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Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

1) I have always suspected that the NSA can use it's supercomputers to crack PGP and other public key encrypted messages. But I suspected it took some effort to decrypt the messages. Is that still true??? Or it is now a trivial inexpensive task for NSA to read messages that are encrypted with PGP and other public key??

2) Just what are these "secret portals" or "hooks" that the NSA has created??? I suspect they are hooks that tell the encryption software used by HTTPS encryption to create encrypted data that is easily decrypted by NSA and other government agencies.

3) This shows that it is really not safe to put ANYTHING that you would like to keep secret from anybody, especially the government on the internet. Same goes for putting the data on telephone lines, radio waves or any public communication method.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

By Michael Winter USA Today Thu Sep 5, 2013 4:51 PM

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show.

In their clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes and have inserted secret portals into software with the help of technology companies, the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica reported Thursday.

The NSA has also maintained control over international encryption standards.

As the Times points out, encryption "guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world."

The NSA calls its decryption efforts the "price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

A 2010 memo describing an NSA briefing to British agents about the secret hacking said, "For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies. Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

The GCHQ is working to penetrate encrypted traffic on what it called the "big four" service providers ---Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, the Guardian said.

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

By NICOLE PERLROTH, JEFF LARSON and SCOTT SHANE

Published: September 5, 2013 1407 Comments

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no evidence its systems had been breached).

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

“The intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he said. “This is the golden age of spying.”

A Vital Capability

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.

The documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and other intelligence powers.

“In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American Civil War battle. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Ties to Internet Companies

When the N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by diplomats and military officers. Over the last 20 years, it has become ubiquitous. Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to a Web address.

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the acronym for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by exploiting security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.

At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with “lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was clearly coerced. Some companies have been asked to hand the government the encryption keys to all customer communications, according to people familiar with the government’s requests.

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. [Remember the old DES or Data Encryption Standard with the worthless 56-bit key size - it was rumored that the government was instrumental in the small key size, because that made it trivial to crack] One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had the key.

That proposal met a backlash from an unlikely coalition that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil Liberties Union. All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth Amendment, but also America’s global technology edge.

By 1996, the White House backed down. But soon the N.S.A. began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became mainstream.

Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety. When Mr. Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”

But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.

By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had set a goal of an additional 300.

But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document warned.

Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see as too cozy a relationship with the government. In response, some companies have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook have pressed for permission to reveal more about the government’s requests for cooperation. One e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, closed rather than comply with the agency’s demands for customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail service rather than face such demands.

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the companies surrendered.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

John Markoff contributed reporting.

Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying

Remember the bottom line is if you don't want cops reading your emails don't put them on the internet. If you don't want cops listening to your conversations don't have them on a telephone that is connect to any public networks, or any network that broadcasts the call on radio waves.

Sure that's an inconvenience and hard to do, but it's a lot easier then spending 5 or 10 years in prison for committing a victimless drug war crime.

Source

Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying

By Craig Timberg, Published: September 6 E-mail the writers

Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments, company officials said Friday.

The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that U.S. government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.

Google’s encryption initiative, initially approved last year, was accelerated in June as the tech giant struggled to guard its reputation as a reliable steward of user information amid controversy about the NSA’s PRISM program, first reported in The Washington Post and the Guardian that month. PRISM obtains data from American technology companies, including Google, under various legal authorities.

Encrypting information flowing among data centers will not make it impossible for intelligence agencies to snoop on individual users of Google services, nor will it have any effect on legal requirements that the company comply with court orders or valid national security requests for data. But company officials and independent security experts said that increasingly widespread use of encryption technology makes mass surveillance more difficult — whether conducted by governments or other sophisticated hackers.

“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, based in Mountain View, Calif. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Experts say that, aside from the U.S. government, sophisticated government hacking efforts emanate from China, Russia, Britain and Israel.

The NSA seeks to defeat encryption through a variety of means, including by obtaining encryption “keys” to decode communications, by using super-computers to break codes, and by influencing encryption standards to make them more vulnerable to outside attack, according to reports Thursday by the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica, based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

But those reports made clear that encryption — essentially converting data into what appears to be gibberish when intercepted by outsiders — complicates government surveillance efforts, requiring that resources be devoted to decoding or otherwise defeating the systems. [Unless their is a backdoor that allows the government to quickly decrypt your messages I suspect this is true. So the question is "Is there a backdoor"] Among the most common tactics, experts say, is to hack into individual computers or other devices used by people targeted for surveillance, making what amounts to an end run around coded communications.

Security experts say the time and energy required to defeat encryption forces surveillance efforts to be targeted more narrowly on the highest-priority targets — such as terrorism suspects — and limits the ability of governments to simply cast a net into the huge rivers of data flowing across the Internet.

“If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in . . . . Most of the people in my community are realistic about that,” said Christopher Soghoian, a computer security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.”

The NSA declined to comment for this article. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement Thursday saying: “Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.”

The U.S. intelligence community has been reeling since news reports based on Snowden’s documents began revealing remarkable new detail about how the government collects, analyzes and disseminates information — including, in some circumstances, the e-mails, video chats and phone communications of American citizens.

Many of the documents portray U.S. companies as pliant “Corporate Partners” or “Providers” of information. While telecommunications companies have generally declined to comment on their relationships with government surveillance, some technology companies have reacted with outrage at the depictions in the NSA documents released by Snowden. They have joined civil liberties groups in demanding more transparency and insisting that information is turned over to the government only when required by law, often in the form of a court order.

In June, Google and Microsoft asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow them greater latitude in reporting how much information they must turn over to the government. On Friday, Yahoo issued its first “government transparency report,” saying it had received 12,444 requests for data from the U.S. government this year, covering the accounts of 40,322 users.

Google has long been more aggressive than its peers within the U.S. technology industry in deploying encryption technology. It turned on encryption in its popular Gmail service in 2010, and since then has added similar protections for Google searches for most users.

Yet even as it encrypted much of the data flowing between Google and its users, the information traveling between its data centers offered rare points of vulnerability to potential intruders, especially government surveillance agencies, security officials said. User information — including copies of e-mails, search queries, videos and Web browsing history — typically is stored in several data centers that transmit information to each other on high-speed fiber-optic lines.

Several other companies, including Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, increasingly have begun using encryption for some of their services, though the quality varies by company. Communications between services — when an e-mail, for example, is sent from a user of Gmail to a user of Microsoft’s Outlook mail — are not generally encrypted, appearing to surveillance systems as what experts call “clear text.”

Google officials declined to provide details on the cost of its new encryption efforts, the numbers of data centers involved, or the exact technology used. Officials did say that it will be what experts call “end-to-end,” meaning that both the servers in the data centers and the information on the fiber-optic lines connecting them will be encrypted using “very strong” technology. The project is expected to be completed soon, months ahead of the original schedule.

Grosse echoed comments from other Google officials, saying that the company resists government surveillance and has never weakened its encryption systems to make snooping easier — as some companies reportedly have, according to the Snowden documents detailed by the Times and the Guardian on Thursday.

“This is a just a point of personal honor,” Grosse said. “It will not happen here.”

Security experts said news reports detailing the extent of NSA efforts to defeat encryption were startling. It was widely presumed that the agency was working to gain access to protected information, but the efforts were far more extensive than understood and reportedly contributed to the creation of vulnerabilities that other hackers, including foreign governments, could exploit.

Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptography expert, applauded Google’s move to harden its defenses against government surveillance, but said recent revelations make clear the many weaknesses of commonly used encryption technology, much of which dates back to the 1990s or earlier. He called for renewed efforts among companies and independent researchers to update systems — the hardware, the software and the algorithms.

“The idea that humans can communicate safely is something we should fight for,” Green said.

But he said he wasn’t sure that would happen: “A lot of people in the next week are going to say, this is too hard. Let’s forget about the NSA.”

Haylet Tsukayama contributed to this report.

Google argues for right to continue scanning Gmail

But is Google sleeping with the government and turning this information over to Uncle Sam, along with state, county and city cops???

Again if you don't want cops reading your email you shouldn't be using the internet to send it. If you don't want cops listening to you phone calls you shouldn't be using public networks that the police can monitor, or placing calls that use radio waves, such as cell phones.

Yes, it's a pain in the but to keep the government from spying on you, but it's a lot easier then doing 5 to 10 years in a Federal prison for a victimless drug war crime.

Source

Google argues for right to continue scanning Gmail

By Martha Mendoza Associated Press Thu Sep 5, 2013 9:48 AM

SAN JOSE, California — Google’s attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people’s Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and they are asking a U.S. judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice.

In court records filed in advance of a federal hearing scheduled for Thursday, Google argues that “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”

The class action lawsuit filed in May says Google “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages” in violation of California’s privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes. The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company’s terms.

Google has repeatedly described how it targets its advertising based on words that show up in Gmail messages. For example, the company says if someone has received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, then it might display an advertisement from a local camera store. Google says the process is fully automated, “and no humans read your email ...”

Privacy advocates have long questioned the practice.

“People believe, for better or worse, that their email is private correspondence, not subject to the eyes of a $180 billion corporation and its whims,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court

Legislation Seeks to Bar N.S.A. Tactic in Encryption

With that in mind do you think any new laws are going to prevent the police from illegally spying on us like they currently do???

It's about as probable as a bank robber deciding not to rob a bank because it's a crime!!!

Last our elected officials at the city, county, state and Federal levels have the power to fire crooked cops who spy on us. But they never do. And that means they support the illegal spying.

Source

Legislation Seeks to Bar N.S.A. Tactic in Encryption

By SCOTT SHANE and NICOLE PERLROTH

Published: September 6, 2013

After disclosures about the National Security Agency’s stealth campaign to counter Internet privacy protections, a congressman has proposed legislation that would prohibit the agency from installing “back doors” into encryption, the electronic scrambling that protects e-mail, online transactions and other communications.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is also a physicist, said Friday that he believed the N.S.A. was overreaching and could hurt American interests, including the reputations of American companies whose products the agency may have altered or influenced.

“We pay them to spy,” Mr. Holt said. “But if in the process they degrade the security of the encryption we all use, it’s a net national disservice.”

Mr. Holt, whose Surveillance State Repeal Act would eliminate much of the escalation in the government’s spying powers undertaken after the 2001 terrorist attacks, was responding to news reports about N.S.A. documents showing that the agency has spent billions of dollars over the last decade in an effort to defeat or bypass encryption. The reports, by The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian, were posted online on Thursday.

The agency has encouraged or coerced companies to install back doors in encryption software and hardware, worked to weaken international standards for encryption and employed custom-built supercomputers to break codes or find mathematical vulnerabilities to exploit, according to the documents, disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The documents show that N.S.A. cryptographers have made major progress in breaking the encryption in common use for everyday transactions on the Web, like Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, as well as the virtual private networks, or VPNs, that many businesses use for confidential communications among employees.

Intelligence officials say that many of their most important targets, including terrorist groups, use the same Webmail and other Internet services that many Americans use, so it is crucial to be able to penetrate the encryption that protects them. In an intense competition with other sophisticated cyberespionage services, including those of China and Russia, the N.S.A. cannot rule large parts of the Internet off limits, the officials argue.

A statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., criticized the reports, saying that it was “not news” that the N.S.A. works to break encryption, and that the articles would damage American intelligence collection.

The reports, the statement said, “reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity.”

“Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate,” it continued, “is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”

But if intelligence officials felt a sense of betrayal by the disclosures, Internet security experts felt a similar letdown — at the N.S.A. actions.

“There’s widespread disappointment,” said Dan Kaminsky, a prominent security researcher. “This has been the stuff of wild-eyed accusations for years. A lot of people are heartbroken to find out it’s not just wild-eyed accusations.”

Sascha Meinrath, the director of the Open Technology Institute, a research group in Washington, said the reports were “a startling indication that the U.S. has been a remarkably irresponsible steward of the Internet,” which he said the N.S.A. was trying to turn into “a massive platform for detailed, intrusive and unrestrained surveillance.”

Companies like Google and Facebook have been moving to new systems that, in principle, would make government eavesdropping more difficult. Google is in the process of encrypting all data that travels via fiber-optic lines between its data centers. The company speeded up the process in June after the initial N.S.A. disclosures, according to two people who were briefed on Google’s plans but were not authorized to speak publicly about them. The acceleration of the process was first reported Friday by The Washington Post.

For services like Gmail, once data reaches a user’s computer it has been encrypted. But as messages and other data like search queries travel internally among Google’s data centers they are not encrypted, largely because it is technically complicated and expensive to do.

Facebook announced last month that it would also transition to a novel encryption method, called perfect forward secrecy, that makes eavesdropping far more difficult.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington, said the quandary posed by the N.S.A.’s efforts against encryption began with its dual role: eavesdropping on foreign communications while protecting American communications.

“Invariably the two missions collide,” he said. “We don’t dispute that their ability to capture foreign intelligence is quite important. The question is whether their pursuit of that mission threatens to undermine the security and privacy of Internet communications.”

Mr. Rotenberg is a veteran of what were known as the “crypto wars” of the 1990s, when the N.S.A. proposed the Clipper Chip, a government back door that would be built into every encryption program.

That proposal was defeated by a diverse coalition of technology businesses and privacy advocates, including Mr. Rotenberg’s organization. But the documents make clear that the N.S.A. never gave up on the goal of being able to read everything and has made what memos call “breakthroughs” in recent years in its efforts.

