By Thomas Gaist, wsws.org

The president that implicitly promised transparency and a strengthening of citizens’ rights, has instead decimated them.

The Washington Post on Tuesday published new revelations stemming from PowerPoint slides and documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. In an article headlined “NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally,” the Post wrote that “the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans.”

The new information reported by the Washington Post further confirms what has become apparent since the first Snowden leaks emerged last June: the NSA data collection programs are virtually unlimited. The NSA and other state agencies are in possession of a wealth of private and personal information on every individual who uses the Internet or a telephone, both in the US and around the world. All of this is carried out in violation of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

According to the Post, “The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and ‘buddy lists’ from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.”

The PowerPoint slides outline the sprawling dimensions of the NSA’s contact list collection efforts. As reported in the Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.

The slides describe intrusive and aggressive practices by the agency. One slide, with the heading “Data is stored multiple times,” cites three different programs—MARINA, MAINWAY and PINWALE—that sort through Internet metadata, telephone metadata and contact chaining, and written content, respectively.

Another slide presents a case study of a Yahoo account, belonging to a member of the Iranian Quds Force, that was hacked by the NSA in September of 2011. A mass of spam messages subsequently sent from the account led to the accidental collection of huge quantities of data as a result of all the “false connections” generated by the spamming.

[pullquote]As reported in the Washington Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.[/pullquote]

Slide four reads: “Buddy Lists, Inboxes: Unlike address books, frequently contain content data—Offline messages, buddy icon updates, other data included—Webmail inboxes increasingly include email content—Most collection is due to the presence of a target on a buddy list where the communication is not to, from, or about that target.”

Slide four further states: “NSA collects, on a representative day, ~500,000 buddy lists and inboxes—More than 90 percent collected because tasked selectors identified only as contacts.”

Collection of the address lists is carried out, the Post reported, on the basis of “secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.”

The address lists provide the NSA with enormous amounts of data. The Post described the lists as “far richer sources of data than call records alone,” noting that “Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information.”

The address books are reportedly collected overseas, allowing the NSA to skirt nominal restrictions on the collection of data produced by US citizens. As the Post reported, “In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes—in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home.”

The newspaper continued: “The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign intelligence to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States…

“The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points ‘all over the world,’ one official said.”

Reports of address book collection are only the latest in a torrent of revelations that have emerged over the past four months regarding illegal surveillance programs carried out by the NSA and other state agencies. These include:

* Telephone metadata collection, including historical location data produced by cell phones

* PRISM, a global electronic surveillance and data-mining operation

* The Drug Enforcement Agency’s Hemisphere Project, a partnership involving DEA agents and AT&T employees from 2007, which collects vast quantities of telephone data

* The XKeyscore program, which enables the NSA to monitor practically all internet traffic produced globally through a variety of spying activities, including dragnet surveillance of web data and reading of email content

* Boundless Informant, a data analysis system used by the NSA to summarize the results of global data-mining for surveillance managers

* NSA penetration of the European Union computer network and its bugging of EU headquarters and offices in Washington, DC and New York City

* Extensive collaboration between the NSA and Microsoft, with the latter making available for snooping all documents and messages produced by users

* Treasury Department plans to transfer data on Americans’ financial records to the military and intelligence agencies.

These programs have the full support of the political and media establishment, including the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

In an opinion piece published in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the unconstitutional NSA programs with the standard claim that they are necessary to protect the US from terrorism.

Ignoring the voluminous evidence that the programs are used to spy on millions of ordinary Americans who are not remotely linked to terrorist groups, as well as foreign governments, organizations and individuals allied with the United States, Feinstein wrote: “The US must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks against the homeland… The NSA call-records program is working and contributing to our safety… If we end this vital program, we only make our nation more vulnerable to another devastating terror attack.”

This is nothing less than a blanket justification for shredding all democratic rights and instituting a police state. Moreover, it ignores the well established fact that the US is supporting groups in Syria, Libya, and other countries that are allied with Al Qaeda, the supposed target of the surveillance programs.

The real target of the surveillance apparatus is not foreign terrorist groups, but the American people. The ruling class is fearful of the emergence of broad social opposition to its reactionary policies and is building up the means for carrying out political repression on a mass scale.

