The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata.
The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.”
The presentation was among the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In a brief phone interview with The Intercept, Zaidan “absolutely” denied that he is a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement provided through Al Jazeera, Zaidan noted that his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and required interviewing key people in the region — a normal part of any journalist’s job.
“For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.”
A spokesman for Al Jazeera, a global news service funded by the government of Qatar, cited a long list of instances in which its journalists have been targeted by governments on which it reports, and described the labeling and surveillance of Zaidan as “yet another attempt at using questionable techniques to target our journalists, and in doing so, enforce a gross breach of press freedom.”
The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns.
In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors.
According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.
It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.
The presentation contains no evidence to explain the designation.
Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.”
“He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.
The NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to answer questions about the basis of Zaidan’s inclusion on the watch list and alleged Al Qaeda affiliation. The NSA also declined to answer a set of detailed questions about SKYNET, and how it uses the information about the people that it identifies.
What is clear from the presentation is that in the NSA’s eyes, Zaidan’s movements and calls mirrored those of known Al Qaeda couriers.
According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”
That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained.
The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.”
For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states.
The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.
The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.”
As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.”
Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.
Yet U.S. drone strikes have killed many hundreds of civilians and unidentified alleged “militants” who may have been marked based on the patterns their cell phones gave up.
People whose work requires contact with extremists and groups that the U.S. government regards as terrorists have long worried that they themselves could look suspicious in metadata analysis.
“Prominent American journalists have interviewed members of blacklisted terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It would surprise me if journalists in Pakistan hadn’t done the same. Part of the job of journalists and human rights advocates is to talk to people the government doesn’t want them to talk to.”
A History of Targeting Al Jazeera
The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda.
During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.”
That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.
During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets.
So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003.
But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”
A Journalist and Al Qaeda
Zaidan first came to international prominence after the 9/11 attacks because of his access to senior Al Qaeda leadership. Zaidan wrote an Arabic-language book on bin Laden, and interviewed him in person multiple times.
“He covered the wedding of bin Laden’s son which was shortly after the [U.S.S.] Cole attack, and I think it was a very useful piece of journalism, because bin Laden declaimed a poem about the Cole which implied him taking responsibility for the attacks, which of course he later did,” said Bergen.
Zaidan also received a number of bin Laden’s taped messages to Americans, which were broadcast on Al Jazeera.
In 2002, he met a mysterious man with a “half-covered face,” who handed him a cassette tape with bin Laden’s voice, Zaidan told Bergen in an interview. In 2004, another bin Laden tape was dropped off at the office gate, Zaidan told the Associated Press. “The guard brought it to me along with other mail. It was in an envelope, I opened it and it was a big scoop,” Zaidan recounted.
Zaidan, right, in a 2011 Al Jazeera documentary he made about bin Laden.
In an August 2010 missive, discussing Zaidan’s plans for a documentary, bin Laden directs his deputies to get “brother Ahmad Zaydan’s” questions and “tell him it would be good if it was on the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.” Any other input should come in “an indirect way,” bin Laden cautions. “If we want this program to be a success, then we should not get involved in the details of how it is run, except that I don’t want him to interview any of my family,” he wrote.
Zaidan released his documentary on Al Jazeera in December 2011, an oral history of bin Laden’s years in Pakistan and Afghanistan comprised of interviews with a range of people who had known him, including Taliban fighters, government officials, and many journalists.
Bin Laden had also grown paranoid about meetings with Zaidan, although he did not think the U.S. government had managed to kill anyone “from surveying Ahmad Zaydan,” he wrote in May 2010.
He continued, “keep in mind, the possibility, though remote, that the journalists may be involuntarily monitored in a way that we or they do not know about, either on ground or by satellite, especially Ahmad Zaydan of Al Jazeera, and it is possible that a tracking chip could be put into some of their personal effects before coming to the meeting place.”
Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”
Disclosure: As freelancers, Cora Currier wrote an article for Al Jazeera America and Andrew Fishman field produced segments for Al Jazeera English’s “The Listening Post.” Glenn Greenwald was a paid studio guest of Al Jazeera’s in Doha on the night of the 2012 U.S. presidential election.
———
Documents published with this article:
* The Intercept had redacted the documents to protect the privacy of individuals.
———
You mean the “prominent journalist” who penned this great piece:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-150519075708245.html
??
I have a dilemma now, who’s bigger clown, that aljazeera buffoon or the “US government”?? Won’t sleep tonight…
The U.S. government is a wholly owned subsidiary of Israel, and is operated, under contract, by the MOSSAD.
Remember when Bush said Al Jazeera was a terrorist organization. This is the “Change” Obama spoke of.
A sidebar. Swedish appellate court rejected Julian Assange’s appeal. The arrest warrant stands.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/11/julian-assange-appeal-rejected-sweden-supreme-court
The Swedish charges never really mattered as much as the fact that, if Assange is extradited from his refuge, the US is quite capable of renditioning him from Sweden, or while he’s en route. At the very least he stays where he is, pretty much neutralized.
… “but if history itself no longer exists, where exactly are you ?” …
If history is indeed written by the victors (and it is, repeatedly, given enough time and multiple victors), the – In the dimension everybody who has ever been written out of history textbooks goes, I would reckon.
According to the US government, ALL Muslims are terror suspects .
And all males killed in strike zones are enemy combatants. By definition of our government, if they kill you, you’re an enemy and deserve it.
and we are all Muslims, therefore …
Satyagraha,
RCL
https://worzelgummidge.bandcamp.com/releases H/T SP
https://vimeo.com/67216050 H/T Cindy
why am i not surprised by this story….this is why Chris Hedges and others took the Obama regime to court over the NDAA….they feared that they would be suspected as “supporting terrorism”, because they had interviewed people that the US government considers to be “enemies”….
Lots of al-Quedas are now in Syria and Iran, and we should immediately start all-out bombing them. Mr Cameron cannot pretend helplessness and not join us this time as he has a majority government. Last time he slipped through despite our request.
By all means, General Fuckup; it worked so well the last time, and the time before that.
This reminds me of how, many decades ago, at the time when the Pakistan civil war was going on, when East Pakistan was breaking away to form Bangladesh, my home phone number was bugged. There were many odd clicks on the line – after that period these stopped. I assumed the British Home Office (MI5/6/Special Branch…?) was doing this, and probably at the request of either the Foreign Office and/or the Pakistan High Commission. My Bengali husband was then editing a Bengali language and culture journal, and like his friends was sympathetic to those standing up for Bengali independence. The audibility of those clicks suggested that those listening didn’t care to disguise their activity, and so this may have been partly done as a deterrent.
