Mike Bloomberg’s Fondness for Spying Extends to the Banksters

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In the wake of the Boston bombing, Mayor Bloomberg had some fairly alarming things to say about privacy.

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

But apparently he — or at least his company — even has a cavalier approach to the privacy of those in his own class.

Goldman Sachs recently discovered that Bloomberg reporters were monitoring Goldman activity on their $20,000 a year Bloomberg terminals.

The ability to snoop on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.

“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.

[snip]

“Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists, and has never included clients’ security-level data, position data, trading data or messages,” said Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet.

“In light of [Goldman’s] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients,” he noted.

Now, normally I’d be laughing my ass off at MOTUs spying on MOTUs. Particularly the thought of MOTUs paying $20,000 a year for the privilege of being spied on.

But I am worried about what this will do for Bloomberg’s business model. Bloomberg News happens to do a lot of (freely-accessible) journalism, subsidized by MOTUs paying for these terminals. If MOTUs get squeamish, it might cut back on actual journalism.

For the moment, at least, it does confirm that MOTU reticence about surveillance has more to do with their belief that their most guarded activities aren’t watched than with a real disinterest in spying.

Update: See this Quartz article for a description of everything Bloomberg employees could snoop on.

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G-Men Want Mike Rogers to Lead FBI

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In what is presumably an attempt to forestall a Lisa Monaco nomination, the FBI Agents Association just endorsed Mike Rogers to be their next boss.

The FBI Agents Association is expected to announce its endorsement of Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), a former agent, and urge President Obama to nominate him when Mueller’s term ends in September.

“His unique and diverse experience as a veteran, FBI agent and member of Congress will allow him to effectively lead the men and women of the bureau,” Konrad Motyka, president of the FBI Agents Association, said in an interview. Motyka said the association’s representatives met with Vice President Biden’s staff about two weeks ago to push for Rogers’s nomination.

Rogers, who has served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee since 2011, said he was “humbled” by the endorsement of the FBI agents group and would be interested in the job.

The nomination has me laughing my ass off for several reasons.

First, there’s the issue of the MI Senate seat. The GOP believes Rogers is their best hope to beat Democrat Gary Peters for the seat. The fact that Rogers is shopping for another job that is not a well-paying lobbying gig (though it would surely lead to well-paid lobbying gigs in retirement) tells me Rogers doesn’t think he can win the Senate race.

Then there are the comments Former MI AG, Mike Cox, had about Rogers a few weeks back.

Former GOP Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox downplayed that motivation, saying Rogers’ ambition for higher office trumps his desire to make a meaningful influence in foreign policy. “If [Rogers] lost, he could make a lot of money in D.C. as a lobbyist,” Cox said last week. “He’s so full of [expletive] to begin with. He tells all these stories about being an FBI agent, and he was in the FBI for two years. Like he was J. Edgar Hoover.”

Sadly, the Senate Judiciary Committee is too polite to ask Rogers whether he is, in fact, full of shit. I do hope they ask him whether he aspires to be J Edgar (which I would believe). I guess I shouldn’t laugh that an aspiring J Edgar wants to take J Edgar’s old job.

Ultimately, though, I have to laugh because I doubt Rogers is really prepared to take the same kind of accountability that Congress currently holds the national security establishment to. Any single terror attack, no matter how crude, is a failure in the post-Cheney era. Rogers may say he wants the job, but I’m not quite convinced.

I guess I should be a lot more worried about the possibility an aspirational J Edgar is talking about taking over at FBI and I may well get there. But for the moment, at least, I’m just laughing.

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John Kerry Finally Meets a Close Election He Wants to Recount

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The other day, Hugo Chavez’ successor Nicolás Maduro beat opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski by 2% of the vote. In the days since, opposition figures have sown violence, claiming vote fraud.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Kerry encouraged a recount.

Mr. Kerry, in comments to a House committee, said, “We think there ought to be a recount.” He added that he had not yet evaluated whether Washington would recognize Mr. Maduro’s victory.

This, in spite of a leaked recording of a close Capriles advisor admitting that this result was a political triumph but an electoral defeat.

This, in spite of the fact that when Bush beat Kerry with precisely the same percentage of the vote in 2004 amid reports of (limited) electoral oddities, Kerry chose not to demand a recount.

On November 2, 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry 50.7 percent to 48.3 percent. Venezuela’s foreign minister immediately (either that night or the day after) recognized the results: “we will hope that in this second mandate we can improve our relations.”

Fast forward nine years, and Nicolás Maduro beats Henrique Capriles with 50.7% of the vote and the US refuses to recognize the result. “Look, we’re just not there yet,” said a State Department spokesman (who now works for—wait for it— John Kerry). “Obviously, we have nearly half the country that had a different view. And so we’ll continue to consult, but we’re not there yet.”