A complicating factor is the role of the major American Internet companies, which have been the target of counterencryption efforts by both the N.S.A. and its closely allied British counterpart, GCHQ. One document describes “new access opportunities” in Google systems; the company said on Thursday that it had not given the agencies access and was aware of no breach of its security.

But the perception of an N.S.A. intrusion into the networks of major Internet companies, whether surreptitious or with the companies’ cooperation, could hurt business, especially in international markets.

“What buyer is going to purchase a product that has been deliberately made less secure?” asked Mr. Holt, the congressman. “Even if N.S.A. does it with the purest motive, it can ruin the reputations of billion-dollar companies.”

In addition, news that the N.S.A. is inserting vulnerabilities into widely used technologies could put American lawmakers and technology companies in a bind with regard to China.

Over the last two years, American lawmakers have accused two of China’s largest telecommunications companies, Huawei Technologies and ZTE, of doing something parallel to what the N.S.A. has done: planting back doors into their equipment to allow for eavesdropping by the Chinese government and military.

Both companies have denied collaborating with the Chinese government, but the allegations have eliminated the companies’ hopes for significant business growth in the United States. After an investigation last year, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that government agencies should be barred from doing business with Huawei and ZTE, and that American companies should avoid buying their equipment.

Some foreign governments and companies have also said that they would not rely on the Chinese companies’ equipment out of security concerns. Last year, Australia barred Huawei from bidding on contracts in Australia’s $38 billion national broadband network. And this year, as part of its effort to acquire Sprint Nextel, SoftBank of Japan pledged that it would not use Huawei equipment in Sprint’s cellphone network.

NSA can access most smartphone data

Report: NSA can access most smartphone data

By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press

Updated 12:53 pm, Sunday, September 8, 2013

BERLIN (AP) — The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine cited internal documents from the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists.

The data obtained this way includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information, Der Spiegel reported. The documents don't indicate that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of phone users but rather that these techniques are used to eavesdrop on specific individuals, the magazine said.

The article doesn't explain how the magazine obtained the documents, which are described as "secret." But one of its authors is Laura Poitras, an American filmmaker with close contacts to NSA leaker Edward Snowden who has published several articles about the NSA in Der Spiegel in recent weeks.

The documents outline how, starting in May 2009, intelligence agents were unable to access some information on BlackBerry phones for about a year after the Canadian manufacturer began using a new method to compress the data. After GCHQ cracked that problem, too, analysts celebrated their achievement with the word "Champagne," Der Spiegel reported.

The magazine printed several slides alleged to have come from an NSA presentation referencing the film "1984," based on George Orwell's book set in a totalitarian surveillance state. The slides — which show stills from the film, former Apple Inc. chairman Steve Jobs holding an iPhone, and iPhone buyers celebrating their purchase — are captioned: "Who knew in 1984...that this would be big brother...and the zombies would be paying customers?"

Snowden's revelations have sparked a heated debate in Germany about the country's cooperation with the United States in intelligence matters.

On Saturday, thousands of people in Berlin protested the NSA's alleged mass surveillance of Internet users. Many held placards with slogans such as "Stop watching us."

Separately, an incident in which a German police helicopter was used to photograph the roof of the American consulate in Frankfurt has caused a minor diplomatic incident between the two countries.

German magazine Focus reported Sunday that U.S. Ambassador John B. Emerson complained about the overflight, which German media reported was ordered by top officials after reports that the consulate housed a secret espionage site.

A U.S. embassy spokesman downplayed the story, saying "the helicopter incident was, naturally enough, the subject of embassy conversation with the Foreign Ministry, but no demarche or letter of complaint about the incident was sent to the German government."

___

Frank Jordans can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

Source

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: September 7 E-mail the writer

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.

“The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.”

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion.

The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Joel gave hypothetical examples of why the authority was needed, such as when the NSA learns of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects that a U.S. person may be a conspirator. Searching for communications to, from or about that person can help assess that person’s involvement and whether he is in touch with terrorists who are surveillance targets, he said. Officials would not say how many searches have been conducted.

The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole” that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.

“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”

Senior administration officials disagree. “If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year.

But — and this was the nub of the criticism — a warrant for each target would no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or “foreign powers.”

That is why it is important to require a warrant before searching for Americans’ data, Udall said. “Our founders laid out a roadmap where Americans’ privacy rights are protected before their communications are seized or searched — not after the fact,” he said in a statement to The Post.

Another change approved by Bates allows the agency to keep the e-mails of or concerning Americans for up to six years, with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Because the retention period begins “from the expiration date” of the one-year surveillance period, the court effectively added up to one year of shelf life for the e-mails collected at the beginning of the period.

Joel said that the change was intended to standardize retention periods across the agencies and that the more generous standard was “already in use” by another agency.

The NSA intercepts more than 250 million Internet communications each year under Section 702. Ninety-one percent are from U.S. Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. The rest come from “upstream” companies that route Internet traffic to, from and within the United States. The expanded search authority applies only to the downstream collection.

Barton Gellman contributed to this report.

Journalist Facing Prison Over a Link

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" to a document is a Federal crime???

"By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities ... are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it"

I guess that is just a cockamamie, convoluted, lame excuse to flush the First Amendment down the toilet by Obama's federal goons.

Source

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Your cellphone: private or not?

Your cellphone: private or not?

Sep. 9, 2013

by Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

Police uncovered Brima Wurie's drug dealing during a routine arrest in Boston six years ago, thanks in part to the frequent calls from "my house" arriving on his flip-top cellphone.

David Riley's participation in a San Diego gang shooting in 2009 was revealed after police stopped his Lexus for having expired tags, found weapons and eventually located incriminating photos and video on his smartphone.

Cellphones - owned by more than nine in 10 American adults - are at the center of a growing legal debate over privacy rights and technology, one that's probably headed to the Supreme Court in the coming months.

As the Wurie and Riley cases illustrate, your cellphone and the intimate information it contains can be used against you. At issue is whether police can search mobile devices upon arrest without first obtaining a warrant - and whether the data inside, from e-mail to the Internet, are fair game.

For the court, it's the latest in a string of Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases involving society's innovations - from the automobile in the past century to the current alphabet soup of DNA, GPS and mobile apps.

"Every generation has its new technologies that raise novel Fourth Amendment questions," says Orin Kerr, an expert on computer crime law at George Washington University Law School. "Technology changes the facts."

The facts about what police can do when making an arrest have been clear for 40 years: They can search the person being arrested and what's within reach, with an eye toward weapons or evidence that could be destroyed.

"It is settled law that a custodial arrest based on probable cause justifies a full search of an arrestee and any items found on him - including items such as wallets, calendars, address books, pagers and pocket diaries," the Obama administration argues in its petition asking the court to hear United States v. Wurie.

Cellphones and, increasingly, smartphones that mimic computers have clouded those facts. At least six federal or state appellate courts have ruled that they are fair game; at least three others have said search warrants are required.

In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has been asked to hear both the California and Massachusetts cases, which could help restore clarity in Fourth Amendment search and seizure law. The justices probably will decide this fall whether to hear one or both, and a decision is possible next spring.

'THE REAL CHALLENGE' FOR DECADES

In the Wurie case, the Obama administration urges the court to reverse a 1st Circuit appeals court decision against the police search.

"Over the last decade, cellphones have become ubiquitous in the United States," the Justice Department's petition says. "Inexpensive, disposable phones that are difficult to trace are particularly common in drug-trafficking conspiracies."

In Riley v. California, lawyers for the appealing defendant argue that cellphone searches without a warrant are unreasonable.

"A cellphone nowadays is a portal into our most sensitive information and the most private aspects of our lives," says Jeffrey Fisher, lead attorney for David Riley and co-director of Stanford University's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. "It's also a device that is the gateway to your office, health records, bank records."

Given the volume of lower court cases and split decisions, it's unlikely the Supreme Court can duck the issue, as several justices publicly wished they could do this year on same-sex marriage - an institution that Justice Samuel Alito noted was "newer than cellphones or the Internet."

In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts and some of his colleagues have said the clash between modern technology and privacy rights is likely to become a dominant legal issue in the future.

"I think that is going to be the real challenge for the next 50 years â?? how we do adopt old, established rules to new technology," Roberts said during an appearance at Rice University last year. "What does the Fourth Amendment mean when you can, through technology, literally see through walls with heat imaging? I mean, is that a search and a seizure?"

Such cases, Roberts said, "are difficult for us, frankly, because we're not all technologically expert."

CASE LAW IS 'CONFUSING'

The cases coming before the court for possible consideration have little in common beyond cellphones and criminal behavior.

In the Massachusetts case, police opened Wurie's flip-phone to get the number for the repeated incoming calls. The limited search led them to get a search warrant for his apartment, where they seized crack cocaine, marijuana, cash, a firearm and ammunition. Wurie was convicted and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

An appeals court panel reversed on two counts, ruling that the cellphone search violated Wurie's constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take the case, contending that "police have full authority not only to seize any object they find on an arrestee, but also to search its contents."

In the California case, a routine traffic stop led police to discover Riley's suspended license. They impounded his car, found two guns under the hood and arrested him for concealing weapons. Upon his arrest and again at the police station, they searched his Samsung smartphone, including text messages, photos and video.

Based on that evidence, Riley was convicted and sentenced to at least 15 years in prison; the conviction was upheld at the state appeals court, and the state Supreme Court refused to reconsider it.

Several experts agree with Fisher that the Riley appeal is more pertinent, both because of today's smartphone technology and the broader police searches that could reveal unrelated data. The Pew Research Center estimates that 56% of Americans have a smartphone, 31% seek medical information on their cellphones, and 29% use them for online banking.

"The Fourth Amendment must be sensitive to new technologies enabling police to easily obtain massive amounts of personal information that, at least as a practical matter, would previously have been inaccessible," Fisher argues in his petition.

What both sides agree on is that the high court should tackle the issue. In the Wurie case, judges on both sides of the ruling appealed for Supreme Court intervention.

"The differing standards which the courts have developed provide confusing and often contradictory guidance to law enforcement," said 1st Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sandra Lynch in her ruling.

FROM QUILL PENS TO E-MAIL

The history of Supreme Court cases on phone technology has been similarly confusing. In 1928, the court said wiretapping didn't require a warrant. By 1967, it said bugging a phone booth certainly did.

Decisions on Fourth Amendment cases also have gone back and forth. The 1969 case Chimel v. California and 1973's U.S. v. Robinson set the standard for what police could search upon an arrest. But in the past few years, courts from California to Texas to Florida have split over the issue of cellphones and digital content.

"The new frontier of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence continues to expand as technology advances," Matthew Orso, a North Carolina attorney, wrote in a 2010 paper on the subject. "This constant expansion creates difficulty for courts in applying decades-old case law to factual scenarios never before considered."

Not far behind the issue of cellphone searches is another legal conundrum: whether police can get the location of cellphone users from service providers without a warrant. Lower courts have split on that issue as well, making a Supreme Court showdown likely in the future.

Increasingly in recent years, the high court has been asked to take on issues so complex or newfangled as to stump the justices, who live in a marble palace of ivory paper and quill pens.

When the justices ruled unanimously this year that human genes cannot be patented, the depth of knowledge required about genetics prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to disassociate himself from parts of the opinion "going into fine details of molecular biology."

"I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief," Scalia said.

Computer technology poses other problems for the court. "E-mail is already old-fashioned," Justice Elena Kagan quipped last month, "and the court hasn't gotten to that yet."

A DIGITAL HARE, A LEGAL TORTOISE

Time doesn't stop for the courts to catch up with modern medicine or technological innovation.

"At every turn, as the digital age hare leaps forward, the constitutional jurisprudence lags, like a tortoise, far behind," says Charles MacLean, an assistant professor at Indiana Tech Law School who has written extensively on the issue. "Perhaps the most unfortunate flaw in the tortoise-hare analogy is that constitutional jurisprudence, unlike Aesop's tortoise, never quite seems to catch up."

MacLean has concluded that legislatures, not courts, should address issues of rapidly changing technology - or else, "the risk is that we defer our privacy limits to programmers and marketers."

When it comes to criminal law involving search and seizure, the court since 2001 has been asked to rule on cases involving thermal imaging, global positional systems (GPS) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA):

- In Kyllo v. United States, the court ruled 5-4 that police needed a search warrant to use a thermal imaging device that detected heat used to grow marijuana inside a home.

- In U.S. v. Jones, the court ruled unanimously that police could not attach a GPS device to a car without a warrant in order to monitor its movements. Perhaps the die was cast during oral arguments when Roberts confirmed that otherwise, even the justices' cars could be followed.

- In Maryland v. King, the court ruled 5-4 last year that police can swab the cheek of someone arrested for a serious offense to obtain DNA - which then can be matched against databases of unsolved crimes.

Scalia, who wrote the Kyllo and Jones decisions and frequently sides with defendants in Fourth Amendment cases, wrote a scathing dissent in the King case. He warned that in the future, "your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."

Some experts warn that if cellphones go the way of cheek swabs, the arrests that follow could lead to embarrassment or legal complications for otherwise law-abiding citizens.

If that happens, "any offense they can arrest you for, they can search the full contents of the phone," says Adam Gershowitz, a professor at William & Mary Law School and an expert on the subject. "I probably do six things that are illegal on my drive to work every day."

Officials misused U.S. surveillance program

NSA - You don't have any stinking 4th Amendment rights!!!

Docs: Officials misused U.S. surveillance program

Associated Press Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:46 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. government officials for nearly three years accessed data on thousands of domestic phone numbers they shouldn’t have and then misrepresented their actions to a secret spy court to reauthorize the government’s surveillance program, documents released Tuesday show.