At that time there were no communications satellites, no mobile phones, no mass usage of the Web etc.
Many years later in the 1980s, UK Opinion Polling companies and others in Market Research were able to use a crude form of metadata sampling as a way to home in on ‘likely/probable’ places to do a survey: with polls, it helped to predict if the survey focussed on marginals with a record of switching from one party to another, and within those key constituencies one could get an idea of which streets were likely to be important.
Back in the 1950s, when I was first working at Gallup, I was told that theirs was just one of only 7 mainframe computers in the UK, 2 of which were owned by government departments. Back then one heard the IT bods talking about GIGO – “garbage in, garbage out” – i.e. the computer is only going to give out rubbish if it’s been told to by some moron.
Maybe the Uncle Sam HUMINT bods are too young to have heard of this?
Thanks Intercept and co – keep shining that light into these dark corners.
Incidentally, the UK government continues to be a willing accessory, supplying so much info via GCHQ and other listening posts, from Hampshire to Yorkshire. All very hush-hush! And in Europe Merkel’s government has been caught at it too – spying on politicians and commercial organisations…
We do seem to be living in an Orwellian dystopia, described chillingly in several films – e.g.Brazil and Enemy of the State. The future? There’s another film – Robot: commercial drones could go this way, autonomous and out of control…
Technology has allowed us to improve things quite a bit since those times Ma’am and, yes, it used it and still do partly as a very effective deterrent. It is called Zersetzung, conducive to “white death”
USG
http://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes/
It is not primarily their youth we should care about and since when being “young” has been equated with being “stupid”? When we select people to work for us we use certain psychological profiles and, luckily for us, we have plenty of the kinds of people that fit them
USG
// __ Referendum in east Ukraine ‘illegitimate’, says Merkel – video
~
theguardian.com/world/video/2014/may/10/referendum-east-ukraine-illegitimate-merkel-video
~
NSA/USG: Look, we need for you to say something against those “pro-Russia” “terrorists”, Putin, Russia, … whatever!, otherwise we won’t have any other options left than having to make public those erotic messages you were swapping with Berlusconi …
Angie: Sure, what do you want for me to say?
NSA/USG: Ach!, that you figure out yourself.
Angie: If I say that I love those U.S.-backed 21-century fascists joyfully torturing and murdering people, would you at least pretend you have stopped monitoring my existence 24×7? It is downright shameful for the world to clearly see I am your subject, what I say would not have any weight anyway …
Actually, what do you want for me to say in order to have a quick look at just the size of the vaults of gold that Germany keeps in the Federal Reserve? Just the size, you see. I am only talking about metadata, right?. Please, would you let us?!? Please?!?!? …
NSA/USG (after some silence/delayed response): Angie, we trusted you to be smart enough to clearly understand our stonewalling. Just do as you are told! (telephone is hung up)
~
How ironic and telling that someone who was instrumental in die Wende, now sucks it up the chain of command …
RCL
My breathless comment about my Zersetzung program (yesterday) was embarrassing to read this morning, not because of the substance, but for the typos, grammar, and structure. Then I noticed you have provided readers with a link to some of your own study of the subject, sourced from your own experience.
Only you, among the jounos and commenters here, seem to understand what Zersetzung is and what it does to a target.
I recognize an ally in you.
‘…what Zersetzung is and what it does to a target.”
It slowly kills people. And in doing so, it destroys whatever life one has left.
Someday, it will be seen as one of America’s greatest shames. In the meantime, it continues to shred the fabric-remnants of civil-society that remain.
Someone else knows!
Regards,
Not Their Victim
This is a must-read which explains what is going on today in America. From: http://www.feedyourneedtoread.com/feature/inside-the-cias-use-of-terror-during-the-vietnam-war/
The overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity in Phoenix operations. This was the second great lessons Vietnam taught the ruling class. The highly indoctrinated managers who run the U.S. government will never again allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians. American citizens never saw the Iraqi women and children killed by U.S. forces. On the contrary, CIA kidnappings, torture, and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies.
Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has also become the template for providing internal security for America’s ruling elite. This process also began immediately after 9-11 with the repressive Patriot Act and a series of Presidential executive orders, which have legalized the administrative detention and murder of American citizens.
Actually, it turns out I (“Albretch Mueller”) do speak German, lived in East Germany in those times
http://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of_a_surveillance_state
and I was raised by a family of high profile political dissidents, artists and no-nonsense anarchists in the Cuba of the 60’s, the closest you got to kind of a sharia-based political system in the West (from an ideological point of view (in hindsight I have my own ideas about the Castro’s dictatorship and repression by Cuban police)).
When you are a child you think it is some sort of demonic curse (as if you were some member of an “untouchable” caste in India/Asia), some kind of bothersome, taxing chronic disease you will have to “fatefully” bear throughout your life like your name, but at some point you actually find cool in a cosmic sense being some “nigga”. It puts your consciousness, awareness on another level.
Imagine you are a 7 year old child and you notice how teachers avoid talking (even referring) to you in classes (teachers were not mean, police were making them keep thorough logs about what “the children of ‘the counterrevolutionaries'” say and do, whom they associated with …, that was their way of not taxing their work with some extra snitching nonsense). A damalige famous baseball player would bring souvenirs to all kids in the neighborhood each time he toured the world with the Cuban baseball team, except to my siblings and me and, of course, other kids shamefully noticed that (they even tried to hide their own souvenirs when they saw us) and wondered about the same …
My mother, socially left-leaning and morally an anarchist to her bones, would bring me to church every Sunday morning, which annoyed me an my brother to no end (baseball time with the other kids in the neighborhood) because “she didn’t trust that thing about some politicians telling people how they should think …” A child doesn’t understand this at all (to the point of thinking your own mother is a bit crazy) all he really wants is play, but now I am thoroughly thankful to my super mom!!!
Satyagraha,
RCL
RCL, I presume that was before electromagnetic fields and elf waves were being used to radiate people. My phone too has been amply limited — texts never arrive. But you don’t say if you are being ‘touch less tortured.’ If so, would you thank your mom
for that?
I’d wish TI would be a more open, participative place. They should soften a bit their “take it down from us” model. If they had fora people would be able to discuss issues on their own and TI journalists could even benefit from it. It would be great if they had a “niggas corner” forum where people who (think) they have become “targets” can vent their worries and get advice from “their equals” even if it is just to share experiences for them to see “they are not the only ones” (as Lennon would say). I really don’t know why TI is like that; their ways to have comfortable “structures of control” in place?, their ways to be “responsible”?
