whistleblowers: wikileaks, snowden i...

[mei]

The Intercept je danas počeo da objavljuje dokumenta iz arhive Snowdena: klik. Prvih 166 članaka je iz 2003. Nastaviće sa objavljivanjem većine dokumenata sve do poslednje 2012. godine. Neće objavljivati dokumenta koje je NSA dobila špijuniranjem privatnih komunikacija, niti slične agencijske prepiske koje mogu da dovedu u opasnost nevine ljude. 

[Prospero]

Snowden calls for whistleblower shield after claims by new Pentagon source

 

Accusations that Pentagon retaliated against a whistleblower undermine argument that there were options for Snowden other than leaking to the media

• Long read: how the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers
• Exclusive: Pentagon source goes on record against whistleblower program

Exclusive: Former Pentagon investigator John Cran goes on record against whistleblower program

Spencer Ackerman in Washington and Ewen MacAskill in London

Sunday 22 May 2016 15.00 BST

 

Edward Snowden has called for a complete overhaul of US whistleblower protections after a new source from deep inside the Pentagon came forward with a startling account of how the system became a “trap” for those seeking to expose wrongdoing.

 

The account of John Crane, a former senior Pentagon investigator, appears to undermine Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other major establishment figures who argue that there were established routes for Snowden other than leaking to the media.

 

Crane, a longtime assistant inspector general at the Pentagon, has accused his old office of retaliating against a major surveillance whistleblower, Thomas Drake, in an episode that helps explain Snowden’s 2013 National Security Agency disclosures. Not only did Pentagon officials provide Drake’s name to criminal investigators, Crane told the Guardian, they destroyed documents relevant to his defence.

 

Snowden, responding to Crane’s revelations, said he had tried to raise his concerns with colleagues, supervisors and lawyers and been told by all of them: “You’re playing with fire.”

 

He told the Guardian: “We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories. Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy – recognize them for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an agency on the wrong side of the law today, and that’s got to change.”

 

Snowden continued: “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”

 

Financially ruined

 

Thomas Drake’s legal ordeal ruined him financially and ended in 2011 with all serious accusations against him dropped. His case served as a prologue to Snowden’s. Now Crane’s account has occasioned a new investigation at the US justice department into whistleblower retaliation at the Pentagon that may serve as an epilogue – one Crane hopes will make the Pentagon a safe place for insiders to expose wrongdoing and illegality.

 

“If we have situations where we have whistleblowers investigated because they’re whistleblowers to the inspector general’s office, that will simply shut down the whole whistleblower system,” Crane told the Guardian.

Crane, who has not previously given interviews, has told his explosive story in a new book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing In The Age of Snowden by Mark Hertsgaard, extracted in the Guardian. The Guardian has partnered with Der Spiegel and Newsweek Japan on Crane’s story.

 

“When someone becomes a whistleblower, they’re making a serious, conscious decision,” Crane said.

“They’re making a decision that can change their lives, change their futures, impact family life, too. There needs to be this certain unbreakable trust. Confidentiality is that trust and that can’t ever be violated.”

Snowden cited Drake’s case as a reason for his lack of faith in the government’s official whistleblower channels.

“When I was at NSA, everybody knew that for anything more serious than workplace harassment, going through the official process was a career-ender at best. It’s part of the culture,” Snowden told the Guardian.

“If your boss in the mailroom lies on his timesheets, the IG might look into it. But if you’re Thomas Drake, and you find out the president of the United States ordered the warrantless wiretapping of everyone in the country, what’s the IG going to do? They’re going to flush it, and you with it.”

 

While Drake’s case is well known in US national security circles, its internal history is not.

 

Major source

 

In 2002, Drake and NSA colleagues contacted the Pentagon inspector general to blow the whistle on an expensive and poorly performing tool, Trailblazer, for mass-data analysis. Crane, head of the office’s whistleblower unit, assigned investigators. For over two years, with Drake as a major source, they acquired thousands of pages of documents, classified and unclassified, and prepared a lengthy secret report in December 2004 criticizing Trailblazer, eventually helping to kill the program. As far as Crane was concerned, the whistleblower system was working.

 

But after an aspect of the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance leaked to the New York Times, Drake himself came under investigation and eventually indictment. Drake was suspected of hoarding documentation – exactly what inspector-general investigators tell their whistleblowers to do.

 

“They made it clear to keep [documents] wherever possible, and obviously properly handle anything that was classified,” Drake remembered.

Crane feared that his own colleagues had told the FBI about Drake. He suspected the Pentagon inspector general’s lead attorney, Henry Shelley, whom Crane said had earlier suggested working with the justice department about the leak, had done so. A confrontation yielded what Crane considered to be evasions.

