NYDN: Census Now Mapping Your Back Hallways

A bunch of leaders in NYC’s Muslim community have declined Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s invitation to an interfaith breakfast because of the racial profiling done by the NYPD’s intelligence division.

The move is interesting for the press it has generated–which in turn, has also (presumably, as designed) focused new attention on the racial profiling itself

It’s interesting, too, for the obnoxious editorial written in response from the NYDN. Along with lecturing these Muslim leaders about what invitations they should accept, the NYDN claims that the NYPD had done no more than map out census data.

The plain and salutary fact is that the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit has done no more than use census data to develop a portrait of Muslim New York and then follow leads, some sent the city’s way from abroad via the CIA, when they demanded investigation.

Many a plot has been disrupted by this type of perfectly proper nonintrusive vigiliance.

I find the claim that this all came from census data alarming, given that the NYPD has actually cased out a bunch of Middle Eastern restaurants in the city, including details such as what back passages the restaurants have, as in these details about the Eastern Nights Cafe.

The restaurant consists of two stores next to each other, connected to each other from the back of the store. The restaurant also has a back yard. The restaurant has access to the basement; the access door is located on the far right of the store.

Note, too, that while NYDN might be speaking generally about the “many a plot” that has been disrupted by mapping the back hallways of NY restaurants, this surveillance has not only disrupted primarily aspirational plots, but it damaged the FBI investigation into the real plot Najibullah Zazi had planned, because one of the NYPD’s own informants tipped the Zazis off to the investigation.

And the invitation declination is interesting, finally, for the way the Muslim leaders framed this issue–as part of a larger choice on the part of the NYPD to neglect law enforcement while it engages in civil rights abuses not just of Muslims, but of people of color and Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Mayor Bloomberg, the extent of these civil rights violations is astonishing, yet instead of calling for accountability and the rule of law, you have thus far defended the NYPD’s misconduct. We, on the other hand, believe that such measures threaten the rights of all Americans, and deepen mistrust between our communities and law enforcement. We are not alone in our belief. Many New Yorkers continue to express a variety of concerns centered on a lack of law enforcement accountability in our city, from stop and frisk procedures in African American and Spanish-speaking communities, to the tactics used in the evacuation of Zuccotti Park.

That’s really what the NYPD surveillance is about: prioritizing the profiling of an entire community (even while periodically and repeatedly stopping and frisking totally innocent people of color), rather than investigating and solving actual crimes.

CIA: No Big Deal That We Trained NYPD to Conduct Domestic Spying

The CIA announced in September it was going to review a narrow aspect of the way CIA officers set up NYPD’s domestic spying agency in the wake of 9/11. As I pointed out then, the investigation was scoped to ignore key parts of the NYPD’s program.

The NYPD program is, by all appearances, a massive ethnic profiling operation that hasn’t been all that effectiveat finding potential terrorists. DOJ ought to be conducting this investigation as a potential civil rights violation.

But instead, CIA will conduct the investigation, meaning the chances the public will know the result are slimmer even than if DOJ conducted it.

[snip]

So is CIA particularly worried? Both James Clapper and the CIA flack appear to be narrowly parsing the potential problem: whether or not there are CIA officers on the streets of NY, whether they are investigating domestically as opposed to overseas (remember, the NYPD is sticking its nose into overseas investigations, too).

And, surprise surprise! CIA’s Inspector General just announced that it found no problem in its narrowly scoped investigation.

The agency’s inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was “no evidence that any part of the agency’s support to the NYPD constituted ‘domestic spying’,” CIA spokesman Preston Golson said.

[snip]

David Buckley, the CIA’s inspector general, completed his review in late October. It’s not clear if his report opens the door for other municipal police departments nationwide to work closely with the CIA in the war on terror.

Let the ineffective, wasteful domestic spying continue then, I guess!

Does the FBI Contend Intelligence Reports on Community Outreach Events Comply with Its Policy?

Yesterday, the ACLU released a report on its ongoing FOIA on what FBI offices around the country are doing to collect intelligence on Muslim communities and particular ethnic groups. The report found a number of cases in which the FBI mixed community outreach with investigative actions:

A 2009 San Jose FBI memorandum describing FBI participation in a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization recorded information about the organization’s expressive activities, the identities of several of its leaders, and the content of conversations with three community leaders and members about their opinions, backgrounds, travel histories, educations, occupations and charitable activities. Contact information for these individuals was forwarded to the FBI’s San Francisco Division.

A 2009 Sacramento FBI memorandum regarding outreach at California State University, Chico documents a conversation with a student about the Saudi Student Association, including its size, purpose, and activities. This memorandum, which includes the student’s social security number, telephone number and address, was sent to the FBI in Washington, DC.

A 2008 San Francisco memorandum to an intelligence file documents community outreach to a Pakistani community organization. The document reports information about the organization’s First Amendment-protected activities and the identities of the organization’s officers, directors and advisors.

A San Francisco FBI memoranda written in 2007 and 2008 by FBI agents who attended Ramadan Iftar dinners under the guise of the FBI’s mosque outreach program documented in several case files the names of attendees, the contents of participants’ conversations and presentations, and the FBI’s collection of pamphlets about different community organizations and identification of associated individuals. The 2008 memorandum shows that an FBI agent collected and documented individuals’ contact information and First Amendment-protected opinions and associations, and conducted internet searches to obtain further information about the individuals in attendance, including, in one instance, the photo of a dinner participant. Both memoranda indicate that the information was “disseminated outside the FBI,” presumably to other law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

A 2007 San Jose FBI memorandum documenting a mosque outreach meeting attended by 50 people representing 27 Muslim community and religious organizations analyzed the “demographics” of those in attendance and identified each individual by name and organization. This memo was sent to three different case files.

In response, the FBI released a statement of its policies on the relationship between its outreach programs and investigative functions. (h/t Ryan Reilly)

Established policy requires that an appropriate separation be maintained between outreach and operational activities and includes several provisions to ensure this is the case:

 

Nine Years after Aluminum Tube Fear-Mongering, Judy Miller Is Back at It

Murdoch’s empire has a funny approach to its own mantra, “never forget.” On what is effectively the ninth anniversary of Judy Miller’s aluminum tube extravaganza, she’s back at work fear-mongering in the WSJ.

This time, she’s serving as NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly’s stenographer. It appears Kelly decided to use the occasion that other anniversary, 9/11, to sow propaganda to counter the work the AP has done exposing Kelly’s CIA-on-the-Hudson.

A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week’s torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They’re also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they’re still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.

Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD’s counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights. [my emphasis]

As is typical for Judy, she parrots the crafty misdirection of her sources.

The police have to factor terrorism into “everything we do,” Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it.

A journalist, after all, would have pointed out that the NYPD’s spooks aren’t simply following leads. as Kelly suggested. Rather they have sought to map out entire communities, based solely on ethnic and racial profiling.

The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray.

Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would “deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities.”

Nor does Judy show any more critical assessment when listing 7 of those 13 plots against NYC that Kelly mentioned, leaving the incorrect impression that Judy’s description that these were “thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts” applies to all these plots.

You can check out the real story of those 7 cases below. As I’ve pointed out, the NYPD failed to discover the two most developed plots. At least from what is publicly known, the NYPD was only involved in 4 of the 7 cases and the ones it led have been criticized as entrapment or mere aspirational plots. And there’s a bit of leakiness from the NYPD that on at least one (and possibly two) occasions has hurt ongoing investigations.

So here’s what New Yorkers have gotten for Ray Kelly’s $3.3 billion investment (assuming the $330 million cited by Judy has remained constant) in his very own spy department.

1) It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said.

The NYPD “undercover officer” in this case, Osama Eldawoody, had infiltrated Siraj’s Bay Ridge Islamic community, getting paid almost $100,000 for his three year effort setting up the plot. He incited Siraj and his young, schizophrenic friend, James Elshafay, in part by showing pictures from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Siraj never had any explosives–Eldawoody was supposed to provide those–and in fact tried to back out of the plot days before he was arrested.

2) Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to “take out the entire building.”

As with the Siraj case, the NYPD had long cultivated Ferhani (according to his lawyers, like Elshafay, he is mentally ill) and Mamdouh; the cops provided the arms used as an excuse to arrest them. The NYPD tripped the sting just days after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Feds declined to take the case, questioning whether the gun deal was really a terrorism case and whether the case would hold up in court. And the grand jury rejected the most serious charges against the men.

3) Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 “who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here.”

Almonte and Alessa were first identified in 2006 via the FBI tip line. They traveled to Jordan (Jordan?! Who goes to Jordan to join a terrorist group?) allegedly to try join terrorists, but failed to do so. It’s unclear when the NYPD first assigned an undercover officer to the two (or why the NYPD did so instead of the FBI), but the first mention of that officer came shortly after the Nidal Hasan attack, so it’s possible the NYPD decided to more aggressively pursue people who had read or listened to Anwar al-Awlaki’s and other English-language jihadist propaganda after that attack. The men definitely did intend to try to join a terrorist group in Somalia (though there are reasons to suspect the undercover officer suggested it; and the evidence suggests they wanted to engaged in jihad there, not in the US) and they did listen to jihadist propaganda. But the bulk of the evidence simply consists of the number of times they trained using gyms or video games and accounts of the number of Camelbak water systems they bought.

4) Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 “Liquid Bomb Plot,” or “Operation Overt,” in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America;

This was, by all appearances, a real, serious plot. While I’m sure the NYPD was alerted to the plot, there’s no reason to believe the NYPD was ever central to the investigation. And Dick Cheney’s sabotage of the British investigation into it would later lead to Najibullah Zazi’s attempted plot.

5) Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009. The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado.

Not only did the NSA and FBI discover this plot, and not only did the NYPD not discover it in spite of using Zazi’s imam as an informant, but they damaged the investigation by tipping Zazi off through that imam.

6) Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River.

This plot was apparently discovered via chat room surveillance, with FBI leading the investigation (though Peter King was quoted as saying the NYPD was involved in the investigation). FBI sources described the plot as aspirational, not the “serious plot” Judy describes. Not only hadn’t suspects traveled to the US, they hadn’t yet done the Pakistani training they hoped would prepare them for the attack. Of particular interest, international cooperation was disrupted on this investigation because someone leaked news of it to the NY Daily News. Given that after that leak NYC’s leaders used it to call for more counter-terrorism funding, and given that some reports insisted the Feds would continue to share information with local authorities, it seems likely that someone in NY leaked it.

7) Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.

And Faisal Shahzad. Judy doesn’t mention that the NYPD’s investigations outside of NYC didn’t include Shahzad’s community in CT nor the hawala he used in Long Island to obtain funding from Pakistan. But at least she included it in her list, implicitly admitting that the CIA-on-the-Hudson she was celebrating didn’t find this plot.

So the story Kelly wanted Judy to tell was that the 1,200 people spying on New Yorkers have done something. And, an obedient stenographer as always, that’s what she uncritically wrote. But even a cursory look behind the claims she makes shows Kelly’s spooks have largely been entrapping dull-witted young Muslim men and hurting FBI investigations with leaks.

Be afraid, Judy says. But it’s clear she’s mistaken about what we need to fear.

Robert Mueller: Civil Liberties Don’t Need a “Fresh” Review

This exchange last Thursday between Senator Al Franken and FBI Director Robert Mueller was frustrating enough–Senator Franken’s questions were the only ones on civil liberties Mueller faced, and the Director seemed pretty miffed to be questioned on the subject in the first place.

But I’m even more troubled by the exchange now that we’ve learned about the FBI’s new investigative guidelines that allow, among other things, database searches without any record and new powers to coerce informants.

After all, Mueller’s response to Franken’s concern about NSLs boasted that they had implemented a compliance system for NSLs and “other areas” where FBI might “fall into the same habits.” (What do you suppose those other areas are? Is he addressing FISC concerns?)

But perhaps as important if not more important, we set up a compliance program to address not just [National] Security Letters, but other areas such as National Security Letters where we could fall into the same, the same pattern, or habits. And so the National Security Letters I believe we addressed appropriately at the time, and it was used as a catalyst to set up a compliance program that addresses a concern in other areas comparable to what we had found with regard to National Security Letters.

Getting rid of the records on database searches would seem to eliminate any compliance system. And Mueller knew he was planning to do so (as did, I presume, Franken) when he gave this answer.

And in response to Franken’s question about infiltration of mosques and peace groups, Mueller assured Franken that FBI complied with its own guidelines.

I’m not certain it needs a fresh, a fresh, uh, look because I’m very concerned whenever those allegations arise. I will tell you that I believe that in terms of surveillances of religious institutions we have done it appropriately and with appropriate predication under the guidelines in the applicable statutes, even though there are allegations out there to the contrary. I also believe that when we have undertaken investigations of individuals expressing their First Amendment rights, we have done so according to our internal guidelines and the applicable statutes. And so, whenever these allegations come forward, I take them exceptionally seriously, make sure our inspection division or others look into it to determine whether or not we need to change anything. And I will tell you that addressing terrorism, and the responsibility to protect against attacks, brings us to the point where we are balancing day in and day out civil liberties and the necessity for disrupting a plot that could kill Americans and it’s something that we keep in mind day in and day out.

But of course, FBI is about to change those guidelines, making it easier for the Agents to attend political meetings undercover and track innocent people. And it doesn’t much matter if FBI complies with its own guidelines if those guidelines support abusive investigations. Mueller is basically insisting that he doesn’t need to reconsider FBI’s actions because FBI complies with its own guidelines and therefore the underlying guidelines themselves don’t need any more scrutiny.

And that canard about balancing civil liberties with the necessity of disrupting a plot (there’s zero evidence of course, that the FBI’s surveillance of peace groups has any tie to a plot, save against political speech)? Not only is this not a zero sum game, but the FBI doesn’t take similar civil liberties-infringing actions to disrupt right wing plots.

When he was gently, respectfully challenged to defend his civil liberties record, Mueller instead resorted to that same old terror fear-mongering. Given the new permissive guidelines, such an attitude is even more troubling.

FBI Aspires to Be the Stasi

Charlie Savage describes changes the FBI is making to its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. On its face, the changes he describes are downright bad. The changes allow FBI agents to:

  • Make a database “assessment” search of a group or person “proactively” without making a record of that search
  • Tail people during a “proactive” assessment more than once
  • Search a potential informant’s trash to gather information to use to force the informant to snitch for the government
  • Attend up to five meetings of a group undercover
  • Eliminate extra supervision of investigations of politicians or journalists if they are witnesses, not suspects, in the investigation
  • Eliminate such protection altogether for “low-profile” blogs

These new rules allow all sorts of fishing expeditions of people based on nothing more than a lead. Moreover, it would make it easy for the FBI to surveil targets with almost no evidence against them until they could be trumped up on some crime.

To some degree they feel like an effort to clean up past illegal activity (as the FBI did with its exigent letters program).

But consider how much worse these guidelines are in consideration of what else we know, or suspect.

We suspect, after all, that our government collects generalized databases of geolocation using Section 215. Since that information need only be “relevant” to a foreign intelligence investigation, it may well include records on all of us.

These new rules would allow the FBI to search such a database without recording that search. Aside from the obvious invitation for abuse–some agent wondering whether his girlfriend was hanging out with his best friend–it also eliminates the evidence that the FBI used such a controversial technique as geolocation as the premise for further investigation. It makes it easier for the FBI to investigate someone because of nothing more than who they know.

Then there’s the new rules allowing the FBI to conduct investigations of what a journalist “witnessed” without supervision. Remember that after the FBI decided James Risen had “witnessed” a leak of classified information, they collected his business records and emails, collecting much of the evidence they needed to indict Jeff Sterling. This rule would seem to virtually eliminate any real protection for journalists’ sources.

Finally, there’s the invitation to snoop through a potential informant’s trash. As I have pointed out, as far back as 2002, the government explicitly described using FISA to collect information, even on potentially unrelated crimes like rape, on potential informants so they could blackmail them into serving as snitches. Taken together, these rules would allow the FBI to search through existing databases (potentially including telecommunications metadata showing who a person communicated with and hung out with, as well as some financial information) to find potential snitches. The agent could search those databases with no apparent limits or record. And then the agent could sift through the potential informant’s trash to get the evidence to blackmail him to become an informant.

These rules seem ripe to snare a bunch of totally innocent people in the FBI’s investigative web. And even if it doesn’t, it may well serve to increase the paranoia of average people.

DHS Gutted Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit after Report Leaked

The Southern Poverty Law Center has an interview with the guy who headed DHS’ domestic terrorism analysis that produced the report on the rise in domestic right wing extremism, Daryl Johnson. (h/t Aravosis) He describes how, after the report was leaked, DHS first backed off its support of the report.

What happened after the leak?

I got to the office, and there were lots of phone calls. Citizens were angry. People wanted to speak to DHS authorities. I was very distraught. I felt I could talk to my peers, but beyond that, I couldn’t speak for myself. The public affairs office was doing all the PR and media response. We weren’t consulted on anything. If I could have responded, I would have said this is why we wrote this. But the response DHS provided just fueled the public’s speculation.

What about Napolitano?

Napolitano initially supported the report. She issued an official press release [on April 14, 2009] that said DHS has the authority to look at all types of threats. And we need to be vigilant. It was very supportive and direct.

Unfortunately, not too many people listened, and they kept applying political pressure. She held a couple of press conferences, trying to put out that same message. And people just kept continuing the pressure, especially after Congress got involved. [Editor’s note: For example, U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), then the ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Napolitano to complain about what he called “a shoddy, unsubstantiated, and potentially politicized work.”]

I don’t know whether her staff advised her to, but she eventually backtracked. The DHS press spokesman came up with this story that it was all unauthorized and orchestrated by a rogue group of analysts. DHS caved in.

And then, DHS effectively gutted the unit focused on domestic terrorism.

What happened to your DHS unit?

When the right-wing report was leaked and people politicized it, my management got scared and thought DHS would be scaled back. It created an environment where my analysts and I couldn’t get our work done. DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies. Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. All of this happened within six to nine months after the furor over the report. Analysts then began leaving DHS. One analyst went to ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], another to the FBI, a third went to the U.S. Marshals, and so on. There is just one person there today who is still a “domestic terrorism” analyst.

Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” eco-terrorists, the whole gamut.

Johnson also reviews that the sole source of sensitivity within DHS came from the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties group, which argued that material support for domestic terrorists did not make one a right wing extremist.

Did your report generate controversy inside DHS?

This is how it happened. I got a tasking from the secretary, which demanded a quick turnaround. We went through all the necessary coordination; many people reviewed the draft and made comments. Several people signed off on the report: two supervisors, the Office of General Counsel, multiple editors, etc. The Office of Privacy signed off, and the Office of Policy had no suggestions.

The secretary doesn’t oversee agency reports. She couldn’t do it, given the number of agencies generating multiple reports a day. As a result, heads of DHS’ agencies have authority to review work, coordinate with other agencies, approve and disseminate reports.

One office raised issues — the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties [CRCL]. At the time, we weren’t required to give them the report, but my boss thought we should run it past them. They had edits, but the main issue related to the definition of right-wing extremism. That office wanted a narrow definition limited to violent groups and individuals. Our subject-matter experts and management felt the definition needed to be broader.

Under CRCL’s definition, if you were in the Klan, burned crosses, had a terrorist in your house and donated money to groups advocating violence, you still would not qualify as a right-wing extremist. Our attorneys basically told them, “We appreciate your input, but we are approving the more broad definition.” This ended up being a sore point with CRCL once the document was released.

Now, I’m actually sort of glad the CRCL spoke up, if only because it shows that someone is reviewing stuff like this.

But CRCL was essentially advocating a double standard for terrorism, such that peaceniks supporting peace in Colombia could be imprisoned for years for offering less support to terrorists than right wingers did. There’s a reasonable historic legal justification for that standard.

But it–along with the way our government chose to stop tracking right wing terrorists when a bunch of right wingers made noise–shows the fundamental lie at the heart of our concern for terrorism.

Please Help Support My Next 525 Posts on Torture

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by June 1st

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Just over two years ago, right around the time I reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month, many of you chipped into the “Marcy Wheeler fund” to support my work; that generosity paid my way until a short time ago. Here’s what that support made possible.

Between May 1, 2009 and yesterday, by my rough count, I wrote 525 posts on torture. I unpacked the torture memos, the CIA IG Report, the OPR Report, and thousands of documents released through FOIA. I showed the bureaucratic games they used to set up our torture program, early efforts to place limits on things like mock execution, followed by more bureaucratic and legal means to get away with violating even those limits. I showed how they hid documents and altered tapes to hide evidence of their torture. I showed how, after CIA and parts of DOJ tried to put limits on torture in 2004, they again used bureaucratic tricks and ridiculous legal documents to reauthorize it. I’ve tracked DOJ’s kabuki claims to investigate torture (though bmaz gets credit for forcing DOJ to admit John Durham’s torture tape investigation had run out the clock on Statutes of Limitation). And I’ve tracked the Obama Administration’s successful efforts to suppress all evidence of torture. And all the while, I’ve relentlessly pushed back against the torture apologists’ lies.

Of course, while writing about torture is a major part mapping out the decline of the rule of law, it’s not the only part. Since May 2009, I’ve written almost 200 posts on wiretapping, almost as many on our Gitmo show trials, posts about state secrets, drones, fusion centers, the forever war metastisizing around the world. I’ve written about Wikileaks and Bradley Manning’s treatment and the banksters and the auto companies.

Cataloging the decline of the rule of law has been exhausting and infuriating. The work has been challenging.

But most of all, it has been humbling. That’s because you made this happen, as much as I did.

In addition to the absolutely brilliant observations you’ve made in comments, your support, two years ago, made this work possible. I’m profoundly grateful that many of you invested your faith and financial support in my work.

And now I’m asking for your faith and financial support again, to support the next 525 posts on torture. This time that support will come in the form of an ongoing Firedoglake membership. By becoming a member of Firedoglake, you will not only give my work some stability over the long term, but support the superb work of Jane and DDay and Jon Walker, and just as importantly, the work of the people backstage who make this all technically possible. And you will become a closer part of our efforts to push our country in the right direction, to return to the rule of law.

Please join Firedoglake today.

I hope some day soon we’ll begin to make headway against our expanding national security state. I hope some day, I won’t feel the need to write a post on torture five days a week. But until then, I feel compelled to write about what is happening to our country. And I can only continue to do that with your help.

Are 95% of People Investigated Under New FBI Guidelines Innocent, but Entered into Database?

The NYT liberated the specific answer to a question that Russ Feingold asked in March 2009, but which DOJ didn’t respond to until November 2010, when Feingold was a lame duck Senator. At issue were new investigative guidelines Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued in late 2008, on his way out the door, which allowed the FBI to investigate Americans for First Amendment reasons so long as that First Amendment reason was not the only reason they were being investigated.

Here’s how the ACLU described the new guidelines:

Under the new “assessment” authority, FBI agents can investigate anyone they choose, so long as they claim they are acting to prevent crime, protect national security, or collect foreign intelligence, with absolutely no requirement of a factual connection between their authorizing purpose and the conduct of the individuals they are investigating. FBI agents can start “assessments” without any supervisory approval, and without reporting to FBI headquarters or the Department of Justice. The Guidelines do not require the FBI to keep records regarding when “assessments” are opened or closed and “assessments” have no time limitation. The FBI can even start an “assessment” of you simply to determine if you would make a good FBI informant. Innocence no longer protects ordinary Americans from being subjected to a wide range of intrusive investigative techniques. The techniques include:

  • collecting information from online sources, including commercial databases.
  • recruiting and tasking informants to gather information about you.
  • using FBI agents to surreptitiously gather information from you or your friends and neighbors without revealing their true identity or true purpose for asking questions.
  • having FBI agents follow you day and night for as long as they want.

So in response to Feingold’s questions about how many assessments had been initiated and closed, FBI responded:

The FBI has initiated 11,667 Type 1 and Type 2 assessments, 3,062 of which are ongoing. 427 preliminary and full investigations have been opened based upon information developed in these Type 1 and Type 2 assessments. 480 Type 3, 4, 5, and 6 assessments have been initiated, of which 422 remain open.

To do the math, 95% of the Type 1 and 2 assessments that have been closed have resulted in no further investigation, suggesting the FBI was on a wild goose hunt.

But here’s the tricky thing: the FBI records on those people can be entered into FBI’s investigative databases!