I remember once Assange critizising Glenn and Laura about not disclosing information about corruption in African countries and the participation of the CIA (or something like that). People started to make fun of Assange and interpreted his comments as if he was accusing them of being “racist”. I think I did get Assange’s point. That bs about being “responsible” we should leave to them. Heck! I even find great how Assange tricked U.S. “intelligence” and their f#ck the EU acolytes into abusively and dangerously downing the plane of a chief of state suspected of carrying Snowden away.
Even though what Assange did was a bit much at the end of the day no one got hurt and I found great how masterfully he exposed U.S. “intelligence” and their f#ck the EU acolytes for the abusive, morally deafferented morons they are.
We have been talking ad nauseum about “they are watching us”, but at some point as John Oliver masterfully showed us () we should talk to people in ways they understand. What about showing pictures of Michelle Obama fingering her husband? (and I am sure those kinds of pictures they have) Some of you may find that idea crazily disrespectful, but think about it for a minute. Why not? The USG/NSA is totally out of hand and that has and will have repercussions for civil society at large in the U.S. and in the world. As Snowden said, there is not a “dick pics” program per se, but if this is what people understand, why not talking to them in terms they do understand for them to be able to put in perspective the scope and importance of those issues? If we are not ultimately reaching out to people’s consciousness, then we are to some extent playing into, being accomplices of the USG/NSA’s b#llsh!t
We should at some point start doing something (other than and in addition to talking) about it. Imagine a “geeks and nerds welcome corner” where people could learn what they could technically do to protect themselves from surveillance. We techies tend to become a little (quite?) cynical, but all it takes is a few of us to develop software in a way that it would be virtually impossible for the NSA to monitor. Those morons do not dwell in a separate physical and moral reality even though they try to “legally” exclude, protect themselves.
Linus Torvals doesn’t care about userland but, even though you never know how people will react to given real circumstances, we could fork Linux by taking networking libraries out of the kernel.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/08/msg00381.html
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/12/476
This would be a first step to securing (anti-ANSing) Linux and then we could fork/align Debian live and tinker a bit GRUB to anti-ANS-prove Linux and ilumOS (for those who prefer Unix). Windows user base is 99% and Microsoft,google, FB are all NSA companies …
As silly as we find it, many people are downright scared about not using Windows, but if we show them how they can install a DVD live version of Linux without removing their most loved Windows [email protected], we could help them in their transition out of Windows
Satyagraha,
RCL
I’d wish TI would be a more open, participative place. They should soften a bit their “take it down from us” model. If they had fora people would be able to discuss issues on their own and their journalists could even benefit from it. It would be great if they had a “niggas corner” forum where people who (think they) have become “targets” can vent their worries and get advice from “their equals” even if it is just to share experiences for them to see “they are not the only ones” (as Lennon would say). I really don’t know why TI is like that, their ways to have comfortable “structures of control” in place?, their ways to be “responsible”?
I remember once Assange criticizing Glenn and Laura about not disclosing information about some corruption in African countries and the participation of the CIA (or something like that). People started to make fun of Assange and interpreted his comments as if he was accusing them of being “racist”. I think I did get Assange’s point. That bs about being “responsible” we should leave to them. Heck! I even find great how Assange tricked U.S. “intelligence” and their f#ck the EU acolytes into abusively and dangerously downing the plane of a chief of state suspected of carrying Snowden away. Even though what Assange did was a bit much at the end of the day no one got hurt and I found great how masterfully he exposed U.S. “intelligence” and their f#ck the EU acolytes for the abusive, morally deafferented, idiotic morons they are.
We have been talking ad nauseum about “they are watching us”, but at some point as John Oliver masterfully showed us (youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M) we should talk to people in ways they understand. What about showing video footage of Michelle Obama fingering her husband? (and I am sure those data feeds they have) Some of you may find that idea crazily disrespectful, but think about it for a minute. Why not? As Snowden said, there is not a “dick pics” program per se, but if this is what people understand, why not talking to them in terms they do understand for them to be able to put in perspective the scope, gravity and seriousness of those issues? If we are not ultimately reaching out to people’s consciousness, then we are are to some extent playing into, being accomplices of NSA’s b#llsh!t
We should at some point start doing something (other than and in addition to talking) about it. Imagine a “geeks and nerds welcome corner” where people could learn in terms they can understand what they could technically do to protect themselves from surveillance. We techies tend to become a little cynical, but all it takes is a few of us to develop software in a way that it would be virtually impossible for the NSA to “monitor”, hack into. Those morons do not dwell in a separate physical, technical and moral reality even though they try to “legally” exclude, protect themselves.
Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about userland but, even though you never know how people will react to given real circumstances, we could fork Linux by first taking networking libraries out of the kernel with his blessings.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/08/msg00381.html
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/12/476
Then in order to continue securing (anti-ANSing) Linux we could fork/align Debian live and tinker a bit GRUB and ilumOS (for those who prefer Unix). Windows user base is 99% of the OS market. Microsoft, google, FB … are all NSA companies.
As silly as we find it, many people are downright scared about not using Windows, but if we show them how they can install a DVD live version of Linux without removing their most loved Windows [email protected], we could help them transition their way out of their Windows [email protected]
Satyagraha,
RCL
Wed May 13 15:09:46 EDT 2015
Perhaps a quick note-of-correction concerning satellites. The first experimental commercial communications satellites were launched in 1962 by AT&T and were called Telstar, 9 years before Bangladeshi liberation in 1971. Additionally, by 1971 the United States was already developing their robust high-resolution spy-satellite program, as in – beginning to use them. No denying the decades of American banks/MIC helping keep status quo Tories and Dems in power there, just as they do neoconservatives and neoliberals backing that MIC here. It’s always been about what I like to call company store profits on debt and petroleum. It only takes looking to see that whole US/UK thing using the combined power of their banks to crush smaller uncooperative fledgling economies, especially those unwilling to sign their country’s citizens into debt for having their energy reserves stolen, since WWI…
A well-known “freedom-loving” strategy of the USG and their f#ck the EU acolytes
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins
ISBN: 0452287081
Paperback: 303 pages
Publisher: Plume; First Thus edition (December 27, 2005)
~
// __ Confessions Of An Economic Hitman
~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AynGBMUgdmg (1/3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sNV6h7DOyY (2/3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOwE0nGLvR4 (3/3)
~
// __ Interview with John Perkins, former Economic Hitman, about 2012, government corruption, and more
~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc1tREsZMW8
~
Satyagraha,
RCL
What constitutes being a member of Al Qaeda? Do you have to be a Muslim? Do you have to be of a certain nationality? Is there a membership card? Monthly dues? What are the requirements? How exactly does one get into this group? Can anyone declare themselves to be a member of Al Qaeda if they so choose or does someone from an American law enforcement or intelligence agency have to confer that title upon them?
