The narrow roads are quiet and winding, surrounded by rolling green fields and few visible signs of life beyond the occasional herd of sheep. But on the horizon, massive white golf ball-like domes protrude from the earth, protected behind a perimeter fence that is topped with piercing razor wire. Here, in the heart of the tranquil English countryside, is the National Security Agency’s largest overseas spying base.
Once known only by the code name Field Station 8613, the secret base — now called Menwith Hill Station — is located about nine miles west of the small town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire. Originally used to monitor Soviet communications through the Cold War, its focus has since dramatically shifted, and today it is a vital part of the NSA’s sprawling global surveillance network.
For years, journalists and researchers have speculated about what really goes on inside Menwith Hill, while human rights groups and some politicians have campaigned for more transparency about its activities. Yet the British government has steadfastly refused to comment, citing a longstanding policy not to discuss matters related to national security.
Now, however, top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept offer an unprecedented glimpse behind Menwith Hill’s razor wire fence. The files reveal for the first time how the NSA has used the British base to aid “a significant number of capture-kill operations” across the Middle East and North Africa, fueled by powerful eavesdropping technology that can harvest data from more than 300 million emails and phone calls a day.
Over the past decade, the documents show, the NSA has pioneered groundbreaking new spying programs at Menwith Hill to pinpoint the locations of suspected terrorists accessing the internet in remote parts of the world. The programs — with names such as GHOSTHUNTER and GHOSTWOLF — have provided support for conventional British and American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they have also aided covert missions in countries where the U.S. has not declared war. NSA employees at Menwith Hill have collaborated on a project to help “eliminate” terrorism targets in Yemen, for example, where the U.S. has waged a controversial drone bombing campaign that has resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
The disclosures about Menwith Hill raise new questions about the extent of British complicity in U.S. drone strikes and other so-called targeted killing missions, which may in some cases have violated international laws or constituted war crimes. Successive U.K. governments have publicly stated that all activities at the base are carried out with the “full knowledge and consent” of British officials.
The revelations are “yet another example of the unacceptable level of secrecy that surrounds U.K. involvement in the U.S. ‘targeted killing’ program,” Kat Craig, legal director of London-based human rights group Reprieve, told The Intercept.
“It is now imperative that the prime minister comes clean about U.K. involvement in targeted killing,” Craig said, “to ensure that British personnel and resources are not implicated in illegal and immoral activities.”
The British government’s Ministry of Defence, which handles media inquires related to Menwith Hill, declined to comment for this story.
The NSA referred a request for comment to the Director of National Intelligence’s office.
Richard Kolko, a spokesperson for the DNI, said in a statement: “The men and women serving the intelligence community safeguard U.S. national security by collecting information, conducting analysis, and providing intelligence for informed decision making under a strict set of laws, policies and guidelines. This mission protects our nation and others around the world.”
Photo: Trevor Paglen
Most visible from the outside are a cluster of about 30 of the giant white domes. But the site also houses a self-contained community, accessible only to those with security clearance. Among operations buildings in which analysts listen in on monitored conversations, there is a bowling alley, a small pool hall, a bar, a fast food restaurant, and a general store.
Most of the world’s international phone calls, internet traffic, emails, and other communications are sent over a network of undersea cables that connect countries like giant arteries. At spy outposts across the world, the NSA and its partners tap into these cables to monitor the data flowing through them. But Menwith Hill is focused on a different kind of surveillance: eavesdropping on communications as they are being transmitted through the air.
According to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Menwith Hill has two main spying capabilities. The first is called FORNSAT, which uses powerful antennae contained within the golf ball-like domes to eavesdrop on communications as they are being beamed between foreign satellites. The second is called OVERHEAD, which uses U.S. government satellites orbiting above targeted countries to locate and monitor wireless communications on the ground below — such as cellphone calls and even WiFi traffic.
A spy satellite launched in 2009 and operated from Menwith Hill. Its role was to intercept communications flowing across “commercial satellite uplinks,” according to NSA documents.
But the prediction proved to be wrong. And millions of phone calls are still beamed between satellites today, alongside troves of internet data, which the NSA has readily exploited at Menwith Hill.
“The commercial satellite communication business is alive and well and bursting at the seams with increasingly sophisticated bulk DNI (Digital Network Intelligence) traffic that is largely unencrypted,” the NSA reported in a 2006 document. “This data source alone provides more data for Menwith Hill analysts to sift through than our entire enterprise had to deal with in the not-so-distant past.”
The U.S. and U.K. governments have actively misled the public for years through a “cover story.”
As of 2009, Menwith Hill’s foreign satellite surveillance mission, code-named MOONPENNY, was monitoring 163 different satellite data links. The intercepted communications were funneled into a variety of different repositories storing phone calls, text messages, emails, internet browsing histories, and other data.
It is not clear precisely how many communications Menwith Hill is capable of tapping into at any one time, but the NSA’s documents indicate the number is extremely large. In a single 12-hour period in May 2011, for instance, its surveillance systems logged more than 335 million metadata records, which reveal information such as the sender and recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and at what time.
To keep information about Menwith Hill’s surveillance role secret, the U.S. and U.K. governments have actively misled the public for years through a “cover story” portraying the base as a facility used to provide “rapid radio relay and conduct communications research.” A classified U.S. document, dated from 2005, cautioned spy agency employees against revealing the truth. “It is important to know the established cover story for MHS [Menwith Hill Station] and to protect the fact that MHS is an intelligence collection facility,” the document stated. “Any reference to satellites being operated or any connection to intelligence gathering is strictly prohibited.”
