F.B.I. Spied on George Carlin

The New York Times – While countless comedy fans spent the 1960s and ’70s poring over the rebellious routines of George Carlin, above, so too did J. Edgar Hoover, according to F.B.I. records released by the comedian’s family and reported by The Associated Press. Among the documents Carlin obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request before his death in June was an F.B.I. memo that noted his 1969 appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show,” when he lampooned Hoover and the F.B.I. “His treatment was in very poor taste and it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance,” the memo said, according to The A.P. The F.B.I. previously told The A.P. that it had no file on Carlin; an F.B.I. spokeswoman told The A.P. that she was looking into the apparent contradiction.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/arts/23arts-FBIKEPTTABSO_BRF.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Intelligence Court Rules Wiretapping Program Legal

The New York TImes – WASHINGTON — A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved.

The court decision is expected to be disclosed as early as Thursday in an unclassified, redacted form. It was made in December by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has issued only two prior rulings in its 30-year history.

The decision marks the first time since the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program three years ago that an appellate court has addressed the constitutionality of the federal government’s wiretapping powers. In validating the government’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

The appeals court is expected to uphold a secret ruling issued last year by the intelligence court that it oversees, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court. In that initial opinion, the secret court found that Congress had acted within its authority in August of 2007 when it passed a hotly debated law known as the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications, according to someone familiar with the ruling.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/washington/16fisa.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The surveillance-industrial complex

Editor’s Note: Author James Bamford who has made a career out of writing about America’s super-secret intelligence gathering community has a new book out – The Shadow Factory, The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9-11 to Eavesdropping on America.

The New York Times – Probably the best place within the entire region to install a listening post is the Indian city of Mumbai,” James Bamford writes in “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” his latest book about the all-seeing, all-hearing National Security Agency. Without question, he says, Mumbai, India, “represents the kind of location where the N.S.A. would seek to establish a secret presence.” And such a place, he notes elsewhere in his book, “presents an extremely tempting target for terrorists.

As it happened, I read those lines at precisely the same time that Mumbai became the scene of a bloody three-day siege that killed more than 170 people and wounded many hundreds. Telecoms were not attacked, and whether there was some symbolic connection between the N.S.A.’s ambitions and the terrorists’ targeting is not a question that can be answered definitively here and now or, perhaps, ever. But it’s a fair bet that Bamford will find a way to work the bloodbath at the Taj Mahal hotel into the long N.S.A. narrative that he began with “The Puzzle Palace” in 1982, followed up with “Body of Secrets” in 2001, and may well continue with paperback updates and further sequels after the present book. These are the kinds of details, or coincidences, that Bamford loves. In “The Shadow Factory” he piles one on top of another — events, addresses, room numbers — in a slapped-together text that often blends facts with speculation to evoke a pervasive atmosphere of conspiracy.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/books/review/Dickey-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Reporters Committee files brief in FISA eavesdropping suit

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a brief in federal district court in Manhattan today asking the court to find that the FISA Amendments Acts of 2008 violates the First Amendment rights of journalists to gather news.

The FISA Amendments Act, signed into law this summer, amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the government to intercept communications between U.S. citizens and people abroad without first obtaining a judicial warrant. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government, in Amnesty International v. McConnell, on behalf of a group of journalists, authors, attorneys and activists, arguing that the law violates the constitution.

The Reporters Committee argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that the law specifically violates the First Amendment rights of journalists by eliminating the ability for journalists and their international sources to communicate confidentially. The law also violates the constitutionally protected role of the news media as a watchdog on government action.

“The FISA Amendment dramatically reduces the ability of American reporters to inform their readers, viewers and listeners about valuable international news,” said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy Dalglish.http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=9856

The NSA – a spy agency so secret it even redacts its feats

WASHINGTON — For much of its history, the government’s most-secretive intelligence agency sought to conceal its very existence.

So it was a surprise last year when university researchers persuaded the National Security Agency to hand over a top-secret, 1,000-page account of its Cold War spying.

George Washington University plans to release the report today, giving historians a rare look inside the agency that gathers intelligence through eavesdropping. But one thing appears to be missing: Many of its biggest successes.Not wanting to reveal too much, NSA blanked out sensitive chunks of the account that, according to intelligence experts, appear to chronicle espionage breakthroughs. What remains makes it appear that the world’s largest ear has been a bit deaf.

