Dissident Veteran For Peace

Just over a week ago I decided to see if anyone else had written about a possible Israeli role in the SolarWinds/SUNBURST hack. Unsurprisingly, I could find no evidence of any interest in this subject by the mainstream corporate media since my post last December.

However, about a month after my post Whitney Webb did a much more thorough treatment of the subject on the The Last American Vagabond site. Her article is titled "Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack".

Readers may recall that I highlighted Samanage in the first numbered paragraph of my post. Webb also discusses Christopher Krebs (my paragraph #2) but does not mention the 2017 putative Israeli cell phone surveillance episode in DC that unfolded on Krebs' watch. Webb links to the same Israeli news source I linked regarding the boost in the stock prices of Israeli cybersecurity firms in the wake of the SolarWinds/SUNBURST hack.

In any case, I think Webb did very good work on this story and I recommend that you read it. Here are a couple of paragraphs from her piece:

... As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

Labels: government, Israel, Russia, surveillance, technology, Trump

Dear Google Content Reviewer: This post has been unpublished and approved for publication multiple times since February 2021. Each time I request review and have it approved it is unpublished again within hours. Apparently, something in the post is triggering an algorithm. Can you please tell me why this post keeps getting unpublished?

Below is the trailer from 2015's A Good American featuring William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis, Thomas Drake (a.k.a. the "NSA Four"), and Diane Roark. Below that are several videos featuring Binney.

A Good American—naturally an Austrian, which is to say non-American, film—tells the astounding, largely untold story of pervasive corruption, incompetence, and/or deliberate misconduct by high government officials in utilizing available threat intelligence. One of the most interesting segments was the discussion of how senior commanders ignored intel that predicted the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and were never held accountable.

The heart of the film, of course, is the story of the deliberate sabotage of ThinThread, an in-house US National Security Agency program that in all likelihood would have provided actionable intel to stop the 9/11 attacks had it not been shutdown just weeks earlier. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA opted for a mass surveillance program carried out via lucrative private contracts. The principal developers of ThinThread—which had strong built-in privacy protections—were thwarted in trying to get other government agencies to take up the technology and, eventually, raided by the FBI after they filed a DoD IG whistleblower complaint.

See also:

• Whistle-blower: Trump likely surveilled for some time (video)
• Ex-NSA official: Spies don't believe Russia collusion story (video)

Labels: 9/11, civil liberties, Edward Snowden, film & television, government, military, National Security Agency, surveillance, Trump, United States

See also: "Update: Israel & the SolarWinds/SUNBURST Hack"

Labels: China, government, Israel, Russia, surveillance, technology, Trump, USS Liberty, video

As it turns the 2014 German television interview of Edward Snowden featured below is not widely available. I could only find it on archive.org. Here's an outtake:

If I'm a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who were reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.

Labels: civil liberties, Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, privacy, surveillance, video

All the quotations below are from the 2019 hardcover edition of Permanent Record, the autobiography of Edward Snowden.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they're gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America's response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US Government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. [pp. 77-78]

Comments on the occasion of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011:

The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red-Severe, Orange-High, Yellow-Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation. [p. 204]

To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a "private" business.

There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry's freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone's. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don't need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You're assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don't care about freedom of the press because you don't like to read. Or that you don't care about freedom of religion because you don't believe in God. Or that you don't care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you're a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn't mean that it doesn't or won't have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling. [p. 208]

Labels: 9/11, civil liberties, Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, privacy, quotations, surveillance, War

Labels: civil liberties, National Security Agency, privacy, Remy, surveillance, video

Police in Arlington, WA, recently seized the legally possessed firearms of Kaleb J. Cole, reportedly a "neo-Nazi" member of Atomwaffen. The weapons were seized pursuant to an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) issued by a King County judge at the request of the Seattle Police Department (SPD). Arlington, where Cole apparently lives, is in Snohomish County, WA. The long reach of the SPD, via RCW 7.94, across county lines is notable here.

Under Section 9 (see below) of the ERPO petition, "Violence and Threats", you may notice that it is indicated that Cole has "recently committed or threatened violence" and "shown ... a pattern of acts or threats of violence".


Yet, the SPD produces no conclusive evidence of any of that in its petition. The SPD's evidence consists of the decision by the Canadian government to exclude Cole along with two reports of an "Unknown suspect" placing Atomwaffen decals and two reports of people being offended by Cole engaging in protected First Amendment activities. The videos cited, which I have not seen, are offered in support of the allegation that Cole attended "ORGANIZED FIREARMS TRAINING/HATE CAMPS", neither of which are threats or acts of violence in any meaningful sense. Remarks in a KING 5 report are telling in regard to the lack of evidence of anything but thoughtcrimes here:

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, whose deputy prosecutor Kim Wyatt argued the ERPO case before the judge, said the order to surrender guns is the right tool when law enforcement does not have enough evidence to file a criminal charge.

"In this case, the [FBI] joint terrorism task force had assessed Mr. Cole and said he was somebody who was doing more than thinking and talking about his extremist, violent beliefs, but that he was actually acting on it," Satterberg said.

Yet, if he were "actually acting" on his beliefs in any criminal manner then he would be rightly subject to arrest. The KING 5 report also makes it clear that federal authorities, including the FBI and CBP, were instrumental in bringing this action forward.

The CBP report (Exhibit 3 of the ERPO petition) says: "COLE also stated that he discourages people (other members) from things that are illegal and he stated that his group is not interested in overthrowing the U.S. Government." The ERPO petition also included material about Atomwaffen from the disreputable ADL and SPLC.

If Cole and his associates were carrying out actual criminal activities such as harassment, assault, or homicide or conspiring to do so then I would be the first to say arrest and try them. What we, evidently, have here is a case of someone being deprived of their rights as guaranteed under the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the US Constitution because of his objectionable ideas and his lawful activities in support of those ideas.

The rule of law and civil liberties are only as secure for members of any given majority as they are for a despised minority or individual. Unfortunately, this country has a long history of officials betraying those purported values when it is politically expedient or technically feasible.

In this case federal, state, county, and local authorities have all violated their oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution and I am hoping civil libertarians will put aside their distaste for Cole's ideas long enough to mount a vigorous legal defense of the state and federal constitutions. It would be nice, too, to see some of the oath breakers—including, but not limited to, Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, Seattle Police Sergeant Dorothy Kim, Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, Kim Wyatt, and Dan Satterberg—held accountable at the ballot box and/or in civil court.

Labels: censorship, civil liberties, freedom, government, guns, police, Seattle, surveillance, thoughtcrime

[Setting: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson discuss information in the Edward Snowden "revelations" from "The adventure of the extraordinary rendition" by Cory Doctorow]

Holmes to Watson: "Naturally, as those agencies have commanded more ministerial attention, more freedom of action, and more strings-free allocations with which to practice their dark arts, Mycroft's star has only risen. As keen a reasoner as my brother is, he is not impervious to certain common human failings, such as the fallacy that if one does good, then whatever one does in the service of that good cannot be bad."


Watson to Holmes: "I know that malware is the latest in a series of names for computer viruses, and I suppose that 'malware implantation' is the practice of infecting your adversaries with malicious computer code."

H to W: "Quite so. You may have heard, furthermore, of Edgehill, the top secret Strap 1 program whose existence was revealed in one of the Snowden documents?"

W to H: "It rings a bell, but to be honest, I got a sort of fatigue from the Snowden news—it was all so technical, and so dismal."

H to W: "Tedium and dismalness are powerful weapons—far more powerful than secrecy in many cases. Any bit of business that can be made sufficiently tedious and overcomplexified naturally repels public attention and all but the most diligent of investigators. Think of the allegedly public hearings that demand their attendees sit through seven or eight hours of monotonic formalities before the main business is tabled—or of the lengthy, tedious documents our friends in Brussels and Westminster are so fond of. If you want to do something genuinely evil, it is best for you that it also be fantastically dull."


[An excerpt from Jacob Appelbaum's "Letter to a young selector".]

In war, surveillance is obvious. Watching an enemy seems as natural as the coming of winter. But even in "peacetime," surveillance is never a matter of peace. Proponents of surveillance often paint a picture of terrorism versus surveillance, when in reality surveillance is used in service of nonconsensual control of all kinds, including extreme acts of terror. It is used to more effectively extract economic value, to squelch dissent, to undermine, and to harm with the information gathered. Those who wield power over surveillance systems will use them to more effectively target, censor, murder, and wage war. Surveillance is violence and it makes other kinds of violence more likely.