Photo: Trevor Paglen
The outpost was built in the 1950s as part of a deal made by the British and American governments to house U.S. personnel and surveillance equipment. In its early days, Menwith Hill’s technology was much more primitive. According to Kenneth Bird, who worked at the base in the 1960s during the Cold War, it was focused then on monitoring high frequency radio signals in Eastern Europe. Intercepted conversations were recorded on Ampex tape recorders, Bird noted in his published 1997 account, with some transcribed by analysts in real-time using typewriters.
The modern Menwith Hill is a very different place. Now, not only are its spying systems capable of vacuuming up far more communications, but they also have a far broader geographic reach. In addition, the targets of the surveillance have drastically changed, as have the purposes for which the eavesdropping is carried out.
The documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that spy satellites operated at Menwith Hill today can target communications in China and Latin America, and also provide “continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass,” where they intercept “tactical military, scientific, political, and economic communications signals.” But perhaps the most significant role the base has played in recent years has been in the Middle East and North Africa.
Especially in remote parts of the world where there are no fiber-optic cable links, it is common for internet connections and phone calls to be routed over satellite. Consequently, Menwith Hill became a vital asset in the U.S. government’s counterterrorism campaign after the 9/11 attacks. Since then, the base has been used extensively to tap into communications in otherwise hard-to-reach areas where Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaeda and al Shabaab have been known to operate — for example, in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, Somalia, and Yemen.
An aerial image captured by a U.S. satellite in support of a covert GHOSTHUNTER operation.
The NSA’s documents describe GHOSTHUNTER as a means “to locate targets when they log onto the internet.” It was first developed in 2006 as “the only capability of its kind” and it enabled “a significant number of capture-kill operations” against alleged terrorists. Only a few specific examples are given, but those cases give a remarkable insight into the extraordinary power of the technology.
In 2007, for instance, analysts at Menwith Hill used GHOSTHUNTER to help track down a suspected al Qaeda “facilitator” in Lebanon who was described as “highly actionable,” meaning he had been deemed a legitimate target to kill or capture. The location of the target — who was known by several names, including Abu Sumayah — was traced to within a few hundred meters based on intercepts of his communications. Then a spy satellite took an aerial photograph of the neighborhood in Sidon, south Lebanon, in which he was believed to be living, mapping out the surrounding streets and houses. A top-secret document detailing the surveillance indicates that the information was to be passed to a secretive special operations unit known as Task Force 11-9, which would have been equipped to conduct a covert raid to kill or capture Sumayah. The outcome of the operation, however, is unclear, as it is not revealed in the document.
In another case in 2007, GHOSTHUNTER was used to identify an alleged al Qaeda “weapons procurer” in Iraq named Abu Sayf. The NSA’s surveillance systems spotted Sayf logging into Yahoo email or messenger accounts at an internet cafe near a mosque in Anah, a town on the Euphrates River that is about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad. Analysts at Menwith Hill used GHOSTHUNTER to track down his location and spy satellites operated from the British base captured aerial images. This information was passed to U.S. military commanders based in Fallujah to be included as part of a “targeting plan.”
A few days later, a special operations unit named Task Force-16 stormed two properties, where they detained Sayf, his father, two brothers, and five associates.
By 2008, the apparent popularity of GHOSTHUNTER within the intelligence community meant that it was rolled out at other surveillance bases where NSA has a presence, including in Ayios Nikolaos, Cyprus, and Misawa, Japan. The expansion of the capability to the other bases meant that it now had “near-global coverage.” But Menwith Hill remained its most important surveillance site. “[Menwith Hill] still supplies about 99% of the FORNSAT data used in GHOSTHUNTER geolocations,” noted a January 2008 document about the program.
A 2009 document added that GHOSTHUNTER’s focus was at that time “on geolocation of internet cafés in the Middle East/North Africa region in support of U.S. military operations” and said that it had to date “successfully geolocated over 5,000 VSAT terminals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.” VSAT, or Very Small Aperture Terminal, is a satellite system commonly used by internet cafés and foreign governments in the Middle East to send and receive communications and data. GHOSTHUNTER could also home in on VSATs in Pakistan, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Mali, Kenya, and Sudan, the documents indicate.
Menwith Hill’s unique ability to track down satellite devices across the world at times placed it on the front line of conflicts thousands of miles away. In Afghanistan, for instance, analysts at the base used the VSAT surveillance to help track down suspected members of the Taliban, which led to “approximately 30 enemy killed” during one series of attacks that were mentioned in a top-secret July 2011 report. In early 2012, Menwith Hill’s analysts were again called upon to track down a VSAT: this time, to assist British special forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. The terminal was swiftly located, and within an hour an MQ-9 Reaper drone was dispatched to the area, presumably to launch an airstrike.
But the lethal use of the surveillance data does not appear to have been restricted to conventional war zones such as Afghanistan or Iraq. The NSA developed similar methods at Menwith Hill to track down terror suspects in Yemen, where the U.S. has waged a covert drone war against militants associated with al Qaeda in the Northern Peninsula.
