Showing posts with label leak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leak. Show all posts
18 Oct 2015
16 Oct 2015
The Drone Papers
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.
In the "Drone Papers," The Intercept reveals drone strikes have resulted from unreliable intelligence, stemming in large part from electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence," that officials acknowledge is insufficient. The documents also undermine government claims that the drone strikes have been precise.
20 Aug 2013
David Miranda: 'They said I would be put in jail if I didn't co-operate'
David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist who broke stories of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, has accused Britain of a "total abuse of power" for interrogating him for almost nine hours at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act.
In his first interview since returning to his home in Rio de Janeiro early on Monday, Miranda said the authorities in the UK had pandered to the US in trying to intimidate him and force him to reveal the passwords to his computer and mobile phone. "They were threatening me all the time and saying I would be put in jail if I didn't co-operate," said Miranda. "They treated me like I was a criminal or someone about to attack the UK … It was exhausting and frustrating, but I knew I wasn't doing anything wrong."
Miranda – a Brazilian national who lives with Glenn Greenwald in Rio – was held for the maximum time permitted under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000 which allows officers to stop, search and question individuals at airports, ports and border areas. During that time, he said, he was not allowed to call his partner, who is a qualified lawyer in the US, nor was he given an interpreter, despite being promised one because he felt uncomfortable speaking in a second language.
"I was in a different country with different laws, in a room with seven agents coming and going who kept asking me questions. I thought anything could happen. I thought I might be detained for a very long time," he said. He was on his way back from Berlin, where he was ferrying materials between Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the US film-maker who has also been working on stories related to the NSA files released by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
The Guardian - David Miranda detention: White House was given 'heads-up'
Alan Rusbridger (editor of the Guardian): The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more." Full story here
8 Aug 2013
Ex-spy 'Falcon': U.S. likes Snowden in Russia
Christopher Boyce, the subject of the 1985 movie "The Falcon and the Snowman," spent 25 years in federal prison for providing U.S. intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union.
It was with a heavy heart that I heard Edward Snowden has been granted, and apparently accepted, temporary asylum in Russia for one year. Short of locking him naked in solitary confinement as an example to other leakers, as was done to Bradley Manning, Russia is exactly where the American intelligence community wants Snowden.
How better to discredit Snowden's warnings of the threat posed to civil liberties by our ever-growing surveillance state than to ceaselessly point out that he has found sanctuary in the arms of the FSB, the successor to the KGB? I suspect this latest development will nix any possibility of reform of domestic surveillance operations coming out of the House Judiciary Committee.
Of course, at this point, where else could Snowden go? He had spent five weeks in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. That had to be a purgatory on earth. By leaning on our allies, America had effectively trapped him there. One should not take too seriously, though, the outrage expressed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Congress over this latest Russian perfidy. By fleeing to America's traditional bogeyman, Snowden has seriously blunted his own effectiveness. He has become an easy target for the U.S. government to demonize.
24 Nov 2011
22 Nov 2011
Bradley Manning hearing date set as court martial process finally begins
Bradley Manning, the US soldier who has been held in confinement for the past 18 months on suspicion of having leaked a huge trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, is to go before a military panel on 16 December at the start of the most high-profile prosecution of a whistleblower in a generation.
The proceedings, at Fort Meade in Maryland, are expected to last five days, and will be the first opportunity for prosecuting officers and Manning's defence team to present their cases. It is known as an Article 32 hearing and, although it is preliminary, both sides will be able to call and cross-examine witnesses.
Since he was arrested in Iraq in May 2010, Manning has become a cause celebre for anti-war and free information advocates in America and around the world. His support network will be calling a rally outside the Article 32 hearing when it opens next month.
25 Mar 2011
Obama takes ‘unprecedented’ aim at leakers
Elected on a promise of a more transparent government, President Barack Obama has taken "unprecedented" aim at leakers who divulge classified information to journalists, critics say.
"We've seen the current president bringing five prosecutions so far... against people for whistleblowing, for leaks of classified information," said Daniel Ellsberg, famous for his 1971 leak of the "Pentagon Papers," which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War. "All previous presidents put together brought three prosecutions... We see a campaign here against whistleblowing that is highly unprecedented in legal terms." The White House declined to answer questions about its policy towards those who leak government secrets.
The five prosecutions include the case of US soldier Bradley Manning, who is accused of having handed hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks.
22 Mar 2011
Japan nuclear firm admits missing safety checks at disaster-hit plant
The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan's history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks, according to documents from the reactor's operator.
