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Security

Military Tech Developers Look To Sell Spy Products Domestically

By Ali Gharib on Oct 18, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Spy drones: Coming to a city near you?

The Daily Beast reports that, with cuts to the over-inflated defense budget imminent, firms that develop military technologies are looking to alternative markets. Because the products they develop are sensitive, they’ll likely be prohibited from making sales overseas. So they’re turning to domestic markets, looking to sell surveillance products like unmanned aerial “drone” vehicles — and presumably other goods, including some weapons — to everyone from local and state cops to the Department of Homeland Security:

Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)] group of [Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)], said he has seen this day coming. [...]

“A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection.”

“All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” said ACLU senior fellow Jay Stanley.

Indeed, local law enforcement agencies — and even national ones — have, at times, been less-than-responsible with their surveillance, particularly of American Muslims, raising the potential for further abuse with a greater technological reach.

At Wired’s Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman’s investigative reporting has revealed a deep-seeded anti-Muslim bias among training materials used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. That bias has also sometimes manifested itself in local law enforcement. A recent groundbreaking investigation by the AP revealed that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance was highly focused on Muslim Americans in the city, including one local cleric who was a counter-terror partner to local and national law enforcement.

Technologies are likely to aid these type of biased surveillance. Stanley, who authored a forthcoming report on the use of drones in American cities, told the Daily Beast that police need to exercise restraint “because the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to use a thermal imaging technology to peer into someone’s home without a warrant.” But this didn’t stop the NYPD in 2004 from using infrared technology from recording a “couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse” as they had an “intimate moment.” The only reason the case came to light was because it surfaced in separate court proceedings.

Likewise, technologies developed for the military have come into much closer contact with Americans on U.S. soil. In 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, authorities deployed Long Range Acoustic Devices — or sound cannons — against demonstrators, but never fired them. That changed during the 2009 demonstrations against the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, when sound cannons were fired on protesters.

And these are just a few of the ways that military technologies can, as the ACLU’s Stanley put it, be “turned inward upon the American people.” It seems like a good space for some oversight: Lawmakers should be cautious about the implications of transferring war-making technologies over to domestic forces for use against Americans. Keeping the profit margins high for these organs of the military industrial complex — at a time when everyone is suffering from belt-tightening — is no excuse to risk encroaching on the rights of ordinary Americans.

Security

VIDEO: FBI Counterterrorism ‘Expert’ Compared Islam to Star Wars Deathstar

By Eli Clifton on Sep 20, 2011 at 11:20 am

In video acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, FBI counterterrorism trainer William Gawthrop, who in previously leaked documents was shown to have lectured that the Muslim prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader,” tells his audience that “[After 9/11] we wasted a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon, the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevent… if you have an Islamic motivation for actions.”

Ackerman had previously called attention to Gawthrop’s presentation materials for his lectures at the FBI’s training facilities in Quantico, Virginia, in which the counterterrorism “expert” suggested that Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, hadn’t moderated its “militancy considerations” since approximately 622 B.C.

Gawthrop, much like many of the experts discussed in the Center for American Progress’s new report Fear, Inc., believes that Islam is, at its roots, a violent ideology at war with the West.

In the newly released video, Gawthrop tells his audience at the New York Metro Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan — an FBI sponsored public-private partnership — that even overthrowing Islamic states, like Iran, who threaten the U.S. and its allies, is insufficient since “there are still internal forces that will seek to exert Islamic rule again.”

Watch it:

Gawrthrop, as he advocates in his PowerPoint presentations, pushes for a direct confrontation with Muslims that challenges the underpinnings of their religion and Koranic teaching. Referring to a slide with the words “Holy Texts” and “Clerics,” Gawthrop says:

If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there. That’s a critical vulnerability.

Ackerman and Shachtman report that a different video, which they were unable to recover before it was deleted, showed Gawthrop criticizing outreach programs to Muslims communities:

If we were going back to the 1940s, this would be like the Army and Navy asking Japanese-Americans to participate in the intelligence and operations paths trying to understand the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. That didn’t happen,

The FBI says that Gawthrop gave his last presentation to Bureau counterterrorism classes in April 2011, but the newly disclosed videos would suggest that Gawthrop has continued his career as a terrorism “expert” at FBI sponsored events for at least another two months.

Yglesias

FBI Peddling Anti-Muslim Views To Counterterrorism Trainees

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 15, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Call it the Failing Bureau of Investigations:

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

Spencer Ackerman has the documents to prove it.