In early 2010, the agency revealed in an internal report that it had launched a new technique at the British base to identify many targets “at almost 40 different geolocated internet cafés” in Yemen’s Shabwah province and in the country’s capital, Sanaa. The technique, the document revealed, was linked to a broader classified initiative called GHOSTWOLF, described as a project to “capture or eliminate key nodes in terrorist networks” by focusing primarily on “providing actionable geolocation intelligence derived from [surveillance] to customers and their operational components.”
The description of GHOSTWOLF ties Menwith Hill to lethal operations in Yemen, providing the first documentary evidence that directly implicates the U.K. in covert actions in the country.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
Menwith Hill’s previously undisclosed role aiding the so-called targeted killing of terror suspects highlights the extent of the British government’s apparent complicity in controversial U.S. attacks — and raises questions about the legality of the secret operations carried out from the base.
There are some 2,200 personnel at Menwith Hill, the majority of whom are Americans. Alongside NSA employees within the complex, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office also has a major presence at the site, running its own “ground station” from which it controls a number of spy satellites.
But the British government has publicly asserted as recently as 2014 that operations at the base “have always been, and continue to be” carried out with its “knowledge and consent.” Moreover, roughly 600 of the personnel at the facility are from U.K. agencies, including employees of the NSA’s British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
For several years, British human rights campaigners and lawmakers have been pressuring the government to provide information about whether it has had any role aiding U.S. targeted killing operations, yet they have been met with silence. In particular, there has been an attempt to establish whether the U.K. has aided U.S. drone bombings outside of declared war zones — in countries including Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia — which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and are in some cases considered by United Nations officials to possibly constitute war crimes and violations of international law.
Though the Snowden documents analyzed by The Intercept state that Menwith Hill has aided “a significant number” of “capture-kill” operations, they do not reveal specific details about all of the incidents that resulted in fatalities. What is clear, however, is that the base has targeted countries such as Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia as part of location-tracking programs like GHOSTHUNTER and GHOSTWOLF — which were created to help pinpoint individuals so they could be captured or killed — suggesting it has played a part in drone strikes in these countries.
“An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder.”
Craig, the legal director at Reprieve, reviewed the Menwith Hill documents — and said that they indicated British complicity in covert U.S. drone attacks. “For years, Reprieve and others have sought clarification from the British government about the role of U.K. bases in the U.S. covert drone program, which has killed large numbers of civilians in countries where we are not at war,” she told The Intercept. “We were palmed off with platitudes and reassured that any U.S. activities on or involving British bases were fully compliant with domestic and international legal provisions. It now appears that this was far from the truth.”
Jemima Stratford QC, a leading British human rights lawyer, told The Intercept that there were “serious questions to be asked and serious arguments to be made” about the legality of the lethal operations aided from Menwith Hill. The operations, Stratford said, could have violated the European Convention on Human Rights, an international treaty that the U.K. still remains bound to despite its recent vote to leave the European Union. Article 2 of the Convention protects the “right to life” and states that “no one shall be deprived of his life intentionally” except when it is ordered by a court as a punishment for a crime.
Stratford has previously warned that if British officials have facilitated covert U.S. drone strikes outside of declared war zones, they could even be implicated in murder. In 2014, she advised members of the U.K. Parliament that because the U.S. is not at war with countries such as Yemen or Pakistan, in the context of English and international law, the individuals who are targeted by drones in these countries are not “combatants” and their killers are not entitled to “combatant immunity.”
“If the U.K. government knows that it is transferring data that may be used for drone strikes against non-combatants … that transfer is probably unlawful,” Stratford told the members of Parliament. “An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder.”
GCHQ refused to answer questions for this story, citing a “long standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.” A spokesperson for the agency issued a generic statement asserting that “all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.” The spokesperson insisted that “U.K.’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.”
Photo: Trevor Paglen
In February 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense announced after a review that it was planning to reduce personnel at Menwith Hill by 2016, with about 500 service members and civilians set to be removed from the site. A U.S. Air Force spokesperson told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes that the decision was based on technological advances, which he declined to discuss, though he mentioned improvements in “server capacity to the hardware that we’re using; we’re doing more with less.”
The documents provided by Snowden shine light on some of the specific technological changes. Most notably, they show that there has been significant investment in introducing new and more sophisticated mass surveillance systems at Menwith Hill in recent years. A crucial moment came in 2008, when then-NSA Director Keith Alexander introduced a radical shift in policy. Visiting Menwith Hill in June that year, Alexander set a challenge for employees at the base. “Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time?” he said, according to NSA documents. “Sounds like a good summer homework project for Menwith.”
As a result, a new “collection posture” was introduced at the base, the aim being to “collect it all, process it all, exploit it all.” In other words, it would vacuum up as many communications within its reach as technologically possible.
Between 2009 and 2012, Menwith Hill spent more than $40 million on a massive new 95,000-square-foot operations building — nearly twice the size of an average American football field. A large chunk of this space — 10,000 square feet — was set aside for a data center that boasted the ability to store huge troves of intercepted communications. During the renovations, the NSA shipped in new computer systems and laid 182 miles of cables, enough to stretch from New York City to the outskirts of Boston. The agency also had a 200-seat-capacity auditorium constructed to host classified operations meetings and other events.
“How can Menwith carry out operations of which there is absolutely no accountability to the public?”