 

“The top lawyer would not reveal to me whether or not Drake’s confidentiality had been compromised or not. That was a concern … Normally I expect direct answers,” Crane said.

When Drake’s attorneys sought potentially exculpatory information from the inspector general’s office, they learned that much of it had been “destroyed before the defendant was charged, pursuant to a standard document destruction policy”, according to a 2011 letter from prosecutors.

 

Crane was livid. All relevant regulations mandated keeping the documents, not destroying them. But a high-ranking colleague, Lynne Halbrooks, prevented Crane from investigating the document destruction. He suspected Shelley and Halbrooks of sacrificing a whistleblower and misleading the justice department and a federal judge, all in a case centering around the cover-up of NSA bulk surveillance.

 

Forced out

 

Crane’s relationship with his superiors spiraled downward until they forced him out in 2013, months before Snowden’s revelations. The next year, he filed a complaint with a federal agency that works with whistleblowers, the Office of Special Counsel. In March this year, it found a “substantial likelihood” that the Pentagon inspector general’s office improperly destroyed the Drake documents and arranged, with Pentagon consent, for the justice department inspector general to investigate.

 

Shelley, still the Pentagon inspector general’s senior counsel, declined to answer questions but said he was “certain my name will be cleared” by the new investigation.

Halbrooks, the Office of Special Counsel and the justice department inspector general declined to comment for this story.

Bridget Serchak, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon inspector general, noted that her office and the Office of Special Counsel jointly requested the justice department investigation.

 

“It is important to point out that there has been no determination on the allegations, and it is unfair to characterize the allegations otherwise at this point. DoD OIG will cooperate fully with the DoJ OIG’s investigation of this matter and looks forward to the results of that investigation,” Serchak said.

 

Crane considers this latest inquiry a “bellwether” for whether the whistleblower system can reform itself in a post-Snowden era.

“Snowden responded to the way Drake was handled. The Office of Special Council investigation regarding destruction of possibly exculpatory documents regarding Drake might be the end of this saga,” Crane said.

 

[akibono]

Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal

 

On the morning of May 29, 2014, an overcast Thursday in Washington, DC, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Robert Litt, wrote an email to high-level officials at the National Security Agency and the White House.

 

The topic: what to do about Edward Snowden.

 

Snowden's leaks had first come to light the previous June, when the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman published stories based on highly classified documents provided to them by the former NSA contractor. Now Snowden, who had been demonized by the NSA and the Obama administration for the past year, was publicly claiming something that set off alarm bells at the agency: Before he leaked the documents, Snowden said, he had repeatedly attempted to raise his concerns inside the NSA about its surveillance of US citizens — and the agency had done nothing.

 

Some on the email thread, such as Rajesh De, the NSA's general counsel, advocated for the public release of a Snowden email from April 2013 in which the former NSA contractor asked questions about the "interpretation of legal authorities" related to the agency's surveillance programs. It was the only evidence the agency found that even came close to verifying Snowden's assertions, and De believed it was weak enough to call Snowden's credibility into question and put the NSA in the clear.

 

Litt disagreed. "I'm not sure that releasing the email will necessarily prove him a liar," Litt wrote to Caitlin Hayden, then the White House National Security Council spokesperson, along with De and other officials. "It is, I could argue, technically true that [snowden's] email... 'rais[ed] concerns about the NSA's interpretation of its legal authorities.' As I recall, the email essentially questions a document that Snowden interpreted as claiming that Executive Orders were on a par with statutes. While that is surely not raising the kind of questions that Snowden is trying to suggest he raised, neither does it seem to me that that email is a home run refutation."

 

Within two hours, however, Litt reversed his position, and later that day, the email was released, accompanied by comment from NSA spokesperson Marci Green Miller: "The email did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse."

 

Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden's communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.

 

The NSA, it seemed, had not told the public the whole story about Snowden's contacts with oversight authorities before he became the most celebrated and vilified whistleblower in US history.

 

Hundreds of internal NSA documents, declassified and released to VICE News in response to our long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, reveal now for the first time that not only was the truth about the "single email" more complex and nuanced than the NSA disclosed to the public, but that Snowden had a face-to-face interaction with one of the people involved in responding to that email. The documents, made up of emails, talking points, and various records — many of them heavily redacted — contain insight into the NSA's interaction with the media, new details about Snowden's work, and an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the efforts by the NSA, the White House, and US Senator Dianne Feinstein to discredit Snowden.

 

The trove of more than 800 pages [pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this time of crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the US government's long-running narrative about Snowden's time at the NSA.