Obviously, the FBI just shouldn’t be doing this nonsense. But it does remind me of the puzzling metaphysics of terrorism. For the past decade, any time there’s a spree killing or the like in the West, the question is immediately asked, “Was it terrorism?” That always appears to mean, “Was the killer a Muslim.” Then we all have a big to-do on blogs about semantics. This seems to me to be the path down which a “counterterrorism unit” decides that its special mission is to train everyone to be super-suspicious of devout American Muslims.

Security

New Documents Reveal FBI’s Islamophobic Counterterrorism Training

By Eli Clifton on Sep 15, 2011 at 11:25 am

Counterterrorism agents at the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia are being taught that “devout” Muslims are more likely to be “violent” and that American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, according to training materials acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman. (In fact, mosques have been found to be a deterrent to the spread of terrorism.)

An FBI spokesperson told Ackerman that the slides were no longer in use but dates on the slides would suggest that they were used at least until March 21.

The documents offer a violent interpretation of Islam in which “Any war against non-believers is justified” and a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.” A particularly blunt slide shows a comparison of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, depicting how they have moderated their “militancy considerations” over time:

The information in the slides is clearly Islamophobic and completely ignores the fact that Islamic extremism, while a national security concern worthy of sober discussion, is a limited problem within the United States and hardly a frequent phenomenon in Muslim communities. A recent Duke terrorism study showed that since 9/11, the U.S. has experienced only 33 deaths from Muslim terrorism while 150,000 murders have occurred during the same time.

Several of the slide presentations are the work of an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop who, in 2006, before he joined the Bureau, gave an interview to WorldNetDaily, in which he said “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the FBI has given a stage to noted Islamophobes. In July, Ackerman identified that an FBI terrorism presentation recommended anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer’s book, “The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.”

Spencer, who is profiled in the Center for American Progress’ new Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” operates the blog Jihad Watch and co-founded the Stop Islamization of America group with Pamela Geller. Spencer is one of the core “misinformation experts” discussed in “Fear, Inc.” and has promoted the conspiracy theory that President Obama may be a Muslim. Notably, Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik cited Spencer’s work 162 times in his manifesto.

While the FBI is developing a track-record for giving pseudo-experts like Robert Spencer and William Gawthrop an opportunity to spread their Islamophobic views which demonize all Muslims, the truth is that Muslim communities have served as some of the most important allies for the FBI in their efforts to combat Muslim terrorists.

Update

The Seattle Times reports on a controversial community outreach workshop in Seattle intended to create better relationships between law enforcement and Seattle’s Muslim, Arab, East African and Sikh communities. The event, held earlier this month, took a turn for the worse when an FBI agent showed a PowerPoint slide about state-sponsored terrorism which included a photo of a man that the audience believed was a Shia Islamic leader. When asked if the photo was of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, a leader of the Iranian revolution, the agents said the photo was too small and they didn’t know the identity of the man. “That offended members of the audience even more, and one of them compared it to calling the pope a terrorist or serving pork to Muslims,” reports the Seattle Times. A Seattle Police Department detective at the meeting said that, “the community is tired of seeing their images represented” in presentations about terrorism.

Update

Muslim Advocates — a professional association of approximately 500 Muslim lawyers, law students and other legal professionals — announced they have sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General requesting an immediate investigation into the FBI’s counterterrorism training. The letter can be viewed here.

Update

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) tells Wired’s Spencer Ackerman that “there is no room in America for the lies, propagated by al-Qaida, that the U.S. is at war with Islam, or the lie propagated by others that all Muslims support terrorism.”

CNN’s Brian Todd talked to Former FBI Assistant Director Tom Fuentes who told CNN that the publication of the slides could play into the hands of al-Qaeda for propaganda purposes and could diminish the FBI’s ability to get the America Muslim community to help in investigations.

Watch it:


Alyssa

‘Bones’ Takes The Next Pop Culture Stab At Treason

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 6, 2011 at 11:07 am

I wrote back in May that I thought one of the core problems with Bones is that the show doesn’t know how to do a Big Bad — more specifically, the kind of Big Bad that would require the extended efforts and concentration of a bunch of highly trained and highly paid crime-fightin’ federal scientists who, as we know, actually have other day jobs. So I’m glad to see that the show is at least going to give that sort of effort another shot with a case that is set up to bring out big core emotions in everyone’s favorite ruggedly handsome teddy bear, Seeley Booth.

This season, the main target will be a hacker who, as a form of misguided activism, shuts down Defense Department communications systems, putting American troops deployed overseas in danger. Obviously this will make our good friend Booth apoplectic, particularly at a time when he’s coping with the stresses of being a new dad. But it also seems like a cleverer-than-usual way to strip some of the complications out of the Bradley Manning case so we can debate some of the issues suggested by it in more usefully abstract terms. We can, and should, and are having debates about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, detention conditions, and speedy trials all inspired by what we’ve learned of Manning and of how he’s been treated since he was caught leaking material to WikiLeaks.