Some of the extensive expansion work was visible from the road outside the secure complex, which triggered protests from a local activist group called the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. Since the early 1990s, the group has closely monitored activities at Menwith Hill. And for the last 16 years, its members have held a small demonstration every Tuesday outside the base’s main entrance, greeting NSA employees with flags and colorful homemade banners bearing slogans critical of U.S. foreign policy and drone strikes.
Fabian Hamilton, a member of Parliament based in the nearby city of Leeds, has become a supporter of the campaign’s work, occasionally attending events organized by the group and advocating for more transparency at Menwith Hill. Hamilton, who represents the Labour Party, has doggedly attempted to find out basic information about the base, asking the government at least 40 parliamentary questions since 2010 about its activities. He has sought clarification on a variety of issues, such as how many U.S. personnel are stationed at the site, whether it is involved in conducting drone strikes, and whether members of a British parliamentary oversight committee have been given full access to review its operations. But his efforts have been repeatedly stonewalled, with British government officials refusing to provide any details on the grounds of national security.
Hamilton told The Intercept that he found the secrecy shrouding Menwith Hill to be “offensive.” The revelations about the role it has played in U.S. killing and capture operations, he said, showed there needed to be a full review of its operations. “Any nation-state that uses military means to attack any target, whether it is a terrorist, whether it is legitimate or not, has to be accountable to its electorate for what it does,” Hamilton said. “That’s the basis of our Parliament, it’s the basis of our whole democratic system. How can we say that Menwith can carry out operations of which there is absolutely no accountability to the public? I don’t buy this idea that you say the word ‘security’ and nobody can know anything. We need to know what is being done in our name.”
———
Documents published with this article:
- Elegant Chaos: collect it all, exploit it all
- Elegant Chaos: collect it all, exploit it all (plus notes)
- Ghosthunter: only capability of its kind
- Menwith satellite classification guide
- UK special forces Reaper drone (Jan-Feb-2012)
- Afghanistan 30 enemy killed (Jan-Feb 2012)
- Project Sandstorm wifi geolocation (Jan 2011)
- Yemen backhaul comms collected (Jan 2011)
- New ops building at Menwith completed, fit up begins
- New technique geolocates targets active at Yemeni cafes
- Work is progressing on Menwith Hill Station’s new operations building
- Ghosthunter and the geolocating of internet cafes
- Traffic series: is your collection surveyed or sustained
- APPARITION becomes a reality new corporate VSAT geolocation capability sees its first deployment
- Ghosthunter goes global
- Menwith continues successful counterterrorism survey along Af-Pak border
- SIGINT target package leads to USMC capture of al Qaeda weapons procurer
- Too much of a good thing?
- Menwith initiatives maximizing our access
- GSM tower mapping made easier and more accurate with new tool
- Ghosthunter future capabilities (2008)
- New tool combines multi agency databases for complete target snapshot
- GSM tower geolocation
- Menwith collection assets
- Menwith databases as of Aug 2008
- Ghosthunter tasking process
- Apparition/Ghosthunter tasking info
I was stationed there some years ago, as a US military member. Beautiful area, and the site has always been doing important work to keep the world safe from communist expansion, Soviet machinations, terrorism (Islamic and otherwise), and other nasty things. Of course Britain’s Labourites and other assorted lefties oppose anything that benefits the west, western civilization, and have no appreciation for our freedoms and how fragile they are. Those nuts protesting outside the main gate every day are misguided children.
Menwith Hill was at the heart of my 2007-09 project: Ultimate High Ground. I even managed to get a tour of the base in 2009 after numerous trips filming from the perimeter. Risked life and limb for that one.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the_ultimate_high_ground
http://www.steverowell.com/index.php/archive/ultimate-high-ground/
If spy programmes like these were capable of making a real difference in the WoT PLC then presumably we would have seen rather less jihadi activism in the ME, rather than its rapid spread over the last ten or so years.
This surveillance isn’t intended to do that, though. the WoT PLC is highly profitable, from sales of ‘security’ equipment and weapons, through lobbying for politicians, to well-paid jobs for security ‘experts’ once they leave the CIA/NSA and go work for the corporations they’ve done so much for. No-one in the western liberal democracies wants the WoT PLC to end any time soon, there’s just too much money in it.
I would add, though, that if I were GCHQ/NSA I would really love articles like this, the more the merrier. Whatever the real capabilities of our spy-lords, spreading the fear that they are omnipotent and omniscient could only increase their effectiveness, from a panopticon point-of-view. I might even set up my own department for writing and disseminating these articles..
One thing’s crystal clear. All that these tools of the 1% do in the name of national security is paid work. It all comes down to money, which I don’t believe in. Call me crazy. Even so, Work is work. Could we not employ all these men and women who happily (with exceptions) enable terrorrism and murder and misery profitably, from a social standpoint. Imagine if we could just offer them jobs being productive instead of destructive. But the wild beast of corporatocracy, and those who run it and prefer it to law and order and security for all, don’t want that. The believers in inquality like their dark world of terror, the only world that they know. We the people can’t dislodge them and we certainly can’t dissuade them. But that doesn’t mean that they are unstoppable.
I have no problem with them using this facility to kill terrorists. In fact, I wish them every success in liquidating terrorists through targeted killing. Or perhaps we should set up court rooms in the accommodating environments of Sudan and Pakistan’s ungoverned mountains. The program has clearly taken a number of top leaders down. Keep at it. The more of them dead, the better.