Source: Laura Poitras, ed., Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living under Total Surveillance (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016) pp. 42, 44, 156.

Labels: Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, surveillance, technology

Okay, as it turns out, not only are the clowns or agents of "The Three Percenters - Original" (TTPO) communicating with their supporters and members through the privacy/communications security nightmare that is Facebook, they are also using a foreign company with deep links to the intelligence services of a foreign country for their web development and maintenance. As you can see from the screenshots below, TTPO web site was built using Wix, an Israeli company, and TTPO uses Wix domain name servers. TTPO also stores files, such as their bylaws, on Wix servers.




As reported by TechCrunch "technology companies, such as CheckPoint, Imperva, Nice, Gilat, Waze, Trusteer, and Wix all have their roots in" Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is "the cyberwarfare division of the Israeli Defense Forces." As TechCrunch reports Unit 8200's "technologists work directly with their 'customers' (the intelligence officers). All of the unit's technology systems, from analytics to data mining, intercept, and intelligence management, are designed and built in-house."

According to Forbes, quoting Yair Cohen, a 33-year Unit 8200 veteran, "90% of the intelligence material in Israel is coming from 8200" and "There isn't a major operation, from the Mossad or any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in."

Wix is known to have been used by BlackCube to carry out operations against US targets. And if you think that Wix has no ongoing relationship with Israeli intelligence then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

As I pointed out previously, TTPO is a target of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, which has been known to maintain extensive intelligence files on its target that it also shares. Israel has major espionage efforts directed at US government and American civilian targets.

So why doesn't TTPO take steps to harden its communications methods and platforms against known and potential risks and hostile actors? Why do they just hand over their internet comms and meta data on a silver platter? Perhaps, they don't really mean it when they say: "Our goal is to utilize the failsafes put in place by our founders to rein in an overreaching government and push back against tyranny." Perhaps they're just clowning. Perhaps they've been compromised.

See also:

• "Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States" AlterNet
• "The Latest Document From the Snowden Trove Highlights Israeli Spying" Newsweek
• "Wix gets caught 'stealing' GPL code from WordPress" Ars Technica
• "Wix.com security flaw places millions of websites at risk" ZDNet
• "How Social Media Led to the Arrest of Phoenix 'Three Percenter' Israel Torres" Phoenix New Times
• "These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database" Forbes
• "Private Mossad for Hire" The New Yorker

Labels: civil liberties, Israel, privacy, surveillance, Three Percenters

"The Three Percenters - Original" (TTPO) bills itself as "a national organization made up of patriotic citizens who love their country, their freedoms, and their liberty [and] are committed to standing against and exposing corruption and injustice." They further claim "We are NOT a militia" and "We are NOT anti-government."

Nevertheless they have been branded by the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which works closely with US law enforcement, as part of the "sector of the radical right known as the 'Patriot' or antigovernment extremist movement". According to the "anti-hate activists" at the SPLC, the " 'Patriot' movement ... includes the militia movement, which comprises groups such as the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, who actively engage in paramilitary activities."

TTPO has been similarly and negatively profiled by Political Research Associates and media outlets (see e.g. here and here and here). They have also been targeted by the Anti-Defamation League, another outfit with a history of legally-actionable defamation and of spying on constitutionally-protected activities.

As a result, TTPO has indicated that the SPLC is an example of an external threat "defined as 'those threats and forces that originate from an individual or organization that does not identify nor ever has identified themselves as belonging to the patriot movement and have aligned themselves in staunch opposition of The Three Percenters Original or our affiliates and allies and have through direct action and behavior sought to harm, damage and defame our members or this organization and allies or affiliates damaging than threats posed to us from an external source." Thus, the SPLC is subject to placement on TTPO's official "Blacklist".

TTPO has also adopted, in their national bylaws, communications standards that designate "the forum located at ​www.thethreepercenters.org" as "the primary method of communications between all levels". The national and all of their state chapters have Facebook pages. The bylaws also state: "The use of Facebook pages should only be used for non-sensitive postings or to alert members to a posting on the forum."