The government’s explanation points to an enormous surveillance infrastructure with such incredible power that even the National Security Agency doesn’t fully know how to properly use it: Officials told a judge in 2009 that the system is so large and complicated that “there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding” of it.

The documents, which the Obama administration was compelled to release as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group, show that National Security Agency analysts routinely exceeded their mission to track only phone numbers with reasonable connections to terrorism.

Officials said that the complexity of the computer system — and a misunderstanding of the laws, court orders and internal policies controlling analysts’ actions — contributed to the abuses. There’s no evidence that the NSA intentionally used its surveillance powers to spy on Americans for political purposes, a fear of many critics who recall the FBI’s intrusive surveillance of civil rights leaders and protesters in the 1960s.

“The documents released today are a testament to the government’s strong commitment to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “As demonstrated in these documents, once compliance incidents were discovered in the telephony metadata collection program, additional checks, balances and safeguards were developed to help prevent future instances of noncompliance.”

The Obama administration had earlier conceded that its surveillance program scooped up more domestic phone calls and emails than Congress or a court authorized. But many details of the program’s abuse were not known until Tuesday.

In a sweeping violation of court-imposed surveillance rules that went on daily between 2006 and 2009, the documents show the NSA tapped the bulk telephone records and compared them with thousands of others without “reasonable, articulable suspicion,” the required legal standard.

The NSA told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court it misunderstood restrictions on accessing data once it was archived, but Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in a March 2009 order that such an interpretation of the court’s orders “strains credulity.” He was so fed up with the government’s overreaching that he threatened to shutter the surveillance program.

After discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records for nearly three years without “reasonable, articulate suspicion” that they were connected to terrorism, the judge said in a blistering opinion that he had “lost confidence” in officials’ ability to legally operate the program.

Walton noted, for instance, that just 1,935 phone numbers out of 17,835 on a list investigators were working with in early 2009 met the legal standard.

The judge ordered the NSA to conduct an “end-to-end” review of its processes and policies while also ordering closer monitoring of its activities.

Later in 2009, a Justice Department lawyer reported to the spy court a “likely violation” of NSA surveillance rules. The lawyer said that in some cases, it appeared the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone records by email to as many as 189 analysts, but only 53 were approved by the spy court to see them.

Walton wrote that he was “deeply troubled by the incidents,” which he said occurred just weeks after the NSA had performed a major review of its internal practices because of the initial problems reported earlier in the year.

The hundreds of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Obama administration has been facing mounting pressure to reveal more details about the government’s domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor released documents showing massive trawling of domestic data by the NSA.

The data included domestic telephone numbers, calling patterns and the agency’s collection of Americans’ Internet user names, IP addresses and other metadata swept up in surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The Obama administration’s decision to release the documents comes just two weeks after it declassified three secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions — including one in response to a separate EFF lawsuit in the federal court in Washington. In that October 2011 opinion, Judge John D. Bates said he was troubled by at least three incidents over three years where government officials admitted to mistaken collection of domestic data.

The NSA’s huge surveillance machine proved unwieldy even for the experts inside the agency. In a long report to the surveillance court in August 2009, the Obama administration blamed its mistakes on the complexity of the system and “a lack of shared understanding among the key stakeholders” about the scope of the surveillance.

Judge asked to prove collection of phone records justified to stop terrorists

Judge asked U.S. in 2009 to prove collection of phone records was justified to stop terrorists

By Carol D. Leonnig, Published: September 11

A federal judge overseeing U.S. surveillance programs raised doubts in the spring of 2009 about whether the massive, secret collection of Americans’ daily phone calls was all that important to protecting the country from terrorists.

Newly declassified records show that four years before the American public would learn that the National Security Agency had created a vast database of all its phone calls, a conservative jurist with detailed knowledge of the program was far from convinced that it led to the identification of terrorist plots.

“The time has come for the government to describe to the Court how . . . the value of the program to the nation’s security justifies the continued collection and retention of massive quantities of U.S. person information,” U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton wrote in March 2009.

It is the same question that several members of Congress have been asking since the classified program was disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in leaks to The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

In early 2009, as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Walton raised questions about the program’s true utility. He had just learned that, over the three previous years, the NSA had scrutinized the records of Americans’ phone calls on a daily basis in violation of court orders to protect the privacy of people who were not the targets of investigations.

In a strongly worded opinion, Walton pointed out that, while the government repeatedly claimed the phone program was critical to its effort to spot terrorist activity, a submission from NSA Director Keith Alexander showed that it had helped launch only three preliminary national security investigations by the FBI.

“However, the mere commencement of a preliminary investigation, by itself, does not seem particularly significant,” Walton wrote. He added that it would be valuable if it could be shown that the probes uncovered previously unknown terrorists plotting on U.S. soil.

Walton noted that he had to rely on the government claims that the record collection was critical to national security and being used legally. But because of a pattern of misstatements and chronic violations, the court “no longer has such confidence,” he wrote.

After Snowden disclosed the collection of Americans’ phone records, among other surveillance programs, government officials have waged a public campaign to stress that they are essential to counter­terrorism efforts.

In mid-June, Alexander said domestic phone data and another program focused on the surveillance of foreign communications had together helped foil more than 50 terrorist plots.

Critics of the domestic program immediately rebutted Alexander, saying the collection of Americans’ phone records, unlike the surveillance of foreigners overseas, had no such impact. With the release of more documents, U.S. intelligence officials testified before Congress in July that the program focused on Americans provided useful assistance in 12 cases but was pivotal in identifying one.

The case that the NSA points to as its primary example of the phone program’s usefulness is that of Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver from Somalia who sent $8,500 to a terrorist group in his home country. Skeptics in Congress say the government could have easily sought court permission for Moalin’s phone records without vacuuming up tens of million of U.S. phone records.

Two key critics of the program, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), have pushed for the Obama administration to end the collection of Americans’ records.

The senators have pointed to the government’s earlier insistence that a parallel program that allowed the collection of Internet data from Americans was also a vital safeguard.

As with the phone program, top intelligence community officials privately asserted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and congressional intelligence committees that data on Internet use was key to tracing terrorists and stopping plots in real time. Wyden and Udall, who were receiving those private briefings, demanded that the government show proof.

Instead, the Obama administration shuttered the Internet program in 2011. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. publicly confirmed to Congress in a July 27 letter that the government “terminated this collection program in 2011 for operational and resource reasons.”

A 2009 intelligence agency document indicated that the program was not that helpful in detecting terrorists, in part because it was so expansive: “Although the programs collect a large amount of information, the vast majority of that information is never reviewed by anyone in the government, because the information is not responsive to the limited queries that are authorized for intelligence purposes.”

An NSA spokesman declined to comment for this article.

Wyden said he sees no evidence that the collection of Americans’ phone data provided critical information that the government could not have gotten in other ways and said he is disturbed by the privacy violations disclosed Tuesday.

“Considering its lack of value and the significant privacy violations that are inherent in the bulk collection program, I can’t find any reason why this program should continue to exist at all,” he said.

Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Zuckerberg says U.S. 'blew it' on NSA spying

Zuckerberg says U.S. 'blew it' on NSA spying

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

Posted: 09/11/2013 05:47:38 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at the U.S. government Wednesday, saying that authorities have hurt Silicon Valley companies by doing a poor job of explaining the online spying efforts of U.S. intelligence agencies.

"Frankly I think the government blew it," Zuckerberg complained during an onstage interview at the tech industry conference known as Disrupt, a weeklong event where Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer and other prominent tech executives also spoke out publicly and expressed frustration in person, for the first time, since a series of news leaks revealed the government's controversial surveillance programs.

"It's our government's job to protect all of us and also protect our freedoms and protect the economy, and companies," Zuckerberg told interviewer Michael Arrington, "and I think they did a bad job of balancing those things."

He went on to say: "They blew it on communicating the balance of what they were going for."

Facebook and other Internet companies have been under intense pressure in recent months after a series of news reports that suggest U.S. intelligence agencies have gained access to the online activities and communications involving users of Facebook and other popular services. Some of those reports have suggested that unnamed companies have cooperated with the U.S. efforts, although the details are unclear.

Analysts say those reports could hurt the companies financially, especially overseas, if consumers and business customers believe their sensitive information isn't safe from government prying.

Along with Google (GOOG), Yahoo and other tech giants, Facebook has insisted it doesn't give the government free rein to tap into its servers. But the companies also say they comply with legal requests to turn over user information. And they have chafed at national security rules that prohibit them from discussing the details of their actions.

Mayer, who was interviewed on stage shortly before Zuckerberg, said Wednesday that she was proud of her company for waging an early, unsuccessful court battle against government requests for Internet user data, a fight that predated her time at Yahoo.

But she said of those battles, "When you lose and you don't comply, it's treason."

Mayer also indicated sympathy for the government's efforts to defend against terrorism -- saying she agreed with earlier comments by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who said onstage this week that government cryptographers and other intelligence workers should not be reviled and deserve respect for trying to keep the country safe.

Arrington had warned tech executives that he planned to ask them about government spying efforts during this year's Disrupt conference, which is organized by the blog TechCrunch. His onstage interviews during the conference are always closely watched industry events.

Zuckerberg, who was clearly prepared for the question, noted that Facebook joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in filing lawsuits this week that seek permission to disclose the number and nature of the user data requests they receive from U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Facebook CEO said the numbers would show that the social network has only provided information about a tiny number of the social network's 1.1 billion users worldwide. But he complained that the government has not explained its efforts clearly.

It didn't help the interests of U.S. companies in overseas markets, Zuckerberg added, when the government said, "Don't worry, we're not spying on Americans." He added sarcastically, "Oh wonderful. That's really helpful" for companies that do business around the world. "I think that was really bad."

Most of Zuckerberg's remarks, however, focused on Facebook's progress over the past year. His appearance was a triumphant milestone of sorts for the 29-year-old CEO, who chose the same conference last year to break a lengthy public silence after the social network's lackluster stock market debut.

At the time of his 2012 appearance, Facebook's stock was floundering at nearly half the company's initial public offering price of $38, as critics questioned whether Facebook could adapt to the mobile Internet trend. Zuckerberg was forced to concede then that Facebook's stock performance had been "disappointing," but he vowed the company's nascent mobile business "will make a lot of money."

In the year since, Zuckerberg has followed through on that prediction, while presiding over a resurgence in Facebook's stock. After developing new kinds of advertisements to show within each user's stream of posts and updates from friends, the company is expected to see more than $2.5 billion in mobile ad sales for 2013, according to research firm eMarketer.

Facebook's stock hit an all-time high of $45.09 on Monday, before closing at $45.04.

Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday that he worried about the company's initial public offering last year, especially after the stock price plunged. He said he feared that talented employees would become demoralized and leave the company.

They didn't, he said, adding that the experience "has made our company a lot stronger."

Facebook's success has also enabled Zuckerberg to increasingly flex his wealth and clout on public issues: He's launched a political advocacy group to campaign for new immigration laws and announced a campaign with mobile tech firms to expand Internet access in undeveloped countries. He reportedly is scheduled to meet next week with congressional Republican leaders in Washington, D.C.

Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Detective ordered to hack iPad of officer's wife

Source

Lawsuit: Will Co. detective ordered to hack iPad of officer's wife

By Andy Grimm Tribune reporter

9:37 a.m. CDT, September 13, 2013

A former Will County sheriff's detective claims a top deputy ordered him to hack the deputy's wife's iPad to look for evidence that she was cheating and then demoted the detective when he complained about it to a supervisor.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Will County, Josh Fazio says Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas in 2012 told him to crack the pass code on Kaupas' wife's computer to investigate "whether she was cheating on (Kaupas)." When Fazio asked his superior, Sgt. Dan Troike, about it, Troike told him to do as he was asked.

"I can't imagine in what universe that is legitimate police work," said Michael Booher, Fazio's attorney.

Fazio is suing Kaupas and Will County.

Ken Kaupas has announced he is running for sheriff in 2014, hoping to succeed his cousin, Paul Kaupas, who is retiring. Ken Kaupas, who often acts as spokesman for the sheriff's department, declined comment on the lawsuit Thursday.

Paul Kaupas said the suit was filed to damage his cousin politically.

"Anybody can say anything they want in a lawsuit and the newspaper, and it will go into print," Paul Kaupas said. "The knowledge I have of the case, in my opinion, I know this is being done for political purposes. None of the accusations are true."

Fazio also claims in the lawsuit that Lt. Jeff McKenzie in 2010 ordered Fazio to send him a pornographic DVD while McKenzie was attending the FBI academy in Virginia "because (McKenzie) apparently had no Internet there."

When Fazio complained about both the DVD and iPad requests two years later, he claims he was chewed out by Ken Kaupas and McKenzie, then demoted to patrol duty, despite receiving numerous commendations for his work during seven years as computer forensics expert for the department.

Fazio resigned rather than take the demotion and is now working in the private sector, Booher said. Booher said he had contacted the department about resolving Fazio's complaint before filing the lawsuit, which seeks damages in excess of $50,000.

"Will County had ample time to resolve this, but they didn't respond to us," the attorney said.

The suit claims that Fazio met with Paul Kaupas before resigning and that Kaupas told Fazio he "should have just kept his mouth shut and did what he was told."

In a meeting before he was demoted, Fazio contends, Ken Kaupas told him that Fazio "broke his trust" by complaining to Troike about the iPad and that McKenzie said the complaint about the DVD could "ruin (McKenzie's) career."

