Jacob Appelbaum talking:
after the summer of 2010, my life became a little hectic with regard to flying. I do a lot of traveling, working with the Tor Project. And after the summer of 2010, where I gave a speech at Hackers on Planet Earth in place of Julian Assange, I was targeted by the U.S. government and essentially, until the last four times that I’ve flown, I was detained basically every time. Sometimes men would meet me at the jetway, similarly, with guns.
TorProject.org. And the basic idea is that every person in the world has the right to read and the right to speak freely. And using their software, using principles of mutual aid and solidarity it’s possible for everybody to use this anonymity network, spread out across the planet. It’s a thing that’s useful for resisting so-called lawful interception. So, for example, when Mubarak in Egypt wants to wiretap someone, they only see an activist talking to the Tor network; they don’t see that person connecting to Twitter. And that is something that can be used by everybody everywhere to resist so-called lawful interception.
originally, the Tor Project is born from ideas that come from the anonymity community, of which the U.S. military has actually contributed quite heavily to. But since the times of the original onion routing patents, it has become a free software project, where, as far as I know, the U.S. Navy has contributed zero lines of code to it, but certainly lots of good ideas, because they understand, as many other people do, that if everyone has anonymous communication, that means everyone does, and if only special people do, it means that you can tell that those are special people that have special privileges, and you can basically see who they are.
So, for example, the Riseup Collective, which you mentioned earlier on the show, they run a number of tor nodes. And I run some, and many other people do. And as long as you get one good one, you have some of the properties that you need. And this helps people to resist not just so-called lawful interception, but also to resist censorship. So if you can’t see inside of the communications, you can’t selectively discriminate based on the content.
they’ve started detaining me, around a dozen-plus times. I’ve been detained a number of times. The first time I was actually detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. One guy cupped me in a particularly uncomfortable way. Another one held my wrists. They took my cellphones. I’m not really actually able to talk about what happened to those next.
Because we don’t live in a free country. And if I did, I guess I could tell you about it, right? And they took my laptop, but they gave it back. They were a little surprised it didn’t have a hard drive. I guess that threw them for a loop. And, you know, then they interrogated me, denied me access to a lawyer. And when they did the interrogation, they has a member of the U.S. Army, on American soil. And they refused to let me go. They tried—you know, they tried their usual scare tactics. So they sort of implied that if I didn’t make a deal with them, that I’d be sexually assaulted in prison, you know, which is the thing that they do these days as a method of punitive punishment, and they of course suggested that would happen.
they wanted to know about my political views. They wanted to know about my work in any capacity as a journalist, actually, the notion that I could be in some way associated with Julian. They wanted, basically, to know any— Julian Assange, the one and only. And they wanted—they wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq war, the Afghan war, what I thought politically. They didn’t ask me anything about terrorism. They didn’t ask me anything about smuggling or drugs or any of the customs things that you would expect customs to be doing. They didn’t ask me if I had anything to declare about taxes, for example, or about importing things. They did it purely for political reasons and to intimidate me, denied me a lawyer. They gave me water, but refused me a bathroom, to give you an idea about what they were doing.
the U.S. government, as I learned while I was in Iceland, actually, sent what’s called an administrative subpoena, or a 2703(d) order. And this is, essentially, less than a search warrant, and it asserts that you can get just the metadata and that the third party really doesn’t have a standing to challenge it, although in our case we were very lucky, in that we got to have—Twitter actually did challenge it, which was really wonderful. And we have been fighting this in court.
And without going into too much detail about the current court proceedings, we lost a stay recently, which says that Twitter has to give the data to the government. Twitter did, as I understand it, produce that data, I was told. And that metadata actually paints—you know, metadata and aggregate is content, and it paints a picture. So that’s all the IP addresses I logged in from. It’s all of the, you know, communications that are about my communications, which is Bill’s specialty, and he can, I’m sure, talk about how dangerous that metadata is.
