organization:national intelligence

  • Tom Stevenson reviews ‘AngloArabia’ by David Wearing · LRB 9 May 2019
    https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n09/tom-stevenson/what-are-we-there-for

    It is a cliché that the United States and Britain are obsessed with Middle East oil, but the reason for the obsession is often misdiagnosed. Anglo-American interest in the enormous hydrocarbon reserves of the Persian Gulf does not derive from a need to fuel Western consumption . [...] Anglo-American involvement in the Middle East has always been principally about the strategic advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. [...]

    Other parts of the world – the US, Russia, Canada – have large deposits of crude oil, and current estimates suggest Venezuela has more proven reserves than Saudi Arabia. But Gulf oil lies close to the surface, where it is easy to get at by drilling; it is cheap to extract, and is unusually ‘light’ and ‘sweet’ (industry terms for high purity and richness). It is also located near the middle of the Eurasian landmass, yet outside the territory of any global power. Western Middle East policy, as explained by Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to control the Gulf and stop any Soviet influence over ‘that vital energy resource upon which the economic and political stability both of Western Europe and of Japan depend’, or else the ‘geopolitical balance of power would be tipped’. In a piece for the Atlantic a few months after 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne explained that Washington ‘assumes responsibility for stabilising the region’ because China, Japan and Europe will be dependent on its resources for the foreseeable future: ‘America wants to discourage those powers from developing the means to protect that resource for themselves.’ Much of US power is built on the back of the most profitable protection #racket in modern history.

    [...]

    It is difficult to overstate the role of the Gulf in the way the world is currently run. In recent years, under both Obama and Trump, there has been talk of plans for a US withdrawal from the Middle East and a ‘#pivot’ to Asia. If there are indeed such plans, it would suggest that recent US administrations are ignorant of the way the system over which they preside works.

    The Arab Gulf states have proved well-suited to their status as US client states, in part because their populations are small and their subjugated working class comes from Egypt and South Asia. [...] There are occasional disagreements between Gulf rulers and their Western counterparts over oil prices, but they never become serious. [...] The extreme conservatism of the Gulf monarchies, in which there is in principle no consultation with the citizenry, means that the use of oil sales to prop up Western economies – rather than to finance, say, domestic development – is met with little objection. Wearing describes the modern relationship between Western governments and the Gulf monarchs as ‘asymmetric interdependence’, which makes clear that both get plenty from the bargain. Since the West installed the monarchs, and its behaviour is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as #colonial.

    Saudi Arabia and the other five members of the Gulf Co-operation Council are collectively the world’s largest buyer of military equipment by a big margin. [...]. The deals are highly profitable for Western arms companies (Middle East governments account for around half of all British arms sales), but the charge that Western governments are in thrall to the arms companies is based on a misconception. Arms sales are useful principally as a way of bonding the Gulf monarchies to the Anglo-American military. Proprietary systems – from fighter jets to tanks and surveillance equipment – ensure lasting dependence, because training, maintenance and spare parts can be supplied only by the source country. Western governments are at least as keen on these deals as the arms industry, and much keener than the Gulf states themselves. While speaking publicly of the importance of fiscal responsibility, the US, Britain and France have competed with each other to bribe Gulf officials into signing unnecessary arms deals.

    Control of the Gulf also yields less obvious benefits. [...] in 1974, the US Treasury secretary, William Simon, secretly travelled to Saudi Arabia to secure an agreement that remains to this day the foundation of the dollar’s global dominance. As David Spiro has documented in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony (1999), the US made its guarantees of Saudi and Arab Gulf security conditional on the use of oil sales to shore up the #dollar. Under Simon’s deal, Saudi Arabia agreed to buy massive tranches of US Treasury bonds in secret off-market transactions. In addition, the US compelled Saudi Arabia and the other Opec countries to set oil prices in dollars, and for many years Gulf oil shipments could be paid for only in dollars. A de facto oil standard replaced gold, assuring the dollar’s value and pre-eminence.

    For the people of the region, the effects of a century of AngloArabia have been less satisfactory. Since the start of the war in Yemen in 2015 some 75,000 people have been killed, not counting those who have died of disease or starvation. In that time Britain has supplied arms worth nearly £5 billion to the Saudi coalition fighting the Yemeni Houthis. The British army has supplied and maintained aircraft throughout the campaign; British and American military personnel are stationed in the command rooms in Riyadh; British special forces have trained Saudi soldiers fighting inside Yemen; and Saudi pilots continue to be trained at RAF Valley on Anglesey. The US is even more deeply involved: the US air force has provided mid-air refuelling for Saudi and Emirati aircraft – at no cost, it emerged in November. Britain and the US have also funnelled weapons via the UAE to militias in Yemen. If the Western powers wished, they could stop the conflict overnight by ending their involvement. Instead the British government has committed to the Saudi position. As foreign secretary, Philip Hammond pledged that Britain would continue to ‘support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat’. This is not only complicity but direct participation in a war that is as much the West’s as it is Saudi Arabia’s.

    The Gulf monarchies are family dictatorships kept in power by external design, and it shows. [...] The main threat to Western interests is internal: a rising reminiscent of Iran’s in 1979. To forestall such an event, Britain equips and trains the Saudi police force, has military advisers permanently attached to the internal Saudi security forces, and operates a strategic communications programme for the Saudi National Guard (called Sangcom). [...]