“The program has clearly taken a number of top leaders down.”
Clearly? Where is the proof? Who are these “top leaders”, and of what are / were they accused? What criteria is being used to filter the data collected? Without accountability, literally anyone can become an arbitrary, unnamed target in the name of “national security”. What is clear is the ever-mounting number of civilian casualties occurring through these “targeted drone strikes” which are then simply chalked up to “justified collateral damage” in our (the US / UK) quest for imperial domination.
Nikki – I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments. By what right does America or its British poodle, send military or other personnel into someone else’s country without the approval of that nation’s government? By what right does A-B murder or abduct anyone? Seems to me, the A-B governments are totally out of control, doing whatever they feel like to whoever, whenever, and the citizens have no say in it other than some farcical ‘election’ every few years.
A simple reading of news reports will reveal the identity of the HVTs taken out by the drone program. Al Qaeda and its affiliates tend to comment on the deaths of its leaders.
Also, you say “literally anyone” can become a target of a drone strike. Well, sure they can—if they happen to belong to a terrorist organization and are seeking refuge in lawless badlands like the Pakistani FATA, southern Yemen, or Somalia. Also, killing terrorist leaders is an end in itself. How exactly does fighting a terrorist group equal a quest for “imperial domination”? Domination of what? Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/13/al-qaeda-files-bin-laden-documents-reveal-struggling-organization/
Great. So what’s the secrecy and total lack of accountability good for ?
They should start killing themselves then..
I think you missed the point dude. These people who are running program like these are thugs and thieves. When they say terrorist they mean people who are trying to defend their own country and struggling against these thugs. Al Quada is a code word for anybody who comes in their way of destroying the whole world, turning it into a capitalistic pip dream and enslave everybody. You are confusing people who are blowing up markets and shooting up people in Paris and with people who are fighting to defend their country in Iraq, Syria and almost every single Middle East country. Our governments on the behest of The Bank is after those freedom fighter because our mission in life is to kill and destroy until people submit. In the West media alone to enough to control the people in other countries people don’t watch TV so you need drone attacks to take care of business.
If Adolf Eichmann could be given a trial before hanging, then surely these suspected terrorists deserve the same.
That should put this subject to rest.
Intelligence is vitally important but also grossly inaccurate and should never be used to take a life. Intelligence should be viewed as a possibly important “piece” of puzzle but it lacks confrontating the accused (under oath) where the “accusers” or Intel folks have a healthy risk of prison for committing perjury.
American style Article III courts (modeled after Old English law) are the most accurate truth gathering mechanism ever invented and have convicted hundreds of real terrorists. Anything less creates an incentive for intelligence and law enforcement abuses.
This lawless and inaccurate assassination process creates a dangerous precedent for domestic law enforcement as well. Instead of a police officer or federal agent capturing traditional suspects, why not just kill them for added officer safety?
What the NSA and other national security should be concerned about is that these powers were granted using wartime exigencies – so participants are complicit in genuine war crimes! There are no statute of limitations for NSA and other officials, including police officers, for these types of war crimes.
Most war crime prosecutions happen 20-40 years after the war crimes take place. Your agencies won’t tell you that!
..and no one from America or Western Europe has ever been indicted for war crimes, despite 80 years of worldwide invasions, bombing, slaughter and death.
Alright, now let’s take a look at the featured VSAT image. I am inclined to guess that the blurred text was censored by the Intercept, not by the government. I don’t know who censored the black box near the “top secret” – doesn’t make sense to have that black space in the original.
Losing the IP address is a problem because I would be curious to see, for example, if the address had any logged contributions at Wikipedia, which publishes IP addresses of unregistered contributors. Losing the physical address is also a problem because we don’t know if the site was bombed or not. An obvious holy grail from the Wikipedia end of things (they do join in some of the lawsuits, after all) would be to find a case in which someone was targeted by drone for contributing data to the encyclopedia. Depending on the data and its sensitivity I don’t think that is out of the question, at least not in Yemen.
It should theoretically be possible to find this spot on a map – I’m sure several government agencies could do it in a fraction of a second, and even a plain Google Maps user might find it unless the neighborhood has been blown off the map in the meanwhile, but it would be hard. It’d be nice if The Intercept could give folks a few clues so they could find it quick and then they could drop the ridiculous censorship since the data is known, at least for the lat and long.
‘This program is only unacceptable to a minority of the population.’
From history, we know that most people are OK with mass murder, as long as it is the mass murder of those elsewhere.
I think Gallagher nailed the phrase: a project to help “eliminate” terrorism targets in Yemen. That’s as good a double entendre as I’ve seen.
Hello
Fabulous and utterly fabulously remarkable…. Including :
“Article 2 of the Convention protects the “right to life” and states that “no one shall be deprived of his life intentionally” except when it is ordered by a court as a punishment for a crime.”
I’m now looking at a Guardian article of August 6, by Spencer Ackerman. Here a part concerning a National Council Staff of around 400 in the executive branch and unaccountable to Congress is said by its spokesman, Ned Price. To be lawful and in propriety of the ‘playbook ‘ and that “our counter terrorism actions are effective and legal, and their legitimacy is best demonstrated by making public more information about these actions as well as setting clear standards for other nations to follow.”
Well, I’ll get to read the Drone Papers soon too….yet it’s all totting up to be quite the fabulously able targeting and killing system now, available.