Fazio also claims in the lawsuit that Ken Kaupas told other police and government officials that Fazio was not trustworthy, "a thief, a fake, and could not do his job."

agrimm@tribune.com

Twitter @agrimm34

NSA secretly kept encryption standards weak

The rumor then was that the government wanted to be able to break any data easily that was encrypted with the DES Standard.

That was probably 20 to 30 years ago and the DES Standard was mostly used by large businesses in mainframe to mainframe computer transactions. Personal computers were just getting started and the Internet didn't exist.

Source

NSA secretly kept encryption standards weak

Records reveal agency's dual role as locksmith and lock-picker

Sep. 11, 2013

WASHINGTON — Years ago when computer users were dialing up the Internet, civilian government scientists already expressed concerns about the National Security Agency’s role in developing global communication standards, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

The records mirror new disclosures, based on classified files 24 years later, that the NSA sought to deliberately weaken Internet encryption in its effort to gather and analyze digital intelligence.

This week, the government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology sought to shore up confidence in the important behind-the-scenes role it plays in setting standards that are used by consumers to make purchases online, access their bank accounts, digitally sign legal documents or file their income taxes electronically. The agency said it “would not deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard” and would continue to work with experts “to create the strongest possible encryption standards for the U.S. government and industry at large.”

It also noted that, under federal law, it was required to consult with the NSA on its computer standards.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that “it should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries’ use of encryption.”

That office criticized recent disclosures — based on classified records revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden — that the NSA for years has used computing power, legal instruments and its role as adviser to NIST to undermine encryption technologies that protect consumers but also could make digital surveillance more difficult for the U.S. government.

NSA dominated encryption

Historical NIST records released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act more than two decades ago show that tensions over security software arose in the early 1990s between the NSA and other scientists in the government who had been working together since 1989 to develop the Digital Signature Standard, a way to electronically sign documents and guarantee their authenticity. That became a federal processing standard by 1994 and was most recently updated in July.

“It’s increasingly evident that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the concerns and requirements of NSA, NIST and the general public using this approach,” the government experts, who included NSA representatives, wrote in a January 1990 memorandum.

Then, in 1992, Stanford University Professor Martin Hellman wrote in an industry journal that the then-proposed standard, eventually embraced by NIST and the NSA, had such serious weaknesses that it undermined NIST’s credibility among civilian cryptography experts.

Additionally, the NSA wanted details of its decisions kept secret. Even the NSA’s reasoning for selecting an algorithm was closely held, stamped “classified” and accessible only to officials with a top secret security clearance. The documents the AP reviewed had been turned over to David Sobel, now senior counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

“This was really the first opportunity the public had to learn of the dominant role that the NSA played in the realm of civilian cryptography and security,” Sobel told the AP.

The recent disclosures by Snowden, he said, “demonstrate that dynamic has not changed over the past 20 years — and, if anything, NSA might have become more dominant since those original disclosures were made.”

On one hand, the NSA is responsible for being the Internet’s chief digital locksmith, helping the U.S. government devise standards that have for years protected e-commerce, sensitive documents and citizens’ privacy. On the other, the agency is charged with being cyberspace’s chief electronic lock-picker, capable of stealing the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

“If you wanted to put it in exaggerated terms, the fox is in charge of henhouse,” said Richard Aldrich, whose study of Britain’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ details how it and the NSA worked together to weaken the quality of the encryption used by international diplomats in the 1960s, ’70s and beyond.

But even if the NSA’s campaign to loosen the world’s digital locks has a long pedigree, experts say the fact that encryption has moved out of embassy cypher rooms and into the mainstream means there’s much more at stake. Cryptographers say that the weaknesses left by the NSA might one day be used by America’s rivals in Moscow or Beijing — or even savvy cybercriminals, if the loopholes aren’t being used already.

“What one person can discover, another person can discover. In the end, somebody will figure it out,” said Ben Laurie, a core developer behind OpenSSL, a protocol that helps protect a big chunk of the world’s Internet users from fraudulent websites, credit-card scams and identity theft. “If you deliberately weaken stuff, it will come back to bite you.”

---

BACK DOORS

Cryptographers generally accept that the National Security Agency devotes an enormous amount of time and money cracking enemies’ and others’ codes.

• But the tactics exposed in the newly revealed classified documents — deliberately weakening or installing hidden “back doors” in widely-used encryption protocols — have distressed academics and practitioners alike.

• “We’re both surprised and disappointed in the way that they’re doing it,” said Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University.

Bloated nuclear spending comes under criticism

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Bloated nuclear spending comes under criticism

By Jeri Clausing and Matthew Daly Associated Press Fri Sep 13, 2013 8:32 PM

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, a seven-year, $213 million upgrade to the security system that protects the lab’s most sensitive nuclear bomb-making facilities doesn’t work. Those facilities, which sit atop a fault line for potential earthquakes, remain susceptible to collapse and dangerous radiation releases, despite millions more spent on improvement plans.

In Tennessee, the price for a new uranium processing facility has grown nearly sevenfold in eight years, to beyond $6 billion, because of problems that include a redesign to raise the roof.

And the estimated cost of an effort to refurbish 400 of the country’s B61 bombs has grown from $1.5 billion to $10 billion.

Virtually every major project under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s oversight is behind schedule and over budget — the result, watchdogs and government auditors say, of years of lax accountability for the agency responsible for maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

The NNSA has racked up $16 billion in cost overruns on 10 major projects that are a combined 38 years behind schedule, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reports. Other projects have been canceled or suspended, despite hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, because they grew too bloated.

Advocates say spending increases are necessary to keep the nation’s nuclear arsenal operating and safe, and to continue cutting-edge research at the nation’s nuclear labs. But critics say the nuclear program — run largely by private contractors and overseen by the NNSA, an arm of the U.S. Energy Department — has turned into a massive jobs program with duplicative functions.

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security financial and contracting oversight subcommittee, said a key problem is the Energy Department’s reliance on private contractors to carry out its mission. The DOE has fewer than 16,000 employees and more than 92,000 contractors.

The retired head of one of those contractors, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, told Congress this spring that the absence of day-to-day accountability and an ineffectual structure at the NNSA pose a national security risk.

DOE and NNSA officials agree there are problems. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this month that addressing the cost overruns and the embarrassing security breaches at some facilities is a top priority. A congressionally appointed panel, co-chaired by Augustine, recently began studying a potential overhaul of the NNSA.

Moniz acknowledged some projects had seen “substantial cost overruns.”

An NNSA spokesman referred a reporter to congressional testimony by the agency’s project and acquisitions manager, Bob Raines, who said projects completed in the past two years had met cost goals and finished under budget.

“We are making progress,” Raines testified in March before a House of Representatives subcommittee.

The problems have resulted in renewed scrutiny and changes in leadership at the NNSA over the past year. In August, President Barack Obama nominated retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz as its next head. He’s awaiting Senate confirmation.

Will Humble's convoluted cockamamie definition of medical marijuana

Last while I think Will Humble is full of BS on this issue, you have to remember that Will Humble's thugs who are called police, have guns and will arrest and jail you if you don't obey the law in the convoluted, cockamamie way that Will Humble views it.

[Will Humble] warned Friday that medical marijuana soda pop or hard candy you bought may still land you ... in jail.

Humble cautioned that the law is crafted to require that the food products contain actual pieces of the marijuana plant [just where does it say that in the law Mr. Humble???]

he said the statute is very clear that only "useable marijuana'' is legally protected and not the extracts minus the plant [just where does it say that in the law Mr. Humble???]

possessing — the brewed [marijuana] tea in a bottle, with no plant material, could be a felony [could be??? It is, or it isn't Mr. Humble!!! Please give us some solid answers, not drug war propaganda designed to scare off medical marijuana patients.]

Humble said the 2010 law did not legalize cannabis [gee Mr. Humble, just what part of a marijuana plant isn't cannabis???? All my life I thought it was the same stuff!!!!! Of course under Arizona criminal law technically cannabis is hashish. But under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act I would say hashish is just another form of medical marijuana which is legal only for medical marijuana patients]

Hashish is ... not protected under the medical marijuana law [Again Prop 203 seems to say that any form of marijuana can be used by medical marijuana users which would include hashish, hash oil and other concentrated forms of marijuana]

Are Marijuana and Cannabis the same thing when it comes to Arizona Law? The short answer is no [Well Mr Humble that certainly is true. BUT!!!! I am sure that the folks that wrote Prop 203 intended for medical marijuana users to be covered by the definition in Prop 203, not the definition in the criminal code. After all, any form of marijuana is legal only for a person with a medical marijuana prescription or recommendation.]

An issue the Department has been wrestling with for some time is how the definition of “Marijuana” and “Usable Marijuana” in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and the definition of “Cannabis” and “Marijuana” in the Criminal Code fit together. [Again Mr. Humble if you weren't so busy trying to flush Prop 203 down the toilet with lame excuses such as in this blog, it should be perfectly obvious to you that the definition of marijuana in Prop 203 applies to people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations. And the definition of marijuana in the criminal code applies to people who DON'T have a medical marijuana prescription or reccommendation]

Marijuana regulations might not cover all food products

Marijuana regulations might not cover all food products

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX — You may have a state-issued card allowing you to buy and use marijuana for medical purposes. But the state's top health official warned Friday that medical marijuana soda pop or hard candy you bought may still land you — and the dispensary owner who sold it to you — in jail.

State Health Director Will Humble said the 2010 voter-approved law clearly contemplates that those authorized to sell and use marijuana for medical reasons need not smoke it. Food products are legal.

But Humble cautioned that the law is crafted to require that the food products contain actual pieces of the marijuana plant. He said anything that contains only an extract remains a felony in Arizona.

Humble said he's not an attorney and cannot define exactly when preparing marijuana for brownies, sodas or lollipops crosses the line. But he said the statute is very clear that only "useable marijuana'' is legally protected and not the extracts minus the plant.

What that means, he said, is someone with a medical marijuana card could legally make, sell or possess a tea bag with marijuana. But selling — or even possessing — the brewed tea in a bottle, with no plant material, could be a felony.

Attorney Ryan Hurley, whose clients include dispensary owners, acknowledged that Arizona law does make a difference between marijuana as defined in the 2010 law and what he called an “archaic” definition of marijuana extracts that are illegal under the criminal code. And he conceded the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act does not include extracts.

But Hurley said he believes it was always the intent of those who crafted the law to allow food products made from extracts.

That's also the contention of Morgan Fox, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project which crafted the Arizona law. He said the statute allows use of not only marijuana but also any “preparation” of the drug, which he said includes extracts.

“I have no doubt that the state will be challenged if it tries to exclude edible marijuana products from protection,” he said.

By contrast, Jeffrey Kaufman, who also represents dispensary owners, said the issue may come down to how the THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — was extracted.

On one hand, he said it's illegal to make hashish or hash oil, the concentrated resins containing the THC, using a butane extraction process. And that would make any food products made with those items illegal.

But Kaufman said he believes there's nothing wrong with extracting THC through a freezing and filtering process and then using what's produced in recipes.

Humble isn't ready to make that kind of distinction, calling it one of the “gray area” in the law. But he said state health inspectors will soon be taking a closer look at the recipes of the food products being sold at marijuana dispensaries and advising operators when they think the items are not protected by the law.

The 2010 laws says those with a doctor's recommendation can get 2 1/2 ounces of “useable marijuana” every two weeks. And the law defines that as being the plant, minus the stems and seeds.

But the criminal code has two definitions.

The first is for “marijuana” which includes the plant “from which the resin has not been extracted.” But there is a separate definition of “cannabis” which includes the resin extracted from the plant.

And Humble said the 2010 law did not legalize cannabis.

“You can produce edibles,” he said. “But you'd better make sure it's made of 'useable marijuana' as covered under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and not extracts and resins,” which remain illegal under the state's criminal code.

The problem is where to draw that line.

“Hashish is clearly a resin or extract,” Humble said, and not protected under the medical marijuana law. But he said that, in making food products, there be “a shade of gray that's up to somebody's interpretation of the law.”

“What we're trying to do is to let folks know to stay away from those shades of gray because it could be problematic for them,” Humble said.

“Avoid using extracts in your recipes and stick to what you believe is 'useable marijuana' as defined under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act,” he continued. “If you can do that, you're probably going to be OK.”

Humble said the initial offerings at the approximately 80 dispensaries now open were pretty much limited to various varieties of the flowers and leaves of marijuana plants.

“What we're starting to see is more diversification in the product mix,” he said.

Humble said inspectors will now start to take closer looks at the various food products being sold. If they conclude the items were made with extracts, they will advise dispensary owners of the possibility of winding up facing criminal charges

At the very least, he said dispensaries that do not come in line could eventually face having their licenses to sell marijuana revoked.

Will Humble's blog at the Arizona Department of Health Services

Source

Marijuana v. Cannabis

August 30th, 2013 by Will Humble

Are Marijuana and Cannabis the same thing when it comes to Arizona Law? The short answer is no- and the distinction may be an important one for Qualified Patients.

The Arizona Medical Marijuana Act provides registry identification card holders and dispensaries a number of legal protections for their medical use of Marijuana pursuant to the Act. Interestingly, the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act definition of “Marijuana” in A.R.S. § 36-2801(8) differs from the Arizona Criminal Code’s (“Criminal Code”) definition of “Marijuana” in A.R.S. § 13-3401(19). In addition, the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act makes a distinction between “Marijuana” and “Usable Marijuana.” A.R.S. § 36-2801(8) and (15).