According to the declassified report, government eavesdroppers generated half of their intelligence reports just after World War II from listening in on the French. Code breakers missed a key tip-off in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The report also suggests that, for the most part, the government couldn’t crack high-grade Soviet communications codes between World War II and the 1970s.

“This was a perfect opportunity for NSA to put its best foot forward,” says Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian who pressed the agency to release the report and plans to publish his own NSA history next year. “Instead what you’re left with is a fair to middling picture of this agency.”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122660908325125509.html

Skype spies on users for Chinese government

The Wall Street Journal – The revelation that a Skype joint venture in China has been monitoring its users’ communications is adding impetus to an industrywide effort to establish an international human-rights code of conduct for Internet companies.
China Journal

Canadian researchers reported Wednesday on an investigation of TOM-Skype — a China-based version of the Internet-based phone-and-messaging service — which is run by a joint venture of the Skype unit of eBay Inc. and TOM Online, a unit of Hong Kong-based TOM Group Ltd. Probing unsecured servers run by the joint venture, researchers said they found evidence of a system that monitored users’ text chats, kept track of who participated in voice calls and stored messages that contain politically sensitive content.

Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype, said practices related to a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages had been changed “without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned. We deeply apologize for the breach of privacy on TOM’s servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM.”

The report was published by the Information Warfare Monitor and by the OpenNet Initiative-Asia, groups that promote Internet freedom. The groups said Chinese authorities may use the system to track users but offered no evidence of government involvement.

Foreign researchers, rights activists and others say China operates one of the world’s most extensive efforts to censor and monitor information on the Internet.
[Skype's China Practices Draw Ire]

Some Chinese users believe Skype, which advertises itself as having encryption to “protect users from unauthorized eavesdropping,” is safe from government monitoring, and it has been widely used by dissidents. TOM-Skype has 69 million registered users.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122291621892397279.html

Government to Proceed with Satellite Spying Program

The Wall Street Journal – WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn’t yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.

The program is designed to provide federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping — to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.

Since the department proposed the program a year ago, several Democratic lawmakers have said that turning the spy lens on America could violate Americans’ privacy and civil liberties unless adequate safeguards were required.

A new 60-page Government Accountability Office report said the department “lacks assurance that NAO operations will comply with applicable laws and privacy and civil liberties standards,” according to a person familiar with the document. The report, which is unclassified but considered sensitive, hasn’t been publicly released, but was described and quoted by several people who have read it.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122282336428992785.html

Revised Intelligence Law Gives Government New Spying Powers

By EVAN PEREZ
July 8, 2008; Page A16

Wall Street JOurnal – WASHINGTON — Congress is expected to approve Wednesday a White House-backed bill to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the most sweeping change in the 30-year-old law and one that may further expand the use of evidence gathered by intelligence agencies in criminal cases

FISA determines how the government conducts intelligence surveillance. Before Sept. 11, 2001, intelligence agencies could not readily share information with federal prosecutors. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S., those rules were relaxed. The Justice Department says that since 2001, there has been a fourfold increase in the number of requests by prosecutors to use information derived from eavesdropping. The great majority of requests are approved.

The new legislation offers a window on how prosecutors have been using such surveillance, and it has spurred a sharp debate over the bill’s likely impact on civil liberties.FISA dates to 1978, when post-Watergate sentiment favored curbs on presidential power. The Bush administration, initially distrustful of the law, now argues in favor of the new bill, in part because it would give conditional retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly aided the administration’s surveillance program, which operated outside FISA’s limits.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121548191654934679.html

Senate Backs Wiretap Bill to Shield Phone Companies

WASHINGTON — More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program.

The plan, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, marked one of Mr. Bush’s most hard-won legislative victories in a Democratic-led Congress where he has had little success of late. Both houses, controlled by Democrats, approved what amounted to the biggest restructuring of federal surveillance law in 30 years, giving the government more latitude to eavesdrop on targets abroad and at home who are suspected of links to terrorism.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/washington/10fisa.html?ex=1373342400&en=6b020423c5314439&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them

Editor’s Note – This post is thanks to student Kevin Riddell
WIRED Magazine – BERKELEY, California — For most people, photographing something that isn’t there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time.

“What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn’t exist in orbit around Jupiter?” Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen’s photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he’s snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, “torture taxis” (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.http://www.wired.com/culture/art/news/2008/06/secret_satellites?npu=1&mbid=yhp