Wikileaks, The Fifth Estate and Corporate Pop Culture’s War on Whistleblowers

Promotional still from The Fifth Estate, with British actor Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange. Do actors ever understand the political implications of their work, and do they care?

by CHRIS GEOVANIS, Counterpunch
If Walt Disney had actually been cryonically frozen and subsequently revived, he’d be laughing his ass off with delight at the reactionary dreck his namesake film company has just pumped out with The Fifth Estate. The film’s central themes would have been right up the notorious right winger’s alley — from the racist stereotype of the ‘good Arab’ State Department asset to its reactionary embrace of censorship, lest full disclosure ‘harm’ a government busily committing and covering up the evidence of its war crimes.

Wikileaks has opined at some length on both the film’s egregious factual inaccuracies and the lethal intent of its embedded meta-messages. Certainly The Fifth Estate serves as a rolling character assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — in these kinds of toxic infotainment fabrications, it’s always more important to spin the politics of personality than to honestly examine the realpolitic of governments and the corporations they represent. But the film is just one cog in the wider wheel of wholesale assault on advocacy journalism and freedom of the press – and it diligently parrots the larger spin that government authorities use to subvert an uncensored review of their crimes.

Every repressive state worth its salt understands that knowledge is power – and that secrecy is the stronghold of official deceit, with censorship that protects liars and criminals at the heart of some of the worst government crimes of the century. One might ask the Iraqis, whose neighborhoods and lives have been torn apart by the official fictions at the heart of the pretext for U.S. war on that nation in 2003 – but thousands are dead and thousands more are still dying, and the dead, as a rule, don’t speak up much. Whistleblowers, advocates and reporters – including journalists of the civilian/citizen/advocacy sort –commonly take up that task for the maimed and murdered.

Wikileaks has been at the forefront of the contemporary effort to push out uncensored, unvarnished data about crimes that range from corporate banking scandals to the U.S. massacre of Reuters reporters in Iraq. What really catches in the government’s craw? You’re free to review and assess that data unencumbered by big media spin or government censorship. How else to explain the feds’ debauched assault on independent journalist Barrett Brown, who’s facing over 100 years in prison for essentially repasting a publicly available link that contained publicly available data “that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist,” according to his lawyer.

Two principles have formed the core of Wikileaks’ operative mores since its formation: uncensored information and a rigorous commitment to protect the anonymity of the whistleblowers who provide that information. Unsurprisingly, authoritarian governments, criminal corporate enterprises and their toadies just hate these two prongs of potential exposure – full disclosure of primary source material and protection of the sources of that information. Just ask Richard Nixon how he felt about Deep Throat.

For a more contemporary example, just ask the censorship-happy Obama administration, which is increasingly being viewed as the single most hostile government to whistleblowers and freedom of the press in the history of history, at least among our vaunted Western ‘democracies.’ According to analysts like Timothy Karr of Free Press, who calls Obama “like Nixon, but worse,” the Obama administration has drawn liberally from the Nixon playbook to silence and criminalize people and projects who expose government wrongdoing.

Mass media and pop culture are potent tools in the effort to manufacture the public consent that neo-liberal states and their corporate allies require to smooth the course of their economic, political and environmental predations. Note, for example, the corporate news networks’ ceaseless conflation of ‘U.S. interests’ with corporate interests, when so many ‘U.S. interests’ like global trade deals and ‘humanitarian intervention’ are clearly terrible for most people and the planet but great for the quarterly bottom line of corporate interests. Mass media also serves as a critical linchpin in their ruling elite owners’ efforts to frame the pesky obstacles to our repression and disenfranchisement – the whistleblowers who make evidence of their crimes available — as ‘terrorists’, ‘leakers’, criminals and whatnot.

These reinforcing memes of ruling elite agendas pop up as visual punch-lines in a variety of formats, from high-rent docudramas like The Fifth Estate to the endless stream of blabbermouths on the nightly news shrieking over the perils of government leaks – occasionally bookended with B-roll of solemn flag-folding at some poor sucker soldier’s funeral. The broad goal: to twist your heart and turn your head from the real predations made possible by the growing security state and the authoritarian corporate monolith it lives to support.

