FBI cut off for unpaid phone bills

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=83544&in_page_id=34

Friday, January 11, 2008

An FBI surveillance operation was shut down after telephone companies cut its lines for the agency failing to pay its bills.

Wiretaps used to listen on suspected criminals were cut off as the FBI owed companies tens of thousands of dollars.

One company was owed $66,000 (£33,000) and more than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance operations were not paid on time the report said.

 

In at least one case, an FBI wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act operation ‘was halted due to untimely payment’.

‘We also found that payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, reuslting in lost evidence,’ said Inspector General Glenn A Fine in the report.

The report blames the failure on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover operations, and included another instance when an employee stole £25,000 (£12,000).

But Assistant FBI Director John Miller said wiretaps were only dropped a few times, though he insisted ‘financial mismanagement’ would not be tolerated.

‘While in a few instances, late-payment of telephone bills resulted in interruptions of monitoring, these interruptions were temporary, and in our assessment, none of tho9se cases were significantly affected,’ Mr Miller said in a statement.

NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber 9-11, Top Spy Says

By Ryan Singel January 15, 2008 | 12:55:56 PMfrom WIRED.COM

The nation’s top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.

That’s according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).

In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.

Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a singe U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.

In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”

It says something ominous about McConnell’s priorities if he believes a DDOS attack on Bank of America, or even a computer intrusion that wiped out its database (and magically purged its backup tapes), would be worse than an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.

Still, it’s hardly a surprising plan — given that McConnell was one of the main backers of the Clipper Chip, the government’s failed, early 1990’s proposal to put a backdoor in every encryption product.

McConnell also makes an astounding assertion that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently crippled the NSA’s overseas signals intelligence collection with a string of soft-on-terror rulings.

McConnell said that federal judges had recently decided, in a series of secret rulings, that any telephone transmission or e-mail that incidentally flowed into U.S. computer systems was potentially subject to judicial oversight. According to McConnell the capacity of the NSA to monitor foreign-based communications had consequently been reduced by seventy per cent.

In other words, McConnell claims the NSA couldn’t intercept a terrorist’s e-mail by tapping a fiber optic cable in Pakistan, if there was a chance the message would pass through a U.S. router or end up in a Hotmail account.

I’m no rich man, but I’ll bet any reader $1,000 that, when and if those rulings are ever released, we’ll see they say no such thing. Send me an e-mail to take me up this bet. U.S. government officials are welcome to participate.

The FISA law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only applies to intercepts that physically happen within the borders of the United States. The NSA has always been free to intercept foreign communications overseas — the mission for which they were created and funded — even if the call passes through a U.S. switch.

So in the case of the now debunked Iraqi kidnappers anecdote that leads off the New Yorker story, the NSA would only have needed to get a court order if its Iraqi targets initiated communications that flowed through U.S. servers or switches and the NSA decided to tap them physically at a United States internet or telecom facility, by burglarizing it, digging up its cables or getting the company to cooperate. (As for why that happens and how common it is, check my story: NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became the Switchboard to the World.)

Simply put, the FISA law is intended to prevent the NSA from operating inside the United States.

In any event, that restriction collapsed this summer with the fear-induced, strong-armed passage of the so-called Protect America Act. That law radically re-architected the nation’s surveillance apparatus.
Now the NSA can turn Gmail’s servers and AT&T’s switches into de facto arms of the surveillance industrial complex without any court oversight.

And though the law ostensibly sunsets in February, any orders in effect at that time will have power for another 12 months. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is reportedly planning to discard legislative attempts to rein in these new powers and will instead simply push to extend the current scheme another 12 months.

In short, McConnell’s politically convenient exaggerations have already worked well for him in winning domestic spying powers, despite their flimsiness under any real scrutiny.

That track record bodes ill for anyone concerned about his new plans to push for sweeping and unnecessary powers to put the NSA in the wires of the internet in order to prevent a computer attacks.

