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Chinese Cyberwar Takeout | Unfilter 98

chris — Wed, 21 May 2014 23:57:15 +0000

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After we breakdown the new NSA revelations, we’ll discuss the escalating “cyber tensions” between the US and China. And the recent high profile indictment that may have pushed China into the hands of Russia, sealing the largest gas deal of the century.

Plus the explosive story from the North West, our follow up, and much more!

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— Show Notes —

NSA is Crazy

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas

In addition to the Bahamas, The Intercept‘s report also revealed NSA’s targeting of mobile networks in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system — code-named SOMALGET — that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country\’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the \”full-take audio\” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas — and to replay those calls for up to a month.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.

If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when. SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact. According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is “deployed against entire networks” in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes “over 100 million call events per day.”

When U.S. drug agents need to tap a phone of a suspected drug kingpin in another country, they call up their counterparts and ask them set up an intercept. To facilitate those taps, many nations – including the Bahamas – have hired contractors who install and maintain so-called lawful intercept equipment on their telecommunications. With SOMALGET, it appears that the NSA has used the access those contractors developed to secretly mine the country’s entire phone system for “signals intelligence” –recording every mobile call in the country. “Host countries,” the document notes, “are not aware of NSA’s SIGINT collection.”

The State Department considers the Bahamas both a \”major drug-transit country\” and a \”major money laundering country\” (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets.

SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence.

Documents published with this article:

WikiLeaks vows to reveal second country where NSA is recording all mobile phone

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CYBER CHINER

U.S. Charges Five Chinese Military Officers With Spying

The U.S. dramatically escalated its battle to curb China’s technology theft from American companies by accusing five Chinese military officials of stealing trade secrets, casting the hacker attacks as a direct economic threat.

China Arrests Former CEO Of JPMorgan Asia

Just one day after the FBI issues arrest warrants for 5 Chinese military officials, Caixin reports that Fang Fang – the former CEO of JPMorgan Asia – has been arrested in Hong Kong by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (or anti-graft agency).

Russia and China seal historic $400bn gas deal

After 10 years of negotiations, Russia\’s Gazprom and China\’s CNPC have finally signed a historic gas deal which will provide the world\’s fastest growing economy with the natural gas it needs to keep pace for the next 30 years.

The total value of the contract is $400 billion, Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller said. However, the price of gas stipulated in the document remains a \”commercial secret.\”

Assuming the overall price of the contract includes only the cost of supplies of Russian gas, then the $400 billion price tag means China will pay about $350 per 1,000 cubic meters. Delivery price for the contract will be tied to market oil prices, Putin said from Shanghai on Tuesday.

Last year, China consumed about 170 billion cubic meters of natural gas and is expected to consume 420 billion cubic meters per year by 2020.

Russia, China sign deal to bypass U.S. dollar

PHOTO: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping celebrate 'gas deal of the century' between Russia, China https://t.co/IMxSdjuyRH pic.twitter.com/6L1iNDQwHM

— RT (@RT_com) May 21, 2014

\”Breaking the dominance of the U.S. dollar in international trade between the BRICS is something that the group has been talking about for some time,\” said Chris Weafer, a founding partner of Macro-Advisory, a consultancy in Moscow. \”The Ukraine crisis and the threats voiced by the U.S. administration may well provide the catalyst for that to start happening.\”

China calls for new security pact with Russia, Iran

China\’s president called Tuesday for the creation of a new Asian structure for security cooperation based on a regional group that includes Russia and Iran and excludes the United States.

Weed Wackers:

More young children getting their hands on vaping devices

In 2010, Washington state had one report of an e-juice poisoning with kids under the age of 6. But the numbers steadily climbed each year to 51 in 2013. And already 39 cases so far in the first quarter of this year.

Fox Panic: Elisabeth Hasselbeck looks dumbfounded as guest says pot isn’t that scary

\”So, why — I think parents would be concerned that this is something that is opening up in the NFL. No?\” she added, nodding her head in expectation of the guest\’s agreement.

Drug lab explosions set car on fire in Puyallup

Authorities in Puyallup, Washington, say a hash oil extraction operation ended in explosions that set a car afire Tuesday night.

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Obama’s NSA Pivot | Unfilter 91

chris — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:49:51 +0000

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Obama is now promising reforms to how the NSA collects phone records, but are the changes as comprehensive as we are being led to believe? We’ll cover some of the big gaps still being left open for the NSA to exploit.

Without missing a beat western powers work together to encircle Russia, and its clear the focus of world security has changed, we’ll bring you up to date on the latest in Ukraine.