But I think it’s worthwhile for pop culture to do some thinking about the circumstances under which we think it’s OK for people to break or bend the law, and I hope Bones will provide a scenario for discussing that by setting up a villain who is convinced what he’s doing is worth the collateral damage, and has clear malign intent. Our cop shows routinely condone the idea that it’s OK to use violence against suspects as long as the people who are employing violence as a tactic are a) officers of the court, b) have pure intentions, c) will feel bad about it afterwards. Bones spends a lot of time justifying Booth’s use of violence to protect Brennan and other members of the lab, usually when he has to kill a suspect or threaten someone who has made Brennan less safe. Our pop culture also suggests that we’re okay with aberrant and aberrational behavior if it’s in defense or service of family, and that we’re excited to sympathize with anti-heroes who employ violence fairly regularly as long as they’re quirky or relatable in some other way.

But mainstream shows and movies, not surprisingly, tend to treat people who betray the government or employ violence against state actors as if they’re insane, misguided as to the tactics that will be effective, or at minimum, totally deluded in their political beliefs. I’m not saying I sympathize with the decisions that Bill Ayers made when he joined the Weather Underground, or that U.S. should have ended the war in Vietnam on the grounds that Mark Rudd was outraged by it to the point of insensibility (the war was wrong for much sounder reasons) but I do think it’s a little strange that there’s a reluctance to acknowledge that the American government can make decisions can make people feel panicked and powerless and urgent. It would be worthwhile to have slightly more than zero television shows and movies that actually took the time to explore the root motivations of people who do powerfully anti-social things. And more than that, good storytelling should have villains actually test your resolve to side with the hero.

Alyssa

Review: ‘Columbiana,’ Sweet And Sour

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 26, 2011 at 6:37 pm

A programming note: I’m finally on the list for movie screenings in the DC area, so expect more reviews. And feel free to treat these reviews both as guidance on whether or not to go see something, and as open threads for discussion over the weekend.

I went to see Colombiana, a movie about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, the moral justifications for assassinating Bernie Madoff, and Zoe Saldana’s naughty bits, hoping for a slickly nasty little late-summer action movie in a year that’s been somewhat short on female heroines, and on gleeful darkness. There are bits and pieces of an entertaining film here, notably an interagency rivalry between the CIA and the FBI and a downturn revenge fantasy. But Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie, and the delightfully named Olivier Megaton, who directed it, are probably right to trust that the sight of Saldana dancing braless in her apartment or setting off plastic explosives in her skivvies are selling points in and of themselves.

The movie begins with a reasonably promising, if somewhat overacted, premise. After watching her family murdered by a drug cartel, a young Cataleya (a promising Amanda Stenberg, who has a key role in the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games and is a welcome reminder that not only white little girls can get tough) gets herself to Chicago and into the home of her uncle Emilio. “I used to want to be Xena: Warrior Princess,” she tells him. “I want to be a killer. Will you help me?” “Sure,” he promises, rather jauntily. I was hoping we might be on the road to a non-white version of Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s relationship in Kick-Ass, a gleefully twisted but genuinely loving father-daughter training movie. But after buying her way into a private school and shooting up a passing car to illustrate why she should attend classes, the movie skips forward 15 years, denying us the privilege of seeing Cataleya learn her stuff, and into the much less creative pleasures of letting us see her deploy it as she goes after Don Luis, the man who had her family killed, and the people who worked for and with him.
Read more

Alyssa

Fix ‘Bones’ By Going Federal

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 20, 2011 at 11:10 am


Holy spoiler alert, Batman. Definitely don’t read this unless you’ve watched last night’s Bones season finale.

Hart Hanson, Bones‘ creator, can be a fairly devious guy. He’s promised he’ll get his heroes, anthropologist Temperance Brennan and FBI agent Seely Booth, together only to deliver a dream sequences, and come up with baroque scenarios to keep his will-they-or-won’t-they couple apart. But last night, on the Bones finale, Hanson pulled the trigger:

Read more

Yglesias

Terrorism Suspects Arrested in Norway and Germany

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 8, 2010 at 10:44 am

Janne Kristiansen, Director of Norway's Police Security Service

Janne Kristiansen, Director of Norway's Police Security Service

As ever with these things it’ll take several days to figure out what, if anything, was really going on here but the Norwegian Police Security Service says it’s busted a terrorist cell in cooperation with American, British, and German agencies and arrested three men, two in Norway one in Germany:

She added, “‘We believe this group has had links to people abroad who can be linked to Al Qaeda, and to people who are involved in investigations in other countries, among others the United States and Britain.”

