CIA Ends Vaccine Programme
May 21, 2014 in Pakistan
On Tuesday, the White House confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has ended the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations amidst concerns for the safety of health workers. In a letter to US public health schools, a White House aide indicated that the CIA had stopped such practices in August 2013.
In a letter dated 16 May, the White House assistant to the president for homeland security and counter-terrorism, Lisa Monaco, wrote that CIA director John Brennan had directed the agency to cease “operational use of vaccine programmes.” The letter further indicated, “similarly, the agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programmes,” adding that the policy applied worldwide to US and non-US persons alike.
The CIA had used a fake vaccine programme in a bid to locate Osama Bin Laden before US Special Forces killed in May 2011. Genetic material obtained through a fake door-to-door hepatitis B vaccination programme reportedly helped the CIA confirm Bin Laden’s whereabouts in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The Pakistani doctor accused of running the vaccination campaign remains in jail. Dr Shakil Afridi was convicted of having ties to militant groups, which he has denied. He was imprisoned in 2012 in a move that is widely seen as punishment for his helping the CIA, with sources indicating that he is regarded as a traitor by Pakistan’s security agencies.
The CIA’s decision to end the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations comes after a wave of deadly attacks by militants on polio vaccination workers in Pakistan. According to CIA spokesman Dean Boyd, “by publicizing this policy, our objective is to dispel one canard that militant groups have used as justification for cowardly attacks against vaccination providers.”
However despite the CIA ending the programme in August, a number of health workers have been targeted, kidnapped or killed as militants suspected that they were either CIA agents or had links to it. Since January, sixty-six cases of polio have been declared in Pakistan, compared with only eight during the same period last year. The geographical spread of the cases suggests that they are mostly sourced to the north-western Wairistan tribal region. Militants who control this region have banned vaccinations, citing that health workers may include American spies. In turn, more than sixty polio workers and security personnel were killed in the country between December 2012 and April 2014. According to Pakistani officials and humanitarian workers, most of them were killed in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
While the CIA’s announcement of ending such vaccination programmes is seen as a positive step, the CIA’s spokesman has warned that “many obstacles” still remain and will likely stand in the way of vaccination programmes. These include myths that vaccinations cause sterility or HIV along with claims that they are spy programmes run by Western governments. Mr Boyd noted “while the CIA can do little about the former, the CIA director felt he could do something important to dispel the latter and he acted,” adding “it is important to note that militant groups have a long history of attacking humanitarian aid workers in Pakistan and those attacks began years before the raid against the Bin Laden compound and years before any press reports claiming a CIA-sponsored vaccination programme.”
In Pakistan, the decision will likely be welcomed, as polio has been spreading fast since the Taliban banned the vaccination campaign two years ago. Prior to the release of the letter, Professor Ibrahim Khan, an intermediary for the Taliban, had indicated that the militants wanted assurances that the vaccination programme was not being used for other purposes. He further added that he was hopeful that the Taliban would then lift the ban on the vaccine. However this is contingent on the success of peace negotiations with the Pakistani government. Currently, the talks have stalled, with the Ministry of Interior indicating that access to the polio vaccination will lead the agenda in the next round of talks.
Barack Obama Announces Changes To IC Spy Programme
January 17, 2014 in United StatesIn light of last year’s Snowden intelligence leaks, United States President Barack Obama is expected to order the National Security Agency (NSA) to stop storing data from Americans’ phones. After initially defending the US surveillance programme, in August, the president announced that the US “can and must be more transparent” about its intelligence gathering.
Reports in Washington have indicated that during a speech set for Friday, which is scheduled to take place at the Department of Justice at 11:00 (1600 GMT), President Obama will request Congress to arrange how data is stored and how the US Intelligence Community (IC) will have access to it. The storing of phone data is just the first in a number of planned changes to the intelligence system that the president is due to announce. The proposed changes within the IC and how the community gathers its intelligence stem from former intelligence worker Edward Snowden’s continued leaks of information pertaining to the NSA’s spying programme. The latest revelations made by Mr Snowden, who is wanted for espionage in the US and now lives in exile in Russia, claim that US intelligence agencies have collected and stored 200 million text messages every day across the globe. According to Mr Snowden, an NSA programme, known as Dishfire, was responsible for extracting and storing data from SMS messages in order to gather location information, contacts and financial data. The information was later shared with the United Kingdom’s spy agency GCHQ. While both agencies have defended their activities, stating that they operate within the constraints of the law, many advocates and civil rights groups have called on greater transparency.
President Obama is expected to approve a number of recommendations put forth by a panel that the White House commissioned last year. If approved, the centrepiece of reforms will be an order to stop the NSA from storing Americans’ phone records. Storage of such data will instead fall to firms or another third party where it can be queried, however under limited conditions. In terms of how this will be implemented, the president is expected to leave this decision to Congress and the IC.
