Boing Boing » secrecy

Back issues of the NSA's secret, in-house mag

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:40:41 +0000

The National Security Agency has released an archive of back issues of Cryptolog, its secret, in-house magazine, in a repository spanning 1974 to 1997. The issues are heavily redacted in places, but still look like a promising source of interesting and curious facts.

Cryptologs

Mirror

(via Schneier)

Yochai Benkler: The dangerous logic of the Bradley Manning Case

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:40:10 +0000

Yochai Benkler, in The New Republic, on an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in January during pre-trial hearings in the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case:

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: 'Yes Ma'am.' The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating.

That "Yes ma'am," argues Benkler, makes Manning's prosecution "a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena." Read the rest.

BB archives: Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning's statement

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:21:08 +0000

Alexa O'Brien transcribed the statement that Pvt. Bradley Manning read to the court yesterday. Manning pleaded guilty to exfiltrating classified documents, but not to a more serious charge of aiding the enemy. In his statement, Manning described his motivations for leaking the information, and said that he tried to contact other news media before Wikileaks, but was ignored.

Bradley Manning military trial updates: live-blogs, who to follow on Twitter, and analysis

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:29:05 +0000

Army private Bradley Manning pleaded guilty on Thursday to 10 of the 19 total charges made by the US that he leaked unprecedented amounts of classified material to Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy organization run by Julian Assange.

Manning entered a not guilty plea to the government's more serious charge of "aiding the enemy," which carries a possible maximum sentence of life in prison. In a statement before the military court today, Manning said he leaked the classified information to "spark a domestic debate."

Liveblog coverage of his trial: Mother Jones, Reuters.

Ed Pilkington at the Guardian reports Manning first contacted the Washington Post about providing them with some of the classified material while he was on leave in January 2010; the the woman who answered the phone said the "paper would only be interested [in the documents] subjected to vetting by senior editors."

Kevin Gosztola has an analysis here of Manning's claims that he first attempted to leak the material to WaPo and the New York Times, before connecting with Wikileaks. A related article at Huffpo explores this further.

At New York magazine, a roundup of tweeted coverage from the courtroom. The New York Times told them they have no record of having been contacted by Manning before he reached out to Wikileaks.

Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Daily Intelligencer, "This is the first we're hearing of it. We have no record of Manning contacting The Times in advance of WikiLeaks."

It appears Manning uploaded many of the classified documents from a Barnes and Noble location near Rockville, Maryland.

Matthew Keys has a curated list of who to follow for live coverage from the courtroom in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Bradley Manning's statement before the court today has not been published online in entirety, but here's a Storified series of tweets from trial observer Alexa O'Brien.

#Manning corrected Judge Lind on the correct pronunciation of the Tor anonymizer. It was awesome.
— Andrew Panda Blake (@apblake) February 28, 2013

NSA’s secret domestic spying program, code named "Ragtime," uncloaked in new book

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:19:17 +0000

According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady's new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.

Shane Harris at the Washingtonian read through the book's account of these sweeping and controversial surveillance programs, conducted under the code name "Ragtime":

Ragtime, which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four parts.
Ragtime-A involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign counterterrorism-related data; Ragtime-B deals with data from foreign governments that transits through the US; Ragtime-C deals with counterproliferation actvities; and then there's Ragtime-P, which will probably be of greatest interest to those who continue to demand more information from the NSA about what it does in the United States.
P stands for Patriot Act. Ragtime-P is the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program, the name given to so-called "warrantless wiretapping" activities after 9/11, in which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the United States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.

Harris, who is an experienced national security reporter, analyzes some of those findings in his Washingtonian item. You can buy a copy of the book here (released Feb. 14, 2013).

(HT: Laura Poitras/Freedom of the Press Foundation)

Army releases some documents on Bradley Manning case

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:05:25 +0000

In response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the military today released 84 court documents related to the case of Bradley Manning. As is routine, many of the documents are redacted.

The Army private is charged with being the source of classified documents published by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization headed by Julian Assange.

The documents released today include court orders, and various rulings read aloud in court. The DoD says more documents will be released, pending review and redaction.