I work for a project. Tor Project, TorProject.org. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to creating an anonymity network and the software that powers it. It’s free software for freedom, so that everybody has the right to read and to speak freely. No logins, no payment, nothing. It’s run by volunteers. And I also work at the University of Washington, which technically is a government institution, as a staff research scientist in the Security and Privacy Research Lab.
And how has it changed my work? Well, like Laura, I don’t have important conversations in the United States anymore. I don’t have conversations in bed with my partner anymore. I don’t trust any of my computers for anything at all. And in a sense, one thing that it has done is push me away from the work that I’ve done around the world trying to help pro-democracy activists starting an Arab Spring, for example, because I present a threat, in some cases, to those people. And I have a duty as a human being, essentially, to not create a threat for people. And so, in a sense, the state targeting me makes me less effective in the things they even, in some cases, fund the Tor Project to do, which is to help people to be anonymous online and to fight against censorship and surveillance.
William Binney talking:
first of all, it was a very depressing thing to have happen, that they would turn their—the capabilities that I built for them to do foreign—detection of foreign threats, to have that turned on the people of the United States. That was an extremely depressing thing for me to see happen internally in NSA, that was chartered for foreign intelligence, not domestic intelligence.
And I guess that simply made it more important for me to try to do things to get the government, first of all, to correct its own criminal activity, and I did that by going to the House Intelligence Committees. I also attempted to see Chief Justice Rehnquist to try to address that issue to him, and I also visited the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office—after Obama came into office, by the way, to no avail. I mean, that was before the 2009 joint IG report on surveillance.
Basically it just said you need to have better and more active monitoring of these surveillance programs. It didn’t say anything else. So that just simply did absolutely nothing, because the oversight that’s given to the intelligence community is virtually nonexistent from Congress. I mean, all—they are totally dependent, because they have no way of really knowing what’s happening inside the agencies that are involved. Unless they had people who would come forward and tell them—like me, for example—they would not know those things.
here’s how I viewed Poindexter’s efforts. He was actually pushed out as a test, to test the waters in Congress to see how they would be receptive to something they were already doing. In other words, that process of building that information about everybody getting total information was already happening. And they threw Poindexter out with DARPA, which is the base—an advanced research group. They fund advanced research programs, and that was one of the things they were saying they were doing, but it was actually already happening. And the question was, would it be acceptable to Congress, because they were keeping it very closely held in Congress under the—calling it a covert program. So, that makes it—that would make it a process to find out what the reaction would be, if they exposed to Congress what they were already doing.
NSA is such a huge agency, and there are so many career people in that agency. they’re so afraid to do anything. I mean, they’ve seen what happened to us. They sent the FBI to us. So they’re afraid of being indicted, prosecuted. And even if you win the case, if you’re indicted, you still lose, because you’ve had to hire a lawyer and all, like Tom did and we did. Tom Drake. And so, you lose any way you speak of it. When they have unlimited funds to do whatever they want and you don’t, they can indict you on any number of things, like they tried to do with us.
They drafted an indictment, but they didn’t—they didn’t actually do it, because I found evidence of malicious prosecution. And they dropped it.
the indictment was drawn up against all of us who were on the IG report, and also Tom Drake, because we all met, plus some others, at the Turf Valley Club, and they had all our emails and all of our data to show that we were doing that. Plus they had the view graphs that we prepared there. And their whole objective there was, how could we incorporate to attack Medicare/Medicaid fraud? And so, what we were doing was preparing a joint teaming paper that would be a kind of a incorporation papers. They called that the “conspiracy paper.” They called it a conspiracy, and we were conspiring to do something. But they didn’t—they thought they had all the exculpatory evidence, and they didn’t, because there were two other people there that weren’t—that had never had a clearance, and they were going to participate in this, in this development, so they had all the data, too.