    As Wearing argues, ‘Britain could choose to swap its support for Washington’s global hegemony for a more neutral and peaceful position.’ It would be more difficult for the US to extricate itself. Contrary to much of the commentary in Washington, the strategic importance of the Middle East is increasing, not decreasing. The US may now be exporting hydrocarbons again, thanks to state-subsidised shale, but this has no effect on the leverage it gains from control of the Gulf. And impending climate catastrophe shows no sign of weaning any nation from fossil fuels , least of all the developing East Asian states. US planners seem confused about their own intentions in the Middle East. In 2017, the National Intelligence Council described the sense of neglect felt by the Gulf monarchies when they heard talk of the phantasmagorical Asia pivot. The report’s authors were profoundly negative about the region’s future, predicting ‘large-scale violence, civil wars, authority vacuums and humanitarian crises persisting for many years’. The causes, in the authors’ view, were ‘entrenched elites’ and ‘low oil prices’. They didn’t mention that maintenance of both these things is US policy.

    #etats-unis #arabie_saoudite #pétrole #moyen_orient #contrôle

  • Source: Discussions to find successor to Bashir play out as Sudanese president expected to step down ‘soon’ | MadaMasr

    https://madamirror10.appspot.com/madamasr.com/en/2019/04/08/feature/politics/source-discussions-to-find-successor-to-bashir-play-out-as-sud

    Omar al-Bashir will step down as president of Sudan “soon,” after more than three months of popular demonstrations that came to a head in recent days when protesters in the thousands staged a sit-in outside the national Armed Forces headquarters in Khartoum, according to a Sudanese military source.

    According to the military source, who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, the announcement that Bashir will step down is contingent on the military, National Congress Party, security sectors and Arab backers coming to an agreement on a successor. The source adds that this successor may be an interim president who will serve for several months until a president is elected.

    According to the source, this announcement is expected to come within the week.

    Hassan Ismail, the Sudanese minister of information, denied a report published by news outlets that Bashir was close to handing over power to the military.

    Protesters remain stationed outside the military headquarters in Khartoum — which also houses the National Intelligence and Security Service headquarters, Bashir’s official residence and the Defense Ministry — and the situation remains “very tense,” eyewitnesses tell Mada Masr. At dawn on Monday, security forces tried to disperse the sit-in by firing tear gas and live bullets into the air, but the military returned fire, pushing security forces back and allowing protesters to resume their demonstration.

    While the military source says that inner circles of the Sudanese state and international actors are narrowing in on a candidate, the opposition Freedom and Change Coalition announced Monday in a press conference the formation of a committee to engage in dialogue with the military about a transition plan, making it unclear who exactly will fill the vacuum in a post-Bashir landscape.

  • Forget About Siri and Alexa — When It Comes to Voice Identification, the “NSA Reigns Supreme”
    https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voice-recognition-technology-nsa

    Americans most regularly encounter this technology, known as speaker recognition, or speaker identification, when they wake up Amazon’s Alexa or call their bank. But a decade before voice commands like “Hello Siri” and “OK Google” became common household phrases, the NSA was using speaker recognition to monitor terrorists, politicians, drug lords, spies, and even agency employees.

    The technology works by analyzing the physical and behavioral features that make each person’s voice distinctive, such as the pitch, shape of the mouth, and length of the larynx. An algorithm then creates a dynamic computer model of the individual’s vocal characteristics. This is what’s popularly referred to as a “voiceprint.” The entire process — capturing a few spoken words, turning those words into a voiceprint, and comparing that representation to other “voiceprints” already stored in the database — can happen almost instantaneously. Although the NSA is known to rely on finger and face prints to identify targets, voiceprints, according to a 2008 agency document, are “where NSA reigns supreme.”

    It’s not difficult to see why. By intercepting and recording millions of overseas telephone conversations, video teleconferences, and internet calls — in addition to capturing, with or without warrants, the domestic conversations of Americans — the NSA has built an unrivaled collection of distinct voices. Documents from the Snowden archive reveal that analysts fed some of these recordings to speaker recognition algorithms that could connect individuals to their past utterances, even when they had used unknown phone numbers, secret code words, or multiple languages.

    Civil liberties experts are worried that these and other expanding uses of speaker recognition imperil the right to privacy. “This creates a new intelligence capability and a new capability for abuse,” explained Timothy Edgar, a former White House adviser to the Director of National Intelligence. “Our voice is traveling across all sorts of communication channels where we’re not there. In an age of mass surveillance, this kind of capability has profound implications for all of our privacy.”

    Edgar and other experts pointed to the relatively stable nature of the human voice, which is far more difficult to change or disguise than a name, address, password, phone number, or PIN. This makes it “far easier” to track people, according to Jamie Williams, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “As soon as you can identify someone’s voice,” she said, “you can immediately find them whenever they’re having a conversation, assuming you are recording or listening to it.”

    The voice is a unique and readily accessible biometric: Unlike DNA, it can be collected passively and from a great distance, without a subject’s knowledge or consent.

    It is not publicly known how many domestic communication records the NSA has collected, sampled, or retained. But the EFF’s Jamie Williams pointed out that the NSA would not necessarily have to collect recordings of Americans to make American voiceprints, since private corporations constantly record us. Their sources of audio are only growing. Cars, thermostats, fridges, lightbulbs, and even trash cans have been turning into “intelligent” (that is, internet-equipped) listening devices. The consumer research group Gartner has predicted that a third of our interactions with technology this year will take place through conversations with voice-based systems. Both Google’s and Amazon’s “smart speakers” have recently introduced speaker recognition systems that distinguish between the voices of family members. “Once the companies have it,” Williams said, “law enforcement, in theory, will be able to get it, so long as they have a valid legal process.”

    The former government official noted that raw voice data could be stored with private companies and accessed by the NSA through secret agreements, like the Fairview program, the agency’s partnership with AT&T.

    #Reconnaissance_vocale #Reconnaissance_locuteur #Voiceprint #Surveillance

  • Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking : #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
    https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
    La pensée unique aux États Unis de plus en plus sectaire et pesante

    Jackson Lears

    American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

    A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

    The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.

    Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

    It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.

    It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.

    Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.

    Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ He also said in July 2016 that ‘even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, ‪#XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times, but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.

    Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.