WikiLeaks and various journalists and pro-transparency advocates are suing for timely public access to all relevant Manning documents, in a case pending before the military's highest court. Manning has been held for more than a thousand days, already; if convicted of "aiding the enemy," a possible life sentence applies.

Sources told NBC News this week that Manning will attempt to plead guilty to some of the lesser charges at a military court martial hearing this Thursday.

Manning will also attempt to read a 35-page statement at the hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, explaining his conduct. But prosecutors have objected to Manning reading the statement, leaving it up the judge in his case, Col. Denise Lind, to decide whether he will be allowed to do so. Manning's efforts to plead guilty to some of the minor charges against him -- such as misue of government computers -- is not part of a plea bargain, said Kevin Zeese, one of the organizers of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

(thanks, Aileen Graef)

Appeals Court affirms state secrecy in Twitter/WikiLeaks case

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 03:34:13 +0000

Our appeal was denied likely due to ongoing FBI probe into #Wikileaks. The probe is wrong and must be dropped; it is an affront to justice.
— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) January 26, 2013

In Virginia today, a federal appeals court has ruled that the government can maintain secrecy around its efforts to obtain the private information of internet users, without a warrant. The appeal originated from a legal battle over the Twitter user records of three activists the government is investigating for connections to WikiLeaks: security researcher Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp (@rop_g), and Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir (@birgittaj). The ruling effectively says the three do not have the right "to know from which companies, other than Twitter, the government sought to obtain their records," as Kim Zetter reports in Wired News:

The ruling, published Friday, upholds a magistrate’s earlier decision that “there exists no right to public notice of all the types of documents filed in a sealed case” and likens the 2703(d) orders in question to grand jury proceedings, which are not subject to public access.

From the ACLU's press release:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation represent Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir. The appeal was filed jointly with Twitter users Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, and did not challenge the district court judge’s November 2011 decision requiring Twitter to turn over their records.

Ars Technica's account is here.

(Thanks, Aileen Graef)

The Zero Dark Thirty files

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:38:02 +0000

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit founded by journalists and scholars in 1985 "to check rising government secrecy," has published all of the available official government documents about the mission to kill the leader of al-Qaeda.

The poster for the blockbuster movie Zero Dark Thirty features black lines of redaction over the title, which unintentionally illustrate the most accurate take-away from the film - that most of the official record of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still shrouded in secrecy, according to the National Security Archive's ZD30 briefing book, posted today at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S. government's recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the twenty-first century's most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film's producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public's "account of record" for Operation Neptune Spear.
As often happens when the government declines on secrecy grounds to provide an authoritative account of a controversial event, leaked, unauthorized and untrustworthy versions rush to fill the void. In this extraordinary case, a Hollywood motion picture, with apparent White House, CIA, and Pentagon blessing and despite its historical inaccuracies, is now the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.

Browse the documents here.

NYT profile of John Kiriakou: first CIA officer to face prison for classified leak

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:58:40 +0000

A long-read you may have missed in the New York Times by Scott Shane, on the story of John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and case officer who is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 25 to 30 months in prison for leaking classified government info to a reporter. With this sentencing, the Obama administration reaffirms its role as one of the most staunchly anti-leak administrations in history.

The imminent sentencing, writes Shane, is part of "a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it."

That law was passed 20 years ago, in response to "radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives."

Other CIA officers may have been responsible for killing innocent civilians in drone attacks, or torturing detainees, but those crimes aren't crimes our nation considers worth pursuing. Disclosing classified information to a reporter is.

Read the rest of the story here.

Attorney Jesselyn Radack, who represents Kiriakou, writes here about "what's left out."

A NYT op-ed by Ted Gup responding to the Shane piece is here.

Steven Aftergood's Project on Government Secrecy site has a collection of case files here. A "Defend John K" site maintained by Kiriakou and his supporters is here. There's a petition to Obama here, to commute or pardon. You can follow Kiriakou on Twitter.

Funny how the CIA official who evidently leaked info to the "Zero Dark Thirty" filmmakers won't be in any trouble.