You don’t have to channel surf much on the idiot box to find shows that reinforce these motifs, whether it’s Showtime’s Homeland franchise and its endless demonization of Arabs and Muslims of every stripe or re-runs of the openly proto-fascist ‘24.’ For that matter, virtually every formula cop show on the market backs up these unabashedly neo-jackboot notions, whether you’re eyeballing bunk science on the endless CSI spin-offs or inadvertently landing on Fox Noise. The messaging is pretty consistent, namely that we mustn’t know too much about what our governments are doing because (choose your favorite canard here): we’re not smart enough to evaluate uncensored information on our own; we help the ‘terrorists’; we endanger our ‘friends’; the ‘bad’ guys win; the government security state really does have ‘our’ best interest at heart.

[pullquote] Mass media and pop culture are potent tools in the effort to manufacture the public consent that neo-liberal states and their corporate allies require to smooth the course of their economic, political and environmental predations.[/pullquote]

That’s what makes big-budget pop culture endeavors like The Fifth Estate so valuable. Non-institutional players unwilling to submit to self-censorship in the service of the government’s notion of what’s good for you are simply intolerable to any jackboot state worth its salt. Fortunately for our overlords, most corporate news outlets are pretty terminally supine to this agenda. Not so Wikileaks and its sources. That’s one reason the U.S. Senate has once again taken up the effort to define ‘legitimate’ journalism, and by extension, who and what remains worthy of protection under what remains of our shredded concepts of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Wikileaks is, of course, excluded from this protection, such that it is – and more and more, it’s less and less.

Make no mistake. The Fifth Estate’s shallow smear campaign has more than Wikileaks in its sites. Besides taking a series of cheap shots at Chelsea Manning, its broad themes undergird the same sorts of distortions that have been used to dirty up whistleblowers and information freedom advocates who include Stratfor whistleblower Jeremy Hammond, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdon, the late, great tech innovator and DemandProgress founder Aaron Swartz, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

This is particularly relevant today as public opinion continues to evolve in the wake of Snowden’s work to reveal the sweeping scope of government spying on our private lives, and as big media continues to scramble to preserve its profit points and control of the flow of information to the public sphere. Hence, the utility of pop culture endeavors that support our ruling elites’ official embrace of repressive tolerance — the kind of state-sanctioned permission designed to preserve the veneer of democratic rights while undercutting any truly serious challenge to a status quo that is literally killing the planet.

At the core of corporate pop culture projects like ‘24’, The Fifth Estate, and media productions of this ilk is the push to advance the demolition of personal privacy while trumpeting the imperatives of state secrecy. This dovetails nicely with the joint corporate/government agenda to sell us shit – be it products or policies – while undermining our ability to gauge that product’s safety, efficacy or morality. While the The Fifth Estate script includes a couple of toss-away bromides about Wikileaks’ commitment to the anonymity of its whistle-blowing information providers, its real thrust is to boost the fabricated ‘common sense’ notion that some information just isn’t ready for prime time consumption, ergo we should rely on ‘responsible’ outlets like The New York Times to parse the data for us. That seems like a pretty dubious strategy, given the Times’ historic embrace of reporters like congenital liar Judith Miller or congenital hidden fister Thomas Friedman.

That ‘not ready for prime time’ frame is particularly important to state/corporate apparatchiks who’ve been screaming about disclosures like the Stratfor and NSA leaks, because the raw data in these kinds of leaks exposes the sweep of corporate/government collusion in our disenfranchisement (and re Stratfor, the pathetic idiocy of their ‘intelligence’). And that kind of government/corporate collusion is truly menacing, whether it’s used to push back public opposition to Keystone or support the bankster/government assault on Occupy Wall Street.

The information that our rulers can’t commodify and manage, they suppress – and projects like Wikileaks monkeywrench that scheme. Above all else, the U.S. government and its corporate allies just cannot abide anonymity, unless you’re on their team. You can’t, after all, crush disclosure and dissent if you can’t ID the dissidents or finger the whistleblowers. Repressive governments work mightily to shut down uncensored, anonymous sources of information and opposition organizing – just ask Athens Indymedia, for example, or Jeremy Hammond, who’s facing a decade in prison for exposing the Stratfor schmucks.

Anonymity undermines managed dissent, and we live in an age of managed dissent. See, for example, the vagaries of the ‘official’ U.S. peace movement, which for more than a decade willfully dismantled itself every 18 months to devote itself to boosterism for Democratic Party candidates like Barak Obama and his congressional cohort of corporate toadies. That’s hardly a recipe for truly radical resistance to state power or state repression – and that’s A-OK with the state, which would just as soon brand you a terrorist and put you on a kill list as allow you to get away with whistleblowing unmolested.

If you think this is hyperbole, then check out the promo posters going up globally for The Fifth Estate. The Benedict Cumberbatch cum Julian Assange image fills the frame and meets you eye to eye, with the word ‘traitor’ pasted just below. Subtle. That harmonizes rather nicely with the beyond-the-pale – but not beyond-the-possible – suggestion from one of the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence officials that Snowden, now that he’s been publicly identified as the NSA whistleblower, ought to be executed.

Wikileaks has just released its own film, a new documentary called Mediastan, which chronicles their largely fruitless efforts to partner with journalists and news outlets from South Asia to the United States to utilize unredacted content that documents U.S. government shenanigans. Mediastan may just concurrently help undermine the funding blockade that hostile corporate governments like the United States have sought to impose on the whistleblowing project. It’s sure as hell a better watch than the corporate smear campaign coming from Walt’s crime partners to a theater near you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Geovanis is a Chicago media activist, advocacy journalist and member of the HammerHard MediaWorks collective. You can reach her via Twitter @heavyseas, via her Facebook page or at chrisgeovanis(at)gmail.com.

Bill Van Auken, wsws.org

Abu Anas al-Liby

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proclaimed Sunday that two covert operations mounted by US Special Forces in Libya and Somalia over the weekend “send a strong message to the world that the United States will spare no effort to hold terrorists accountable, no matter where they hide or how long they evade justice.”

Far from strong, upon any serious examination, the message sent by these operations is decidedly murky.

The abduction in Libya of alleged Al Qaeda operative Abu Anas al-Liby and the abortive Navy Seal raid on a leader of the Al Shabab Islamist militia in Somalia—called off after it encountered stiff resistance—are being treated by the US media as some monumental new battle in the never-ending global war on terror.

Al-Liby, who has been indicted in a US court on charges related to the preparation of the 1998 terror bombings at the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in which 224 people died, is reportedly being held on a US warship in the Mediterranean—beyond the reach of civilian courts and laws and being subjected to unknown methods of interrogation.

Counter-terrorism experts, ex-agents, and former cabinet members are being paraded before the television cameras in an attempt to rope in the American public, implicating it in another criminal operation by Washington.

For all of the blather from these experts, however, on one thing they are totally silent: the extraordinary history of al-Liby, the target of the US raid. A review of his career points to not some implacable struggle between mortal enemies, but rather a falling out between intimate partners. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Mr. al-Liby knows some of those who planned his capture on a first-name basis. His biography provides a glimpse into the bizarre and frightening world of the CIA and its secret wars, dirty tricks and global murders.

Al-Liby joined Al Qaeda when it was fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, providing the foot soldiers for a covert CIA-organized war for regime change against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. At the time, then-US President Ronald Reagan hailed al-Liby and his fellow right-wing Islamist fighters as the “moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers,” while the US government poured some $10 billion into financing the war.

[pullquote]Al-Liby knows some of those who planned his capture on a first-name basis. His biography provides a glimpse into the bizarre and frightening world of the CIA and its secret wars, dirty tricks and global murders.[/pullquote]

This relationship was not merely Reagan’s innovation. For decades before, US imperialism had promoted reactionary Islamist organizations to further US interests and combat socialist and left-nationalist influence in the Middle East and beyond. These layers provided the shock troops for CIA-orchestrated coups in Iran, Indonesia and elsewhere.