Plus our thoughts on the media’s heyday with Flight 370, your feedback, and much much more.

On this week’s episode of, Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

NSA is Crazy

Obama’s New NSA Proposal and Democratic Partisan Hackery

As for the substantive reform, the fact that the President is now compelled to pose as an advocate for abolishing this program – the one he and his supporters have spent 10 months hailing – is a potent vindication of Edward Snowden’s acts and the reporting he enabled.

And now the President himself depicts himself as trying to end it. Whatever test exists for determining whether “unauthorized” disclosures of classified information are justified, Snowden’s revelations pass the test with ease.

That President Obama now proclaims the need to end a domestic spying program that would still be a secret in the absence of Snowden’s whistleblowing proves that quite compellingly.

The House’s NSA Bill Could Allow More Spying Than Ever. You Call This Reform?

While the full draft of the bill isn’t yet public, the Guardian has seen a copy, and its description does not inspire confidence. Under the Rogers and Ruppersberger proposal, slyly named the “End Bulk Collection Act”, the telephone companies would hold on to phone data. But the government could search data from those companies based on “reasonable articulable suspicion” that someone is an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power”. The NSA’s current phone records program is restricted to a reasonable articulable suspicion of terrorism.

A judge would reportedly not have to approve the collection beforehand, and the language suggests the government could obtain the phone records on citizens at least two “hops” away from the suspect, meaning if you talked to someone who talked to a suspect, your records could be searched by the NSA. Coupled with the expanded “foreign power” language, this kind of law coming out of Congress could, arguably, allow the NSA to analyze more data of innocent Americans than it could before.

President Obama’s reported proposal sounds more promising, though we have even fewer details than the Intelligence Committee proposal. The administration’s plan would supposedly end the collection of phone records by the NSA, without requiring a dangerous new data retention mandate for the phone companies, while restricting analysis to the current rules around terrorism and, importantly, still requiring a judge to sign off on each phone-record search made to the phone companies – under what the New York Times described as “a new kind of court order”.

If, for some reason, your phone number happens to be within three hops of an NSA target, all of your calling records may be in the corporate store, and thus available for any NSA analyst to search at will.

Obama’s NSA reform leaves out email, text and social media

But, what seems to be lost amidst today’s victory is that the NSA, right at this very moment, is collecting data via email, text, social media, and mobile apps. This should be a big concern.

US Moral High Ground Completely Gone As China Demands US Stop Spying On Its

Some people forget this, but the day before the very first of the Ed Snowden revelations, there were plenty of headlines about how President Obama was about to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping, with a major focus of the talk being about how Obama wanted to the Chinese to stop their “cyberattacks” on US companies. An anonymous “senior White House official” was quoted at the time saying:

_“We expect this to become a standing issue in the US/China relationship. We believe that all nations need to abide by international norms and follow the rules of the road and that means dealing with actions emanating from your territory.”
_

The NSA Has a Media Kit

The media kit came with a short letter from an NSA spokesperson, which explained that the kit is about the NSA’s “mission and contributions to national defense.”

The kit “may inform your national security beat reporter or team” and “enhance awareness of NSA’s role in defending the nation,” the letter reads. The kit “may inform your national security beat reporter or team” and “enhance awareness of NSA’s role in defending the nation,” the letter reads.

The kit actually consists of two pamphlets. The large one defines the agency as “a unique national asset,” but warns that “most of the details about how NSA contributes to national security can’t be publicly discussed without tipping off America’s adversaries.”

Did Flight 370 Coverage Create new breed cable news beast?

Too much coverage of plane mystery?

So, a new formula: When you find a story you think will sell, pound it, over and over again, to the exception of pretty much everything else. And that’s what CNN did with the missing plane.

Media judgment vanished in Flight MH370 coverage

So we remain glued to the saga of Flight MH370, filling the gaps in our understanding the same way the television networks fill their airtime, by spreading crazy theories, speculating about tiny blobs on satellite images and just generally pretending we know what we’re talking about when we obviously have no clue. We can’t get enough. Precisely because there isn’t enough.

CNN’s Don Lemon: ‘Is It Preposterous’ to Think a Black Hole Caused Flight 370 to Go Missing?

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

Lemon brought this up along with other “conspiracy theories” people have been floating on Twitter, including people noting the eerie parallels to Lost and The Twilight Zone, and wondered, “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility?