Freedom of the Press Foundation launches: crowdsourcing funding for transparency and accountability

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:50:45 +0000

I'm proud to serve as a board member for the newly-launched Freedom of the Press Foundation, dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. The project accepts tax-deductible donations to an array of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability. The board includes Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, actor and activist John Cusack, and other journalists and activists with whom I'm honored to serve.

Early news coverage: New York Times, Huffington Post, Firedoglake. An op-ed by Barlow and Ellsberg is here. A press release on the launch is here. A list of beneficiary organizations here. Twitter: @FreedomofPress.

Judge prods FBI over plans for Internet spying

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:26:03 +0000

At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports on a federal judge's rejection of the FBI's attempts to withhold information about its efforts to make backdoors for government surveillance mandatory for internet firms.

CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg ruled on Tuesday that the government did not adequately respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Seeborg, in San Francisco, ordered (PDF) a "further review of the materials previously withheld" in the lawsuit, which seeks details about what the FBI has dubbed "Going Dark" -- the bureau's ongoing effort to force companies including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

One almost-entirely-redacted document that the FBI turned over.

Ecuador's president denies granting asylum to Wikileaks' Assange

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:45:30 +0000

Rumor de asilo a Assange es falso. Todavía no hay ninguna decisión al respecto. Espero informe de Cancillería.
— Rafael Correa (@MashiRafael) August 14, 2012

The Guardian reports that the Ecuadorean government will grant asylum to embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The New York Times notes that the president of Ecuador denies this.

US goes after bloggers for writing about imaginary laser weapon that could set insurgents’ clothes on fire

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:08:07 +0000

A number of journalists I know believe the Obama administration is the most secretive administration yet.

When I read news like this, I am inclined to believe them: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is going after our pals at Danger Room, over a 5-year-old leak about a weapon that was never built.

"Federal agents are also chasing a leaker who gave Danger Room a document asking for a futuristic laser weapon that could set insurgents’ clothes on fire from nine miles away."

Total bullshit.

America's secrecy system is totally, utterly, completely screwed up

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:56:33 +0000

It's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that the US secrecy system, by which government documents are classified "secret," "top secret," etc, is totally broken. J. William Leonard, who served as GW Bush's secrecy czar, called it "dysfunctional" and warned that it "clearly lacks the ability to differentiate between trivial information and that which can truly damage our nation’s well-being."

So why is the Obama administration, which promised to be the "most transparent in history," arguing for more secrecy? Good question -- it's one the EFF wants to know the answer to.

The controversy over leaks has spilled into the Presidential race, and instead of pointing out the obvious and systemic problems of withholding too many secrets, Mitt Romney and President Obama are arguing about who would be a more secretive president.
Meanwhile, the government is busy creating still more secrets under a bigger umbrella. Spending on classification is now approaching $11 billion, double what it was ten years ago. That’s also a 10 percent increase from last year and a 30 percent increase since Obama took office. And as the New York Times pointed out, that total “does not include the costs incurred by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other spy agencies, whose spending is—you guessed it—classified.”
Additionally, a new intelligence report to Congress shows that the US issued a staggering 4.8 million classified security clearances last year—which comes out to about one in every 50 Americans. That number is a 3 percent increase on the year before, and as Steven Aftergood remarked, the 2010 number “astonished observers because it surpassed previous estimates by more than a million.”

As Secrecy System Veers Into Absurdity, Politicians Argue For More

DOJ asks Court to keep secret any partnership between Google and NSA, not that one exists, definitely not

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:29:12 +0000

Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government's refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, "any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency."

The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.
The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.

(via Oxblood Ruffin)

Ellsberg on Manning

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:38:24 +0000

"[President Obama] is involved in a war against leakers, against whistle-blowers."

2011's official secrecy outrages

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:01:38 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rounds up "the year in secrecy," a year's worth of shame and excuses in the realm of official secrecy from "the most transparent administration in history." As catalogs of outrage go, it's a pretty fine example.

* Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
* Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
* Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
* President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.
* CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark