The Collaborators List for Immediate Targeted Action.

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WASHINGTON, DC -- Recent moves to beef up intelligence gathering in
the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks have civil
libertarians concerned that law enforcement agencies will entangle
many law abiding citizens and social justice groups in their
surveillance missions. Intelligence networks are setting their sights
on the Internet, which up to now has had no clear privacy guidelines.
Under the provisions of the inaptly named anti-terrorism act,
"USA-PATRIOT," the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National
Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a
number of other smaller law enforcement agencies are looking for ways
to monitor the Internet and mine useful intelligence from it. And new
technology makes it easier than ever to spy on the Internet.
Although law enforcement and intelligence agencies claim they are
merely looking for information to counter future acts of terrorism,
the definition of "terrorism" is being expanded to cover non-violent
groups that have traditionally used the Internet to marshal
resistance to corporate-inspired globalization. Politicians are
already painting dissent as "unpatriotic" and therefore somehow
linked to terrorism.
Meanwhile, a phalanx of software companies, consultants, and defense
contractors stand to reap billions of dollars over the next few years
by selling surveillance and information-gathering systems to
government agencies and the private sector.
Technology Already in the Hands of Law Enforcement
Law enforcement agencies like the FBI already have at their disposal
a massive information sharing network through which federal, state,
local, and foreign police forces can exchange information on groups
felt to pose a threat. The system, RISSNET, or Regional Information
Sharing System Network, which existed before the September 11th
attacks, recently got a boost when Congress authorized additional
money for it in the USA PATRIOT Act.
RISSNET is a secure intranet that connects 5,700 law enforcement
agencies in all 50 states, as well as agencies in Ontario and Quebec,
the District of Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico,
and Australia. According to sources close to the Washington
Metropolitan Police, data on targeted local groups such as the
Alliance for Global Justice, the anti-World Bank/International
Monetary Fund activist organization, has been shared with other
jurisdictions through RISSNET.
RISSNET has also been used to coordinate the monitoring of the
activities of anti-globalization protestors in Seattle, Quebec City,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Genoa. For example, when
the FBI seized network server logs from Independent Media Center
(IMC) in Seattle during the April 2001 anti-free trade protests in
Quebec City, RISSNET was used to coordinate activities across
jurisdictional boundaries. The IMC, founded during the 1999 WTO
protests, allows activists and independent journalists to post
directly to its site.
State and metropolitan police intelligence units also monitor the web
sites of activist organizations in their jurisdictions. All RISS
intelligence is archived by an Orwellian-sounding entity called
MAGLOCLEN or "Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law
Enforcement Network." There are other regional RISS intelligence
centers around the country with equally mysterious acronyms.
MAGLOCLEN, a nerve center headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania,
distributes political intelligence to all police departments hooked
up to RISSNET.
MAGLOCLEN allows police investigators to link various activist groups
and members through the Link Association Analysis sub-system, a
relational data base that identifies the "friends and families" of
groups and individuals. The Telephone Record Analysis sub-system can
call up records of phone calls of targeted groups and individuals. A
suspect group's banking and other commercial data can be monitored by
the Financial Analysis sub-system. And through a system that would
have been the envy of J. Edgar Hoover, police and federal agents can
also call up profiles that provide specific information on the
composition of organizations, including their membership lists. The
Justice Department has instituted a project called RISSNET II, which
directly links the individual databases contained within the various
RISS centers.
The FBI also runs its own intranet called Law Enforcement On-line or
"LEO," which allows it to communicate intelligence with select other
law enforcement agencies. In the aftermath of September 11th , the
FBI is under pressure to open up LEO to more police agencies so they
can have access to more real-time intelligence. If Attorney General
John Ashcroft lifts restrictions placed on the FBI's collection of
political intelligence, undoubtedly information on the First
Amendment activities of American citizens will wind up in the
Bureau's computer databases.
"There has been no indication that the FBI needs expanded spying
powers," says Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael
Ratner. "We should learn from history; spying on dissent is not only
unlawful but it is abusive."
This kind of surveillance is not new. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI's
Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, was used to gather
personal details on the lives and habits of a wide array of activists
ranging from public figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., actress
Jane Fonda and noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock, to members of local
anti-war and civil rights groups. This information was often used to
disrupt lawful organizing and protest activities.
A modern-day FBI list might include any group deemed "terrorist" by
any law enforcement agencies, the military, or criminal prosecutors.
That could subject organizations as varied -- and unconnected to
terrorism -- as Earth First, Greenpeace, the American Indian
Movement, the Zapatista National Liberation Front, ACT UP, and their
supporters to a wide array of high-tech surveillance and
eavesdropping tools.
Chief among spy agency tools is an e-mail sniffing program known as
Carnivore. Changes brought about by USA-PATRIOT allow federal law
enforcement officials to petition a secretive federal court called
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to tap
phones, read e-mail, or break and enter into homes or offices to
conduct searches and plant bugging devices. These spy activities can
be carried out without proof that an organization has links to
terrorists or foreign intelligence agencies.
To read e-mail the FBI can order an Internet Service Provider to
place a special monitoring computer called Carnivore (now renamed
Data Collection System 1000) on its network servers. The FBI can then
select the e-mail of surveillance targets for capture and storage.
Not content with this device, the FBI now seeks to expand its
surveillance capability to the entire Internet.
