As the widespread use of encryption starts to make surveillance more challenging, one of the nation’s fusion centers has a proposed solution: more informants.
That’s the message behind a new document created by the Wisconsin Statewide Information Center, a designated intelligence fusion center, with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The document, which was obtained by The Intercept, is marked “for official use only” and titled “Going Dark — Covert Messaging Applications and Law Enforcement Implications.”
The document, dated Sept. 29, 2015, appears to serve as a primer for law enforcement on encryption, examining various encrypted messaging services, such as Silent Circle, Telegram and Wickr. It notes that increasing “public awareness of government surveillance has contributed to the rising consumer demand for covert messaging apps.”
FBI Director James Comey has blasted the growing use of encryption in recent months, claiming simultaneously that it presented an opportunity for terrorists, while also suggesting the FBI could thwart efforts by those people “going dark.”
This new document outlines the different encryption apps, giving information on what sort of data is retained and the type of user registration required. The authors acknowledge, however, that in many cases, the apps will frustrate law enforcement attempts to obtain data, and may require other methods of investigation. “Knowledge that the subject of a law enforcement investigation is using covert messaging may also enable decisions about alternative investigative techniques such as confidential informants or undercover operations,” it says.
The use of confidential informants has exploded in recent years; exact numbers are hard to come by, but the New York Times reported in 2008 that the FBI maintains more than 15,000 covert informants and the Drug Enforcement Administration about another 4,000.
In addition to paid informants, law enforcement should turn to people who may know the target of the investigation, including family. “Due to the security restrictions of such apps, it is increasingly imperative that bystanders — to include parents, teachers, and community members — remain aware of possible signs of radicalization and mobilization to violence and report concerns to the appropriate authorities,” the document says.
As to the future, the fusion center has a commercial prediction: “The increasing market demand for secure services will continue to spark the startup of anonymization companies and the development of new techniques to counter law enforcement efforts.”
The DHS declined to comment on the report.
Top photo: Flyers are posted on a wall outside of the prayer room at the Islamic Culture Center in Newark, N.J., Feb. 15, 2012.
The informant program is a gigantic scandal unto itself – it’s fraught with corruption, provocation, entrapment, and lying under oath in exchange for money or preferential treatment. So it should come as no surprise that the state has an insincere motive here too: the object of these political theatrics is to scare the public away from privacy software by insinuating that everyone who uses it is a criminal. But if the public knew the extent to which mass surveillance is being abused by criminals in government, it would change everything. The truth is that most of the state’s surveillance resources are not being used to fight crime; they are being used to illegally profit from political and industrial espionage. There are more criminals in government than there are anywhere else – and they are the ones who should be under surveillance. There is no shortage of informants but for the kind that would inform the public about the extent of corruption in government.
So let me get this straight. This advisory company basically said that if you can’t read the targets message you need to employ an informant.
Isn’t this basically common sense during an investigation and has been done since the beginning of time? Cryptography has been used for a very long time and planting informants has been around longer than that, I just cant even grasp how someone was paid for this advice.
The FBI no longer considers the Constitution or the best interests of America when it makes it’s decisions. Their sole concerns are increasing the FBI’s power and money.
The FBI’s role is not that of a paternal “nanny-state”, the FBI is subordinate to the American people and subordinate to the U.S. Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment is NOT a “preemption doctrine” in either letter or spirit. The U.S. Constitution is a wartime charter designed to be followed during wartime. Executive branch agencies, like the FBI or NSA, were designed to be restrained by the Bill of Rights – not play parent nosing into everyone’s non-probable cause business while subverting the constitutional rule of law.
Welcome to East Germany, everyone!
It is really important to understand that informants PROFIT from informing, either monetarily or by reduced sentences, favors, etc. It behooves them to find something to inform about.
There is much more to this informant program than can be found in this article. There is also stalking and harassment of “suspects” or people who just get on the shit list of someone with connections. This goes by the name Counterintelligence Stalking.
http://www.fightgangstalking.com has been trying to get the word out for several years now. So glad a few in the press are picking it up. Thanks, TI.
I’m willing to guess that a lot of informants use their status and power to go after people they didn’t like before they got roped into informing (including lying about why). So basically they not only get paid, but they get paid to get revenge on people (likely based on lies and/or misinformation or disinformation), and have totally protected status to do so. This is my biggest problem with the informant system (and there are quite a few; that Glossip story was heartbreaking, and it’s hardly the only story like it).
https://twitter.com/MikeRogersBot
If you need help coining a phase for this sort of lowering of the moral high-ground in america. Please feel free to use the term; usa_naziland! Because its one thing hating your government & another to freely & openly hate you’re fellow citizen with permission from ‘big brother’.
Shades of Nazi Germany.
Who do you call when the FBI is remotely watching your daughters webcam when she’s in her bedroom all by herself on Facebook?
SPCA
http://www.ACLU.org to find your state affiliate. Except for a small handful of newspapers the ACLU are the only real cops policing disloyal government officials.
First call in a very good tech with experience with network monitoring and verification. Why do you believe this is the FBI, is one question to ask. Not saying it’s not (who knows), but the first step to dealing with any case of harassment and stalking is to get proof and evidence and then find a way to use that proof and evidence to figure out who the culprit is. Generally speaking, your state police probably has a division (albeit understaffed) if she is underage to look into pedophilia cases. Your first step should be figuring out who’s doing it. From what I’ve read and seen, most FBI ‘spyware’ doesn’t advertise itself as being from the FBI or from any FBI range… It could be someone saying they’re the FBI to harass her?
And a sidebar, prominent on today’s NYT op-ed section. (NYT may be getting a little more perturbed about such matters).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/opinion/how-the-fbi-can-detain-render-and-threaten-without-risk.html
On point here in that this could be a swell way to pressure people to inform.