    So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.

    Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.

    The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.

    Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.

    The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

    The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

    For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

    that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.

    Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.

    Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.

    The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.

    I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.

    The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.

    Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.

    We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.

    It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.

    On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’

    Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

    This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –

    was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

    #USA #cuture #politique

  • Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking: #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
    https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking

    Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

    [...]

    The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

    The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. #Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

    For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

    [...]

  • The NIC Global Trends Main Report
    https://www.dni.gov/index.php/global-trends/letter-nic-chairman
    Là c’est gratuit, la traduction allemande vient de sortir pour ca. € 25,00

    This version, the sixth in the series, is titled, “Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress,” and we are proud of it. It may look like a report, but it is really an invitation, an invitation to discuss, debate and inquire further about how the future could unfold. Certainly, we do not pretend to have the definitive “answer.”

    Long-term thinking is critical to framing strategy. The Global Trends series pushes us to reexamine key assumptions, expectations, and uncertainties about the future. In a very messy and interconnected world, a longer perspective requires us to ask hard questions about which issues and choices will be most consequential in the decades ahead–even if they don’t necessarily generate the biggest headlines. A longer view also is essential because issues like terrorism, cyberattacks, biotechnology, and climate change invoke high stakes and will require sustained collaboration to address.

    Peering into the future can be scary and surely is humbling. Events unfold in complex ways for which our brains are not naturally wired. Economic, political, social, technological, and cultural forces collide in dizzying ways, so we can be led to confuse recent, dramatic events with the more important ones. It is tempting, and usually fair, to assume people act “rationally,” but leaders, groups, mobs, and masses can behave very differently—and unexpectedly—under similar circumstances. For instance, we had known for decades how brittle most regimes in the Middle East were, yet some erupted in the Arab Spring in 2011 and others did not. Experience teaches us how much history unfolds through cycles and shifts, and still human nature commonly expects tomorrow to be pretty much like today—which is usually the safest bet on the future until it is not. I always remind myself that between Mr. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech and the demise of that empire, the Soviet Union, was only a scant decade, a relatively short time even in a human life.

    Grasping the future is also complicated by the assumptions we carry around in our heads, often without quite knowing we do. I have been struck recently by the “prosperity presumption” that runs deep in most Americans but is often hardly recognized. We assume that with prosperity come all good things—people are happier, more democratic and less likely to go to war with one another. Yet, then we confront a group like ISIL, which shares none of the presumption.

    Given these challenges to thinking about the future, we have engaged broadly and tried to stick to analytic basics rather than seizing any particular worldview. Two years ago, we started with exercises identifying key assumptions and uncertainties—the list of assumptions underlying US foreign policy was stunningly long, many of them half-buried. We conducted research and consulted with numerous experts in and outside the US Government to identify and test trends. We tested early themes and arguments on a blog. We visited more than 35 countries and one territory, soliciting ideas and feedback from over 2,500 people around the world from all walks of life. We developed multiple scenarios to imagine how key uncertainties might result in alternative futures. The NIC then compiled and refined the various streams into what you see here.

    This edition of Global Trends revolves around a core argument about how the changing nature of power is increasing stress both within countries and between countries, and bearing on vexing transnational issues. The main section lays out the key trends, explores their implications, and offers up three scenarios to help readers imagine how different choices and developments could play out in very different ways over the next several decades. Two annexes lay out more detail. The first lays out five-year forecasts for each region of the world. The second provides more context on the key global trends in train.

    The fact that the National Intelligence Council regularly publishes an unclassified assessment of the world surprises some people, but our intent is to encourage open and informed discussions about future risks and opportunities. Moreover, Global Trends is unclassified because those screens of secrets that dominate our daily work are not of much help in peering out beyond a year or two. What is a help is reaching out not just to experts and government officials but also to students, women’s groups, entrepreneurs, transparency advocates, and beyond.

    Many minds and hands made this project happen. The heavy lifting was done by the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group, directed by Dr. Suzanne Fry, with her very talented team: Rich Engel, Phyllis Berry, Heather Brown, Kenneth Dyer, Daniel Flynn, Geanetta Ford, Steven Grube, Terrence Markin, Nicholas Muto, Robert Odell, Rod Schoonover, Thomas Stork, and dozens of Deputy National Intelligence Officers. We recognize as well the thoughtful, careful review by NIC editors, as well as CIA’s extremely talented graphic and web designers and production team.

    Global Trends represents how the NIC is thinking about the future. It does not represent the official, coordinated view of the US Intelligence Community nor US policy. Longtime readers will note that this edition does not reference a year in the title (the previous edition was Global Trends 2030) because we think doing so conveys a false precision. For us, looking over the “long term” spans the next several decades, but we also have made room in this edition to explore the next five years to be more relevant in timeline for a new US administration.

    #USA #politique #impérialisme #CIA #NSA #stratégie

  • La semaine où le monde a frôlé l’apocalypse nucléaire

    http://www.slate.fr/story/149934/la-semaine-ou-le-monde-a-frole-la-guerre-nucleaire

    C’est l’un des grands mystères de la Guerre froide : comment le monde a-t-il fait pour ne pas disparaître lors de la deuxième semaine de novembre 1983 ?

    Une grande partie de notre survie est due aux actions –ou plutôt à l’inaction– d’un officier de l’armée de l’air américaine, Leonard Perroots, mort en janvier dernier. Que nous ayons frôlé l’anéantissement, au contraire, est imputable au bellicisme rhétorique et militaire de Ronald Reagan, à la terreur qu’il a suscité chez les Soviétiques et au tragi-comique d’un malentendu qui aurait pu nous coûter très cher.