Amongst the other proposals that are likely to be approved is the creation of a public advocate position at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), where government agencies request permission for mass spying programmes. Currently, only the US government is represented in front of FISC judges. In turn, Mr Obama is also expected to extend some privacy protections for foreigners, increase oversight of how the US monitors foreign leaders and limit how long some data can be stored.
According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the aim of these proposals and changes is to make intelligence activities “more transparent,” adding that this would “give the public more confidence about the problems and the oversight of the programmes.” However while in the wake of the Snowden leaks, civil rights groups have been requesting significant reductions to powers that government agencies have with respect to the collection of data, many believe that these latest proposals appear to be structured in a manner of broad rules, effectively meaning that they will do little to limit the intelligence-gathering activities of the US IC.
Edward Snowden and the Leaks that Exposed US Intelligence Programme
In May 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) left the US shortly after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance carried out by the US IC. Mr Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia, faces espionage charges in the US over his action.
By early June, the scandal of the US spy programme broke when the UK Guardian newspaper reported that the NSA was collecting telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. At the time, the newspaper published the secret court order, which directed telecommunications company Verizon to hand over all its telephone data to the NSA on an “on going daily basis.” The newspaper report was later followed by revelations in both the Guardian and Washington Post that the NSA had tapped directly into the servers of nine Internet firms, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft. This was done in order to track online communication through a surveillance programme known as Prism. At the time, Britain’s GCHQ was also accused of having gathered information on Internet companies through Prism.
Several days later, it was revealed that Mr Snowden, a former CIA systems analyst, was behind the leaks pertaining to the US and UK surveillance programmes. He was later charged by US authorities with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence.
The spy scandal continued to develop when on 21 June, the Guardian reported that officials at GCHQ were taping fibre-optic cables, responsible for carrying global communications, and sharing vast amounts of data with the NSA. At the time, the paper also revealed that it had obtained documents from Mr Snowden, which indicated that the GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, had already been running for eighteen months. According to reports, GCHQ was able to monitor up to 600 million communications every day throughout that period, with information gathered from the Internet and phone use allegedly being stored for a period of thirty days where it would be sifted and analysed.
A week later, on 29 June, claims by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine emerged that the NSA has also spied on European Union (EU) officials in the US and in Europe. At the time, the magazine reported that it had seen leaked NSA documents confirming that the US had spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the 27-member bloc’s UN office in New York. The files, all provided by Mr Snowden, also allegedly suggested that the NSA had conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council were located. While it remains unknown as to what information the US IC may have obtained in the operation, reports have suggested that details pertaining to European positions on trade and military matters may have been obtained.
On 24 October, Italian weekly L’Espresso reported that the NSA and GCHQ had been eavesdropping on Italian phone calls and Internet traffic. The revelations were later sourced to Mr Snowden. It is alleged that three undersea cables with terminals in Italy were targeted in the operation. That same day, the German government summoned the US ambassador after German media reported that the NSA had eavesdropped on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
French President Francois Hollande also expressed alarm at reports that millions of French calls had been monitored by the US. In all, the Guardian later reported that the NSA had monitored the phone calls of thirty-five world leaders. In turn, according to a secret file leaked to the Guardian, a total of thirty-eight embassies and missions had been the “targets” of US spying operations. On 1 July, it was reported that amongst those countries targeted by the operations were France, Italy, Greece, Japan, South Korea and India. EU embassies and missions both in Washington and New York were also reported to be under surveillance.
On 10 July, it was revealed by Brazil’s O Globo newspaper that the NSA had ran a continent-wide surveillance programme. At the time, the newspaper had cited leaked documents which indicated that at least until 2002, the NSA had ran the operation from a base in Brasilia, seizing web traffic and details of phone calls from around the region. The newspaper further indicated that US agents worked with Brazilian telecoms firms in order to eavesdrop on oil and energy firms, foreign visitors to Brazil and major players in Mexico’s drug wars. By September, specific claims that the emails and phone calls of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico had been intercepted were revealed. This prompted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to cancel a state visit to the US, the first high-profile diplomatic move since the scandal unfolded.
By mid-August, documents leaked to the Washington Post revealed that the NSA broke US privacy laws hundreds of times every year. Later that month, the Washington Post reported that the US IC had a “black budget” for secret operations, which in 2013 had amounted to US $53 billion.
After fleeing to Hong Kong, Edward Snowden confirmed to the South China Morning Post that the NSA had led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, which included many operations in Hong Kong and mainland China. He indicated that targets in Hong Kong had included the Chinese University along with public officials and businesses.