The risk that used fuel rods present to efforts to avert disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was underlined on Tuesday when nuclear safety officials said the No 2 reactor's storage pool had heated to around boiling point, raising the risk of a leakage of radioactive steam.
"We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible," Hidehiko Nishiyama, of the nuclear and industrial safety agency, said.
According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility.
21 Mar 2011
Manning supporters rally at Quantico
Twice this weekend, police put plastic riot cuffs on Daniel Ellsberg’s hands. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was arrested Saturday in Washington and again Sunday in Quantico. Ellsberg was one of about 35 protesters taken into custody for refusing to leave U.S. 1 in front of the main gate of the Marine Corps base.
Hundreds rallied in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks. Manning has been in the Quantico brig since May, awaiting a court martial. Supporters said the 23-year-old Manning is confined to his cell for 23 hours each day. He is given a tear-proof smock to wear to bed, but until recently was required to sleep naked.
To decry these conditions, some protesters donned prison garb and carried signs saying “I am Bradley Manning.” Many wore masks with Manning’s boyish face and shy smile. They kept their clothes on this time. But at earlier rallies, protesters stripped to their underwear as a visual protest of Manning’s treatment.
20 Mar 2011
Is Anonymous The New WikiLeaks?
After defending WikiLeaks late last year, hactivist collective Anonymous may have just scooped it.
At midnight last night an Anonymous member who goes by the Twitter handle OperationLeakS released a series of e-mails with an employee at a Bank of America subsidiary, who is accusing the bank of fraud through inappropriately tracking loan documents. (WikiLeaks claimed last year that it had a trove of damaging, and as-yet-unreleased data about Bank of America that could take the bank down.)
The e-mails, between OperationLeakS and the Balboa employee, claim among other things that the bank is run “like a cult.”
How damning is the leak? Forbes’ Wall Street writer Halah Touryalai has taken a look and says it’s “tough to tell if there’s anything truly damning” about them. Meanwhile some of the leaks from bankofamericasuck.com have been removed, and a Bank of America spokesman told Reuters that the bank is “confident that [the former employee's] extravagant assertions are untrue.”
However inconclusive the e-mails may be, the leak may have wider implications for Anonymous as it gradually proves itself a source of comeuppance for disgruntled employees with damning information about a company or institution. “A lot depends on the impact of this week,” says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at NYU who is researching Anonymous, adding that the online collective could go in a similar direction to WikiLeaks.
26 Jan 2011
U.S. Officials Have No Link Between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, But They Continue to Imprison, Torture Manning Anyway
Well this is an unfortunate development for the officials who decided imprisoning Private Bradley Manning would be a sure-fire way to take down WikiLeaks: according to NBC, "investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between [Manning] and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks."
Although Manning has admitted to downloading tens of thousands of classified government documents to draw attention to wrongdoings by the U.S. government, there is apparently "no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure."
Despite having been convicted of no charges, the 22-year-old Manning has spent months in a Virginia prison, where he is being held in solitary confinement and is only allowed to leave his cell one hour a day. He has been denied visitors and is being kept in conditions that are described as torturous and inhumane. Presumably, Feds were hoping Manning would break under the pressure and help bring down Julian Assange and his website. But that hasn't worked out.
24 Jan 2011
Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process
The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.
The documents – many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days – also reveal:
• The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
• How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
• The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
• The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
• How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City – the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
22 Jan 2011
Lawyers condemn 'abuse' of suspected WikiLeaker Bradley Manning
The lawyer for Bradley Manning, the army private suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, has filed a complaint that he is being unfairly treated at the marine base jail in Virginia.
David Coombs, Manning's lawyer, said that holding him in maximum custody over the last five months and placing him on suicide watch amounted to abuse. Coombs called for his removal from such tight monitoring.
The complaint was filed on Wednesday and on Thursday the marines downgraded his classification from suicide watch to prevention of injury. But Coombs argues that prevention of injury is not significantly different in practical terms and is seeking his removal from maximum security.
Coombs, writing on his office website, said that on Wednesday, against the recommendation of two forensic psychiatrists, the commander of the Quantico jail, James Averhart, listed Manning as a suicide risk, which meant he was confined to his cell 24 hours a day. "He was stripped of all clothing with the exception of his underwear. His prescription eyeglasses were taken away from him. He was forced to sit in essential blindness with the exception of the times that he was reading or given limited television privileges. During those times, his glasses were returned to him," Coombs wrote.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)