All you have to do is identify the first member. Then you search the meta data, and the most similar pattern is identified as the second member. Then you compare your database with the second person’s metadata and find your third member. This process continues until everyone in your database has been ranked in terms of their order within the hierarchy.
The system isn’t perfect, because some people don’t have a cell phone and therefore can’t be linked using metadata. But anyone who doesn’t have a cellphone is obviously trying to hide, and must therefore be a terrorist. So it’s more a theoretical problem than a practical one.
I am remind of that “urban legend” that you know everyone in this world through 7 contacts. for example, my father knows a senator who visited Kabul and met with a reporter who knew Zaidan, who has had contact with OBL, therefore I am a muslin extremist 4 times removed!
“For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.”
(top secret) Scahill’s also on that list…
“A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Thought those two were more or less antagonist forces (cf. Saudi Arabia’s support to al-Sissi in removing the MB from power in Egypt)…
___________
Meanwhile, Nasr al-Ansi, the alleged mastermind who claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack, and also seemed to be behind US journalist Luke Somer’s abduction, whom he had threatened to execute before the US army did it for him, was killed in a drone strike.
It’s JS who brought out the scoop on AQAP’s involvement in the CH event for TI. I remember his second article on the subject was a little more cautious than the previous one. Basically, he wrote there was a high probability AQAP indeed gave the order, but that in order to affirm it with full certainty, they should provide additional evidence, as any terrorist organization can claim whatever attack they want after the facts. Generally, Scahill added, AQAP does provide this additional intel a few months after the events. It would seem this is no longer necessary in this case, since “justice” has been served…
In France, one of the survivors of the martyred newspaper hailed the news. And this is interesting because it can be related to the sequel of the story about the APA’s involvement in Bush’s torture apparatus.
“Well, tonight, I’m in love with a drone”, P. Pelloux, the survivor, tweeted. I’m sure they’ll think of some nice cartoon to illustrate their next cover with. Pelloux’s job, beside writing a short weekly column for the Pen-awardee ? MD…
The best approach for practical remedy seems to be appealing to the good nature of some powerful people *within* the corrupted United States establishment, as the establishment as a whole is largely and grotesquely compromised, and functionally restrained ethically to the point of being proactively evil as a matter of ‘business.’
Nevertheless, people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden (and fortunately an increasing amount of judicial experts) were ‘in the system’ yet couldn’t ignore the call of moral courage, and they can’t be the only ones not willing to see totalitarianism and authoritarianism disease the nation and all of her remarkable aspirations.
In times like these, I find this mans message encouraging. He’s been there before. Your mileage may vary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFlrA01OOqs
h/t to #WhateverTheHellHe’sCallingHimselfTheseDays
Since I sometimes take the battery out of my phone and power down frequently, I can assume a red flag pops up concerning my NSA file. Just because someone believes it’s none of the government’s business where you go or who is talking to whom raises that person’s threat profile. Worse yet, when considering how the CIA uses analyses of metadata provided by the NSA to populate their signature strike lists, the likelihood, nay, I say, near certainty that we have, are, and will in the future, purposefully kill people based on extremely flawed assumptions. And the beat goes on…….and the beat goes on.
No one knows they’re being watched, but paranoia and ubiquitous (often well-meaning) messaging about monitoring encourage everyone to assume that things like their computer seizing up amount to some sort of disciplinary action being taken against them by the authorities, and this serves the corrupted establishment well.
In Orwell’s 1984 the threat of possibly being watched was enough to panic people into subduing their curiosity, creativity and rebellion – and this is pretty much the 5 eyes countries right now, although it seems hard to accept in the midst of modern conveniences, dazzling entertainment and apparently helpful technology. People already don’t know what parameters of thought have been culturally compromised by the steady onslaught of a ‘benevolent authoritarianism,’ for the alternative was never allowed to flower. From what I can tell, the enigmatic American spirit as a national phenomenon was systematically assassinated in the 60s, and only rare individuals have kept the flame of aspirational liberty alive since, against astonishing odds.
“No one knows they’re being watched…
I beg to differ. I could provide a litany of evidence, but will spare you. But even the AT&T technician who has visited my house three times told me my line had been tapped. And my IPhone visibly turns on and off and was ‘wiped’ of all notes, texts and contexts and not by me. Everyone who comments here should assume they are being watched as a high priority.
“No one knows they’re being watched…”
That’s rich. (And wrong.)
Do you assume you’re that important?
Cindy, you speak with the confidence of someone who has social
standing. If you come froma family with money, you likely are safe. But if you do not have strong social ties and little financial standing, I expect you find out soon firsthand what zersetzung is. They are targeting people like yourself.
“We have, are, and will in the future, purposely (kill) people based on extremely flawed assumptions.” But it just feels so good to report that “effectiveness” in the killing program. Does it even matter who gets it, or who is collateral damage? You might say the same about police forces in major American cities. While they cannot boast of kills in public, I imagine there is gloating in the inner circles, and overwhelming sympathy in juries.
It’s about scoring.
Very good story. This was probably already mentioned here and I’ve forgotten (the memory is fading fast – #JustAskChlorpromazine) due to the vast trove of documents that were leaked – but the fact that the NSA actually has a SKYNET program should have been in the headline.
A #NotAllClickBaitIsBadProduction™
A #NotAllClickBaitIsBadProduction™
H/T ‘sauve https://twitter.com/Chlorpromazine
A Guts for Garters Production © (h/t Mona™)
Indeedy!!
Especially when said bated-click doesn’t misconstrue premise of said article in question..
“.. twisted truth and half the news can’t hide it in your eyes” -tt
https://youtu.be/E2-I_ucQA0A
*note: the ‘amazing dancing `cindy’ (@:20)
A “DOWN OUTRIGHT MURDER”: A Complete Guide To The Shooting Of M. Brown By D. Wilson Production
By Ryan ‘I wear full black ensembles to riots’ Devereaux
So are Robert Fisk of The Independent, Amira Hass of Ha’aretz, and other Mid East correspondents who interview everyone there, also on the terrorist watch list? The risk to journalists seems greater than the risk to terrorists and maybe that’s the point. Keep people from getting news about anyone the US doesn’t like.
Alarming stuff, not least because some writers for The Intercept could also be ‘implicated’ by this oppressive, establishment-serving myopia.