Even if information obtained during an assessment does not warrant opening a predicated investigation, the FBI may retain personally identifying information for criminal and national security purposes. In this context, the information may eventually serve a variety of valid analytic purposes as pieces of the overall criminal or intelligence picture are developed to detect and disrupt criminal and terrorist activities. In addition, such information may assist FBI personnel in responding to questions that may subsequently arise as to the nature and extent of the assessment and its results, whether positive or negative. Furthermore, retention of such information about an individual collected in the course of an assessment will alert other Divisions or Field Offices considering conducting an assessment on the same individual that the particular individual is not a criminal or national security threat. As such, retaining personally identifying information collected in the course of an assessment will also serve to conserve resources and prevent the initiation of unnecessary assessments and other investigative activities.

So that says the FBI may be entering those 95% innocent people into a database with personally identifiable information.

Now, to be fair, FBI also mandates that these personally identifying information contain a warning that the person “does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time.”

As a result: (i) when records retained in an assessment specifically identify an individual or group whose possible involvement in criminal or national security threatening activity was checked out through the assessment; and (ii) the assessment turns up no sufficient basis to justify further investigation of the individual or group, then the records must be clearly annotated as follows: “It is noted that the individual or group identified during the assessment does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time. It is recommended that this assessment be closed.”

And, as Charlie Savage notes, the numbers FBI gave Feingold may not be all that accurate.

Some aspects of the statistics are hazy, officials cautioned.

Read more

Will the US Share Intelligence with Israel’s New Left Wing Intelligence Initiative?

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s Military Intelligence set up a group several months ago dedicated to collecting intelligence on non-Israeli leftist organizations that criticize Israel.

Military Intelligence is collecting information about left-wing organizations abroad that the army sees as aiming to delegitimize Israel, according to senior Israeli officials and Israel Defense Forces officers.

The sources said MI’s research division created a department several months ago that is dedicated to monitoring left-wing groups and will work closely with government ministries.

[snip]

Military Intelligence officials said the initiative reflects an upsurge in worldwide efforts to delegitimize Israel and question its right to exist.

“The enemy changes, as does the nature of the struggle, and we have to boost activity in this sphere,” an MI official said. “Work on this topic proceeds on the basis of a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of the State of Israel on the one hand, and efforts to harm it and undermine its right to exist on the other.”

The new MI unit will monitor Western groups involved in boycotting Israel, divesting from it or imposing sanctions on it. The unit will also collect information about groups that attempt to bring war crime or other charges against high-ranking Israeli officials, and examine possible links between such organizations and terror groups.

Now aside from thinking generally that this is a bad idea, I’m particularly concerned about whether or not the US will share intelligence with Israel on such issues.

For example, the initiative says it will look for ties between groups critical of Israel and terrorist groups. How is that different from the investigation of a bunch of peace activists’ ties with humanitarian organizations which has suggested the peace activists have ties to Hezbollah? And since we know OLC gave the President and certain Federal Officials the green light to ignore privacy protections on the sharing of grand jury information in the PATRIOT Act, does that mean our government will readily share the information they’re collecting in that grand jury with the Israelis?

And to some degree, the Israelis wouldn’t even have to rely on intelligence sharing, per se. In his book The Shadow Factory, James Bamford spent some time detailing the Israeli ties to key companies in our electronic surveillance, companies like Verint, which intercepts and stores communication, PerSay, which does voice mining, NICE, which does voice content analysis, and Narus, which enables real-time surveillance on telecom lines. Between Verint and Narus, Bamford writes,

Thus, virtually the entire American telecommunications system is bugged by two Israeli-formed companies with possible ties to Israel’s eavesdropping agency–with no oversight by Congress.

And we can find such ties closer to home, too. The company that had been paid by Pennsylvania to track potential threats to critical infrastructure which ended up tracking First Amendment protected speech, the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, is an Israeli company. Among other groups it tracked (one key focus was anti-fracking groups) were peace organizations–precisely the kind of group that might oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The concern that federal and state entities have been paying companies with Israeli ties to collect information on groups that might include the same peace groups targeted by this new initiative in Israel is one thing.

But think of the other logical possibility. Our federal and state governments usually show some embarrassment when they get caught collecting intelligence on peace groups (though that doesn’t seem to stop it from happening over and over again). What will stop those same government entities from asking Israel to collect such information?

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