Barack Obama Announces Changes To IC Spy Programme
January 17, 2014 in United States
In 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.
Two killed in Attack on Pakistani Polio Vaccination Campaign
October 8, 2013 in PakistanYesterday, October 7th, two people were killed in a terrorist attack on a polio vaccination campaign in the troubled frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan. Despite being one of the few nations in the world were polio remains endemic, attacks on vaccination workers are not uncommon. Rumours and distrust of the vaccines are spread by fundamentalist clerics in the country, and large swathes of the country remain unvaccinated despite the authorities’ desire to eradicate the disease and amidst continuing warnings from the World Health Organisation. Recent weeks have seen numerous serious terrorist attacks in Pakistan, raising fears of further destabilisation surrounding the nation’s already acute security challenges. In particular, further moves to attack aid organisations and ethnic minority groups are particularly concerning.
The blast happened outside a health clinic in Sulemankhen, on the outskirts of Peshawar, yesterday. Two people were killed, one a police officer and the other a local member of a ‘volunteer peace committee’. 20 people, mainly members of the police, were also injured in the attack. A second, larger, device was found at the scene and diffused. Monday was the third and final day of a campaign aiming to vaccinate 10’000 children through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and the bomb was detonated remotely when police gathered to protect the vaccination teams.
A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jundullah, has claimed responsibility for the attack, releasing a statement saying “Jews and the United States want to stamp out Islamic beliefs through these drops”. Jundullah is a prolific terrorist organisation, and has been connected with numerous attacks throughout Pakistan in recent months, including the murder of climbers in Gilget-Baltistan in June and last month’s attack on the Christian community in Peshawar.
Vaccination campaigns have come under attack in Pakistan before. Earlier this year, also in Peshawar, two female aid workers were shot dead, while another 8 vaccination workers were murdered in December last year. The use by the CIA of a fake hepatitis vaccination program to gather intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 has reportedly damaged the reputation of aid and vaccination programs in Pakistan. However, issues with vaccinations have been fermenting for several years outside of this, with Islamist propaganda in Pakistan often claiming vaccination programs are attempts by the West to sterilise Muslim populations, or that the vaccines are ‘un-Islamic’ as they supposedly contain pork derivatives. This phenomenon has manifested in other countries with similar strains of Islamist militancy such as Nigeria, which saw the murder of nine vaccination workers earlier this year.
Largely seen as an anachronism in the West, polio remains endemic in only three countries worldwide – Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Amidst increasing rates of the disease in Pakistan and the warnings of international health organisations, the Pakistani authorities have launched campaigns in attempts to eradicate the disease in recent years, but have faced widespread resistance in the fractious and restive border and tribal areas.
This recent attack comes amidst a spate of serious attacks throughout the country in recent weeks that have killed over 150 people. Despite the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif making overtures to militants late in August, the security situation in Pakistan appears to be becoming increasing unstable, with the country’s regular terrorist attacks showing no sign of abating. The Pakistani authorities have been criticised in the past for the lack of a coherent or robust national security strategy, and with elements of the Pakistani state widely seen as collaborating with some terrorist movements, serious doubts remain about their ability to contain the violence. Currently, all the indications are that the security situation in Pakistan is only likely to deteriorate further in the foreseeable future.
A particularly concerning trend is a diversification of the victims targeted in terrorist attacks, as opposed to the traditional targets of Shia Muslims or the Pakistani security forces. Recent months have seen the murder of foreign mountaineers at the base of Nanga Parbat, attacks on Pakistan’s tiny Christian minority and yesterday’s targeting of an UN-backed health campaign. As such, the security risks for foreigners in Pakistan remain severe and are only set to increase if, as seems likely, this trend continues.