I dunno what to say…. This isn’t out of control. This is total control in the making. I’m reading around and deciding that the ‘law’ is a decision at the time in the echelons of this control able body of people who decide the kill list.
What do we do? Current thinking of mine says ok, we can suppress possibility ; yet to take it to the near future then we have quite the creative tools in use which by conscious design of these law making users can fashion entire populations.
Outrageous!!!!!
Thanks and have a better one.
Great article.
Domes are half of a round object I think. Those are randomes, not domes.
It’s actually radome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radome
Stellar reporting, thanks.
The problem is the flaw – hiding it does not fix it – and there is no way to fix it without first admitting it….ARE YOU SAFER TODAY / does not include TRUTH
• HE who would play God….. bomb them – they are nothing – they are meaningless…
George W. Bush has said we bombed them back to the dark ages ( think of the actual meaning of that statement (PLEASE THINK )..). COMPASSION?.? for the refugees created?.? ARE YOU SOFT ON DEFENSE ?.? Bombing people half the world away….Be Afraid…..Be Very Afraid… KILL ….MURDER….DESTROY…. TORTURE….MAIM…..STARVE….the products of George W. Bush’s war…
Today the WAR is owned by Barrack Obama and the people of our country – it will produce the same misery so someone can feel powerful spending countless money to destroy what someone says is our enemy.. Be Afraid….Be Very Afraid….who will the finger of destruction be pointed at next – who will be named to the role of enemy so again someone can feel all so powerful.. NOTE – the cost is never discussed… not in money – not in damage to the environment – not in Blood. HE WHO WOULD PLAY GOD?.? – – the emperors new clothes?.? Meaningful? or Meaningless? The WAR-MONGERS AWAIT YOUR VOTE – death & destruction……
Please VOTE, sadly we do not have a PEACE nominee
HOW NOT TO BALANCE A BUDGET / SECRET OR OTHERWISE
A pertinent podcost from a Bristol Broadband Co-operative on 20 July 2016:
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/87528
John has a long mustache. There is a fire at the insurance agency. Mollasses tomorrow will bring forth cognac. The chair is against the wall. Snow in the den will bring fresh news.
The book is on the table.
The Roman, Juvenal, famously asked: “Who shall guard the guardians?”
His question remains unanswered, right down to the present day.
Um, wow! If the archives has an even moderately detailed “satellites classification guide,” with what’s apparently these 3 subsections addressing UK/Menwith assets participating in NSA world-wide collections, one can only imagine what information also exists about empire’s own “birds” – and space-based abilities. It’s a bit difficult to ignore what I’m guessing are TI supplied redactions – or that the whole base document seems to be missing. But for some reason I hear Tiny Tim’s ukulele and he’s singing, “Tiptoe through the Minefield,” and I think I can relate.
Not bad though when 3+ years into Snowden you can still make it shitty day for multiple US/UK above-the-law intelligence agencies. Except for maybe that DNI Clapper guy. He always looks constipated. Which I suppose also makes any day shitty when you think about it. Sorry.
Anyway, that look seems especially noticeable whenever he’s deceiving some figurehead congressional oversight committee.
Well done, Mr. Gallagher, I too would see war crimes end and perpetraitors brought to justice!
Tiny Tim – Tiptoe Through the Tulips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcSlcNfThUA
What a charming place in the charming British country side. This should become the back drop for a new episode of “Murder, she wrote”. I am eagerly waiting.
Here are 8 factors.
1. Machiavellian Egocentricity – a sense of detachment and a
lack of empathy towards others for the sake of personal gains.
2. Social Potency – the ability to charm and influence others.
3. Coldheartedness – a distinct lack of emotion, guilt, or regard for
other’s feelings.
4. Carefree Nonplanfulness – Difficulty in planning ahead and considering
the consequences of one’s actions.
5. Fearlessness – An eagerness for risk seeking behavior and a lack of fear.
6. Blame Externalization – Blaming others for one’s behavior.
7. Impulse Nonconformity – A disregard for social norms and acceptable
behavior.
8. Stress Immunity – A lack of typical marked reactions to traumatic
or otherwise stress-inducing events.
These are the interconnected factors of a
Psychopathic Personality Inventory.
The degree of the manifestation of each factor may vary from
Psychopath to psychopath.
Also, defining the difference between a psychopath and a Sociopath
may be limited.
As I read this article, the delusions and the obsession with
“hearing voices” which determine behaviors in people
who are classified as Paranoid Schizophrenic seems to
also infuse these “security” obsessed “governments” and
a large portion of their members.
Creative thought of the day –
Tip of the Iceberg: On gizmodo dot com, there’s an article 1/29/16 “New Techniques Allows Scientists to Read at Nearly the Speed of Thought”… that’s in the public realm. What about the technologies – 50 to 100 years ahead of present day public realm in the military? “U.S. government satellites orbiting above targeted countries to locate and monitor wireless communications on the ground below—such as cellphone calls and even WiFi traffic.”, i.e. wireless brain signals?
If you could read brain signal info from satelights, you could read everyone on the planet. If you could record that info on neural network computers, per individual, you could capture all the intellectual property, including contacts, contracts, and memory info, of every individual. Could you repurpose that info onto other brains? Well, of course you could. Just download the video ‘experience-set’ capture onto the other mind clone, and voila, BCI and you have the info access to – well, everything.