Most interesting of all is something James Clapper just said in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. In response to a question from Richard Blumenthal about whether there had been fraud in the election, Clapper said (my rough transcription):

There may have been some, but it’s unclear whether it was of sufficient magnitude to merit recount. Right now it doesn’t appear to be.

In other words, even the intelligence says, whatever fraud there was, it wasn’t enough to affect the outcome.

At this point, the Administration’s hesitation at recognizing Maduro and Kerry’s support for a recount do nothing but stoke violence.

Which I can only assume is the point.

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Where Were These Dems Asking about CIA-on-the-Hudson During Brennan’s Confirmation?

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I have always been a huge fan of what Thomas Perez has done in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. But this sentence, from Adam Serwer’s query on what happened to DOJ’s review of the CIA-on-the-Hudson, ought to give pause.

Since taking office, the special litigation section of the civil rights division has investigated more local police departments for unconstitutional policing than ever before, but never on behalf of American Muslims profiled by law enforcement.

But the rest of Serwer’s piece barely touches a big missed opportunity — and, potentially, an explanation for why DOJ has slow-walked its investigation of the profiling of Muslims in NYC. Serwer notes that Brennan complimented the program, in contrast to Eric Holder’s stated concerns about it.

Although Holder referred to the reports of the NYPD’s actions as “disturbing,” that’s not the view of everyone in the Obama administration. CIA Director John Brennan, formerly a top White House counterterrorism adviser, praised the NYPD’s surveillance program in April 2012. “I have full confidence that the NYPD is doing things consistent with the law, and it’s something that again has been responsible for keeping this city safe over the past decade,” Brennan said.

Brennan is not just the former White House counterterrorism [and homeland security] czar, but he’s also the guy who, when CIA-on-the-Hudson was being set up in the days after 9/11, was in charge of logistics and personnel at the CIA. Which means there’s a pretty decent chance he had a role in dual-hatting the CIA guy who operated domestically to help NYPD spy on Americans.

But Brennan’s role in finding a way to use CIA tactics domestically barely came up in his confirmation hearings. As I noted, he was asked whether he knew about the program (and acknowledged knowing about it), but he was not asked — at least not in any of the public materials — whether he had a role in setting it up.

Sort of a key question for the guy now in charge of the entire CIA, whether he thinks the CIA should find loopholes to get around prohibitions on CIA working domestically, don’t you think?

Serwer names several House Democrats — Rush Holt, Mike Honda, Judy Chu — who have been asking about this investigation. Obviously, they didn’t get a vote on Brennan’s nomination. But it seems the nomination period would have been a very good time to ask questions about how and why, at a time when Brennan played a key role in logistics and personnel at the agency, the government decided to set up this workaround. Asking at that time might have clarified why it is that the Administration seems uninterested in investigating this program.

As it is, we’re now left with a guy who publicly applauded such work-arounds — and CIA involvement through cooperation in fusion centers — in charge of the entire CIA.

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Pivot, Damnit!

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Remember how during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation I kept insisting that Hagel actually had an intelligence oversight role at the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board that might be pertinent to the confirmation battle?

Turns out PIAB wasn’t just scrounging intelligence for their own contracting interests, as often happens with PIAB and its predecessor PFIAB.

A panel of White House advisers warned President Obama in a secret report that U.S. spy agencies were paying inadequate attention to China, the Middle East and other national security flash points because they had become too focused on military operations and drone strikes, U.S. officials said.

Led by influential figures including new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and former senator David L. Boren (D-Okla.), the panel concluded in a report last year that the roles of the CIA, the National Security Agency and other spy services had been distorted by more than a decade of conflict.

And while the WaPo focuses on the way this report might have influenced John Brennan — who repeatedly said he’d assess the “allocation of mission” at CIA — I’m just as interested in how the report influenced James Clapper, who recently testified we face a more diverse set of threats than ever before.

This year, in both content and organization, this statement illustrates how quickly and radically the world—and our threat environment—are changing. This environment is demanding reevaluations of the way we do business, expanding our analytic envelope, and altering the vocabulary of intelligence. Threats are more diverse, interconnected, and viral than at any time in history.

If so, I find it interesting that rather than focusing on China, Clapper focused on cyber and — to an unremarked degree — food insecurity (AKA climate change). That is, the report seems to say we need to refocus on China, but Clapper seems to be focusing on cyber instead (which is sort of a focus on China, as will food insecurity be).

One more point. The WaPo suggests that the report said we’re wasting too much energy on drones, and rehashes today’s drone-to-DOD announcement, including this predictable tidbit.