And when I found out, because they told our lawyer that they were preparing to indict us on that as a conspiracy, why, I went through and pulled all the data together. And since Tom had been indicted at that time, and I knew his phone was tapped, so I—by the FBI—I decided I would give him a call and tell him what all the evidence is of malicious prosecution, so that I was speaking to the FBI people, and they would pass the information along to the DOJ, that would say, “Hey, we know this is malicious prosecution. You had the emails that listed the agenda, what we were going to discuss at the Turf Valley Club. You also had all of the slides that we prepared at the Turf Valley Club. And, oh, by the way, if you need to find out when they were prepared, you go in to click on the file, go down to properties, look in the properties and see the date and time that the file was created, and that’s when we were at the Turf Valley Club. So it was direct evidence of what we were doing there. Plus there were two other people that were there that they didn’t have a grudge against, so they weren’t targeting, and they never talked to them at all about what the meeting was about.” So I said, “This is all evidence of malicious prosecution. And you need, Tom, to tell your lawyer about this,” because I was telling the FBI that we’re going to notify all our lawyers what you’re doing. So, and after that phone call, we never heard about the Turf Valley Club again. That was dead.
Tom Drake then, though, faced espionage charges. they created other charges. They said he had aided the enemy, etc. Ultimately, the case went away. Those were all fabricated charges.
federal aviation regulators have acknowledged dozens of universities and law enforcement agencies have been given approval to use drones inside the United States. that’s simply another step in the assembly of information. This is the visual part of the electronic information they’re collecting about people. So here’s your visual part. I mean, you could collect on phone—the cell phones as you move around, and then you can watch them now with a drone.
if you go back and look at Director Mueller’s testimony on the 30th of March to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he responded to a question when he was asked the question of “How would you prevent a future Fort Hood?” He responded by saying that “We have gotten together with the DOD and have created this technology database.” He called it a “technology database.” Utah Bluffdale will be included in that, I’m sure.
And he said, “From this technology base, with one query, we can get all past and all future emails. So we only have to make one query to get it.” That means he gets a target, puts the target in, goes into the base, pulls all past ones, and as they come in, then he gets all future ones. So, that says they’re sharing it across the legal—with the legal authorities, so…
you want to see if your wife is cheating on you? OK, you could do that, yes. That’s right. There’s a—that’s the hazard of assembling all this kind of data. It’s not just the government misusing it, but it’s also people working in it, looking at it, and using it in different ways. They have no effective way of monitoring how people are using that information. They don’t.
primary focus of CIA is supposed to be human intelligence, a human espionage, you know, like spies, recruiting sources around the world, and so on, whereas NSA’s responsibility is electronic intercept and electronic—analysis of electronic communications, to form intelligence from what they’re either saying or how they’re acting, to assess threat. And CIA is to take the people input side, the human input side. That’s their charter, anyway, so… But they also do some of their own intelligence gathering, that there’s kind of some overlap there, which is, I guess, a part of their charter also. I’ve not really looked at the CIA charter that much. But so—but I do know they do some of that. But they’re primarily focused on human intelligence.
There is a conflict or competition between the NSA and the CIA. It’s—the barrier for sharing, the way I would put it, is they’re hesitant to share knowledge and information, because then that’s sharing power, and you no longer control that kind of input to higher authorities for decision making. So when they do that, that’s like releasing knowledge and releasing their power to others. And that’s a barrier for them.
Jacob Appelbaum talking:
I think one thing that is important is to know that if you’re being targeted, these people, they’re, you know, in the weapons industry. It turns out that they also have the ability to break into computers. So, if you’re being targeted, you have to take a lot of precautions. For example, there’s a bootable CD called “Tails,” and the idea is you run Linux, and all your traffic routes over Tor, so you don’t have something like Adobe Flash trying to update itself, and then the NSA or someone else gets to perform what’s called a “man in the middle” attack. Instead of using Gmail, using something like Riseup. I mean, after their server was just seized, I think kicking them some cash is probably a good thing. They provide mutual aid for people all around the world to have emails that are not just given up automatically, or even with a court battle. They try to encrypt it so they can’t give things up. So people can make choices where their privacy is respected, but also they can make technical choices, like using Tor, to ensure, for example, that when data is gathered, it’s encrypted and it’s worthless. And I think that’s important to do, even though it’s not perfect. I mean, there is no perfection in this. But perfection is the enemy of “good enough.”
https://www.torproject.org. And you download a copy of it, and it’s a web browser, for example. And the program, all put together, double-click it, run it, you’re good to go. I would really recommend using something like Jitsi instead of Skype.