Off-topic:
“The day after a New York federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s mass collection of telephone records is unlawful, the whistleblower responsible for bringing this program to light gave his first public reaction to the ruling at the Nordic Media Festival. Edward Snowden was interviewed on livestream by Tor expert and Forbes contributor Runa Sandvik, who first met Snowden while he was still an NSA contractor when they threw a cryptoparty together in Hawaii.”
*Edward Snowden on 2d Cir. Ruling NSA Phone Records Program Unlawful*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8ZJJuJfw8
Democracy Now:
*Court Rules NSA Bulk Spying Illegal: New Vindication for Snowden, and Uncertainty for PATRIOT Act*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQctAjFW5SM
I’m not sure there is anything particularly wrong with what the Government did in this case.
It’s kind of their job to do some of these things. On the other hand, Mr. Zaidan is lucky he didn’t disappear into a black site prison. That would have been wrong.
The CIA is allegedly having problems infiltrating these groups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk7UUDE6UWk
The something wrong comes when the government orders people killed based only on their metadata. Which the government does.
It’s coming to you. Recently, ancestry.com genetic project yielded some of its data to a police investigation. The man was the son of someone with a record, and as they were trying to solve a cold case, whose genetic clues resembled but were not identical with those of the father, they thought to check on the son. Luckily, the innocent man was not quite a match. Not quite. But since these things are never perfect and there might be some prosecutorial zeal to close the case, you have to wonder if he isn’t still a suspect (what about a paternal cousin, unknown as yet, that he might possibly have conspired with?). These weapons in the hands of zealots can be of unlimited mischief. And to think your little innocent family tree project might have yielded such an outcome. Wait until they take it global! Think of the body count!
Damned if this isn’t precisely the scenario that Chris Hedges warned of.
One would think the national security apparatus would be sane enough to see value in the kind of information that might be gleaned from Zaidan’s reporting. Instead, it brands him a terrorist because (i) it can, which is especially easy with non-Christians and non-Americans; and (ii) it fears his independent voice.
Mr Zaidan is getting a taste of what law enforcement/judicial system are doing to people every day in this country. Keep it up America this Zaidan guy will end up working with those dangerous groups because of our bullshit policies.
UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!
These bureaucrats surely don’t actually believe in what they are doing but rather need a rationale to collect the obscene amounts of money they are hauling in. Delusion is a dangerous thing. How did it get so bad? How can Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton be shameless enough to seek the presidency?
You are aware of course,that the US government works with AlCIAda,AlnUSrA and Isus and their gulf govt,supporters regularly.
The most dangerous people on earth exist in Tel Aviv and Washington.
I learned about these techniques in Social Network Courses at school. And Actually marketers use these techniques similarly to detect behavior across different mediums (mobile, desktop, physical location). An Analytic Program can detect a “suspicious” pattern and reveal so much of private information of any individual. But computers do not have contextual information to make a judgment. It has a little benefit in Intelligence Analysis, in my opinion, because of the level of noise and the follow analysis required to verify information. nice work intercept.
Being a member of al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood while working more than full time may not be accurate, but would make him an overachiever.
And we all know you can’t trust those types.
The US using journalism as a cover for our spies has really skewed the analysis and created one more unearned threat for the people working to keep us informed.
In an earlier day, these ham-fisted “security” goons would have branded William L. Shirer a Nazi and Bernard B Fall a VC.
Nuns in Baltimore were put on the terrorist watch list in 2005, so it does not surprise me that a bonafide reporter was too put on the list.
I have a question about this site which could perhaps be answered by one of the writers or the editors. Glenn Greenwald articles typically have the most active commenting. My question is this:
How does First Look/The Intercept make money?
I understand the organization is a non-profit, but it still needs revenue to operate, with expenses like server bandwidth, staff salaries, travel expenses, etc. I can’t figure out how The Intercept makes any money, which tends to be a red flag for me. There are no ads and it isn’t subscription based. In the realm of typical free things on the internet, this leaves a few possibilities. 1) Bundling crappy toolbars, search engine and home page changes and trial programs with ‘free’ software. This one is obviously not the case. 2) This site is infected with malware like free porn sites. This one is also unlikely, because someone would have found it, and there isn’t a lot of places here to hide it (pop-up ads, streaming videos, malicious links, downloads). 3) The Intercept is selling information on hits, readership and commenters. 4) The Intercept receives enough donations to operate. 5) Mr. Omidyar is funding everything. This could be good or bad. Maybe he is a plain altruistic guy determined on getting different viewpoints, censored information and the truth out there. Or maybe he has an agenda like Sheldon Adelson with Israel HaYom (He still has advertising, even his motives aren’t strong enough to completely give away something for free). I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, I’m just skeptical of anything where the monetary value is non-obvious.
The Intercept’s lengthy privacy policy is here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/privacy-policy/
“I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, I’m just skeptical of anything where the monetary value is non-obvious.” – Keith
I’m not sure if your questions have been answered; if not, this may help.
The Intercept (although it’s not spelled out clearly in their ‘About’ page) is the non-profit arm of First Look Media.
As such, The Intercept should act much like the non-profit news site ProPublica does, which is partly outlined here:
How ProPublica Is Funded
Thanks, I think this clears up most of what I was asking. So for now it’s basically funded by Omidyar and other donations.
6) TI pays with perks, personal favors, sweat money … A nice, true and good looking partner for Glenn in Rio de Janeiro where they share a jungle house; an Academy Award to Laura Poitras (who exiled herself in Berlin) …
7) TI throws burrito parties to which politicians and their cronies are not invited
8) TI staff wash dishes for Mr. Omidyar and babysit, nanny his children
Or, maybe, TI staff and folks who frequent this site are OK with being “irresponsible”, have some working neurons, a spine and a drive for social justice?
How will you organize around structures of control and monetize that, Sir?
RCL
I get that the writers might not be raking in money working for The Intercept, but they still have to get paid something. Many of them exclusively write here and still need to get paid enough money to pay bills and put food on the table. Glenn Greenwald maybe not as much as some of the others, but I seriously doubt he’s working for free. That’s not the point I was trying to make anyway, I don’t really care how much the writers are making. All I know is they are getting paid something and there are other expenses involved with running a news site. The money to operate is coming from somewhere, and the cynic in me finds it hard to believe Pierre Omidyar is running a free, adless news site solely out of the goodness of his heart. I could be wrong though, maybe the writers are ‘”irresponsible”‘ and due to their “working neurons, a spine and a drive for social justice” accepted getting paid less than market value, and maybe the servers are cheap to operate. For Omidyar it could be a drop in the bucket, maybe he is totally fine just throwing what he perceives to be a small amount of money at this project. I believe my skepticism is warranted, and mocking me is uncalled for.
