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Sy Hersh, published by the London Review of Books. The New Yorker had "little interest" in publishing it. The Washington Post was supposed to publish it but then backed out. This is perhaps one of the most important stories of our time. You've probably read it already this weekend. There has been a lot of discussion. If you read anything this week, read this and read analysis and additional commentary about it by people you trust.
Whose sarin?
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
New story this morning by James Ball at The Guardian and upcoming stories on the same subject by ProPublica and NYT. This really takes the cake. What a freakshow. What a disgusting statement about the "golden age" of our intelligence community. OSS is back! says General McRaven, who also talked about the golden age. They are apparently completely oblivious to the pain and suffering of others as they revel in the incredible economic boom in the DC area, in the world of forever war, the world is the battlefield and the era of war profiteering, bubble and the intelligence world and their hidden black budgets.
This is so creepy and pathetic. Get a life, intel spooks! Actually I'm sure they have quite the life when highly paid intel agents spend their days playing video games. Do they set up their video rockers in Keith Alexander's Star Trek control room?
I'm curious to see how my millennial sons (and the college friends) will react to this. I'm sure you can collect some really interesting kinds of quotes from people who are playing a fictitious first person shooter game. And store them in some Big Brother data base for perpetuity. You're spending our taxpayer money sending real life agents into gaming networks! But you have to cut the food stamp program?? They're recruiting informants. Stealing "buddy" information to create yet another graph of people's relationships. Gaming relationships are often long distance, anonymous, never develop into real life relationships. But gaming buddies count, apparently and could tie you to a suspect. With three hops, between email lists, phone contacts, social media and now gaming environments, I don't see how anybody escapes being connected to some kind of a suspect, thereby making every person who has any online presence fair game for total surveillance if Big Brother so chooses. Gah. This is pathetic. Invading every aspect of people's lives. Using gaming environments as another way to hack into your computer, your network, your home.
We're paying employees and contractors huge $$ to do this. They have so many intelligence agents spending their days in gaming environments that they have to take special measures, have special "deconfliction" groups to figure out who is a spook in the gaming world so they don't carry out operations on each other.
If FBI, NSA and the Pentagon will put large numbers of gamers and trolls out into the virtual gaming environments, to spy and to recruit informants, how many have they put out into social media and blogs? What kinds of operations would they conduct? Would they also use the dragnet to find petty crimes and use that to turn them into informants? Would they conduct psyops? Geez, if their reputation, their budget and the threat of legislation that would shut down some of their programs, rein in their power and harsh their buzz was at stake, would they take to the places where anti-surveillance and pro privacy activists organize? Would they target said activists? Or would they conduct operations to distract and disrupt? It's hard to know, but knowing that they think funding hoardes of Orcs on World of Warcraft, it's also hard to believe that they wouldn't invest in such operations.
Revealed: spy agencies' covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online games
NSA and GCHQ collect gamers' chats and deploy real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life
To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.
That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.
The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.
[...]
Games, the analyst wrote "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.
If properly exploited, games could produce vast amounts of intelligence, according to the the NSA document. They could be used as a window for hacking attacks, to build pictures of people's social networks through "buddylists and interaction", to make approaches by undercover agents, and to obtain target identifiers (such as profile photos), geolocation, and collection of communications.
ProPublica.
World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games
This story has been reported in partnership between The New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by The Guardian.
The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.
[...]
But for all their enthusiasm — so many CIA, FBI and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.
The documents do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort, and former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.
NYT. It looks like they have an accompanying video with this article (which appears to be the same article as was published on ProPublica, but different from the Guardian article). There are also documents. If they spend this much money and effort and have vast numbers of agents crawling the gaming environment, how many do they have in the blogosphere? We spend between a half trillion and a trillion dollars on the "defense" budget and have for years now. A trillion dollars is an almost unimaginable amount of money. The Pentagon can't even (or deliberately can't) account for all of it. Some portion of it is secret to almost everyone, the black budget. It's a threat to national security for even Congress to know how it's spent. Is this part of the black budget? Is it a grave threat to national security for Americans to know this is the way our money is being spent?
Even the guy from Brookings recognizes that a place where you have to pay with a credit card is a stupid place for terrorists to hide. The counterterrorism value of this operation is really questionable. But I bet it's a hell of a lot of fun for people who blow through billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars while 80% of the taxpayers are either in poverty or in danger of falling into poverty.
Spies’ Dragnet Reaches a Playing Field of Elves and Trolls
Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”
I'm floored by this. On the same day as Obama's populist speech... How craven can you get?
Contractors Receive Huge Raise on Same Day Income Inequality Discussed
On the same day that the President spoke eloquently and fervently about the rising income inequality in the United States, the ever-contractor-friendly Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) increased the maximum amount of contractor compensation that can be charged to government contracts from a mere $763,029 per employee per year to what OFPP apparently considers a much more reasonable $952,308 per employee per year. This increase primarily affects the employees of the largest government contractors—most notably defense and information technology firms. So taxpayers are now on the hook for paying up to nearly $1 million for every one of these contractor executives or employees every year.
OMB tried to excuse its scheme to enrich the wealthiest contractor executives and employees by including shallow lamentations that on the surface appear to decry the need for such a large increase in allowable compensation (OFPP acted similarly when the cap was raised in 2012). The OFPP notice essentially cries that “Congress makes us do it,” but the truth is, raising the contractor compensation cap is a discretionary act, which OFPP has managed to turn into a nearly annual contractor feeding frenzy—this year it becomes a massive holiday bonus for contractors, all while agencies are being asked to do more with less.
To add a final insult to injury, OFPP made the change retroactive to January 1, 2012, for most firms.
Big Tech supports the Sensenbrenner bill reining in the out of control NSA and intelligence community. It's affecting their bottom lines already and they know that it might wreck their business and the incredible head start and advantages they enjoy. The Freedom Act is dreaded by the powers that be. Absolutely dreaded and they'll go to great lengths to either try to get out in front of it with a substitute bill or executive orders. Also, their bought politicians, political operatives, intelligence operatives, media hacks, et al will no doubt want to distract as much attention from this and disrupt any organizing in support of real reform.
This is a huge story. Many of us have been waiting to see if Big Tech would use their power this way. Too bad they didn't use their power to push back against the megalomaniacs before the monster was built and didn't do this until they were exposed on the world stage. But that is water under the bridge now.
Internet companies demand spying overhaul after NSA revelations – live reaction
Eight American tech companies including Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have written to Barack Obama demanding an overhaul of US surveillance laws
Commenting on the tech giants' letter, Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union said:
The tech giants' message couldn't be any clearer or more welcome - the government's massive spying authorities must to be reined in immediately.
Widespread support for reform will only continue to grow until Congress and the administration deal with out-of-control spying head on by prohibiting indiscriminate surveillance.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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