So, I suppose someone thinks TTPO has implemented some level of communications security. Here's what I don't get: If you know you are an active target why would you have any Facebook pages at all for your group at any all level unless you want to give Facebook ("the perfect mass surveillance tool"), the National Security Agency, and law enforcement a great means to collect data on your members and supporters?

The national TTPO Facebook page has 166,922 likes and 166,896 followers—an intel treasure trove giveaway by TTPO, a group that claims: "Our goal is to utilize the failsafes put in place by our founders to rein in an overreaching government and push back against tyranny." I'm neither a supporter nor an opponent of TTPO—I'm not making a judgment about their purposes or activities. I'm highlighting the striking disconnect between what they claim to stand for and what they've done with Facebook.

Update: The Clowns (or is it Agents?) of TTPO

Labels: civil liberties, National Security Agency, politics, privacy, repression, surveillance, Three Percenters

The map below is from a joint 2007 report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International. Unfortunately, they do not have a more recent US report.

Labels: civil liberties, surveillance, technology

Historian Kathryn S. Olmsted's Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1996) is a retrospective look at the 1975-76 work of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the "Church Committee") and the House Select Intelligence Committee (the "Pike Committee"). Olmsted argues that the outcome of these "inquiries show that American political culture of the 1970s was characterized more by continuity than by change." More specifically, she highlights the "resistance to change in three important areas:"

1. Congress "hesitated" to take responsibility to oversee the operations of US intelligence agencies.
2. "The media proved reluctant ... to confront the national security state."
3. The American people "were reluctant to acknowledge unpleasant truths about their secret agencies."

Each of the points above is drawn from Olmsted's "Introduction" and is an example of scholarly understatement, as the body of the book makes clear. For example, as Olmsted, quoting I.F. Stone, notes: "at the end of the investigations, their net effect 'has been to accustom the public mind to the evils exposed and to institutionalize and legalize them by systems of congressional "oversight." ' " Olmsted quotes former CIA head William Colby drawing a similar conclusion.

In the chapter, "Sensational Scoops and Self-Censorship" the case of Mr. Colby shows how the press generally performed a lapdog rather than a watchdog role. Concerning Project Jennifer—the CIA's secret operation with Howard Hughes to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine—Colby is shown to have contacted the editors of major US news organizations and they all "agreed to suppress the story." As Olmsted continues:

For his part, Colby was "totally surprised and pleased" by the media's self-censorship. ... Indeed, "responsibility," not aggressivesness, was the watchword for the post-Watergate press in the case of Project Jennifer. Far from playing the mythic role popularly assigned to them after Nixon's fall, the nation's editors seemed terrified of the potential risks of defying the government.

An earlier chapter, "Trusting the 'Honorable Men' " explores how the media suppressed information about the CIA's involvement in domestic spying and in Watergate affair.

There are mostly villains and anti-heroes—including the American public—in Olmsted's book but a few heroes emerge, too: Otis Pike, Seymour Hersh, Daniel Schorr, Jack Anderson. General Lyman Lemnitzer makes a cameo appearance in the book. In 1962, Lemnitzer, "infuriated [then-Representative Gerald] Ford by deleting some of his questions on the U-2 spy plane program from the transcript of a defense appropriations hearing" and Ford complained, at the time, of a " 'totalitarian' attempt to suppress information." In the wake of Seymour Hersh's expose on CIA involvement in the Chilean coup of Augusto Pinochet, however, Ford appointed Lemnitzer to his Commission on CIA Activities in the United States, along with Lane Kirkland and Ronald Reagan, because Ford knew that Lemnitzer could be trusted to guard the CIA's secrets and power.

I first learned of Lemnitzer while reading a book about the National Security Agency by James Bamford. During the Kennedy administration, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lemnitzer was one of the proponents of Operation Northwoods—a secret plan that included killing American civilians in false-flag operations to be blamed on Cuba. According to a March 13, 1962 memorandum, the point was to create "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The Northwoods memo was supported by the other Joint Chiefs and sent to the Secretary of Defense for his approval. In 1963, Lemnitzer left the JCS to become Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and Operation Northwoods remained secret for 25 years.

Labels: civil liberties, history, media, politics, repression, Ronald Reagan, surveillance, United States