The NSA has, according to Bill BInney, of 100 years storage space for total info from everyone on the planet.
How about an general AI that would solve really hard problems for you – say where and how to wage war next? Or how to get 95 light years away instantly, back in time 1 billion years? (We know there is ancient time here now- because we see it in the stars every night.)
Secrecy = Power. Absolute Secrecy = Absolute Power.
5 short questions:
1. Could you make a wireless electronic body/brain torture/kill behavior control program? (Oh those TI mental cases, lol!)
2. Could you scale it to all people on the planet?
3. Could you steal “everything” using this program?
4. Could you “bank” the info so that after everyone was gone, you could clone and re-make the world as you wanted?
5. Could you take this memory bank to another planet and do #4?
most informative report – had no idea how devious things have become
1. Why Britain? This is our special relationship?
2. pretty ugly stuff and spoils the countryside view
3. good people born into a world like this, doesnt seem good
4. this type of power can only attract the worst type of people as time goes on
5. thats a lot of money to go after a few people who would otherwise be of no consequence had we left them alone in their corner of the world?
6. So democracy is a facade and the military really are in charge of whatever they want to be in charge of and we just work for them to pay for their wants. And they will always want more. And if we dont give them what they want they what, turn on us like a rabid dog or pitbull?
If God built the planet and all life, and as humans are on the path of destroying the planet, would He smote us?
Just because you work for the government, doesn’t mean you are sane.
paranoia is expensive on many levels
The revelations are “yet another example of the unacceptable level of secrecy that surrounds U.K. involvement in the U.S. ‘targeted killing’ program,”
This is the Alice Speri school of advocacy journalism at work. Find somebody to quote who says what you want to say and then run with it as fact.
This program is only unacceptable to a minority of the population.
So? Only a minority understands what this program does.
But is the secrecy acceptable?
At least there was some progress from previous interpretations of the Official Secrets Act that left reporters afraid to print a picture of a building in the middle of London (or was it more than one?) The photos here are well done and interesting. Especially I notice in the close-up of the “geodesic” dome that it is no such thing. There’s one node with *seven* bars coming off of it, and right next to it there’s a *trapezoid*. It would appear that the spies have some special method of making those things that blows Bucky Fuller out of the water…
How does it do that?
Well, an ordinary geodesic dome is an approximation, based on how the fixed 20-sided symmetry of an icosahedron maps out onto a sphere with bars of some length that is arbitrary but limited to a certain number per edge of the original icosahedron. This thing … this thing seemingly could have bars of any size, and looked at from a distance it does a damn good imitation of a sphere. I suppose it’s just a matter of coming up with some numerical solution (I can say that with the easy confidence you have before you start trying to write a script and see what a pain in the ass it is to actually figure out what you meant to do).
So secret is Menwith Hill that Google has satelite images of RAF Menwith Hill which show, in addition to the ‘golf balls”, a baseball diamond and an eight-lane athletics track that looks like it is up to ‘international specification’! RAF Menwith Hill also has its own Wikipedia page.
I remember back in September 1995 the Baltimore Sun published a massive 4-parter on the NSA which included the agenct’s ‘outposts’ in UK – Menwith Hill, GCHQ in Cheltenham, and other locations.
From the article:
So the article does not claim that the existence of such a facility is unknown. Rather it deals with what the facility has done, and does now.
From the Wikipedia article:
This, at the very least, is misleading.
obama sends drones into yemen to kill civilians, and according to experts these actions are “possibly illegal”.
but, i suppose if we invaded & occupied yemen, that would make it a “war zone” and then all manner of killing would be legal.
when the rich kill the poor it’s not a crime; when the poor kill the rich, it is.
alternaticvely – when white skins kill brown skins it’s liberation. When brown skins kill white skins it’s terrorism.
This of course wasn’t news 6+ years ago when the documents were more relevant only now years later are the revealed to the public. I suppose this comes under the heading “responsible journalism” which is a vague and undefined concept. Keeping information vital to the public interest secret for years and refusing to name people legitimately suspected of high crimes including torture is apparently what “responsibility” is all about.
It is a terrible world where such vital information becomes the private property of one person who decides when and if it is given to the people most effected by what they reveal. If your a “journalist” you have “special rights” the rest of us must surrender to, because of “responsibility” what ever the fuck that means.
How do we get out from under the oppression of power when we too act in secrecy and with hold vital information?
I guess “journalistic” secrecy is for the “right reasons” sort of like drone strikes are for “freedom and democracy”
So would you have whatever raw data, which Snowden risked everything for, and which he wanted vetted and investigated by journalists he trusted, dumped on the public with no investigative reporting on the facts surrounding the revelations? Would that not make this data even easier to dismiss as a conspiracy theory? Would that not make it very simple for the NSA to leak false stories meant to make reporters look like fools, and further marginalize this kind of important reporting?
Do you really think that anyone paying attention “6+ years ago” did not know that the NSA was targeting people with very sophisticated surveillance?
If you are not in favor of immediate dumping of raw, mostly incomprehensible data on the public, at what arbitrary point should journalists reveal their stories, instead of when they are finished with their investigation? Please do advise these folks on when YOU think the best time to reveal data is, if not when the investigative reporting is finished. That would be awesome. I’m sure they would be very grateful.
Or, are you simply a whiny little ankle-biter who gets paid to take cheap shots at people who reveal war crimes?