The White House also is weighing whether to give the Defense Department more control over the drone campaign and reduce the CIA’s role, although officials cautioned that the change could take years and probably would not involve CIA drone operations in Pakistan. [my emphasis]

But it doesn’t consider what it means that one of the guys who chaired this report is now in charge of the agency that is reportedly getting all the drones.

First Obama’s Moral Rectitude Drone Assassination Czar, after setting up a Drone Rule Book, will spin off CIA’s drone program (except for Pakistan, and maybe not for another few years, and, well, maybe he’s got his fingers crossed a little bit, covertly) to DOD. Meanwhile, it turns out the guy getting that drone program, former PIAB co-Chair and now Secretary of Defense, thinks we need fewer drones and more real intelligence.

Funny how that works out.

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According to James Clapper, John Brennan Is a Leaker

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To celebrate Sunshine Week last week, the Office of Director of National Intelligence  released to Jason Leopold that office’s memo on ramped up use of polygraphs to crack down on leaks.

The memo requires that polygraphs incorporate the following guidelines about what constitutes a leak.

  • “Unauthorized recipient” includes any U.S. person or foreign national without a need to know or not cleared at the appropriate level for the information, including any member of the media.
  • “Unauthorized disclosure” means a communication, confirmation, acknowledgement, or physical transfer of classified information, including the facilitation of, or actual giving, passing selling, keeping, publishing, or in any way making such information available, to an unauthorized recipient.
  • Classified information includes information classified at any level, including Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret. [my emphasis]

Note these categories are — at least as listed in the memo — position independent. No matter who does these things, an unauthorized disclosure of classified information to an unauthorized recipient is a leak.

Including the acknowledgement of classified information that may be already public.

Funny, then, that Clapper celebrated the confirmation of John Brennan at the Global Threats hearing last week. Because as part of Brennan’s confirmation process, he responded this way to a Richard Burr supplemental question about his own leaks.

Describe each specific instance in which you were authorized to disclosure classified information to a reporter or media consultant, including the identity of the individual authorizing each disclosure and the reason for each such disclosure.

In exceptional circumstances, when classified information appears to have already been leaked to the media, it may be necessary to acknowledge classified information to a member of the media or to declassify information for the very purpose of limiting damage to national security by protecting sources and methods or stemming the flow of additional classified information. Such conversations involve only the most senior Agency officials or their designees and must be handled according to any applicable regulations. I have on occasion spoken to members of the media who appeared to already have classified information, in an effort to limit damage to national security; however, even in those circumstances I did not disclose classified information.

Now, this doesn’t mean CIA Director Brennan will fail the polygraph question his new boss set up last year. At multiple times in his confirmation process, he admitted that he talks to journalists, up to and well beyond “acknowledging” information already out there. (Though he proved remarkably unwilling to provide the Senate Intelligence Committee a list of those acknowledgements leaks, which is one reason Saxby Chambliss voted against him.) He’s honest that he’s a leaker, though he himself excuses his own leaking because he’s so high ranking.

But as the effects of Clapper’s new system become clear, remember that he thinks John Brennan, an admitted leaker, is a great guy to head up the CIA.

Read more →

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CIA Continues to Cover Up Dick Cheney’s War-Mongering

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10 years ago today, George Bush gave his final warning to Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq or face war. While the first half of Bush’s speech cited Saddam’s purported refusal to give up his WMD program, the second half of the speech was littered with insinuations about Saddam’s terrorist allies.

If Saddam Hussein attempts to cling to power, he will remain a deadly foe until the end. In desperation, he and terrorists groups might try to conduct terrorist operations against the American people and our friends. These attacks are not inevitable. They are, however, possible. And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail. The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.

[snip]

We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.

 [snip]

Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations — and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now. [my emphasis]

We know that Dick Cheney tried, in the days leading up to this speech and an earlier March 14 one, to boost these vague allegations in part by resuscitating the claim that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi diplomat-spook Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in April 2001. The CIA pushed back hard on the claim. An account of that fight is one of the most significant redactions in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2006 assessment of the bullshit lies told to get us into Iraq (see numbered page 96), as explained by Mark Hosenball.

According to two sources familiar with the blacked-out portions of the Senate report that discuss the CIA cable’s contents, the document indicates that White House officials had proposed mentioning the supposed Atta-Prague meeting in a Bush speech scheduled for March 14, 2003. Originated by Czech intelligence shortly after 9/11, the tendentious claim was that in April 2001, Atta, the 9/11 hijack leader, had met in Prague with the local station chief for Iraqi intelligence. The sources said that upon learning of the proposed White House speech, the CIA station in Prague sent back a cable explaining in detail why the agency believed the anecdote was ill-founded. Read more →

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Mark Udall: Leakers on Senate Intelligence Torture Report Got Facts Wrong

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Last week, I noted that leaks to the WSJ about CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Torture report seemed designed to box John Brennan in, making it very difficult for him to authorize declassification of the report.