    Comme un National Intelligence Estimate, un document du renseignement américain venant d’être rendu public, le détaillait en 1987 :

    « La stratégie de guerre nucléaire [des Soviétiques] […] ne les prédispose pas à faire preuve de retenue s’ils estiment très probable la survenue d’une guerre nucléaire. Ils pensent d’ailleurs qu’une telle réserve pourraient mettre en péril leurs chances dans cette guerre. Les Soviétiques sont très enclins à vouloir tirer les premiers afin de maximiser les dommages infligés aux forces américaines, tout en minimisant les dégâts subis par la société et les forces soviétiques. »

    C’est à ce moment délicat que les États-Unis et leurs alliés décident de simuler une attaque nucléaire sur l’Union soviétique et ses alliés du Pacte de Varsovie. Effectué par des soldats alliés dans toute l’Europe, la simulation, surnommée Able Archer 83, fait partie d’un exercice militaire orchestré par le QG de l’Otan à Bruxelles, le ministère britannique de la Défense et le Pentagone, son objectif est de « tester les procédures de commande et de personnel, avec un accent tout particulier mis sur la transition entre des opérations conventionnelles et des opérations non-conventionnelles, y compris l’usage d’armes nucléaires ».

    C’est là qu’intervient Leonard Perroots, un agent du renseignement militaire américain dont le rôle sera crucial dans cette histoire. Quand débute Able Archer 83, cet homme originaire de Virginie Occidentale a plus de trente ans d’expérience derrière lui dans les services de renseignement de l’US Air Force en Europe. Tout en supervisant Able Archer 83, il remarque que les forces soviétiques (les vraies, pas celles de la simulation) ne cessent d’augmenter leurs niveaux d’alerte. Mais au lieu de réagir comme il se doit, Perroots ne fait rien. S’il avait relevé le niveau d’alerte des dispositifs militaires européens –ce qui n’aurait pas été absurde–, les Soviétiques auraient pu en conclure que exercice était bel et bien une préparation d’attaque déguisée. L’instinct de Perroots permettra d’arrêter la course vers la guerre et sans doute d’éviter une passe d’armes nucléaire.

  • Report : CIA set up task-force in 2016 to investigate possible Russian funding of Trump’s campaign
    http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/trump-russia-dossier-claims-cia-2017-1

    A US counterintelligence task force was established by the CIA in 2016 to investigate possible Russian funding of President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the BBC reported on Friday.

    The task force included the FBI, the Treasury and Justice Departments, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency (NSA).

    It was set up after the director of the CIA, John Brennan, received a recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into Trump’s campaign coffers, the BBC’s Paul Wood reported. The recording was apparently passed to the CIA by the intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States.
    […]
    The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released a statement last Wednesday reiterating that, while the intelligence community had "not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, “part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.

    Cette dernière phrase est incroyable : on ne sait pas si c’est juste une rumeur, mais on diffuse aux décideurs…

    L’article de la BBC dont sont extraites les informations ci-dessus comprend une première moitié sur le kompromat de 2013.

    Trump ’compromising’ claims : How and why did we get here ? - BBC News
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38589427

    Donald Trump has described as “fake news” allegations published in some media that his election team colluded with Russia - and that Russia held compromising material about his private life. The BBC’s Paul Wood saw the allegations before the election, and reports on the fallout now they have come to light.

  • Donald Trump Plans to ‘Pare Back’ Top U.S. Spy Agency
    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/donald-trump-plans-to-slim-down-top-u-s-spy-agency.html

    Donald Trump has spent much of the past month assailing America’s intelligence agencies over Twitter. But now, he’s plotting to hit them where it hurts – right in their budgets.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that the president-elect is working with his top advisors on a plan to “restructure and pare back” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which they believe has become “bloated and politicized.

    Trump’s team is also, reportedly, drafting a similar plan for the CIA – one that would cut staffing at the agency’s Virginia headquarters and send more agents out into the field.

    The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world [is] becoming completely politicized,” an individual close to Trump’s transition operation told the Journal. “They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.

    L’article du WSJ est sous #paywall

    Donald Trump Plans Revamp of Top U.S. Spy Agency - WSJ
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-officials-frown-on-donald-trumps-dismissal-of-u-s-intelligence-148355

    President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said.

  • U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, Versus #Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia
    http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2016/11/10/us-airstrikes-in-iraq-and-syria-versus-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-yemen-an

    On July 1, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a “Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities.” That release claimed that between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, there were 473 strikes that killed between 2,372 and 2,581 combatants and 64 and 116 noncombatants. Therefore, using the average of the range provided by ODNI, 473 drone strikes killed 90 civilians.

    Or, 0.19 civilian is killed for every drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

    And, 0.009 for every airstrike (almost all are manned airstrikes) in Iraq and Syria.

    That means that airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are more than 20 times more likely to kill a civilian than those in Iraq and Syria.

    #victimes_civiles

  • Trump will soon be getting briefings from U.S. spy agencies. It might not go well. - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/05/donald-trump-will-soon-be-getting-briefings-from-u-s-spy-agencies-it-might-not-go-well/?tid=pm_world_pop_b

    Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told my colleague Robert Costa that he is eager to start meeting with U.S. intelligence officials for classified briefings on the nation’s secrets. The feeling may not be mutual.

    The outlandish GOP candidate is not known for discretion or nuanced understanding of global security issues, let alone awareness of the widespread revulsion among U.S. intelligence officials over some of Trump’s positions — including his expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and pledge to resume torturing terrorism suspects.

    Where should the U.S. intelligence community’s first PowerPoint presentation for Trump begin?

    Where should the U.S. intelligence community’s first PowerPoint presentation for Trump begin?

    […]
    Either way, Director of National Intelligence and CIA analysts may have little leeway in what they present. The decision on how much to share and when are traditionally made by the sitting president.

    The candidates get the same information — no favoritism,” said David Priess, a former CIA briefer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” a history of the PDB. “It’s not that the briefer can freelance.

