinton years Toto Constant got CIA jack. When Aristide returned to power (briefly) Toto snuck out the back. Entering the USA through Puerto Rico on a tourist visa. When Toto’s stateside presence was discovered it was kinda embarrassing for the Clinton admin. Threats of deportation were made. Supposedly Toto beat that rap by offering to reveal the details of his CIA deal on TV. Whatever. The Bloody One settled down in a lovely home on a quiet street in Queens. Though his residence in the USA remained legally dicey neither Clinton nor Bush deported him.

Eventually Toto became a licensed Realtor and mortgage broker. (In New York State having a rep for paramilitary excess doesn’t disqualify a person from becoming a real estate pro.) By the beginning of the new millennium Toto’s mortgage fraud career was flourishing. He was working with several overlapping groups of organized white collar criminals based in New Jersey and New York — zeroing in on low-income and/or Caribbean immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. Toto also flipped out on Long Island, a regional hot spot of the national mortgage biz. Constant & crew employed all the tricks the FBI has been hollering about for years. Straw buyers, collusive bank officers, phony appraisers, forged docs, invisible rehabs, etc. One player bragged that their fraudulent appraisals had inflated the values of an entire down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Turning it into a pair of Manolo Blahniks. On paper.

Some of the biggest names in the mortgage game went for paper cranked out by Toto and his twisted business associates. One prime example: EMC Mortgage, son of Bear Stearns.

You can read all about Bloody Toto in Mortgage Fraud Land at Blogger News Network or NowPublic. Detailed trial coverage can be found at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Incidentally, Toto was warned about intimidating witnesses. He’d been making creepy phone calls. You can take the boy out of FRAPH but –

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

“Se bon ki ra”
Good is rare
Haitian proverb

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com