The definition of “Marijuana” in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act is “… all parts of any plant of the genus cannabis whether growing or not, and the seeds of such plant.” The definition of “Usable Marijuana” is “… the dried flowers of the marijuana plant, and any mixture or preparation thereof, but does not include the seeds, stalks and roots of the plant and does not include the weight of any non-marijuana ingredients combined with marijuana and prepared for consumption as food or drink.” The “allowable amount of marijuana” for a qualifying patient and a designated caregiver includes “two-and-one half ounces of usable marijuana.” A.R.S. § 36-2801(1).

The definition of “Marijuana” in the Criminal Code is “… all parts of any plant of the genus cannabis, from which the resin has not been extracted, whether growing or not, and the seeds of such plant.” “Cannabis” (a narcotic drug under the Criminal Code) is defined as: “… the following substances under whatever names they may be designated: (a) The resin extracted from any part of a plant of the genus cannabis, and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of such plant, its seeds or its resin. Cannabis does not include oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any fiber, compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of the mature stalks of such plant except the resin extracted from the stalks or any fiber, oil or cake or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination; and (b) Every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of such resin or tetrahydrocannabinol.” A.R.S. § 13-3401(4) and (20)(w).

An issue the Department has been wrestling with for some time is how the definition of “Marijuana” and “Usable Marijuana” in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and the definition of “Cannabis” and “Marijuana” in the Criminal Code fit together. This confusion, which appears to be shared by dispensaries and registered identification card holders alike, is not easy to clear up and has resulted in the Department receiving numerous questions regarding the interplay between the protections in A.R.S. § 36-2811 and the Criminal Code. While we can’t provide legal advice as to whether a certain conduct is punishable under the Criminal Code (only an individual’s or entity’s legal counsel can do this), “Cannabis” is defined as the “resin extracted from any part of a plant of the genus cannabis” and “Cannabis” is listed as a narcotic drug according to the Criminal Code in A.R.S. § 13-3401(4) and (20)(w).

In other words, registered identification card holders and dispensaries may be exposed to criminal prosecution under the Criminal Code for possessing a narcotic drug if the card holder or dispensary possesses resin extracted from any part of a plant of the genus Cannabis or an edible containing resin extracted from any part of a plant of the genus Cannabis. If you’re concerned that your conduct may expose you to criminal prosecution, you may wish to consult an attorney. We’ll be providing some specific guidance for dispensaries licensed by the ADHS next week.

Laws from the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act

Source

SNIP

8. "Marijuana" means all parts of any plant of the genus cannabis whether growing or not, and the seeds of such plant. [And that should included hashish, hash oil, marijuana pollen and other concentrated forms of marijuana]

SNIP

15. "Usable marijuana" means the dried flowers of the marijuana plant, and any mixture or preparation thereof [again usable marijuana seems to mean any part of the marijuana plant which contains the THC - for anybody who is not making a living using the war on drugs to jail people that should include hashish, hash oil, marijuana pollen and other concentrated forms of marijuana]

Laws from the Arizona Criminal Code

Source

4. "Cannabis" means the following substances under whatever names they may be designated:

(a) The resin extracted from any part of a plant of the genus cannabis, and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of such plant, its seeds or its resin. Cannabis does not include oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any fiber, compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of the mature stalks of such plant except the resin extracted from the stalks or any fiber, oil or cake or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.

(b) Every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of such resin or tetrahydrocannabinol.

Watching the watchers

Watching the watchers

By Alessandra Soler Viewpoints Fri Sep 13, 2013 12:05 PM

Many Americans were shocked earlier this year to learn that the National Security Agency has engaged in massive, sustained and systemic surveillance of millions of people. Unfortunately, the ACLU was not surprised to learn how the NSA has abused the law and its authority to invade the privacy of countless Americans.

Government tracking of Americans’ daily activities and movements is not limited to the federal level. Indeed, many state and local agencies track our day-to-day activities, such as our driving habits and how we use our cellphones. We should be concerned about how these bodies intrude upon our privacy rights.

But the media explosion around the NSA’s big-brother behavior has stimulated a necessary and long-overdue conversation about how this one federal agency spies on innocent Americans all too easily. So, it’s worth taking a look at what the NSA says it’s doing, what it’s actually doing and what it has no business even trying to do.

The Patriot Act grants dangerously broad surveillance powers to the federal government. Various entities within the federal government, including the NSA, have relied specifically on Section 215 of the act to justify spying on innocent Americans. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union believes Section 215 is unconstitutional because it violates the Fourth Amendment. Ordinarily, the Fourth Amendment requires the government to show probable cause and obtain a warrant before it can conduct a search. Section 215, however, allows the government to conduct such searches without showing probable cause and without bothering to get a warrant.

But even if Section 215 is constitutional, the NSA is still taking things way too far. The NSA conducts a domestic call-tracking program wherein it eavesdrops on people’s phone calls as a matter of routine. The NSA claims that this program is targeted, the implication being that you have nothing to worry about if you’re behaving yourself.

Not true.

How NSA operates

The program is not limited to terrorists or those associated with foreign powers. On the contrary, the NSA uses this program to collect “on an ongoing daily basis” the records of every call made in the United States, even those by innocent Americans. And congressional intelligence committees have confirmed that the government has been collecting the phone records of practically all Americans for at least seven years. In doing so, the NSA has developed a database filled with revealing information about every American’s associations and affiliations.

Think about the sweeping breadth of information being collected. Every time a resident of the United States makes a phone call, the NSA knows who he or she called, when the call was placed and how long the conversation lasted. The NSA knows if that resident called a doctor, a pastor, a political party, an addiction support group or a romantic interest. Calling patterns can indicate when we are asleep and when we are awake, our work habits and the number of friends we have. How many people would be comfortable with the government knowing this kind of information about their private lives?

Also, the NSA claims that the domestic call-tracking database is examined only sparingly. More specifically, the executive branch has stated that the database was “queried” only 300 times last year. But again, the truth is more complicated and far more alarming because these queries aren’t limited to a single person or phone number.

Instead, NSA analysts can examine the phone information of people within three “hops”— or degrees of separation — from the initial target. If each person has only 50 telephone contacts, applying this three-hop approach to even a single individual could implicate the phone records of more than 125,000 people. So, those 300 queries last year could have actually yielded information on more than 37 million people.

Even worse, the NSA aggregates these records to construct social graphs and to study their development and communications patterns over days, week, months and even years. This information can reveal the rise and fall of intimate relationships, the diagnosis of a serious illness, the identity of a potential government whistle-blower and even the signs of a corporate merger or acquisition.

Congress can fix this

Security is important, and so is privacy. One does not have to be sacrificed in order to guarantee the other. The ACLU recently supported bipartisan congressional legislation, the Amash-Conyers amendment, which would have ensured the government’s ability to protect Americans while limiting the government’s power to overreach.

The amendment would have changed Section 215 to require that requests for private records be targeted at those who are actually the subject of an investigation. This change would prevent the NSA from collecting, storing and using the records of all Americans. The amendment would not hinder the government’s ability to gather information about terrorists — it would just limit the government’s ability to spy on the rest of us in the process.

And, of course, the government would still enjoy considerable authority under many other laws and programs to pursue important intelligence leads. While Democrats and Republicans broke party lines to support the Amash-Conyers amendment, the legislation fell short of passage by just 12 votes.

The NSA and the Obama administration dismiss legitimate concerns about our privacy rights by regurgitating half-truths and tired talking points. Their response to our concerns seems to be, “Don’t worry, just trust us.” But given how the NSA has betrayed Americans’ trust by spying on all of us, whether we’re implicated in a crime or not, it’s difficult and unwise to maintain that trust.

The government may have genuine concerns about protecting our security, but it can’t use them to steamroll our genuine concerns about our privacy. And while the ACLU strongly believes that Americans’ privacy rights must be respected for constitutional and policy reasons, don’t think that this is a purely academic exercise. After all, the NSA has been spying on the ACLU’s phone calls, too.

Alessandra Soler is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

You think your going to get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!!

Debra Milke - Alex Garcia - Detective Armando Saldate - Detective Louis Scarcella

In the Buddhist Temple murders, first the 4 kids from Tucson was framed for murder by the Maricopa County Sheriff. They were Mike McGraw, Leo Bruce, Mark Nunez, 19, and Dante Parker.

After it was discovered they were innocent Alessandro Garcia and Johnathan Doody had their civil rights violated, and may have also been framed for the murder.

Next we have the Debra Milke case. Even if she is guilty she was framed by crooked Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate who seems to have made up an imaginary confession out of thin air.

Last in New York City we have Brooklyn homicide detective Louis Scarcella. He is suspected of framing 50 people for murder. He uses the same techniques of Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate. Make up confessions out of thin air. Beat up people to get confessions. Bribe criminals with drugs, special favors and reduced prison sentences to make up imaginary evidence to help him frame real people for murder.

Temple witness has history of lying

Temple witness has history of lying

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Sep 16, 2013 9:40 PM

The state’s key witness in the retrial of a man accused of being his accomplice in the 1991 Buddhist temple massacre admits a history of lying about the case.

Ultimately, it will be up to the jurors to decide whether Alessandro “Alex” Garcia is now being honest about Johnathan Doody’s involvement in the murders.

Doody and Garcia were convicted more than 20 years ago in the fatal shooting of six Thai monks, two acolytes and a nun in the temple’s sitting room.

Doody’s retrial is in its second month, and closing arguments may take place as early as Thursday.

Defense attorney Mark Rothschild had his first chance on Monday to question Garcia, who began testifying last month. His cross-examination was postponed because of a defense attorney’s personal emergency.

Garcia testified on Monday that, when police first interrogated him, he lied and said he had nothing to do with the brazen robbery and murder of nine people at the Wat Promkunaram temple in Waddell.

He again lied to investigators when he falsely implicated four men from Tucson, known at the time in the media as the Tucson Four, and two others, even though they had nothing to do with the state’s largest massacre on record, Garcia testified.

Additionally, Garcia admitted that he lied by initially withholding information that he had committed a 10th murder about two months after the temple slayings.

Garcia pleaded guilty in 1993 in a deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty. Doody was convicted by a jury the same year. Garcia was sentenced to 271 years and Doody to 281 years in prison.

But Doody’s conviction was overturned when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that his confession, elicited over 12 hours of questioning, was illegally coerced.

Doody’s was not the only confession found to be false. There were six false confessions in the case obtained under tactics by investigators under then-Maricopa County Sheriff Tom Agnos.

There was Garcia’s initial false confession implicating the “Tucson Four”; four false confessions from each of the Tucson suspects, who later won lawsuits over the ordeal; and Doody’s confession, which was later thrown out by an appeals court.

Garcia’s testimony in the retrial gives an eyewitness account placing Doody at the scene of the slayings and putting the murder weapon — a Marlin .22-caliber rifle — in Doody’s hands. It was Doody who insisted there be no witnesses and insisted that all victims must die, Garcia testified.

Defense attorney Maria Schaffer said before Doody’s retrial that the defense would attempt to show that Garcia is an unreliable witness and that Doody was not at the temple that night.

Under redirect testimony from Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Jason Kalish, Garcia said jurors should believe his account.

“It is the truth,” he said.

Bill Montgomery takes 9th Circuit to woodshed over Milke decision

Posted on September 16, 2013 4:58 pm by Laurie Roberts

Bill Montgomery takes 9th Circuit to woodshed over Milke decision

So, it seems the Phoenix police detective who put away Debra Milke — a woman once considered Arizona’s most notorious baby killer — now has a sudden bout of … well, let’s just call it shyness.

Former Detective Armando Saldate doesn’t want to testify against Milke.

This, after sending her to prison 23 years ago in a case that was basically his word that she confessed to setting up her four-year-old son’s murder against her word that she didn’t.

The jury went with his word and Milke went to death row.

In March, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out her conviction due to substantial and alarming questions about the detective’s character. Saldate, a three-judge panel wrote, had a “long history” of trampling people’s Miranda rights and lying under oath – something that should have been, but never was, disclosed to the Milke jury.

The opinion painted a scathing and scary portrait of police and prosecutors who abused their power to send a woman to death row. Or, as Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery sees it, a doctored photo.

Montgomery took the 9th Circuit to the woodshed on Friday, saying basically that the appellate court was out to get Saldate and misrepresented his work in eight previous cases in order to discredit the detective.

“In a rush to draw a conclusion that would support the 9th Circuit’s apparent desire to take out the detective, they glossed over all the facts,” Montgomery said, in summarizing one of those cases cited by appellate judges as evidence of “the detective’s lack of compunction about lying” and his tendency to violate suspects’ rights.

In one case, for example, the appellate court pointed out that Saldate got a confession from a murder suspect who was in intensive care and drifting in and out of consciousness. A judge, the appellate court noted, tossed out the confession as “involuntary and inadmissible” due to a violation of the suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights.

Montgomery acknowledges that the suspect confessed as he drifted in and out of consciousness. But he says Saldate stopped that interview because of the suspect’s condition and never submitted that confession. Instead, he came back 10 days later, after the suspect’s condition had improved, and interviewed him again. The resulting confession was suppressed, Montgomery says, not due to Fifth Amendment concerns but because the man hadn’t been properly given an initial court appearance.

“It is safe to say that any unbiased third party reviewing this distortion of the facts would wonder whether the appellate court had an agenda which was not supported by the truth,” according to an analysis of the case by Montgomery’s office.