 

ostatak dugačkog priloga na - https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive

 

Edited June 5, 2016 by akibono

[Lord Protector]

 

 

Западна „памет” у служби диктатура

Уједињени Арапски Емирати користе шпијунске програме развијане у САД и Европи да би прогонили активисте за људска права

 

Политика Ј. Стевановић среда, 08.06.2016. 

 

НСА, неприкосновена шпијунска агенција за надзор комуникација, добија пандане у земљама широм света јер је софистицирана западна технологија за ухођење постала доступна чак и најрепресивнијим режимима и најсиромашнијим државама на планети.

Захваљујући америчким и европским софтверима, ниче безброј „малих НСА” који разбијају шифре на телефонима и рачунарима и долазе до целокупне комуникације власника. Клијенти компанија које развијају програме за шпијунирање неретко су земље попут Уједињених Арапских Емирата (УАЕ), Египта или Азербејџана, које користе поменуту технологију да би сломиле дисиденте и активисте.

У САД послује неколико ИТ фирми које, како је јавио „Њујорк тајмс”, обучавају званичнике страних влада како да употребљавају шпијунску опрему у телекомуникацијама и на интернету. У Европи су по томе познате фирме „Финфишер” из Немачке и „Хакинг тим” из Италије, док је један од значајних произвођача и „НСО група” из Израела. Као што се ни при продаји америчког и британског оружја не води рачуна о томе што се оно продаје режимима попут Саудијске Арабије, која користи наоружање за репресију унутар својих граница и убиства цивила у Јемену, тако се ни при продаји шпијунске сајбер-опреме не води рачуна о томе како ће их земље купци употребити. Један од највећих поручилаца јесу УАЕ, који користе технолошке новине да би, како пише њујоршки дневник, уходили активисте за људска права, прислушкивали им разговоре, читали мејлове, одређивали њихово кретање, па чак и укључивали камере на њиховим паметним телефонима. Ахмед Мансур, активиста који се тамо бори за опште право гласа, тврди да је претучен, затворен и истеран са посла након што је прво хакован, при чему му је чак украдена и уштеђевина са банковног рачуна.

И није да само нафташке краљевине могу да дођу до најнапредније западне технологије, софтвери стижу и у сиромашну Етиопију, која нема проблем да издвоји суму од шест или седам цифара ако је реч о опреми за праћење на светској мрежи.

„Свака влада која жели програме за шпијунирање може одмах да их купи или да плати људи да их развију. Када видимо да и најсиромашније земље то могу, јасно нам је да новац више није препрека”, сматра Бил Маркзак, истраживач са Универзитета у Торонту.

Он помаже дисидентима и активистима са Истока да открију да ли су хаковани. У многим случајевима се открило да су људи који су заговарали, на пример, једнака права жена или грађанске слободе били лишавани слободе само неколико дана након што су њихови рачунари постајали мете владиних сајбер-напада.

„Емирати су постали далеко софистициранији од када смо их први пут ухватили да користе ове софтвере пре четири године. Нису на истом нивоу као САД и Русија, али напредују”, додаје Маркзак.

Мансуров рачунар напали су програми осмишљени у  „Финфишеру”, и „Хакинг тиму”. Емирати су прошле године били други највећи клијент „Хакинг тима” (после Марока). Опрема вредна 600.000 долара таргетирала је више од 1.100 људи преко мејлова и „Твитера”, за шта се сазнало када је и сам „Хакинг тим” хакован. Италијанска фирма је ове године изгубила међународну дозволу за рад. Задржала је имиџ компаније која владе познате по кршењу људских права снабдева шпијунским софтвером за ухођење политичких непријатеља.

У САД је „Хакинг тим” постао важан оног тренутка када је „Вашингтон пост” открио да је ово предузеће партнер америчкој компанији „Сајберпоинт интернешенел”, која пружа сајбер услуге ФБИ и Пентагону. Тада се сазнало да су клијенти италијанског бренда не само УЕА и Египат већ и Русија, Бахреин, Казахстан, Азербејџан, Узбекистан, Оман и Саудијска Арабија. Амерички медији попут „Дејли биста” дочекали су то откриће коментаром да је послујући са „Сајберпоинтом”, влада у Вашингтону унајмила „хакере који су омиљени код диктатора”.

Компанија регистрована у Балтимору добила је дозволу Стејт департмента да саветује УАЕ о безбедности комуникација, тако да су њене везе са Персијским заливом не само посредне (преко Италијана) већ и најдиректније. Како је јавио „Интерсепт”, Емирати не само да су куповали њене услуге већ су и уложили новац у њене деонице. Фирма је у свој тим доводила и неке од људи који су у Бушовој влади били званичници за сајбер-програме, а такође је и лобирала да Конгрес донесе закон који је олакшао поступак којим ИТ компаније достављају податке о својим корисницима НСА и другим владиним агенцијама.