    Pre-election briefings tend to be overviews of spy agency assessments of major topics such as the civil war in Syria. That changes after Election Day, however, when separate teams are sent in advance to the candidates’ headquarters. The winner is given a deeper briefing on more highly classified material, including CIA operations overseas. The other team heads back to headquarters without briefing the losing candidate.

    Analysts selected for such assignments tend to be among the most polished and experienced in the intelligence community. “They are going to be very professional,” Peritz said, but Trump poses unique complications. “He has all kinds of relationships with Chinese investors and Russian investors. He’s spoken very highly of our adversaries. And he’s talked about using torture and waterboarding and attacking people’s families. All these things are going through the analysts’ minds.

  • Sudan: The ICC and the Crime of Genocide

    http://www.noria-research.com/icc-and-the-crime-of-genocide-maneuvering-the-status-of-minority-in-

    The International Criminal Court (hereafter the ICC) first indicted the Sudanese head of State, Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, in March 2009 for the crimes committed by the Sudanese Armed Forces, the National Intelligence and Security Service, and affiliated Arab militias in the course of the Darfur civil war that broke out in early 2003.

    Western media, NGOs or governments have occasionally embraced the depiction of the Darfur conflict made by the Sudanese government.That is: a conflict opposing autochthonous African rebels – mainly factions belonging to the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – to the Arab government of Sudan over issues such as power-sharing, resource-sharing, or traditional land rights. This common representation of the conflict obscures the fact that Arab tribes instrumentalized by the government of Sudan suffer the same structural and systemic discrimination as African tribes do in Darfur. It also begs the question of former transnational affiliations of JEM and SLA factions to Chad or Libya.

    #soudan

  • Saudi Arabia offers to send ground troops to Syria to fight Isis | World news | The Guardian

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/saudi-arabia-ground-troops-syria-fight-isis

    Saudi sources told the Guardian that thousands of special forces could be deployed, probably in coordination with Turkey

    Syrian government troops fire at Isis group positions near Mahin, Syria. Photograph: AP

    Ian Black Middle East editor
    @ian_black

    Thursday 4 February 2016 20.06 GMT
    Last modified on Thursday 4 February 2016 20.07 GMT

    Saudi Arabia has offered for the first time to send ground troops to Syria to fight Islamic State, its defence ministry said on Thursday.

    “The kingdom is ready to participate in any ground operations that the coalition (against Isis) may agree to carry out in Syria,” said military spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asiri during an interview with al-Arabiya TV news.

    #arabie_saoudite #syrie #ei #is #isis

    • Très sceptique sur les capacités militaires des forces, même spéciales, des Saoudiens. J’imagine que l’apport serait surtout financier et en termes de couverture politique.
      Reste que cela relance l’idée qu’il y a dans les cartons d’Erdogan un plan d’invasion du nord de la Syrie.
      Sur le site de l’influent think tank WINEP on trouvait déjà évoqué, il y a peu, un plan américano-turc pour contenir le PYD en prenant du territoire à Da’ich :
      http://seenthis.net/messages/450143
      Patrick Cockburn, il y a quelques jours, se demandait dans The Independent si Erdogan, étant ce qu’il est, ne serait pas tenté par un tel coup de force - avec ou sans l’aval de Washington -, malgré son caractère désormais extrêmement risqué, voire apocalyptique :
      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syrian-civil-war-could-turkey-be-gambling-on-an-invasion-a6844171.htm

      Il se pourrait bien que ce soit ce genre d’espérances, parmi d’autres et fondées ou pas, qui a fait que l’opposition de Ryadh s’est fait un devoir de multiplier les conditions à Genève, malgré la dynamique négative sur le terrain militaire pour eux. Question posée ici par : @nidal : http://seenthis.net/messages/455545#message455976

    • Et le point de vue de Pepe Escobar sur la question :
      http://seenthis.net/messages/457872

      Comme si les choses n’étaient pas assez confuses, tous ces think tanks formant le royaume du baratin aux USA nous rabâchent maintenant qu’il y a une entente entre Washington et Ankara pour ce qui sera, à toutes fins utiles, une invasion turque au nord de la Syrie, sous le prétexte d’écraser Daesh au nord d’Alep.
      C’est de la foutaise. Le jeu d’Ankara comprend trois volets : soutenir ses mandataires turkmènes lourdement meurtris ; assurer le maintien des activités dans le corridor menant à Alep (où passe la cruciale autoroute djihadiste liant la Turquie à la Syrie) ; et surtout empêcher par tous les moyens les Kurdes des Unités de protection du peuple (YPG) de relier Afrin à Kobané et d’unir ainsi les trois cantons des Kurdes syriens à proximité de la frontière turque.
      Tout cela n’a rien à voir avec la lutte contre Daesh. Le plus dingue, c’est que Washington aide actuellement les Kurdes syriens en leur fournissant un appui aérien. Le Pentagone doit ou bien soutenir les Kurdes syriens, ou bien soutenir Erdogan dans son invasion du nord de la Syrie. La schizophrénie n’a pas sa place ici.
      Un Erdogan au désespoir pourrait être assez cinglé pour affronter l’Armée de l’air russe pendant sa supposée invasion. Poutine a dit officiellement que la réponse à toute provocation sera immédiate et fatale. Pour couronner le tout, les Russes et les Américains coordonnent maintenant leurs sorties aériennes au nord de la Syrie.

    •  :)

      Balanche, lui, semble se faire l’avocat d’un envoi de troupes occidentales au sol, pour éviter une escalade turco-russe :
      http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-struggle-for-azaz-corridor-could-spur-a-turkish-interventio

      TURKISH INTERVENTION?