Montgomery says that Saldate was never accused of misconduct in any of the eight cases cited by the 9th Circuit and faces no possibility of prosecution.

Which brings us to the curious decision by ex-Detective Saldate.

Mum’s apparently the word with this guy as his attorney, Larry Debus, said last week that he’s advising his client to take the Fifth if he’s called to testify. On Monday, Saldate will have to appear in court and tell Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Rosa Mroz whether he intends to invoke his privilege against self-incrimination.

If he does, that presumably would mean that he’s done something for which he needs protection from prosecution.

It almost certainly would mean that Debra Milke would not be retried for the 1989 murder of her son, Christopher.

Saldate’s no saint. Montgomery raises sizable questions about the 9th Circuit’s grasp of events — though, interestingly, he didn’t bring up the appellate court’s revelation of the 1973 incident when Saldate pulled over a woman for a traffic stop, took “liberties” with her and later lied about it to internal affairs investigators.

The question now is this: Was he corrupt enough to invent a mother’s confession to murdering her son, as the appellate court suggests? If so, then silence is golden.

But if not, is he honorable enough to let a jury decide – his word against hers, with all the information out there this time?

That is something for Saldate to consider, as he ponders his reputation and Milke’s future.

If he lied, then a potentially innocent woman was robbed of her life.

But if he was telling the truth, then by his silence he’s now letting a murderer go free.

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella may have framed 50 people for murder???

Several Murder Confessions Taken by Brooklyn Detective Have Similar Language

By FRANCES ROBLES

Published: June 12, 2013

As the Brooklyn homicide detective Louis Scarcella told it, the suspect in a ruthless home invasion that left one man dead and two more people in a coma started talking after just a few minutes of questioning.

A confession by Jabbar Washington in his 1997 murder trial uses phrases found in other confessions recorded by Mr. Scarcella.

“You got it right,” the suspect, Jabbar Washington, said. “I was there.”

The phrase was straightforward and damning, introducing the central piece of evidence that sent him to prison for 25 years to life. At the 1997 trial, Mr. Scarcella told the jury that it was the easiest confession he had obtained in more than two decades working for the Police Department.

But if the interrogation was unique for him, the wording was not. In at least four more murder cases, suspects questioned by Mr. Scarcella began their confessions with either “you got it right” or “I was there.”

Mr. Scarcella, 61, was a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide squad who developed a reputation for eliciting confessions when no other detective could. But questions about his credibility have led the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to reopen all of his trial convictions.

The similarity of the confessions, which was discovered in a review of cases by The New York Times, raises new doubts about the statements that Mr. Scarcella presented and that the prosecutors used to win convictions in dozens of murder cases. One of the men, David Ranta, who had spent more than two decades arguing that he never made the confession attributed to him that began “I was there,” has already been released from prison.

Defense lawyers fighting the convictions say the resemblance of statements attributed to inmates who shared nothing in common makes it more likely that Mr. Scarcella fabricated evidence, laying the groundwork for cases to be dismissed and millions to be paid in wrongful conviction lawsuits.

“It’s sort of beyond belief that it would be coincidental,” said Steven Banks, chief lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which is reviewing 20 cases handled by Mr. Scarcella.

Mr. Scarcella, a 26-year veteran who retired in 1999, stood by his record, saying he was one of the best detectives in the department. As for the similarities, he said: “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I will say this again: I have never fabricated a confession in my life.”

In a previous interview, Mr. Scarcella said that because of Mr. Ranta’s recent exoneration, inmates now considered him a “get-out-of-jail-free key.”

However, records show that in many cases, the allegations of misconduct and manufactured confessions are not new.

Mr. Washington, who is still in prison for the 1995 killing of Ronald Ellis, took the stand in his trial and testified that Mr. Scarcella provided the script for the confession. The detective, he said, grabbed him by the neck and testicles and forced him to sign his name to a document the detective wrote. “He always said the cop fed him what to say,” said Mark Pollard, who was Mr. Washington’s lawyer at the trial.

Mr. Washington, who was 23 during the trial, had an alibi, and the survivors of the shooting were unable to identify him in court, leaving the confession as the crux of the prosecution’s case. Mr. Washington’s claim of a forced confession was undermined, prosecutors wrote in response to his appeal, by a video of the confession that showed he did not appear to be looking to Mr. Scarcella for cues.

“The D.A. broke the confession down and tried to show it was extemporaneous,” Mr. Pollard said. “But I would not accept these similarities as coincidence. It definitely doesn’t smell right.”

By then the language had already appeared in several other cases. One of them centered on a 1994 arson in Williamsburg in which two people died. The suspect, Hector Lopez, had been entangled in a dispute with his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend, both of whom survived, and was accused of setting the man’s building on fire.

After about 12 hours in custody, Mr. Scarcella said that Mr. Lopez began to weep and said: “You guys got it right.”

Mr. Lopez, who was confronted with other evidence like a gas can in his car, is serving 25 years to life at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y. But his lawyer, William Loeb, wrote in an appeal that discrepancies between the confession and evidence suggested “the disturbing likelihood” that Mr. Scarcella had made up the confession.

Pierre Sussman, Mr. Ranta’s lawyer, said that was precisely what Mr. Scarcella did with Mr. Ranta, who in 1990 was an unemployed drug addict when the detective questioned him for the killing of a Hasidic rabbi. Mr. Scarcella testified that he was at central booking with Mr. Ranta when his prisoner did an about-face and decided to come clean about the robbery and shooting.

Mr. Scarcella said he scribbled the man’s exact words on the back of a manila envelope, starting with “I was there.”

Mr. Ranta, who has frequently said he never confessed to the detective, was exonerated in March after 23 years in prison. “If you take a look at statements given to Detective Scarcella, and they start out the same way — ‘I was there’ — and then follow with a narrative, that’s a huge problem,” Mr. Sussman said. “It’s a sign that it may be Scarcella’s words, and not the suspects’.”

Scholars who study police interrogations say it is not uncommon for confessions to include traces of the detective’s speech, particularly law enforcement jargon the suspect was unlikely to have used without prompting. In addition, sometimes a detective will prompt a person to admit being present at the crime scene, while still playing down the role in the crime, a technique known as minimizing, which has been cited as sometimes leading to false confessions.

“It’s hard to imagine all five people used the same exact words,” said Richard Leo, a University of San Francisco law professor who specializes in confessions. “It almost sounds like a template.”

The phrases still seemed etched in Mr. Scarcella’s memory. Even in spontaneous retellings of various confessions in recent years, he has reached for those exact words.

In an interview with The New York Post last month, he said he still remembered Mr. Ranta’s confession from a quarter century earlier: “I said: ‘You come from 66th Street. I come from 66th Street. We’re both Italian. Why don’t you tell me the truth?’ So he says, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I was there.’ ”

And talking about a different case during an appearance on the “Dr. Phil” television program in 2007, where he discussed the tactics he used to get suspects to admit their misdeeds, Mr. Scarcella recalled a similar conversation with a suspect. “He says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”

Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, has declined to publicly identify the 50 cases that are under review by the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit. So it is unclear how many more may have featured such language.

“We are looking for certain patterns,” said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the office. The wording “may be a pattern.”

An earlier examination by The Times also showed that Mr. Scarcella used the same crack-addicted prostitute as a witness in a series of unrelated murder cases.

The Legal Aid Society was informed by the office that 20 of the cases under review involved the agency’s clients. At the request of The Times, the organization’s lawyers reviewed those cases and found two with similar wording at the start of the confession. They declined to reveal the names but said both defendants served about 14 years in prison for shootings that took place in the 1990s, six years apart.

“One of the confessions includes ‘I was there’ and the other says, ‘I want to tell you the truth: you are right,’ ” Mr. Banks said. “Given the patterns that are emerging, clearly that gives great concern about the detective’s techniques.”

The DEA, CIA, FBI and NSA were reading my email

Of course I was paranoid and wonder was someone else really reading my email.

Of course my first guess was that it was one of my enemies like David Dorn.

And of course the second guess was that it was the government.

Of course now after Edward Snowden released his information that the government was spying on it that I realized that the government probably was involved with illegally reading my emails several times.

I also wondered why on Earth government would waste their time cracking my passwords.

Well again from the recently released information about government spying it turns out that the government wasn't cracking my passwords.

The NSA was simply twisting the arms of Google and Yahoo and getting them to give the government the passwords and email addresses of people the government considers to be criminals like me.

Of course the government's definition of a criminal seems to be any body that "thinks they have Constitutional rights" or anybody that expects the government to obey it's own laws.

And I guess by those definitions I am a criminal because I do think I have "Constitutional Rights" and I do expect the government to obey it's laws.

Of course I an not a criminal by the standards most normal people think of criminals being.

I don't steal stuff. I don't vandalize stuff. I don't destroy property.

Collection of 'suspicious activity' reports is challenged

Surveillance: Civil rights groups seek end to collection of government reports on 'suspicious activity' by Americans

By Thomas Peele and Josh Richman

Posted: 09/19/2013 06:47:05 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Be careful if you're heading out to buy a lot of bottled water or photograph a California landmark. The government is watching, and it may put details about what you're doing into a giant antiterrorism database, especially if you appear to be Arab or Muslim.

More than 1,800 "suspicious activity reports" collected by law enforcement officers and shared with federal agencies through clearinghouses called "fusion centers" that were released Thursday showed for the first time in California that activities like photographing buildings, flying the U.S. flag upside down, or even just giving the cold shoulder to a neighbor may result in the firm rap of FBI agents on your door and demands that you explain yourself.

This is especially true for Arabs, Muslims and people of South Asian descent, who are more often the subject of the secret reports, the value of which are dubious and have never been shown to have resulted in a terrorism-related arrest, members of civil rights groups said Thursday.

The government "should not be putting us in databases as potential terrorists when we have nothing to hide and haven't done anything wrong," said Linda Lye, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "This is wrong and it needs to stop."

A computer analysis by this newspaper of the documents released Thursday showed that about half of the suspicious activity reports resulted in the FBI interviewing the people named in them about their activities.

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman said Thursday the agency would not comment on the release of the reports.

In a letter sent Thursday to Attorney General Eric Holder, the ACLU called for immediate reforms to the post-Sept.11 national "Suspicious Activities Reporting Program," in which activities such as "photography, videography and note taking" are considered "inherently suspicious" and recorded.

The reports, obtained under state Public Records Act and federal Freedom of Information Act requests, came from the so-called fusion centers in central and Southern California. Similar requests to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, based in San Francisco, were denied, Lye said.

Mike Sena, the Northern California fusion center's director and president of the National Fusion Center Association, said the Suspicious Activity Report initiative is merely a more organized way of organizing and vetting the sort of tips and leads people have been passing along for years.

Sena said his center -- one of 72 across the country -- won't release its data because it could compromise criminal investigations or investigative practices. But he said his center, like all the fusion centers, has a formal privacy policy. In addition, Sena said, he also has a full-time privacy officer.

"We take it very seriously," Sena said. "Our role is protecting public safety, but also protecting privacy, civil rights and civil liberties."

Of about 800 such tips and leads his fusion center receives per year, only about 100 meet the standards for being passed along to the FBI and the area's Joint Terrorism Task Force, Sena said.

He added that others deemed unrelated to terrorism but perhaps related to local crimes are referred to local police. Those that aren't referred are retained for one year, he said, but anything that meets the standard of being criminal intelligence can be kept for up to five years.

A report earlier this year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office ripped the Suspicious Activities Reporting Program, saying that average Americans going about their everyday lives were getting swept up in the program and that their names were being retained in databases.

A bipartisan report issued in October 2012 by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Investigations Subcommittee suggested that the fusion centers sometimes forward intelligence of uneven quality -- "oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not, unrelated to terrorism."

The reports the ACLU released Thursday from Southern and central California included details like these:

"Suspicious ME (Middle Eastern) males buying several large pallets of water."

"Female subject taking photos of the Folsom Post Office."

A police officer in the city of Elk Grove "reported on a suspicious individual in his neighborhood" who was a doctor of Middle Eastern ancestry. The officer thought the doctor might be a terrorist because he was "very unfriendly."

"Suspicious photocopy of Folsom Dam by Chinese Nationals."

A man "nonchalantly taking photos" inside a Los Angeles subway car.

A university art professor from San Diego taking photos in an industrial area.

Someone writing anti-government slogans on the wall of a room at UC Davis.

A "noticeable increase" of female Muslims wearing veils and burqas at a shopping mall.

Someone taking photos of the Al Zampa Bridge over the Carquinez Strait between Contra Costa and Solano counties.

A trucker flying the American flag upside down on a big rig.

Four "clean-cut Middle Eastern males speaking excitedly in a foreign language."

"They still think that it is legitimate and constitutional to treat someone as a possible terrorist because of their race" or skin color, said Yaman Salahi, a lawyer with the Asian Law Caucus.

Although suspicious activity reports for the Bay Area were not obtained, he said he routinely hears from Muslims and Asians across the region reporting that they had been questioned by FBI agents.

Hal Bergman, a 29-year-old freelance photographer from Los Angeles, said that he was taking stock photos from a public street of an oil refinery at the port of Los Angeles two years ago when a security guard approached him. After a brief conversation, Bergman continued his work.

Two weeks later, there was a pounding on his door. Two FBI agents, he said, were carrying a stack of documents, a photocopy of his driver's license and were demanding to know what he was doing at the port, who he worked for and why anyone would want a photo of a refinery. The security guard had filed a suspicious activity report.