So, every time you use proprietary software, you have to ask yourself, “Why is this provided to me for free?” And now that Microsoft is involved with Skype, the question is: Doesn’t Microsoft have some sort of government leaning on them, say the U.S. government, to give them so-called lawful interception capabilities? And of course the answer is going to be yes, right? If you log into Skype on a computer you’ve never used before, you get all your chat history. Well, why is that? Well, that’s because Skype has it. And if Skype can give it to you, they can give it to the Feds. And they will. And everybody that has that ability will. Some will fight it, like Twitter. But in the end, if the state asserts it has the right to get your data, sometimes without you even knowing that that’s happening, they’re going to get it, if they can get it.
So we have to solve these privacy problems with mathematics, because it’s pretty hard to solve math problems with a gun or threat of violence, right? No amount of violence is going to solve a math problem. And despite the fact that the NSA has got a lot of people working on those math problems, you know, podunk cops in Seattle, for example, they’re not going to be able to do that, and the NSA is not going to help them. Now, they may have surveillance capability. They may have IMSI catchers. They might have automatic license plate readers. They have an incredible surveillance state. They’re still not the NSA.
And even if they are sharing information, what we want to do is make whatever information they would share worthless, especially if it’s encrypted. So if your browsing is going over Tor, at least if someone is watching your home internet connection, they don’t see that you’re looking at Democracy Now!’s website. They don’t see that you’re checking your Riseup email. They see that you’re talking to the Tor network. And there’s a lot of value in that, especially because your geographic location is hidden. So when you log into Gmail—let’s say you still use Gmail—but you don’t want Gmail to have a log of every place you’ve been, you use Tor, and Gmail sees Tor, and anyone watching you sees Tor. And that’s really useful, because it means that they don’t get your home address, they don’t know when you’re at work. You make the metadata worthless, essentially, for people that are surveilling you.
William Binney talking:
according to Cheney, it originally started with a Gang of Four. And then, after the 2004 objections in the DOJ, then it expanded to the Gang of Eight. The Gang of Four initially was the majority and minority leader of the Intelligence—House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, the HPSCI and SSCI. Then, after the—and that, on the House side, that was Chairman Goss and Nancy Pelosi, initially, in 2001. I don’t remember the other two on the Senate side. And then it expanded in 2004, it expanded to the Gang of Eight, which added—on top of those four, it added the senior—the majority and minority leaders of the House and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate.
more importantly, it’s a violation of the constitutional rights of every American citizen. And that’s a violation that they took an oath to defend against.
Electronic Frontier Foundation is like the legal version of Riseup, in my mind, you know? They’re really amazing. And they’re fighting these cases, such as NSA v. Jewel. And I think that it is incredibly important basically to point out—and when we want to talk about Congress for a second, I mean, the judiciary has some— hey have some power, but what really—what really matters is that Congress needs to have people like Bill. They need to have people who actually understand the technology questioning people like General Alexander, not people who are bamboozled and fooled by the word “email” or the word “network.” And that’s what we need to do is we need to have people that know speak to the people that don’t know. And that is Congress.
William Binney, served in the NSA for over 30 years, including a time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA’s data-mining program has become so vast that it could “create an Orwellian state.” William Binney worked in a top-secret agency for close to 40 years. quit soon after 9/11 because the agency was spying on the American people, and had helped develop the program that allowed this to happen.
Jacob Appelbaum, computer security researcher. He is a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, a network enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the internet.
Laura Poitras, award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer. She is working on the third part of a trilogy of films about America post-9/11. The first film was My Country, My Country, and the second was The Oath.
– source democracynow.org