Of the 27 documents released above, most well beyond my ability to even interpret, there is one NSA document that makes your point:
“Too much of a good thing?” https://theintercept.com/document/2016/09/06/too-much-of-a-good-thing/
“[] …(S//SI) What’s the problem, you ask? More data is a good thing, right? Well, anyone who has ever spent time on search engines like Google(?), might get a hint at the problem. Accessing too much data does not necessarily lead to good information upon which to make good decisions …
*(S//SI) For more information on this project, or if you are interested in helping, please contact [REDACTED]… The team leads would like to hear any “great ideas” you might have to make this project a success “
You go to great length to beat down the straw man you created. One person having the decision on publication of data vital to the public interest holding it for years is not the ideal situation. Alternatives to that reality are hardly confined to a “dump” of raw data without analysis.
Snowden certainly should have influence and is an important figure. That does not make him infallible regarding how to proceed with disclosure.
As you point out war crimes torture and oppression through the invasion and violation of privacy of the entire global population are the most serious crimes known to man. Those who order these crimes to be done and those who actually do them are criminals. When someone is suspected of a crime they are named and charged and tried all in public.
Where is the “responsibility” in hiding and protecting these people?
What of you and me and the billions of other victims of these crimes? Are our lives so less valuable than theirs that they should be protected and allowed to continue to kill and spread suffering unmolested un-accused of crimes? The victims have names, we can know those names, the perpetrators have names which are kept secret on the grounds of “responsibility”
I did not create a straw-man, I asked you to define at what point in their investigations reporters should post their stories. Should it be on your timetable, or theirs?
If you are unaware that killing people with drones is a war crime, no amount of data will convince you, regardless of when it is delivered.
If you have evidence that one person withheld information to protect drone killers, please provide it, otherwise you are just another whiny ankle-biter, and possibly a paid troll, which are legion.
How ironic that you (falsely) accuse others of erecting straw men, when you spew this:
There is no such “one person” making that decision.
And if you think any of the people committing the acts the Snowden documents reveal would be charged with crimes, you could not be more stupid. No one has been charged yet, not even James Clapper who was proven to have lied to a congressional committee.
And no one is going to be. The CIA tortured during the Bush era; it’s admitted. And no one has been, or will be, prosecuted. No one will ever be prosecuted for any of this.
Finally, some of what Snowden’s documents show is legal, or arguably so. The question then is, should it be? That can at least now be debated.
I have 1.7 million documents I need you to read and redact and then publish with articles explaining all. There are many subjects and they are all complicated. I need all this done in the next 6 weeks. Think you can get this done for me?
Well, I would probably need more than 6 weeks but if you gave me $250,000 budget I could probably get it all done in a year or so.
Panama Papers is 2.6 terabytes (over 11 million documents) and its available on line.
So you think you could turn out the volumes of articles that a few teams of reporters have been working on for 3+ years in 1 year for as little as 250k. I guess they should have put this out for open bid. Tell me what make you so good that you could do better with the Snowden archives than the people that are working on it now. If you are so good why don’t you look through what is available, which is quite a lot at this point, and show these slow buggers up. I’m sure wikileaks could use someone of your tremendous talent as they have even more files to go through.
Well said, it is amusing that Mahatma can’t tell the difference between a straw-man argument and a question, and yet, thinks itself/herself/his self to be capable of doing the job of the Intercept.
Good point. There again, how many of these articles are written to keep the sheeple in fear and subjection?
Here is an article that looks at new technology that will allow the “police state” to further surveil society:
http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2016/08/facial-emotion-recognition-and-how-2016.html
George Orwell was right – he was just three decades early.
microsoft is definitely off the hook. In a microsoft world, it’s the people who are the tools of the computer occupiers; they define the meaning, we become the victims.
The Middle East is switching to more advanced communications technologies, which are easier to monitor. So Menwith Hill is becoming obsolete. But it’s difficult to shut it down since it would devastate the British, who are so pathetically eager to please. Now that they’re committed to leave Europe, they are more reliant than ever on the United States. Combined with their love of spying, and fond self image as a nation of James Bonds, deflating their domes would be cruel. So I hope the NSA can find it in its budget to continue to provide them with make work projects in order to maintain their self esteem.
But it’s difficult to shut it down since it would devastate the British, who are so pathetically eager to please. “unquote
Fuck the British. I hope they wallow in abject poverty.. just like what they forced on other nations… like Ireland. In fact.. I hope they starve. Meanwhile, I also hope at some point, these NSA scumbags will finally be brought to trial for complicity to war crimes. But I’m not holding my breath
If the 7 street officers in CHI who wrote false reports, technically making them accessories to murder after the fact, only get fired with no criminal prosecution how could you even HOPE that some of these big wigs would see a trial. We can’t even put a simple street cop on trial when we have indisputable video evidence of the crime.
The problem with the British is that they have been serfs, stuck away on a little island for the last 1’000 years. All they understand is obedience to the ruling elite. They actually gather in their 000’s to wave flags as the descendants of their oppressors drive by in expensive cars paid for by the serfs, on their way to sumptuous castles and mansions likewise paid for by the serfs.
We can expect nothing from the British. They will continue to bow and scrape to anyone with a plummy accent.
Save the radomes!
Menwith Hill is becoming obsolete? I’m sure they can find ways to adapt to the changes, as all intelligence agencies must and have, if they wish to remain effective.