The Wall Street Journal’s intelligence guru Siobhan Gorman’s take is here. Gorman wrote a groundbreaking story on the cyberspace initiative last September while at The Baltimore Sun.

UPDATE: Ex-spook Michael Tanji guest-posting over at Danger Room writes:

It’s bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What’s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.

Of more interest to observers of intelligence activities is the issue of quality vs. quantity and the slow creep towards doom that these efforts foretell. The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.

Its not a question of listening in to you whispering sweet nothings into the ear to your significant other, it is simply a case of – as the late Sam Kinison joked – going where the food is. That our intelligence agencies can intercept adversary communications is largely a given, they just want to do it from the convenience of the homeland, not some remote switch in the darkest hinterlands.

UK Government targets ‘extremist’ websites

Hélène Mulholland

Thursday January 17, 2008
Guardian Unlimited

The government will target extremist websites that “groom” terrorists, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said today, as part of the government’s strategy of tackling radical groups.In her first major speech on terrorism, Smith said there was a consensus on the need to gather information about terrorist suspects; to protect Britain’s borders and infrastructure; to prepare for terrorist incidents; and to prevent radicalisation.”In the case of violent extremism, I have no doubt that stopping people becoming [terrorists] and supporting terrorism is the major long-term challenge we face,” the home secretary told a conference held by the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. Insisting that terrorists are, “first and foremost”, criminals, Smith stressed the need to understand the causes and effects of radicalisation.

She said the number of violent extremists in Britain was on the rise, citing the conviction of 42 people for various terrorism activities last year, and the fact that five major terrorism trials were ongoing. Some 2,000 people in the UK were estimated to pose a threat to security last year, up from 1,600 in 2006 she said, adding: “Our current security threat level in this country is ’severe’, which means an attack is highly likely.”

On the threat from the internet, Smith said the government was already working closely with the communications industry to take action against paedophiles, and planned to target extremist websites in the same way. “Where there is illegal material on the net, I want it removed,” she said.

The move comes after details were revealed of an extremist website containing threats against the prime minister and calling for the creation of a “British al-Qaida”.

“If we are ready and wiling to take action to stop the grooming of vulnerable young [people] on social networking sites, then I believe we should also take action against those who groom vulnerable people for the purposes of violent extremism,” she said.

Smith said studies in Britain and abroad showed the importance of understanding what drew people to violent extremism “either as actors or supporters”.

These factors included ideologues who distort history, religion and contemporary politics; young people’s vulnerability; communities that are sometimes poorly equipped to challenge violent extremists; and a harbouring of grievances by individuals – “some genuine, some perceived, and some of course directed very specifically against the government”.

“Our strategy to deal with radicalisation to violent extremism must therefore focus on each of these factors,” she said.

But she warned that the state alone could not tackle the threat. Highlighting extra resources and the move to increase powers to counter terrorism in a forthcoming bill, Smith warned that the state could not combat the problem alone, but also relied on citizens defending the “common good”.

“It is a weakness of terrorists as a tactic that the way we respond determines the impact they will have. Whether terrorists succeed is ultimately up to us, not up to them,” she said.

“An effective response to terrorism is never dependent solely on the state and solely on law enforcement,” she added. “It depends on us. On the active commitment of individuals and communities and to certain rights and responsibilities.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme before her speech, Smith said there were specific examples of websites that “clearly fall under the category of gratifying terrorism”.

“There is growing evidence people may be using the internet both to spread messages and to plan specifically for terrorism,” she said.

“That is why, as well as changing the law to make sure we can tackle that, there is more we need to do to show the internet is not a no-go area as far as tackling terrorism is concerned.

Smith said the government planned to work with religious leaders to counter misrepresentations of Islam, and tackling ideologies that might fuel violent extremism.

Next year the government will provide more than £500m to fund security and counter-terrorism measures, rising to nearly £600m over the following two years.

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