"It is a permanent record," he said of the inclusion of his name in the fusion center databases. "Who has access to this? Am I going to have a problem flying or getting across the border?

Staff writer Daniel J. Willis contributed to this report. Contact Thomas Peele at tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com and follow him twitter.com/thomas_peele.

Source

ACLU says domestic spying goes too far

Associated Press Fri Sep 20, 2013 11:24 AM

SAN FRANCISCO — Two men of Middle Eastern descent were reported buying pallets of water at a grocery store. A police sergeant reported concern about a doctor “who is very unfriendly.” And photographers of all races and nationalities have been reported taking snapshots of post offices, bridges, dams and other structures.

The American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups released 1,800 “suspicious activity reports” Thursday, saying they show the inner-workings of a domestic surveillance program that is sweeping up innocent Americans and forever placing their names in a counterterrorism database.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government created a multibillion-dollar information-sharing program meant to put local, state and federal officials together to analyze intelligence at sites called fusion centers.

Instead, according to a Senate report the Government Accountability Office and now the ACLU, the program has duplicated the work of other agencies, has appeared rudderless and hasn’t directly been responsible for any terror-related prosecutions. According to the GAO, the government maintains 77 fusion centers throughout the country and their operations are funded by federal and local sources.

The ACLU obtained about 1,700 suspicious activity reports filed with the Sacramento office through a California Public Record Acts request. Another 100 were submitted as part of a court case in Los Angeles filed by the ACLU on behalf of photographers who say they are being harassed by Southern California law officials.

The documents do not appear to show valuable counterterrorism intelligence.

A report from Bakersfield, phoned in to a police officer by a “close personal friend,” describes two men who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent stocking up on water.

Another report shows a Lodi police sergeant “reporting on a suspicious individual in his neighborhood.” The sergeant, whose name was redacted, said he “has been long concerned about a residence in his neighborhood occupied by a Middle Eastern male adult physician who is very unfriendly.”

A third report states, “An off-duty supervising dispatcher with Sacramento P.D. noticed a female subject taking pictures of the outside of the post office in Folsom on Riley Street this morning. The female departed as a passenger in a silver Mazda.”

The fusion center project was a target of a blistering Congressional report last year complaining that too many innocent Americans engaging in routine and harmless behavior have become ensnared in the program.

The ACLU and others are calling on the Obama administration to make overhauls so that only activities with legitimate links to terrorism investigations are reported.

“We want the administration to stop targeting racial and religious minorities,” ACLU lawyer Linda Lye said.

A Senate report last year concluded that the program has improperly collected information and produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism. The report suggested the program’s intent ballooned far beyond anyone’s ability to control.

What began as an attempt to put local, state and federal officials in the same room analyzing the same intelligence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining software, flat screen televisions and, in Arizona, two fully equipped Chevrolet Tahoes that are used for commuting, investigators found.

The lengthy, bipartisan report was a scathing evaluation of what the Department of Homeland Security has held up as a crown jewel of its security efforts.

A Homeland Security spokesman countered that the program is “safe and effective.”

“In recent years, reporting of suspicious activity by the public has led to the arrest of multiple individuals planning mass casualty attacks,” Peter Boogaard said. “These programs are governed by robust privacy and civil rights and civil liberty protections.”

Homeland Security Department spokesman Matthew Chandler at the time the Senate report was released called it “out of date, inaccurate and misleading.”

He said it focused entirely on information being produced by fusion centers and didn’t consider the benefit to involved officials from receiving intelligence from the federal government.

Brazilian president, at United Nations, blasts spying by Washington

Brazilian president, at United Nations, blasts spying by Washington

By Carol J. Williams and Vincent Bevins

September 24, 2013, 7:59 a.m.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff used her lead-off speech at the annual United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to blast the United States for operating a worldwide spying network that she said violates the sovereignty of other countries and the civil liberties of their citizens.

Rousseff had already signaled her nation's outrage over reports of National Security Agency data interceptions in Brazil by canceling a summit and state dinner with President Obama that had been set for late October.

"What we have before us is a serious case of violation of human rights and civil liberties," Rousseff told the assembly immediately after opening pleasantries.

She described arguments that the technological surveillance of individuals, businesses and diplomatic missions is necessary in the global fight against terrorism as "untenable" and an affront to the sovereignty of nations.

"Brazil can protect itself," Rousseff declared. "Brazil doesn’t provide shelter to terrorist groups."

Rousseff never mentioned Obama or the NSA by name but said her nation's dismay over "this case of disrespect" had been communicated to Washington, along with its insistence that Brazil "cannot possibly allow recurring and illegal actions to go on as if normal practice."

Since July, Brazilian news organization Globo has published three reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which alleged that the United States had spied on Brazilian citizens, Rousseff herself, as well as important state-run oil company, Petrobras.

Rousseff has strongly denounced the alleged eavesdropping and asked Obama for a public apology and concrete actions to curb it. The decision to cancel the Washington trip, a rare diplomatic snub of the United States, was well received in many parts of Brazil, especially in the base of her left-of-center Workers Party, many of whose members have memories of a U.S.-backed military dictatorship that spied on dissidents.

Put NSA in a narrower box

Source

Reach Robert Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8472.

Posted on September 26, 2013 4:28 pm by Robert Robb

Put NSA in a narrower box

The United States needs to put the National Security Agency into a much more narrowly defined box. It’s out of control. And it’s out of control in a way that violates civil liberties and harms U.S. national interests.

Brazil is Latin America’s leading economy and one of the most important countries in the developing world. The United States wants warmer relations with it and to facilitate that had invited President Dilma Rousseff for a rare full-spectrum state visit, with all the pomp and circumstance such occasions can be vested with. For U.S. diplomacy, it was a big deal.

Rousseff canceled the state visit. She did, however, come to the United States. She went to the United Nations to harshly denounce the United States.

Why? News came out that the NSA was intercepting her phone calls and emails. And those of her staff and government. And of Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company.

The National Security Agency is supposed to be a “security” agency. It is part of the Department of Defense.

So, what threat to U.S. security do the Brazilian president, her government and the state oil company pose?

Earlier it was revealed that the NSA was extensively snooping on European Union officials. And what threat to U.S. national security were they hatching?

The NSA was looking at the emails of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto – before he was ever elected.

This gratuitous spying, with utterly no rational connection to protecting the United States against any conceivable security threat, has consequences.

Obviously, it put the kibosh on an important U.S. diplomatic overture to Brazil, to put it mildly.

Brazil is in the market for some new fighter jets. Boeing, a U.S. company, is a bidder. The NSA making sure there are no terrorist plots emanating from Rousseff’s office is thought to have damaged its prospects.

Brazil is also auctioning off deep-sea oil concessions, in which American companies have an interest. In Brazil, however, the question is whether NSA spying on Petrobras has irredeemably tainted the process.

The United States wants a free trade agreement with the European Union. NSA spying on EU officials has, unsurprisingly, cooled interest in Europe and raised questions about whether the integrity of negotiations for such a treaty could be protected.

Domestically, NSA is also out of the box. It’s not supposed to be prying within the United States. The Patriot Act increased the intelligence gathering power of the FBI, not the NSA. Yet it is the NSA that has the telephone records of virtually every U.S. resident.

The NSA has an important job to do. It’s supposed to gather intelligence about true national security threats. In so doing, it will need periodically to follow leads to sources in this country and in foreign governments.

But that’s not what the NSA is doing. Its indiscriminate collection of data is vastly outside its writ, violates civil liberties domestically and internationally, and is damaging U.S. interests.

It is also jeopardizing NSA’s ability to do its true national security job. NSA can tap so easily into Internet data because so much of it is routed through the United States. The NSA revelations, however, have caused other countries to become more interested in developing Internet routes that avoid the United States. They have also given impetus to calls to put the Internet under some sort of international control, which would be disastrous in numerous respects.

Yes, everyone spies. But no one spies as invasively as the NSA. The invasive capabilities we justifiably develop and use for national security shouldn’t be turned to gaining diplomatic or commercial advantage.

And yes, these rows wouldn’t be taking place except for the leaks by Edward Snowden. But it would be unwise for the United States, in today’s interconnected world, to assume that the agency it assigns to steal the secrets of others will be able to perfectly protect its own.

Microsoft outlines 66,539 account requests from law enforcement

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Microsoft outlines 66,539 account requests from law enforcement during first half of 2013

By Timothy J. Seppala posted Sep 28th, 2013 at 11:53 AM 18

We've covered various transparency reports before, but now the whole notion takes on a different feel in our post-PRISM world. Microsoft's latest report details that it received 37,196 requests from law enforcement agencies between this January and June, which impacted 66,539 of its accounts. Seventy-seven percent of those requests were for data like a user's name, IP history and billing address, and with 21 percent of requests, no data was disclosed at all. However, in 2.19 percent of queries by law enforcement, Redmond disclosed "at least some" customer content. What does that mean? Well, the company's definition includes the subject or body of an email, photos stored in SkyDrive and address book info. According to the document, the info was all obtained via lawful warrants and court orders.

While National Security Letters also fall under the guise of law enforcement requests -- which primarily come from the FBI in order to obtain records such as phone numbers and email addresses -- Microsoft is only allowed to publish these statistics on an annual basis. Hence, they're absent this time around, and will be published in the company's next Law Enforcement Requests Report. To see just how deep the rabbit hole goes, do check out the source. We suggest putting on a pot of coffee, though -- it's not a quick read.

NSA watchdog: Employees spied on lovers

NSA watchdog: Employees spied on lovers

Associated Press Fri Sep 27, 2013 10:44 AM

WASHINGTON — Some workers at the National Security Agency intentionally misused the government’s secret surveillance systems at least 12 times over the past decade, including instances when they spied on spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends, according to embarrassing new details disclosed by the agency’s inspector general. In nearly every case, the workers were allowed to retire before they could be punished. [While us civilians will get draconian prison sentences for trivial crimes, government employees rarely get more then a slap on the wrist for major crimes]

In addition to the 12 historical cases, authorities are investigating two other suspected violations and reviewing a third allegation for possible investigation, the inspector general, George Ellard, told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, in a letter released late Thursday.

Senior national security officials and some U.S. lawmakers have said such cases were exceedingly rare considering the breadth of the NSA’s surveillance programs and reflect how seriously the government monitors use of its systems for potential abuses. [Yea, that's what they always say. The f*ck up never happened before and will never happen again!!!]

“Where (a media report) says we’re sweeping up the communications of civilians overseas that aren’t targets of collection systems is wrong,” the NSA’s director, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, told senators Thursday. “If our folks do that, we hold them accountable.”

At least six times the cases were reported to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, Ellard’s letter said. In some cases, U.S. prosecutors declined to take action but in nearly every case the employees were allowed to retire without punishment. [Yea, that's what usually happens - nothing] In one case, a worker was suspended without pay then retired; in another case, a worker’s promotion was cancelled; in two cases, military employees suffered a reduction in rank, extra duty and brief reduction in salary for two months.

Public concerns about how telephone and Internet surveillance data is handled by the NSA have intensified in the wake of leaks about the agency’s programs by former contract employee Edward Snowden. With the Senate readying to consider new limits on the NSA’s spying programs, national security officials have sought to boost confidence in their procedures. Senior officials have said they moved quickly to report and correct internal problems that led to the NSA’s accidental collection of 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans, and they insisted that willful abuse of surveillance data by officials is almost non-existent.

Grassley, who had asked Ellard last month to provide more information about the 12 violations, urged robust oversight of the secret programs. “We shouldn’t tolerate even one misuse of this program,” he said. [But our government masters will pretty much tolerate any all all crimes committed by the goons in the NSA]

Several cases clearly showed government officials using the surveillance system to probe for information about spouses or paramours. During a 2011 polygraph test, an official acknowledged tapping into surveillance data about his foreign girlfriend’s telephone number in 2004. The official also tried to retrieve data about his own phone but was prevented because internal mechanisms prevented queries on domestic phone numbers without authorization. The matter was referred to the Justice Department. The official retired in 2012 before internal disciplinary action could be taken.

In another case, the foreign girlfriend of a U.S official reported her suspicions that the official was listening to her telephone calls. An internal investigation found that the official had made internal surveillance queries on the phones of nine foreign women without authorization and had at times listened in on some phone conversations. The same official also collected data on a U.S. person’s phone.

The case was referred to prosecutors and the official resigned before internal discipline could be imposed.

Ex-EPA official pleads guilty to stealing $900K

Ex-EPA official pleads guilty to theft; he also had claimed to work for CIA

By Ann E. Marimow and Lenny Bernstein, Published: September 27

A former high-level official at the Environmental Protection Agency admitted Friday that he stole nearly $900,000 from the government by pretending to work for the CIA in a plea agreement that raised questions about how top agency managers failed to detect the scheme since it began in 1994.

John C. Beale duped a series of supervisors, including top officials of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, disappearing from the office and explaining his absences by telling his bosses that he was doing top-secret work for the CIA and its “directorate of operations.”

He lied about contracting malaria (he didn’t) while he served in Vietnam (all his military service was in the United States) to obtain a parking space reserved for the disabled that cost the EPA $8,000 over three years. He took personal trips to Los Angeles for which he charged the government more than $57,000, according to new court filings.

In all, Beale was paid for 21 / 2 years of work he did not perform since early 2000 and received about $500,000 in “retention bonuses” he did not deserve for nearly two decades, according to court papers and interviews.