      The Azaz corridor holds major strategic importance for Turkey, but will that be enough to spur direct intervention? If the corridor falls and Ankara fails to respond, rebel groups would interpret it as a sign of weakness, while the international community would view it as capitulation to Russia. With the Azaz border link closed, Russia could then help the Syrian army and its Shiite allies lock other Turkish crossing points between Bab al-Hawa and Jisr al-Shughour, effectively putting the entire province of Idlib in a net. This would mean a near total defeat for Ankara’s Syria policy. And if the corridor’s fall were accompanied by ethnic cleansing of the area’s large Turkmen population (who are ethnic kinsmen of the Turks) or IS violence against civilians, Turkish public opinion would be further riled up.

      Does Putin underestimate Turkey’s offensive capacity? Thus far, the Turkish army has refused to send ground troops into Syria; the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is the agency in charge of Turkish operations there. Russia’s presence will remain the main deterrent to large-scale Turkish intervention, though Ankara would likely escalate indirectly to prevent the corridor’s fall. Then again, Putin may well want Turkey to intervene directly against the PYD, since that could force the Kurdish group to join the Russian alliance and deprive the West of its only efficient actor on the ground against IS. To avoid this disaster, Western countries should send ground troops to occupy strategic locations such as Azaz and fight IS directly.
      The Azaz corridor may or may not fall, but the bigger U.S.-Turkish goal remains securing the Marea-Jarabulus corridor from IS, and any future Azaz-Jarabulus corridor if Azaz falls to the group. In other words, if the corridor is overrun, broader US-Turkish policy in this area (backed by allies from Incirlik) would essentially become two steps forward, one step back.

    • @gonzo : ça renvoie à ta remarque sur le nouveau « statut » des chercheurs devenus militants/lobbyistes, qui se mettent à dire où et quand, à leur avis, il serait bon que nous bombardions. Si ces « experts » se mettaient à expliquer qui et quoi bombarder en Israël, où quelle partie de la Galilée il faudrait occuper stratégiquement, je ne doute pas qu’on se hâterait de les rappeler à un peu plus de sérieux dans leur travail académique.

      Mais p’têt que c’est ce qui est demandé quand on rejoint le WINEP (des conseils de trucs à occuper dans le monde arabe).

    • J’espère ne pas couper cette discussion qui s’amorce - ou plutôt reprend -, et m’intéresse, sur la question du statut des chercheurs.
      En incise donc, les déclarations officielles russes sur les suspicions de préparatifs d’invasion, les dénégations turques, et les Américains qui bottent en touche :
      http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/04/middleeast/turkey-russia-syria-invasion-denial

      Turkish forces aren’t preparing to invade northern Syria — and Russia’s allegation that they are is an attempt to hide Moscow’s crimes in the war-ravaged nation, a source within the Turkish Prime Minister’s office told CNN on Thursday.
      “Simply they are diverting attention from their attacks on civilians as a country already invading Syria,” the source told CNN. “Turkey has all the rights to take any measures to protect its own security.”
      The comments come after Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov was quoted by Russian state news agency Ria Novosti as saying Moscow believes some activity on the Turkish side of the border with Syria indicates preparations for an incursion.
      “The signs of hidden preparation of Turkish armed forces for activities in the territory of Syria we notice more and more,” the general said.
      When asked about the Russian claim at a media briefing, John Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, said: “I’m not certainly not going to get up here and speak to what the Turks are doing on that border on any given day.”

    • @Souriyâm @Nidal, c’est vrai qu’on marche encore et toujours sur des oeufs dès qu’il s’agit de Syrie mais l’intensité du barrage médiatique, quoi qu’on pense de ce p. de régime, est tout de même extraordinaire... Cela étant, je me demande vraiment comment les Turcs peuvent envisager d’entrer en Syrie, avec un soutien aussi flanchant que celui des USA et de l’Otan, et avec les Russes qui seraient assez heureux de venger l’affront subi avec leur pilote (et peut-être plus si ce qui se raconte sur l’avion dans le Sinaï est vrai). En même temps, mais je ne suis pas expert militaire, je ne sais pas si leur dispositif est adapté à ce type d’affrontement. En tout cas, si je ne vais pas pleurer pour les milliers de mercenaires, je voudrais bien espérer que le pire ne va pas arriver aux derniers « fidèles de la révolution syrienne » dont les Turcs vont faire tout ce qui est en leur pouvoir pour jouer les dernières cartes qui leur restent, à savoir fermer leur frontière pour justifier une éventuelle action internationale. Le montage médiatique a déjà commencé, il suffit de lire l’Orient-Le Jour pour le comprendre... Et l’expérience de Kobané, et de toute la guerre, aurait dû montrer aux plus lucides des « purs » qu’il ne fallait pas attendre beaucoup de soutiens désintéressés... Et comme on sait que le régime syrien va se faire un plaisir de donner la plus cruelle leçon possible aux « mutins », dans la bonne tradition familiale, l’avenir s’annonce très rose... Une diplomatie intelligente consisterait à soutenir à fond l’opposition interne, Manaa et Cie, seuls capables de minorer, au moins un tout petit peu, la répression qui s’annonce, ce que les Russes (et peut-être aussi les Iraniens) ne verraient pas forcément d’un mauvais oeil. Mais pour cela, il faudrait être intelligent, et surtout pragmatique. Je ne suis pas certain que Fabius soit l’homme de ce défi-là sur la Syrie en tout cas.

    • @gonzo : Pas grand chose à redire à ça, y compris sur le "p. de régime". Grosso modo sur la même ligne. Quelques remarques complémentaires comme hypothèses de prospective.