Making a Buck off of Government Spying
Companies that are positioning themselves to help the government
surveill the web came out in force at a recent Homeland Security
Conference in Washington. They included Oracle, Microsoft,
Information Builders, Choice Point, Man Tech, AMS, and Booz Allen &
Hamilton. Government speakers from civilian and military agencies all
stressed that they urgently need the technology to store
surveillance-derived intelligence and exchange it with other
agencies. If these corporations step up to the plate on developing
new surveillance, monitoring, and biometric ID systems, they stand to
make billions.
Companies like Top Layer Networks, Inc. of Westboro, Massachusetts,
are developing ways for the FBI to install surveillance systems at a
few key Internet hubs which would allow federal agents to remotely
flip a switch and pound a few keys to begin monitoring the e-mail or
web-based mail of any targeted group or individual. According to
chief Top Layer engineer Ken Georgiades, the firm is working with a
number of partners to develop new standards for the legal
interception of communications at the Internet Service Provider level
and at higher gigabit speeds.
The higher gigabit intercept equipment would be placed at major
Internet backbone hubs in strategic locations like Washington, DC,
the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Georgiades said that the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law
Enforcement Act (CALEA) does not currently extend to the Internet and
only applies to telecommunications companies. However, the fact that
Top Layer and its unspecified partners are ramping up to deliver
CALEA-like wiretapping services for the Internet indicates the FBI
sees the power of CALEA growing beyond phone lines to the web. And
Georgiades pointed out that foreign governments are under no such
constraints and can use Internet snooping equipment under existing
current wiretapping laws.
David Banisar, Research Fellow at Harvard's Information
Infrastructure Project, said such systems "set a dangerous precedent
to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to run the
communications system." He added, "these agencies take an
over-inclusive view of who they think are the enemies and its likely
that civil and human rights groups will, again, be monitored for no
legitimate reason."
The large defense and intelligence consulting and engineering firm
Booz, Allen & Hamilton has not only developed the FBI's Carnivore
capability but it has assisted the bureau in ensuring that all
telecommunications companies engineer their systems to ensure they
are "wiretap friendly." The companies are required by the
Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to ensure the FBI
has access to all forms of telecommunications, including cellular
calls.
What if a target decides to use encryption to protect their e-mail
from interception? That is not a problem for the FBI. Booz Allen &
Hamilton has helped develop a system code-named Magic Lantern, which
permits a virus containing a key logging program to be secretly
transmitted to a recipient. After installing itself on the target's
computer, any time the target types in a password to decrypt a
message, that same password is immediately picked up by Magic Lantern
and transmitted to the FBI. Essentially, the FBI has a virtual master
key to break any encryption program used by a surveillance target.
A companion program to Magic Lantern, code named Cyber Knight, is a
relational database system that compares and matches information from
e-mail, Internet relay chats, instant messages, and Internet voice
communications.
Not to be outdone by the FBI, the CIA has also been extremely active
in developing software than can dig deep within the Internet to
harvest information. The CIA has relied heavily on its wholly-owned
and operated proprietary Silicon Valley company, IN-Q-TEL, to fund
research and development for Internet snooping software. IN-Q-TEL's
President and Chief Executive Officer Gilman Louie is to keynote a
January 2002 Las Vegas seminar on the use of emerging intelligence
technology to search and analyze the web. He is to be joined by Joan
Dempsey, the Deputy Director of the CIA for Intelligence Community
Management. IN-Q-TEL's web page describes the aggressive attitude the
CIA is taking toward ensuring new technologies come complete with the
spy agency's seal of approval, "IN-Q-TEL strives to extend the
Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to
address their priority problems."
Assisting the government in its goals to gather massive amounts of
personal information on citizens and non-citizens, is a company that
owes its very existence to the CIA. Oracle, Inc. Chairman Larry
Ellison has offered to provide to the government free of charge the
database software required to establish an interactive national ID
card system. Oracle got its start when the CIA gave Ellison a
contract in the 1970s to design a system to enable the agency to
store and retrieve massive amounts if information in databases. Not
coincidentally, the code name of that CIA project was "Oracle."
The rush by the government to monitor the Internet has the backing of
a group of federal contract research facilities that have pounded out
report after report warning about the threat of cyberspace to
national security. These "think tanks" include Rand Corporation and
Analytical Services Corporation (ANSER). They are assisted in this
policy laundering effort by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the K Street rest home for former Pentagon,
intelligence, and State Department political appointees.
But all the technology in the world will not protect citizens from
terrorist attacks, unless the government knows how to use the
information effectively. As the government and a few selected
companies and think tanks push for new surveillance laws and more
monitoring of the Internet and telecommunications in general, the
words of Mary Schiavo, the Transportation Department's former
Inspector General and outspoken critic of lax airline security, are
particularly poignant. Speaking in Washington on December 18, Schiavo
pointed out that the "United States already had laws to prevent what
happened on September 11th . . . they weren't being enforced."
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist who covers
intelligence, national security, and foreign affairs. He is also a
Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in
Washington, DC and author of "Genocide and Covert Operations in
Africa 1993-1999" (Mellen Press).

Updated: 12/21/2001
Homeland Security, Homeland Profits
By Wayne Madsen
CorpWatch
PO Box 29344
San Francisco, CA 94129 USA
Tel: 415-561-6568 Fax: 415-561-6493
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