“To our knowledge, prior to [current EPA Administrator] Gina McCarthy expressing her concerns, no one at EPA ever checked to see if Mr. Beale worked for the CIA,” said Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan, who led the investigation that included interviews of 40 people. Only one, an executive assistant, suspected Beale’s story of working for the clandestine service.

Nor did EPA personnel compare Beale’s travel vouchers, which said he was in places such as Boston and Seattle, with hotel receipts for the same dates that showed him in Bakersfield, Calif., where he has family.

Even during the probe, which began in March, Beale continued to insist that he could not be interviewed because of his work for the CIA, Sullivan said. Only when investigators offered to question him in a secure room at the agency’s Langley headquarters did he admit he had no connection to the CIA, Sullivan said.

For reasons the EPA cannot explain, Beale continued to draw a paycheck until April 30, 19 months after his retirement dinner cruise on the Potomac River and 23 months after he announced he would retire, according to Sullivan and court documents. Beale and his attorney declined to comment after the federal court hearing Friday.

The case has attracted political attention, in part because Beale was defrauding the agency when he worked for McCarthy, the new EPA administrator, when she headed the agency’s Air and Radiation office.

McCarthy started her job in 2009 and told investigators she began to suspect Beale in March 2012, Sullivan said. McCarthy, who is identified as “EPA Manager #2,” in court documents, eventually discovered that Beale was still receiving a paycheck long after she helped celebrate his retirement. She became EPA administrator this year.

McCarthy referred the matter to the EPA general counsel’s office. Instead of being transferred to the inspector general, it was referred to the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security, which has no investigative authority. That delayed the IG’s probe for months, said people familiar with the investigation.

Repeated calls and e-mails to EPA representatives were not returned Friday.

The top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, David Vitter (La.), said Friday that the case highlights a “major failing within EPA” and that “no direct actions have been taken to guarantee this kind of abuse won’t happen again.”

The committee’s chairman, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) called Beale’s actions “outrageous” and praised the inspector general and McCarthy for “putting an end to his thievery.” Boxer has scheduled a briefing for Monday. Beale is scheduled to appear at a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing next week titled “Secret Agent Man?”

Beale, 64, was charged in August with stealing $886,186 in pay and bonuses. A senior policy adviser in the Air and Radiation office, he earned $164,700 when he retired in April. He has repaid the $886,186 to the EPA as part of his plea agreement but still owes a money judgment of $507,000. Beale, who until recently lived in Arlington County, faces up to three years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

Even though court documents trace Beale’s conduct to 2000, the IG’s office found that Beale’s deception began in 1989, when he falsely wrote on his employment application that he had worked for former senator John Tunney of California, Sullivan said. Tunney’s name was misspelled on the form, he said. Beale said he began the CIA ruse in 1994, Sullivan said, because he missed the limelight from his work on the Clean Air Act reauthorization from 1990 to 1993.

Early on at the EPA, Beale’s air-quality expertise led to many legitimate overseas trips to places such as China, South Africa and England, said people familiar with the case. His frequent international travel also allowed him to cultivate an aura of mystery, his former colleagues said.

When Beale started disappearing from the office in 2001, he told a person identified as “EPA manager #1” that he was assigned to a special advisory group working on a project with the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, according the court filing.

The manager agreed to Beale’s request to be out of the office one day a week for the CIA work, according to the statement of the offense.

In 2005, court documents say the same manager approved a long-term research project that Beale had proposed. Beale took five trips to Los Angeles to work on the project, which prosecutors said did not require travel. Beale stayed in Bakersfield and visited nearby family members. He was reimbursed more than $57,000 in travel expenses for work that was never produced.

The inspector general’s office identified “manager #1” as Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who was head of the Office of Air and Radiation from 2001 to 2005, during the administration of George W. Bush. Holmstead, a lawyer in Washington, said in an e-mail that he had “no recollection of approving [Beale’s] requests.”

“He did tell me that he had an assignment with the CIA that would sometimes take him out of the office, but I was never asked to approve this arrangement. Career employees are sometimes detailed to work at other agencies, and I assumed that Mr. Beale’s work at the CIA was done pursuant to such an arrangement.”

In 2008, Beale did not show up at the office for about six months, telling his managers that he was either working on a research project or for “Langley,” a reference to the CIA.

Throughout the scheme, Beale was receiving a 25 percent retention bonus that should have expired after three years, in 2003. Instead, he continued to receive the bonus through 2013, according to the court documents, and was among the highest paid, nonelected federal government employees. A close friend of Beale’s, his supervisor Robert Brenner, put him in for the bonus twice, Sullivan said.

In May 2011, Beale announced his retirement. The next month, he told McCarthy that his CIA work would keep him out of the office for long periods. Beale sent e-mails to McCarthy and others at the EPA during that time, saying he was traveling overseas and doing CIA work. In reality, Beale was at home or at his vacation house on Cape Cod, according to the plea agreement.

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

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N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS

Published: September 28, 2013 58 Comments

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.

An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”

“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”

The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

N.S.A. officials declined to identify which phone and e-mail databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Mr. Snowden do not specify them. The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Mr. Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (N.S.A. officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)

But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.

The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.

A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.

The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.

Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.

“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The N.S.A. had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and e-mail data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or e-mail address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden. N.S.A. officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.

The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.

A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.

In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.

A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.

After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).

In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation, international drug smuggling or espionage to conversations with a foreign diplomat or a political figure.

Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.

The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.

The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal N.S.A. bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.

The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.

The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.

A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”

A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.

If the N.S.A. does not immediately use the phone and e-mail logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.

One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the N.S.A. Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”

James Risen reported from Washington and New York. Laura Poitras, a freelance journalist, reported from Berlin.

John McAfee reveals details on gadget to thwart NSA

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John McAfee reveals details on gadget to thwart NSA

By Tracey Kaplan

tkaplan@mercurynews.com

Posted: 09/28/2013 07:06:58 PM PDT

SAN JOSE -- John McAfee lived up to his reputation Saturday as tech's most popular wild child, electrifying an audience with new details of his plan to thwart the NSA's surveillance of ordinary Americans with an inexpensive, pocket-size gadget.

Dubbed "Decentral," the as-yet-unbuilt device will cost less than $100, McAfee promised the enthusiastic crowd of about 300 engineers, musicians and artists at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

"There will be no way (for the government) to tell who you are or where you are," he said in an onstage interview with moderator Dan Holden at the inaugural C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival.

And if the U.S. government bans its sale, "I'll sell it in England, Japan, the Third World. This is coming and cannot be stopped."

The ambitious -- some would say quixotic -- project is the latest chapter of McAfee's colorful life.

The anti-virus software pioneer's antics have included his widely publicized flight last year from Belize, where he remains wanted as a "person of interest" in the shooting death of his neighbor.

Even so, he remains an icon in the annals of Silicon Valley's history of entrepreneurship. In 1989, he founded the anti-virus software company that still bears his name and once was worth $100 million. In 1994, he ended his relationship with the company and moved to Colorado.

During the interview, the 68-year-old with spiky black hair tipped blond, who wore light blue cargo pants and a black sweatshirt, remarked on a wide range of topics, from how quickly he gets bored once one of his creations comes to fruition (including the software security company he founded) to how yoga helped him 30 years ago to quit using drugs, including his favorite (psychedelic mushrooms).

It was a talk bound to appeal to the young audience, which broke into frequent applause. Among the group was his new 30-year-old wife, Janice Dyson. She said in a brief interview afterward with this newspaper that she is a former stripper. The couple met in Miami, where McAfee went after being deported from Guatemala.

"I keep him grounded," she said.

McAfee outlined what some might regard as a pie-in-the-sky plan to finish the first prototype of the Decentral in six months. He said the gadget is called Decentral because by communicating with smartphones, tablets and other devices, it will create decentralized, floating and moving local networks that can't be penetrated by government spy agencies.

The design is in place already for a version whose range will be three blocks in the city and a quarter mile in the country, he said. The device will be compatible with both Android and iPhones.

As far as consumers' appetite for such a gizmo, he said, "I cannot imagine one college student in the world who will not stand in line to get one."

Commuters will also find it useful, he said. Neighborhoods will be better able to fight crime because Decentral will include an option that sends an alert if there is a burglary or other crime.

McAfee said the idea for the device came to him well before computer analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked National Security Agency documents that exposed widespread monitoring of U.S. citizens' phone calls and Internet communications.

But with Snowden's actions, "it became the right time" to make it real, he said.

At the end of the 75-minute discussion, McAfee gamely took questions from the audience about everything from what advice he'd give teens (do what you love) to what he fears (his wife, he joked). In response to a question about marijuana, he made clear he doesn't embrace every aspect of the youth culture.

He said he liked pot users when he sold drugs decades ago because their "lives never go anywhere and they remain customers," adding, "Marijuana is a drug of illusion -- it creates the illusion that you're doing great things when all you're doing is sitting on the sofa growing a beard."

McAfee also reiterated that he never killed anyone in Belize and fled after angering the authorities by refusing to pay a $2 million bribe.

There seemed to be intense interest Saturday in McAfee's John McAfee, right, speaks with Dan Holden at the "Fireside Chat with John McAfee" during the C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2013. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group) ( LiPo Ching ) current plans. One man asked whether Decentral essentially creates a "dark Web," or part of the Internet that can no longer be accessed by conventional means.

Yes, he said.

Will the privacy it affords allow criminals and others to evade the authorities, another wanted to know.

"It will of course be used for nefarious purposes," he said, "just like the telephone is."

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482.

No. 2 U.S. Nuke Commander Under Investigation

Source

Vice Admiral Is Suspended in Gambling Investigation

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and RAVI SOMAIYA

Published: September 28, 2013

A vice admiral who is second in command at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear war-fighting forces for the military, has been suspended amid an investigation into his possible involvement in illegal gambling, officials said on Saturday.

The officer, Vice Adm. Timothy M. Giardina, is a highly decorated sailor with more than three decades in the Navy. The suspension occurred on Sept. 3, but was not announced publicly, said Capt. Pamela Kunze, the command’s spokeswoman.

Captain Kunze would not comment further on the circumstances surrounding the suspension, citing a continuing investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The Strategic Command was first alerted about the issue in mid-July. A month earlier, Admiral Giardina became the target of an inquiry being conducted by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation into possible use of counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, said David Dales, the head of the Southwest division of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

Mr. Dales said the criminality in question involved poker at the casino, but said he could provide no further information. The agency’s investigation is still open and no state charges have been filed against Admiral Giardina, Mr. Dales said.

It was not clear whether Admiral Giardina’s actions compromised national security or the operations of the Strategic Command.

The commander of the Strategic Command, General C. Robert Kehler, has submitted a recommendation to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Admiral Giardina be reassigned, Captain Kunze said. It has not been determined what, if any, additional actions will be taken. The leadership of the Strategic Command is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The Strategic Command, based at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, oversees a web of military efforts including the military’s space and cyberwarfare operations. It also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Admiral Giardina, a career submarine officer, assumed his duties at the Strategic Command in December 2011. Before that, he was the deputy commander and chief of staff of the Pacific Fleet. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1979.

He was scheduled to rotate out of his position at Strategic Command later this year. In early July, President Obama appointed an Air Force general to replace Admiral Giardina.

Source

Tim Giardina Suspended: No. 2 U.S. Nuke Commander Under Investigation

By ROBERT BURNS 09/28/13 06:10 PM ET EDT AP

WASHINGTON — The No. 2 officer at the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear war-fighting forces is suspected in a case involving counterfeit gambling chips at a western Iowa casino and has been suspended from his duties, officials said.

Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina has not been arrested or charged, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent David Dales said Saturday. The state investigation is ongoing.

Giardina, deputy commander at U.S. Strategic Command, was suspended on Sept. 3 and is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a Strategic Command spokeswoman said.

The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at Strategic Command was made more than three weeks ago but not publicly announced at that time. The command is located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb.

Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, who heads Strategic Command, suspended Giardina, according to the command's top spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze. Giardina is still assigned to the command but is prohibited from performing duties related to nuclear weapons and other issues requiring a security clearance, she said.

Kehler has recommended to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Giardina be reassigned, Kunze said. Giardina has been the deputy commander of Strategic Command since December 2011. He is a career submarine officer and prior to starting his assignment there was the deputy commander and chief of staff at U.S. Pacific Fleet.

DCI agents stationed at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, discovered the counterfeit chips, Dales said. He would not say when the discovery was made or how much in counterfeit chips was found, only that "it was a significant monetary amount."

Council Bluffs is located across the Missouri River from Omaha.

"We were able to detect this one pretty quickly and jump on it," Dales said. He declined to give specifics on how authorities determined that casino chips had been counterfeited or how Giardina might have been involved.

Strategic Command oversees the military's nuclear fighter units, including the Navy's nuclear-armed submarines and the Air Force's nuclear bombers and nuclear land-based missiles.

Kunze said Strategic Command did not announce the suspension because Giardina remains under investigation and action on Kehler's recommendation that Giardina be reassigned is pending. The suspension was first reported by the Omaha World-Herald.

Kunze said a law enforcement investigation of Giardina began June 16. Kehler became aware of this on July 16, and the following day he asked the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to begin a probe.

The suspension is yet another blow to the military's nuclear establishment. Last spring the nuclear missile unit at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., pulled 17 launch control officers off duty after a problematic inspection and later relieved of duty the officer in charge of training and proficiency.

In August a nuclear missile unit at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., failed a nuclear safety and security inspection; nine days later an officer in charge of the unit's security forces was relieved of duty.

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Associated Press writer Margery A. Beck in Omaha, Neb., contributed to this report.