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The West Works Together to stop Russia

Barack Obama: Russia is a regional power showing weakness over Ukraine

President Barack Obama has described Russia as no more than a “regional power” whose actions in Ukraine are an expression of weakness rather than strength, as he restated the threat from the G7 western allies and Japan that they would inflict much broader sanctions if Vladimir Putin went beyond annexation of Crimea and moved troops into eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine crisis: Gunfire and explosions as Crimean base is stormed by Russian troops

Machine guns and stun grenades were used in the assault by Russian soldiers as they ended the siege of Belbek military airport in a brutal show of power. The commander of the base, Colonel Yuli Manchur, who had led his men in defying repeated demands for surrender, was arrested and taken away.

Russia Ominously Building Up Troops on Border with Ukraine

Martin reports Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the Russian Defense Minister to ask about the troop movements and was told they are only “exercises.” But no timetable was given for when the “exercises” will end.

BRICS rejects sanctions against Russia over Ukraine

The White House said earlier on Monday that US President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan decided to end Russia’s role in the G8 over the crisis in Ukraine and the status of Crimea.

Meanwhile, the G7 group of top economic powers has snubbed a planned meeting that Russian President Vladimir Putin was due to host in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi in June.

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Cold War 2.0 | Unfilter 90

chris — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:09:17 +0000

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Putin’s next move is revealed, showing once again he’s two steps ahead of Obama and the world. But what is his end-game, how far will the US go, and are we witnessing the launch of the next cold war? As Russia digs in, the US doubles down on their toothless bite. We’ll discuss.

While the corporate media capitalizes on a lost flight, Edward Snowden makes another public appearance, this time with a much more polished message. We’ll look at Snowden’s changing role in the NSA debate, and discuss the outrageous new leaks that came out this week.

Plus your feedback, our follow up, and much much more.

On this week’s episode of, Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

NSA is Crazy

Snowden gets his badge. #TEDActive #TED pic.twitter.com/16cA6FXKuU

— Grant W. Graves (@GrantWGraves) March 18, 2014

Edward Snowden: The Biggest Revelations Are Yet to Come

In a surprise appearance via satellite robot at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver, Snowden said there is still a lot of reporting to be done, including diving deeper into the accusation that the NSA tricks companies into building backdoors into their systems that make data vulnerable to hackers across the world.

“Rights matter because you never know when you’re going to need them,” Snowden said, adding that people should be able to pick up the phone and call their family, send a text to their loved ones and travel by train without worrying about how these events will look to a government years in the future.

Edward Snowden: Here’s how we take back the Internet

Appearing by telepresence robot, Edward Snowden speaks at TED2014 about surveillance and Internet freedom. The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. “Your rights matter,” he say, “because you never know when you’re going to need them.” Chris Anderson interviews, with special guest Tim Berners-Lee.

Edward Snowden – now with a #TED2014 badge – wanders the halls & runs into Sergey Brin at #TED pic.twitter.com/uOHz8KLDdt

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) March 18, 2014

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls – The Washington Post

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency’s top lawyer insists | World news | theguardian.com

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”

Nancy Pelosi Admits That Congress Is Scared Of The CIA

In response to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s speech last week calling out the CIA for spying on her staffers, Rep. Nancy Pelosi was asked to comment and gave what might be the most revealing comments to date as to why Congress is so scared of the CIA:

_“I salute Sen. Feinstein,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference of the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’ll tell you, you take on the intelligence community, you’re a person of courage, and she does not do that lightly. Not without evidence, and when I say evidence, documentation of what it is that she is putting forth.”

Pelosi added that she has always fought for checks and balances on CIA activity and its interactions with Congress: "You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth._

:– Jason H
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Putin Wins this Round

Putin signs Russia-Crimea treaty

Mr Putin told parliament that Crimea, which was taken over by pro-Russian forces in February, had “always been part of Russia”.

Legacy of Iraq Putin in Western criticism: “They tell us that we are violating the norms of international law. First of all, it’s good that they at least remember that international law exists”

“They tell us that we are violating the norms of international law. First of all, it’s good that they at least remember that international law exists,” Putin said, pointing at what he called the U.S. trampling of international norms in wars in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Unknown Snipers Once Again Stir Up Violence

However, there were indications that it was the separatist Crimean government’s recently created “Self Defence Forces” who had actually carried out the fatal attack. Local officials, meanwhile, claimed that “fascist snipers” had fired the first shot from a residential building and one of the injured was one of the defence force members.

Why Russia No Longer Fears the West – Ben Judah – POLITICO

The focus is on Crimea, but next is the fight for Ukraine

Only the criminally naive or the hardened fellow-traveller could maintain that the pro-Russian groups now working to produce chaos, disorientation and violence in cities such as Donetsk and Kharkiv are not actively supported by Moscow.

Feedback:

A slice of Conspiracy Bacon regarding the situation in Urkraine

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