Sure enough, the very day after Brennan won confirmation, WSJ reports that CIA is not done with their review yet, but they disagree with the report’s findings.

The report examines the details of conditions under which each detainee was held and interrogated, the quality of the information provided and the accuracy of how the CIA described the program to other officials and lawmakers. It included 20 recommendations, officials said.

The report assesses the utility of information from interrogations in 20 cases and concludes that it wasn’t useful; the CIA disputes that conclusion in all but one or two of those assessments, officials said.

The CIA is objecting to the majority of the report, a senior intelligence official said.

“The overall objection was the report basically says we never in any instances got good information from this program,” another U.S. official said. “To anyone who has worked at the CIA on this issue, that’s not true.”

Even CIA officers who opposed the interrogation program acknowledge that the agency obtained useful information, the U.S. official said.

Even if Brennan wanted to declassify this report — and given his stated desire to protect CIA from criticism, he probably doesn’t want to — he’d have a hard time doing so, because it would instantly turn the torture dead-enders against him, which is not the safest way to start a job managing a bunch of talented spooks. [my emphasis]

In today’s Global Threat Assessment hearing, Mark Udall addressed the WSJ report. He revealed that the leakers behind that report had gotten basic facts about the report wrong — such as that there were 20 recommendations.

He then asked John Brennan three questions:

  • CIA officials are leaking what may or may not be official response to the report. Do you believe this is leak of CIA views?
  • Do you anticipate looking into leak?
  • There’s no new deadline for CIA comments in response to report. When can we get it?

Brennan did say the CIA was assessing the story to determine whether “there had been a disclosure.” I’m not sure whether he answered whether the leaks represented the views of the CIA.

Brennan also hedged a bit about a new deadline to respond to Congress. He would like to say comments will come back within a months time, he said (the original deadline was February 15, basically a month past already). He then promised his “firm resolve” to look at what CIA has put together and get back to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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James Clapper Sneaks Climate Change — But Not Bankster Speculation — Into His Threat Assessment

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You wouldn’t know it by looking at his written statement, which lists Cyber, Terrorism and Transnational Crime, Counterintelligence, and Counterspace before it lists Natural Resource Insecurity, but water and food insecurity was actually the first threat Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described in today’s Worldwide Threat Hearing.

That said, in his spoken statement, he didn’t utter the words “climate change.”

Though those words do appear in the written statement, as a subcategory of resource scarcity, as follows:

Food security has been aggravated partly because the world’s land masses are being affected by weather conditions outside of historical norms, including more frequent and extreme floods, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, coastal high water, and heat waves. Rising temperature, for example, although enhanced in the Arctic, is not solely a high-latitude phenomenon. Recent scientific work shows that temperature anomalies during growing seasons and persistent droughts have hampered agricultural productivity and extended wildfire seasons. Persistent droughts during the past decade have also diminished flows in the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Niger, Amazon, and Mekong river basins.

Note: the head of our intelligence community seems to have missed that “persistent droughts” have not only diminished flows in the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Niger, Amazon, and Mekong river basins. Last year’s drought also diminished flows right here in the US, in the Missouri-Mississippi basin.

I guess somehow the US is exempt from climate change, intelligence folks?

I’m glad Clapper got climate change in his statement, I’m glad he put water and food scarcity at the front of his presentation (last year just water scarcity appeared in his written statement). But if we’re going to treat climate change merely as one underlying factor contributing to resource scarcity, perhaps we should also look at bankster speculation, which is increasingly recognized as a key driver of rising food costs. Food speculation, after all, is something we can do a great deal to fix, here in the US. But we have refused to do so, choosing instead to deal with the instability that results.

Ah well, baby steps, people. The Director of National Intelligence just implicitly said that climate change and resource scarcity is the most urgent problem facing us. I’ll take it.

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The Bipartisan Effort to Keep Robert Mueller on at FBI Starts

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I’m watching the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on Global Threats.

And I’m a bit alarmed that both Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss used their statements to suggest Robert Mueller should stay beyond the end of his already-extended term this year.

DiFi said,  “unless Congress intervenes again, this threats hearing will be the last one for Robert Mueller” and then looked at him and said, “it could happen.”

Then Saxby repeated that line, saying he would shortly approach Mueller to ask him to stay on again.

Before his statement, James Clapper also nodded to Mueller, noting he has served as Director for 12 years.

We have terms for FBI Director for good reason. Not just to prevent the rise of another J Edgar Hoover, one person with an empire over the secret information collection in the US. But also to bring a fresh approach to such things as our manufacturing of “terrorists.”

 

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