      Pour les Turcs et les Saoudiens il y a deux problèmes :
      1° - la tentative du régime et de ses alliés de fermer entièrement la frontière turco-syrienne au nord-ouest. Maintenant que la poche d’Azaz, avec son poste de Bab al-Salam, est isolée du reste des provinces d’Alep et de la province d’Idlib, il ne reste plus que le poste-frontière de Bab al-Hawa. Il existe certainement d’autres lieux de passage mais de moins grande ampleur et beaucoup plus incommode. Si cette tentative venait à réussir, non seulement Alep-est est menacée d‘encerclement mais aussi tous les gains obtenus en 2015 (Idlib, Jisr al-Shoughour, ...) par la coalition Jaysh al-Fatah qu’ils ont montée avec le Qatar. La conséquence serait une disparition complète de ces deux pays de l’équation syrienne.

      2° - La question de ce que deviendra le territoire syrien tenu par Da’ich à l’est. Sans que personne ne le remarque formellement, tout le monde parle et agit en ce moment comme s’ils considéraient qu’à terme il est destiné à disparaître de la région, au moins comme proto-Etat. On sait que les Turcs ne veulent pas voir le YPG kurde et leurs alliés au sein des SDF prendre la bande au nord que Da’ich tient et relier l’ensemble de leurs zones de contrôle. L’autre peur est qu’une fois la frontière nord-ouest sécurisée, l’effort du régime et de ses alliés ne se porte beaucoup plus massivement sur Da’ich en choisissant de laisser subsister des poches « rebelles » au nord-ouest - des chaudrons comme on dit à l’est de l’Ukraine - que l’armée syrienne réduirait au fil du temps, par exemple Idlib voire l’est d’Alep (Jisr al-Shoughour me paraissant, par sa position, plus stratégique qu’Idlib). Impossible alors de s’opposer à ces combats et à terme à la victoire complète du régime.
      Comment justifierait-on devant les opinions publiques occidentales les condamnations du régime et des opérations russes contre Da’ich au profit de « rebelles » qui ne le combattent pas, pour éviter cette victoire totale ? Comment éviter que le YPG ne passe entièrement dans l’orbite russe et ne devienne clairement l’allié du régime (Saleh Muslim avait déjà fait une proposition en ce sens évoquée ici) ? Comment à ce moment là la Turquie pourrait-elle envisager de s’ingérer directement pour écarter les options arrangées entre le régime et le YPG, qu’elles refusent à sa frontière, à part en se remettant directement à soutenir à Da’ich, alors que le contexte international s’y prête de moins en moins ?

      Conclusion :
      A - soit la Turquie tente un coup militaire insensé maintenant au nord-ouest - soit dans la poche d’Azaz, soit côté province d’Idlib - pour écarter le risque immédiat n°1 en profitant et organisant la mise en scène médiatique des souffrances des civils pour prétendre y créer une zone refuge (vieille idée du safe haven façon Benghazi). Il n’est pas sûr que les USA suivent et les machins militaires russes Sukhoï 35, S-400, … ont l’air d’être assez dissuasifs pour qui que ce soit de sensé…
      Un coup moins risqué serait peut-être l’envoi de missiles anti-aériens portatifs (façon afghane avec les Stinger) dans le cadre d’une nouvelle intensification de l’aide à Jaysh al-Fatah avec les Saoudiens.
      B – soit la Turquie abandonne l’idée de s’opposer autrement que par la parole au risque n°1 et s’organise avec les Saoudiens et leur « coalition islamique », en essayant d’y entraîner les USA, pour mettre des « boots on the ground » au nord-est, chez Da’ich, afin de rester dans l’équation syrienne et écarter au moins le risque n°2. C’est aussi très risqué mais les Russes auront plus de mal à s’y opposer.
      C - Soit ils reconnaissent leur défaite et soutiennent un vrai processus de négociations. Mais je n’y crois pas trop.

  • Nokta: Turkish intel delivers 60 foreign fighters to ISIL in Syria
    http://www.todayszaman.com/national_nokta-turkish-intel-delivers-60-foreign-fighters-to-isil-in-sy

    The report, published on Aug. 3, claims that the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) escorted over 60 militants to Syria who wanted to join ISIL. It states that the applicants had previously been incarcerated after being apprehended by the Turkish police for suspected involvement in criminal activities pertaining to terrorism. It is alleged that MİT then collected the applicants from prison and brought them to ISIL handlers in Syria via the Akçakale border gate.

    #Turquie

  • U.S. Releases Images That Purportedly Show Russia Fired Artillery Into Ukraine - ABC News
    http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-releases-images-purportedly-show-russia-fired-artillery/story?id=24732228

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a series of overhead images that, it says, show evidence of artillery fire from the Russian side of the border directed at Ukrainian military positions in Ukraine.

    ODNI claims the images prove Russian military — not Russian-backed separatists operating from across the border — were responsible.

    The following images provide evidence that Russian forces have fired across the border at Ukrainian military forces, and that Russia-backed separatists have used heavy artillery, provided by Russia, in attacks on Ukrainian forces from inside Ukraine,” ODNI wrote atop a four-page file that includes four images ODNI says were taken July 21-26.


    PHOTO: The ODNI says that this slide shows ground scarring at a multiple rocket launch site on the Russian side of the border oriented in the direction of Ukrainian military units within Ukraine.


    PHOTO: The ODNI says that this slide shows ground scarring at two multiple rocket launch sites oriented in the direction of Ukrainian military units.
    Note: sur celle-ci, les traces de départ sont situées en Ukraine.

  • Intelligence Policy Bans Citation of Leaked Material
    NYTimes CHARLIE SAVAGE ,MAY 8, 2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/us/politics/obama-policy-bans-employee-use-of-leaked-material.html

    A new pre-publication review policy for the Office of Director of National Intelligence says the agency’s current and former employees and contractors may not cite news reports based on leaks in their speeches, opinion articles, books, term papers or other unofficial writings.

    Such officials “must not use sourcing that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information,” it says. “The use of such information in a publication can confirm the validity of an unauthorized disclosure and cause further harm to national security.”