A cost effective way to perform surveillance is to organize a daily session in kindergarten classes where children report on any suspicious activities of their parents. This can be done as part of their citizenship education program. There is some supplemental training needed for the teachers who conduct these sessions, but otherwise the program has very little overhead.
Any toddler, whose parents are turned in as result, can be awarded a special ribbon of merit. This should provide sufficient motivation, so it’s not even necessary to pay them.
I sometimes think that we’ve been too quick to abandon low tech surveillance. It doesn’t generate as much money for the big data firms, which is no doubt the explanation, but if it helps fill for-profit prisons it can still be a major money maker.
The optimist in me says it’s just a matter of time.
>> … a designated intelligence fusion center…
from Wikipedia:
“…A two-year senate investigation found that “the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever.”[2][3] The report also said that in some cases the fusion centers violated civil liberties or privacy.[4]…”
“undercover operations”
call it what it is..Gangstalking
snitch community to monitor society.
Provoke, harassment and frame.
FBI STASI crews are scum!
“report concerns to the appropriate authorities” — kinda hilarious given the 911 call in Colorado where the dispatcher explained to the concerned caller that open carry laws mean that it’s a-ok to carry firearms in public. One has to wonder what “concerns” law enforcement is actually interested in responding to… skin color, religious affiliation, reading materials, sure! Weapons? Eh, not so much.
They are crying about having to eat the fruits of overreach and abuse of Constructional law. Now they must use informants, warrants and investigation that better restrict actions to criminals and terrorists. This if competently focused will improve their performance and keep us safer. Do your job, catch the guilty and take your beck out of the rest of our asses. This is what we the people taxpayers pay you to do, not to spy on every citizen, ignore the Constitution and commit sedition.
Now they must use informants, warrants and investigation that better restrict actions to criminals and terrorists. This if competently focused…
But it won’t be. I lost a family member due to confidential informants, who had been busted propagating a theft ring, implicating him in that theft ring due to a child custody dispute. Children’s Services brought stolen baby clothes to the house along with the child, all from the CIs home. This got him killed and the home completely destroyed in the subsequent swat raid, which happened because the detective running everything couldn’t be bothered to just walk up to the house and talk to them during daylight hours. As far as I know, the CIs have still never been charged for the initial theft ring and my family was left devastated. A federal lawsuit was dismissed.
Informants don’t keep anybody safe.
You are right injustice and abuse can and will still exist. Information is part of legal investigation and questioning potential informants are part of the process. This also hold true for the flipside of the coin whistleblowers that inform the public of governmental wrong doing. At least if a source exists they might be indentified and cross-examined. Better to have it in a report that includes sources and rationale that can be tested in court, rather than a digital investigation, known only to the investigators or the ether. If someone questions my friends and family, someone will give me a heads-up.
If someone questions my friends and family, someone will give me a heads-up.
But that’s just it. No one in the family was contacted. The police arrested the CIs for theft, they told police my sister and her sig-other were involved and lied about their house and character until the police – the very next night – performed a no-knock entrance of the house.
In the meantime, the CIs had been anonymously calling the house telling them that someone was going to come and kill them while they slept. That was actually reported to one of the members of the swat team (a multi-county group) but it didn’t make it to the detective running things, who was subsequently awarded Detective of the Year and promoted to head the crime lab.
Information is part of legal investigation and questioning potential informants are part of the process.
Yes but so should be followup to assess truth. By the time all of this was tested in a court, my sister’s partner was dead and she was spiraling down into mental illness that no one could control or help. We tried. She died this January, less than 6 years after this incident.
I think you speak from a good place, Fred, but everyone should be much more skeptical about the skills/intentions of our police forces. There are men there who can be trusted – two of the men present at the raid got in touch with civil rights attorneys on our behalf, anonymously, of course – but it’s very difficult to sort out where trust in the system applies and where it would be foolish and costly.
Thanks for engaging with me.
I agree with you on police abuse. There are indeed too many tragic stories, yours being one of the worst, that highlight the abuse of police powers. If “professional” informants are bribed, paid or coerced this should be made know to the defense. Programs were prisoners get reduced time for informing on others and the Insider Threat Program that requires Federal Civil Servants to inform on each other are ripe for abuse. Police are like the rest of society some are bias, prejudice, stupid or incompetent, not just a few bad apples but a small portion of the force. We grant law enforcement great power this demands diligent oversight. Mike in the TV series “Breaking Bad” to some degree was on the mark “I’ve known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves”.
I think the DEA and NSA just cut and pasted protocols from Stalinist era KGB and East German Stasi. When I was growing up, we were taught in school these types of policies were why we were fighting the ‘Godless Commies.
Government trying to infiltrate friends and family to collect dirt on anyone is disgusting use of my tax dollars. This is a government policy that is immoral, antisocial, anti family, and anti democratic.
I am wondering if the FBI had plagiarized the handbook of the East German Stasi organization?
Snoopers should have their nose smacked.
And along the same lines:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/fbi-tool-prevent-extremism-ignores-right-wing-extremism-focuses-only-muslims
Also, a or any counter law enforcement effort sounds synonymous with illegal or unlawful activity.
The language used there sounds to me like that the use of encryption places you outside their legal framework – so you’re a law breaker.
I just now realized after typing: this comment is really no different than avelna2001.
If they use the encryption tools they will never get the whole picture because eventually access will be denied by certain sites. oops
“…counter law enforcement efforts.” In other words, anyone who doesn’t want to be spied on by the government, or by anyone else for that matter, is countering law enforcement efforts and is, of course, therefore suspect. We’re all potential terrorists in the view of the US govt.