Judging by the post linked below, some of your questions are addressed, and Michael Bloom would probably be the one to direct your inquiry to for details.
Welcoming Michael Bloom — First Look Media
I believe my skepticism is warranted, and mocking me is uncalled for. – Keith
I completely agree. Kitt offers a very helpful link to info on the new President and General Manager of First Look Media; and therefore The Intercept.
Contacting Mr. Bloom may yield results as to the non-profit (tax exempt) status of The Intercept and the composition of its governing structure and legally required public information about the publication.
One hopes that The Intercept will, as soon as possible, make this public information public on The Intercepts’ main page, as has ProPublica and other non-profit publications have; as it’s hardly helpful for a publication covering government transparency to be opaque about itself.
Not saying this missing information is intentional; just that its lack is counter-productive as it can hurt credibility and potential readership.
There could be, and likely is, a very simple explanation why this required information hasn’t been provided to the readers here to date.
If that’s the case, that explanation would go farther than the current silence.
I wasn’t aware of the new hire (tbh, turnover at The Intercept is pretty high). I suppose he would be the guy to ask. I agree with your points sillyputty. I’m guessing they haven’t worked out all of the kinks of running a news site yet and are focused on getting the readership first, revenue later.
@Keith
My intention was not mocking you even if I dressed my point in sarcasm/mockery. Of course, there is a “business as usual” aspect of TI, TI servers run on electricity and ultimately people have to “put food on the table”, but this is not what makes TI what it is. Any kind of culture needs some sort of “physical” support/business venue and it also needs its collective sense/raison d’etre, mindful driving force
RCL
The awkward thing is, from a political and economic perspective, concentrating so many powerful journalists in one location is a terrific return, even absent an ersatz “profit”. I say this despite (mostly) supporting TI and commenting here frequently. There are some who believe only chaos can provide distinct turmoil and change these days (think, disruption or deBord). While I believe the journalists here are well-intentioned for the most part (a couple seem questionable, especially when it comes to angles and one-sided reporting on the whole Ukraine mess), I do worry that it allows easy focusing on political rabble-rousers, journalists, and those who might seem more ‘interesting’ to certain powers that be. The cynic in me wonders if that is a bug or a feature.
OTOH Assange initially wanted funding from someone like Soros, and group-funding of journalistic endeavours seems perilous at best. One of the smarter things I have seen GG (and Poitras, et al) do, is seed the source materiels out to multiple other journalists. The downside of this is how easy it is to not find out about any of it because, as though a miracle(!), places like Reuters, AP, and aggregators such as Google news helpfully filter out all this unimportant nonsense so we can learn more about Bieber’s acting career or how evil those Russians and Chinese hackers are. Thank goodness for that, and all. So there is some upside to centralising some of this – I suspect for both sides.
From a very cynical perspective, I do have a massive question though, and with all due respect – does Omidyar really get advanced access to stories as I have read some ex-TI staffers say? If so then that’d be stock market gold with a good behavioural economist on standby, wouldn’t it? Nor is that per se a worst case scenario, just something I do ponder.
I don’t think you’ll get much quality without some form of pay/financial stability either way — nor should anyome expect journalists to live on nothing or almost nothing with party favours (eg, what I have heard about VICE is terrible) and quote Blanche duBois — but I generally wonder if from a change perspective keeping journalists where they were but on point wouldn’t have been a more salient and useful option. They’d also have reached more (and different kinds of) people. Maybe that’s an unintended consequence, maybe not?
I think this article highlights the problem of relying too much on computers and not enough on human beings. Computers can be great at crunching numbers and finding patterns, but they don’t have enough common sense built into them to say, “wait a second, something isn’t right.” At least there was no drone strike on this guy.
Well “computers” didn’t seem to have gone “wait a second, something isn’t right” in many other cases:
http://collateralmurder.com/
Oh, “wait a minute”, do you mean “humans” are smarter, “more humane”? Well, “humans” were having collective fun at making sure they killed those who were trying to save their lives and killing unsuspecting people, among them journalists, who didn’t have any connections with Aljazeera, the Taliban, Al-Quaida … so at this point you may choose to be killed by “computers” or morally deafferented humans
RCL
Behind this decision are human beings who need to be fired for using secrecy to veil their criminal activities, then they should be tried and sued for 3x damages under RICO.
There’s the taxpayer funded attacks on journalists, then there are the volunteers:
“‘Put on your raping shoes and find this b*tch': Abby Martin is the latest target of crazed Chris Kyle sycophants
Other journalists, including Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal, have been subjected to death threats and online harassment for their criticism the film American Sniper.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/put-on-your-raping-shoes-and-find-this-btch-abby-martin-is-the-latest-target-of-crazed-chris-kyle-sycophants/
Did Chris Kyle kill people in Iraq, so others in America could threaten to rape journalists who criticize pro-war propaganda???
Speaking of propaganda, not content with giving their young players traumatic head injuries, NFL teams taking taxpayer money to recruit…er, I mean “honour” more soldiers for the next Hamburger Hill
“The U.S. Department of Defense and the New Jersey Army National Guard paid the Jets $377,000 from 2011 to 2014 to feature “hometown heroes” on the big screen at MetLife Stadium.
TRENTON — When the Jets paused to honor soldiers of the New Jersey Army National Guard at home games during the past four years, it was more than a heartfelt salute to the military — it was also worth a good stack of taxpayer money, records show.
The Department of Defense and the Jersey Guard paid the Jets a total of $377,000 from 2011 to 2014 for the salutes and other advertising, according to federal contracts. Overall, the Defense Department has paid 14 NFL teams $5.4 million during that time, of which $5.3 million was paid by the National Guard to 11 teams under similar contracts.”
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/05/taxpayers_pony_up_for_jets_salutes_to_nj_national.html
edit re. Skynet.
… the man most directly responsible is Miles Dyeson, director of special projects Cyberdyne systems corporation. In a few months he creates a revolutionary new micro processor. In three years Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded to Cyberdyne systems becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online Aug. 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from the system. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 am August 29th.
In a panic, the 2nd circuit court of appeals tries to pull the plug…
*stay tuned ~
Wow, America is turning into 17th century Salem, but without the need of witches—-journalists now seem to fill the need of some anonymous government persons to find people that are guilty of something , even if it’s nothing.
Maybe this explains Michael Hastings untimely and weird death?
This also sounds like the fury circus that could be coming. If you ever read, Fahrenheit 451, then think back on the part where Guy Montag is escaping.