    Failure to comply “may result in the imposition of civil and administrative penalties, and may result in the loss of security clearances and accesses,” it says. It follows a policy that James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued in March that bars officials at all 17 intelligence agencies from speaking without permission to journalists about unclassified information related to intelligence.

    #services_secrets #censure #whistleblower #NSA & co.

  • The revolving door between #Google and the Department of Defense
    http://pando.com/2014/04/23/the-revolving-door-between-google-and-the-department-of-defense

    Many of Google Federal’s top managers come from the biggest and baddest military and intel outfits: US Army, Air Force Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Director of National Intelligence, USAID, SAIC, Lockheed… the list keeps going on and on.

    Take Michele R. Weslander Quaid, Google’s Chief Technology Officer of Public Sector and “Innovation Evangelist.”

    Chances are you’ve never heard of her. Neither had I. But Weslander Quaid took the top spot in Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of the seven most powerful women to watch in 2014.

    The reason?

    She helped bring the Google mindset to federal intelligence agencies.

    (...)

    #porte_tournante

  • Turkish government seeks broader power for its spy agency
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/turkish-government-seeks-broader-power-its-spy-agency

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to members of parliament from his ruling AK Party (AKP) during a meeting at the Turkish parliament in Ankara on February 18, 2014. (Photo: AFP - Adem Altan)

    #turkey's government has submitted a bill to parliament to give the country’s spy agency more sweeping powers, a parliamentary source said Thursday. The bill aims to give the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) the authority to carry out missions and surveillance both in Turkey and abroad without the need for a court order. The MIT, which reports to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will also have unlimited access to all documents - from personal information to data on public or banking sector - pertaining to national security. read (...)

    #Top_News

  • Truth in journalism
    http://warincontext.org/2014/02/12/truth-in-journalism

    In a report exemplifying the kind of journalism-as-stenography in which David Sanger specializes, comes this observation about the pressures under which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper now operates — thanks to Edward Snowden:

    The continuing revelations have posed a particular challenge to Mr. Clapper, a retired Air Force general and longtime intelligence expert, who has made no secret of his dislike for testifying in public. Critics have charged that he deliberately misled Congress and the public last year when asked if the intelligence agencies collected information on domestic communications. He was forced by the Snowden revelations to correct his statements, and he has been somewhat more careful in his testimony.

    “Critics have charged” that Clapper perjured himself in Congress, but as studiously impartial journalists, Sanger (and his colleague Eric Schmitt) are incapable of making any determination on that matter.

    #journalisme_MSM

  • US LOOKS AT WAYS TO PREVENT SPYING ON ITS SPYING
    http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-quietly-working-prevent-spying-its-spying

    As the Obama administration considers shifting the collection of those records from the National Security Agency to requiring that they be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, it’s quietly funding research to prevent phone company employees or eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government’s possession. The project is among several ideas that would allow the government to discontinue storing Americans’ phone records, but still search them as needed.

    Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to public documents obtained by The Associated Press and AP interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

  • Edward #Snowden speaks : after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html

    Clapper [Director of National Intelligence] has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.

    “People must communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”

    Sur lui-même (cc @artemis1) :

    Over two days his guard never dropped, but he allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an “ascetic,” he said. He lives off ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and many of them bring books. The books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless library and a window on the progress of his cause.

    “It has always been really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see, people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented, you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”

    In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored attacks on himself.

    “Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s not about me.”

    @kassem a relevé un bout du même passage + trad :
    http://seenthis.net/messages/210910

  • Intelligence contractors donate millions to intelligence watchdogs in Congress
    http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/09/13959/intelligence-contractors-donate-millions-intelligence-watchdogs-con

    According to a new report, however, every single one of those lawmakers has received campaign funds from twenty of the largest contractors providing intelligence services to the Defense Department, which accounted for a signficant portion of the nation’s overall $75.4 billion intelligence budget in 2012.

    The total, election-related benefits for current intelligence committee members, including ex-officio members, provided by companies in the industry they directly oversee amount to at least $3.7 million from the companies’ PACs and employees since 2005, according to the report released Dec. 9 by Maplight.org, a nonpartisan group that investigates campaign finance issues.

    (...)

    In 2007, 70 percent of the overall intelligence budget went to contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but the number of contractors providing core services to the intelligence community has declined by about a third since then. A Senate intelligence committee report in March said that after some recent cutbacks, the intelligence contracting workforce “continues to grow.”

    The issue of whether the contractor donations have any impact on the committees’ oversight functions is pertinent because so much of the committees’ authority is exercised behind closed doors. The Senate Intelligence Committee lists 56 hearings this year on its website, but only three were open to the public. Similarly, the House Intelligence Committee has had fewer than 10 open hearings this year.

    The committees are “supposed to be exercising check and balances,” but they haven’t, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. He noted that in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, for example, the intelligence committees have been “generally supportive” of the intelligence community, while the House and Senate Judiciary committees “have been quite critical on a bipartisan basis.”

    “It says something about the character of the intelligence committees,” Aftergood said.

    Spokesmen for the two intelligence committees, asked by phone and e-mail whether the campaign donations to their members influenced their work, declined to comment. Mikulski, Langevin, and LoBiondo also did not respond to requests for comment.

  • The perils of predicting Pyongyang purges | NK News – North Korea News

    http://www.nknews.org/2013/12/the-perils-of-predicting-pyongyang-purges

    Wednesday’s reports of the dismissal of Jang Song Taek – an influential advisor to the Kim family and uncle of Kim Jong Un – are continuing to fuel speculation that North Korea’s third dynastic ruler is conducting a major purge of the North Korean leadership.

    As well as Jang, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) alleged that two of his confidants were publicly executed late last month. If the rumors are true, Jang and his associates’ removal represents a significant shift at the very top of North Korea’s power structure – where Jang was previously seen as “the power behind the throne” and highly influential.

    #corée_du_nord