After the Afghan war, al-Liby reportedly followed Osama Bin Laden to Sudan, where he continued to enjoy US and Western backing. It was during this period of the 1990s that Al Qaeda funneled Islamist fighters into Bosnia to go into battle for the US-backed Bosnian Muslim regime. In 1993, Bin Laden received Bosnian citizenship and a Bosnian passport. Al Qaeda terrorists were also sent into Kosovo to join the separatist movement against Serbia, which by 1999 was backed by a full-scale US-NATO air war.

In 1995, Sudan forced Bin Laden to send his Libyan followers out of the country in response to pressure from Libya’s head of state, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Shortly afterwards, Bin Laden himself would also be asked to leave, as Sudan faced pressure from Egypt, where an Al Qaeda-affiliated group had attempted to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak.

While Bin Laden went to Afghanistan, al-Liby found political asylum in the United Kingdom, Washington’s closest ally, on the grounds that he would face persecution in Libya.

In 2002, it was revealed that six years earlier al-Liby had been a key figure in a Libyan Islamic Fighting Group cell that was paid large sums of money by the British intelligence service, MI6, for an abortive plot to assassinate Gaddafi.

For nearly two years after the African embassy bombings, al-Liby was able to continue living in the UK, fleeing only in May of 2000 around the time he and 20 other Al Qaeda operatives were indicted in a Manhattan federal court as co-defendants of Osama in the African terrorist attacks. He was placed on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.

After a decade as a wanted terrorist, al-Liby returned to Libya in 2011 and once again was transformed into a US-backed “freedom fighter,” joining one of the Islamist brigades that served as proxy troops for the US-NATO war for regime change.

Why, two years after the toppling and assassination of Gaddafi, al-Liby has been snatched off the streets of Tripoli is by no means clear. His presence there was known to Washington from even before the war began. It is, however, part of a pattern alternating between close collaboration and falling out between the US intelligence apparatus and Al Qaeda. This is a pattern that goes a long way to explaining how the 9/11 terror attacks could take place—i.e., how Al Qaeda operatives known to the CIA could freely enter the US, take flying courses, and prepare the mayhem of September 11, 2001.

This same phenomenon was seen in the September 11, 2012 Al Qaeda assault on US diplomatic and CIA facilities in the eastern Libyan port city of Benghazi, in which the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans lost their lives. Stevens had played the instrumental role in coordinating US military action with operations of Islamists like al-Liby.

In the aftermath of the war, the CIA established a major secret station in Benghazi for the purpose of shipping arms stockpiles to similar elements being employed in the war for regime change in Syria. Something caused the relationship to sour, likely involving resentments among the Islamist militias that they had not been adequately compensated by their American patrons in terms of money or power.

The kidnapping of al-Liby by Delta Force commandos—ostensibly with no notification to the Libya’s nearly powerless interim government—only underscores the real results of a war promoted by the Obama administration as a crusade for human rights, democracy and freedom. Having claimed thousands of lives and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, the war has left Libya in a complete shambles, dominated by Islamist militias and petty warlords, rife with assassinations, kidnappings and torture and its oil production and other core economic activity at a virtual standstill.

Among the most staggering elements of this predatory war is that pseudo-left organizations, from the International Socialist Organization in the US to the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France hailed it as a revolution, acting to politically facilitate the total destruction and subjugation of a former colonial country.

For the last dozen years, Washington has justified military aggression abroad and the implementation of police-state methods at home in the name of a never-ending war on terrorism. Over the course of this period, the Bush and Obama administrations’ principal achievement consists of overthrowing two secular Arab regimes—in Iraq and Libya—and attempting to do the same to a third one in Syria. Each of these interventions has devastated the societies of these countries.

While Al Qaeda did not exist in any of these three countries before US intervention, it now thrives in all three. Tens of thousands from all over the region have been drawn to its banner in the US-backed sectarian war for regime change in Syria.

In the biography of al-Liby, the real character of the so-called war on terror emerges more clearly. It is the byproduct of multiple filthy operations mounted by US intelligence, using elements like Al Qaeda, betraying them and then dealing with the consequences in the form of terrorist operations, which are then turned into the pretext for wars abroad and state repression at home.

Bill Van Auken is a senior member of the Social Equality Party.