As he runs through a neighborhood, he hears the live news which gives exciting detail for the at home wall screen viewers, who become one in the play by play of a weirdly drone like death.
Except, it wasn’t Guy Monyag that was blasted ; it was a poor sad man that had the unfortunate horror of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The poor dead man became the lead character of a live action government play to make the masses believe that Guy Montag was dead and that , they the people, were safe. Any BODY will do—was the new mantra.
The witch-hunts are in full swing. Someday, maybe some journalist will tackle the topic.
They are indeed and somehow I ended up on the list. Former journalist/blogger and someone who supported Wikileaks in print and sued a very powerful member of the 1 percent. I guess that’s two strikes against me, never mind what I wrote. I’ve been naming names and knocking on doors (Hello, Intercep?) for two years. If there is a justice-seeking decent reporter left in this world who wants to tackle, call me and leave a message at 773-412-5326.
So [insert names of all prominent US journalists here] are members, simultaneously, of both the Republican and Democratic US political parties, based on the number of interviews they conduct with top government officials and the pattern of calls on their cell phones? And Giampaolo Pioli is a citizen-member of the United Nations? Perhaps this reflects the NSA’s view of how journalism works.
To borrow a line from Noah Chomsky, this another facet of US Govt’s screw-up
I have no patience with those who, from a lofty perspective as having been considered ultra intelligent in various academic contests over their lifetimes, consider the government merely incompetent (as were the sad little mathophobes they once tutored). Had they been forced to compete for work in other arenas, they would have met with their share of frank sociopaths, and understand that malice is a real human trait and climbing to the top on the broken bones of others is par for the course in some professions. Once you absorb that some people are born killers, and that they consider a certain error rate in who they blow away simply part of the game, then you may understand that it is not their incompetence which is the problem but their power over the rest of us.
Well said, though one caveat… Most of those “born killers” wouldn’t do the killing themselves unless it is metaphorical or through others at a distance. They outsource their killing and limit themselves to doing so with distancing tactics, so it likely removes the onus of thinking of the ‘things’ they affect as ‘people’ (aka objectification), instead of merely operational targets or expediants to a goal. It is not only for political reasons, that they choose to outsource to those who are willing to take the orders to do so. There are different ways to score high on the Hare checklist. “Successful psychopaths” typically do not exercise physical violence personally, as such.
it’s good that he denied being a member of al Qaeda…..but that hardly proves that he’s not.
does al Qaeda have a rule that excludes journalists from membership?
No, but the default presumption should be innocence, and metadata is not evidence of wrongdoing. There isn’t much more known evidence to suspect Zaidan is a member of Al Qaeda than, say, Bergen.
Innocence is the presumption before convicting someone of a crime, but before investigating someone.
I wasn’t specifically referring to legal presumption of innocence, although that matters too in the context of summary executions. I’m just saying one shouldn’t go around accusing people of criminality based on very weak circumstantial information.
Jose, you don’t have the foggiest idea of what the basis for thinking him a member of AQ might be….
where do you get off calling it ” very weak circumstantial information.”?
No, dubinsky, I do have a pretty good idea of how it works, because it’s in the article and the slides. They use well-known machine learning algorithms on the metadata. It’s quite clear from everything known that his designation is due to his journalistic contacts with members of Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and so forth. Anything beyond that is not known, that is, it only exists in your imagination, and hence it’s not a basis to be making accusations that are quite serious.
Furthermore, it’s clear from the article that The Intercept did contact the NSA, whose officials declined to comment. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know more than what is evident, but it’s telling nonetheless.
and how did they know about his whereabouts? Most probably, because he didn’t know about Faraday cages. Something as simple as keeping your phone in a can
The USG may use microscopic radio-emitters as EM beacons to track you as well
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chilling-effect-nsa-surveillance-internet#comment-24402623
Satyagraha,
RCL
You can keep your cell phone in a Faraday cage, or, like me, use 2G technology that does not include a GPS chip. But every time you use the phone, your location is fixed because the communications protocol includes the cell tower ID. One can even triangulate using multiple towers.
Bottom line is that unless you use a satellite phone (and even then) you can count on your position being signaled every time you place or receive a call.
Yes, but the point I am actually making you could see by looking at that chart.
Had he kept his phone in a Faraday cage, there were no (timed) trajectories of his whereabouts, which are correlated with those of other “phones”, but dots of the locations where he used his phone …
In order to gain “intelligence” they need a large portion of the population to naively carry their “locators”/”triangulators” with them. If two people meet, but only one of them uses his phone they have no way to correlate whereabouts, recurrence graphs, build “social” networks, …
I have a much simpler approach to all of this. I don’t own or carry a cell phone. Which I could imagine at some point they will make mandatory. Then I will manage for my phone to somehow break itself (they are called “smart” phones, right? ;-)), for which they could fine you … If it sounds like 1984 on steroids it does because it is
RCL
One reason to protest payment systems through mobile phones as is catching on. If it ever becomes the de facto standard (and somethingblike it will, and this goes for digital ‘currency’ too), then they will be unavoidable (well, outside of a complete bartering economy and going back to chits).
Not going to address the meat of the topic just wanted to mention that 2G is easier to intercept, decrypt, and man in the middle (though with StingRays now popular… maybe it doesm’t matter so much anymore). This though is one reason masquerading basestations will often try to downgrade connectivity to 2G/GSM from 3G/WCDMA. Just something to be aware of if you’re not (if it even matters).
RCL, where can I get a Faraday cage for my body?
you don’t have to go that far. Using one of those altoids-like tin cans to keep your phone, credit cards, … basically anything that could be used as an RFID or EM beacon will do
RCL
Which, in the minds of US govt. officials is, by definition, a terrorist. Or, at the very least, ought to be arrested if American, under the Espionage Act. Freedom of the press is a myth anymore.
Now why might a Big Brother government perpetually project on other-than-empire-minded opinions the notion of editors, producers or journalists – as spies?
I’m no fan of the NSA, but doesn’t this show that the system is working? They correctly identified someone who talks to terrorists and travels to known terrorist locations/regions. At that point, a human steps in, sees that he is a journalist, and decides that he isn’t a threat. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? If he was summarily executed by a drone strike, that would be an application where the system wasn’t working correctly.
He wasn’t summarily executed by a drone, but maybe he’s just been lucky. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anything to suggest they considered Zaidan a false positive of the machine learning model.
What documentation do you have that a human stepped in and decided he wasn’t a threat? Are you assuming this happened simply because he hasn’t been killed yet?