One of the men arrested was a 39-year-old Norwegian citizen of Chinese origin who belonged to the Muslim Uighur group, she said. Another was a 37-year-old Iraqi citizen who came to Norway in 1999 and has permanent residency.

The third man was a 31-year-old Uzbek citizen who also has permanent residency in Norway.

I think this once again underscores a couple of important points. One is that for all the disparagement of the “law enforcement and intelligence” approach to counterterrorism from the right, this is all we’ve got. International terrorists aren’t the same as average criminals, but the basic methods involved in apprehending them are similar. An aircraft carrier doesn’t help, and soldiers don’t have the right training. The other is that the most dangerous “safe havens” are inside western cities and not in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There’s no way to perpetrate a terrorist attack on a western target if you’re in Peshawar, still less if you’re in the mountains somewhere. If you’re in Oslo with a Norwegian passport, you can hop on a plane and go anywhere. And yet somehow we’re debating a $37 billion supplemental appropriation for a war in Afghanistan while the total FBI budget is around $7 billion. I’m not saying we should necessarily go out and triple the FBI’s counterterrorism budget, but if you want to think about spending lots of money on catching terrorists that seems like the smart place to do it.

Yglesias

Zubaydah Interrogator: Torture Was Unnecessary and Ineffective

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 23, 2009 at 10:01 am

People continue to treat the claim that institutionalized torture is not an effective investigative method as some kind of fringe position adopted out of convenience by squishes who don’t want to face up to the hard tradeoffs in the world. But the fact remains that this is what you hear from everyone who does investigations professionals. And it’s also the case that you never see examples of highly effective investigative agencies being reliant on torture. The Dzerzhinksy-era NKVD put on a lot of great show trials, but the Bratton-era NYPD didn’t bring about an impressive drop in crime rates through “enhanced interrogation methods.”

Meanwhile, here’s Ali Soufan, an FBI supervisory special agent who oversaw elements of the Zubaydah interrogations, speaking out:

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned. [...]

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. [...]

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Soufan hints at this briefly, but another problem with institutionalized torture is that it wrecks your entire system of laws. If you do a normal investigation and get someone to cough up the name of a confederate, then you can arrest the confederate. And then you can interrogate him through normal methods. But if you torture someone to get him to cough up the name of a confederate, then what do you do? Well, you’ll have to kidnap him and send him to a “black site” or something. But then whatever info you get from him also has to go on the “secret” side of your operations. That means you can’t share it effectively with state and local law enforcement, or with the Border Patrol or with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Either that, or else in the name of effective counterterrorism you need to completely rebuild the entire system of law enforcement and criminal justice along Stalinist lines. The FBI, which in additional to having national security responsibilities has always been in a position where it needs to cooperate with the “ordinary” police and prosecutors, is attuned to these kind of problems which, I think, is one reason why it was more institutionally resistance than the CIA to getting into the torture business. But in the long haul, to fight terrorism it’s extremely important to have effective methods of information-sharing and cooperation both vertically and horizontally across a very large country with a great diversity of law enforcement agencies. To take the most “high value” sources of information and unplug them from the rest of the system is a disaster.

Yglesias

A Distracted FBI?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 12, 2009 at 8:43 am

fbi_badge_psd3441_1.png

The oddity of terrorism as an enterprise is that, in essence, it’s an effort by a weaker party to trick the stronger party into weakening himself by engaging in panicky overreactions. In particular, though 9/11 had an appalling cost in terms of lives and money we’ve actually seen a somewhat larger cost in lives and much larger cost in money in our response to those events.

Benjamin Friedman offers up a thought along these lines that I hadn’t heard before:

In other cost-of-fear-of-terrorism news, both Stephen Dubner of the Freakonomics blog and Bruce Schneier ask whether the diversion of federal attention from crime to terrorism since 9-11 helped cause an outbreak of financial fraud. They cite this New York Times article discussing the shift of FBI resources to counterterrorism. Dubner is unsure, but I say it’s a no-brainer that moving 2,400 FBI agents from crime to counterterrorism and the resulting 40 percent drop in financial crimes referred to US Attorney’s for prosecution caused more financial crime.

I’m not sure I buy this. Despite the increased focus on terrorism, the FBI seems to have had plenty of time to undertake missions that were considered priorities—fighting pornography, investigating Elliot Spitzer’s consensual sexual activities, etc.—and the FBI was hardly the only agency to see its interest-level of combating corporate malfeasance tumble during the Bush years. It’s true, in other words, that we ought to take a look at whether we’re getting the balance between counterterrorism and other law enforcement priorities right. But I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that it’s really the pressure of fighting terrorism that led the FBI to ease off on financial crimes.

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