Edited June 8, 2016 by slow

[akibono]

za oko 5 minuta počinju prva 4 strima u 'global eventa' FreeAssange, ima razni govornici, ima sve...

https://freeassangenow.org/

[Prospero]

US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself in prison last week, her lawyers have confirmed.

[Roger Sanchez]

[Redoran]

WL se ozbiljno bruka u Turskoj. Batch koji su pustili neposredno nakon punča™ ne sadrži bilo šta problematično za vlasti ali zato sadrži sledeće:

 

 

Yes — this “leak” actually contains spreadsheets of private, sensitive information of what appears to be every female voter in 79 out of 81 provinces in Turkey, including their home addresses and other private information, sometimes including their cellphone numbers. If these women are members of Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP), the dumped files also contain their Turkish citizenship ID, which increases the risk to them as the ID is used in practicing a range of basic rights and accessing services. I’ve gone through the files myself. The Istanbul file alone contains more than a million women’s private information, and there are 79 files, with most including information of many hundreds of thousands of women.

 

We are talking about millions of women whose private, personal information has been dumped into the world, with nary an outcry. Their addresses are out there for every stalker, ex-partner, disapproving relative or random crazy to peruse as they wish. And let’s remember that, every year in Turkey, hundreds of women are murdered, most often by current or ex-husbands or boyfriends, and thousands of women leave their homes or go into hiding, seeking safety.

 

I have confirmed that these files indeed appear to contain correct private information by confirming that dozens of my friends and family members in multiple cities were included in that database, to my horror, with accurate private data. The files also include whether or not these women were AKP members — right after a brutal and bloody coup attempt to overthrow the AKP.

 

Dakle, dva dana nakon što je na AKP udareno pučem oni pod plaštom (nepostojeće) ekskluzive objavljuju lične podatke stotina hiljada članova partije, uglavljenih između ličnih podataka miliona drugih građana uključujući bezmalo sve punoletne žene u Turskoj. Sve to spakovano u Excel fajlove a ovamo su tema šatro bili neki kompromitujući mejlovi - u kojima nema ničeg kompromitujućeg.

 

Ali to nije sve. Nakon što ih je autorka gore linkovanog teksta bustovala i debunkovala (žena je inače kritičarka aktuelne vlasti i jedna od ikona turske liberaldemokratske komune), WL je ladno krenuo da je bully-ira sa svog zvaničnog naloga:

 

 

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/757644729605562369

 

 

Napalm, ukratko.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Redoran

[Gandalf]

[iDemo]

 

 

https://freeassangenow.org/

Malo se sramim sto nisam ovo ispratio u realnom vremenu... Je l' on to umislio da je nesto kao freemandela™??

Jos malo pa ce koncerte da mu organizuju... :)

[Lord Protector]

 

 

If Russian Intelligence Did Hack the DNC, the NSA Would Know, Snowden Says

Robert Mackey

July 26 2016, 6:43 p.m.

 

AS MY COLLEAGUE Glenn Greenwald told WNYC on Monday, while there may never be conclusive evidence that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russian intelligence operatives to extract the trove of embarrassing emails published by WikiLeaks, it would hardly be shocking if that was what happened.

“Governments do spy on each other and do try to influence events in other countries,” Glenn noted. “Certainly the U.S. government has a very long and successful history of doing exactly that.”

Even so, he added, given the ease with which we were misled into war in Iraq by false claims about weapons of mass destruction — and the long history of Russophobia in American politics — it is vital to cast a skeptical eye over whatever evidence is presented to support the claim, made by Hillary Clinton’s aide Robby Mook, that this is all part of a Russian plot to sabotage the Democrats and help Donald Trump win the election.

Edited July 27, 2016 by slow

[Desmond Bojčinski]

http://soros.dcleaks.com/

[Prospero]

Vidim da je prva reakcija da Soros ima "anti-Israel bias"

[Lord Protector]

Russians are furious with Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow to escape prosecution by U.S. authorities, for suggesting Russia might be behind a new NSA hack.

In a series of tweets Tuesday, Snowden referred to a breach of the National Security Agency’s malware server over the weekend. It was carried out a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which acquired and released code for programs some experts believe were created by the NSA.

 

http://www.vocativ.com/351435/russians-time-to-send-snowden-home/

 

http://www.vocativ.com/350718/hackers-release-alleged-nsa-programs/

Edited August 18, 2016 by slow

[Lezilebovich]

Vault 7 je napolju... Sad mi je jasno sto renne stalno hvali LG :)