He wasn’t summarily executed by a drone strike, but the point The Intercept is making, is that other people are… on no more evidence than metadata and travel habits of people. If you travel to the border region of any country, you will find that the people who live on the borders, speak the language of the people who live on the other side of the border. Border regions are almost always bilingual, because people who live in these areas, have been traveling and trading with the people on the other side for ages. Just because you prove that people in border regions travel across borders and talk to people on the other side of the borders with their cell phones, is in itself, evidence of nothing sinister. But according to Hayden, people are killed based on metadata. I’m not sure humans are stepping in to find out more detail, before authorizing strikes.
I don’t chalk it up to malice, or evil. I think it’s political cowardice. Obama is so afraid that another 9/11 might happen on his watch, he’d rather kill people based on metadata than “tarnish” his legacy. As I found out from reading the Chomsky/Harris exchange, just because tens of thousands of Sudanese might die because you destroy their only pharmaceutical factory and supplies, meant absolutely zero, politically speaking to Clinton. So he didn’t think twice. So while Obama might have liberal pangs in his Democrat heart, he is far more concerned about what Fox News says about him.
Apparently, not everybody can be like Jimmy Carter!
ot`..
WSJ ARTHUR DESIGNATED PROMINENT THE // INTERCEPT BLOGGER AS “PUBLIC SAFETY ASSASSIN”
re: ‘The writers who protested a PEN award chose their side, but most of the group rejected the ASSASSIN’S veto.’
-Amanda ‘Lucy’ Foreman -wsj
[snip]
“.. the self-appointed committee of public safety”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/charlie-hebdo-and-a-rubicon-moment-for-free-speech-1430952005
A Where Is Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck When You Need Him Production
well, the article may or may not have been of any value. Couldn’t tell as one had to either sign in or subscribe to read it :-(
Oh well. To me, the real deal would be the French Parliament rejecting that draconian anti-terror bill (being considered in the French Senate now, I believe.
“Divided = Conquered, But United = Empowered!”
.. point was to highlight the despicable tack utilized by the author Amanda Foreskin -wsj. The gall one must have to refer to individuals as “assassins” (over a difference of opinion) after 12 individuals have been massacred….
A Feline Sixteen Candles Production
One of the main tenants of statistics is that “Correlation does not imply Causality”. Unfortunately, this is usually not taught to social science majors because to delve into it one actually needs to know some math. Never mind that it is also common-sensical. Nobody can ever accuse the NSA (or indeed Congress or the White House) of having either mathematical acumen or common sense.
In fact, this case crystallizes Snowden’s case against bulk surveillance and the long term retention of records. With the mindless manipulation of petabytes of data, false correlations will occur quite often, and given the motivation of the reviewers, false accusations are thus guaranteed. There is a way to bring this to an end, of course, but the will to do so no longer exists in the US.
This is stale news. The current list includes RT and TI.
U.S. Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda”
Isn’t it a technicality, in the same way FOX’s James Rosen was listed as a “co-conspirator”, a way to allow for further investigation or prosecution, or assassination.
The reality, That the person is obviously not a terrorist, doesn’t seem to bother Obama’s spies and lawyers.
Dear Citizen,
You have been scheduled for drone execution thanks to a billion dollar computer algorithm with the intelligence of a retarded sea slug.
Have a nice day,
Uncle Sam
Yes. The USG working very hard to eliminate any and all traces and instances of “moral hazard.”
….which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.
…which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying political dissidents based on metadata.
…which raises troubling questions about a private investigator’s method of identifying marital infidelity based on metadata.
…which raises troubling questions about an insurance company’s method of identifying “unhealthy” subscriber activities based on metadata.
…which raises troubling questions about an employer’s method of identifying “disloyal” employee practices based on metadata.
ps. Has someone recentlyadjusted the commenting “matrix” – or is it just the computer/OS/browser I happen to be on at the moment?
Tracking Al Qaeda has allowed the US to find and identify a number of journalists. This demonstrates the massive investment in surveillance technology is starting to pay dividends.
Yes Benito you are 100% right -the investment in surveillance technology, and data analytics through the NSA and the US tech giants will pay dividends and help ensure that all journalists that don’t tow the official line, and dare to raise any dissent to Governments can be identified and tracked, and classified as terrorists.The forthcoming Internet of Things, and Big Data developments will also help to ensure that surveillance can be extended into homes, and work places across the World, whilst the rise of drones, robots, artificial intelligence, and web self service, can all help eradicate many jobs so that the profits of the shadowy elite, and the Governments corporate puppet masters can be massively increased.The erosion of freedom of speech and oppression of investigative, fearless journalists are all part of the plan, along with the dirty wars of profit. This revelation however, does help us understand the failure of the NSA to prevent so many terrorist attacks in the past, as we know now that they have had no choice but to concentrate and prioritise efforts on these dreadful journalists with their words of mass destruction.
I think this is important work and I am grateful for it. But don’t understand why it took two years to report.
This question was addressed some time ago, I can’t recall by whom and when, but the archive GIVEN(not sold as some suggest) by Ed was voluminous, not collated, with many terms and acroyms needing to be researched, and much cross referrencing was necessary to tease out the truth in a coherent, understandable, and presentable form…..the articles. There are pros and cons in the way these stories are coming to light. Try to imagine if it were possible that all the stories that needed to be revealed were done so all at once. I would liken it to cleaning out a storage barn with decades of forgotten stuff. My first question would be, “where do we start?”
But that slide above makes it very clear that this was a story
that didn’t neef a lot of interpretation. What if this man had been killed during the last two years by a drone?
Anon, you hinted the other day that more revelations would be coming. Can you elaborate?
NameWitheld I don’t control the timing of release of revelations but would bet my last dollar that the best will be saved to last, or at least until some time closer to the US election. Don’t you just love the fear of the unknown,, and the pleasure that comes from seeing psychopathic control freaks watching their powers of manipulation, and their stranglehold on the press slip away. Don’t you just love surprises? I appreciate it must be a struggle to manage and prevent damage limitation, when you just don’t know what revelation of your crimes against humanity are coming next. Still what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger- assuming that is possible !
One “Anon” posing as another… Gotta be careful.
Yes, I recognized that. Speech has identifiable rhythms & styles. Thanks though for heads up.
Thank you for the warning — I can ‘hear’ a difference.
“Tracking Al Qaeda has allowed the US to find and identify a number of journalists.”
Ha! Yes, being on Obama’s hit list could serve as alternative press credentials.
True, but as a massive side effect it is more or less only possible for the NSA to track the American population. Thinks Russia, a very poor country with no investment in surveillance technology and no interest in dividends…