Public Intelligence

More than 1700 pages of building specifications for the NSA/CSS facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia known as “Sweet Tea” dated February 5, 2010.

The present report analyses the implications of States’ surveillance of communications for the exercise of the human rights to privacy and to freedom of opinion and expression. While considering the impact of significant technological advances in communications, the report underlines the urgent need to further study new modalities of surveillance and to revise national laws regulating these practices in line with human rights standards.

Technical specifications released by the Qatari Ministry of Interior for CCTV surveillance cameras that are required in all the mentioned categories of businesses operating in Qatar including hotels, apartments, banks, shopping centers, hospitals and warehouses.

Harris Corporation’s standard terms and conditions for the sale of their wireless surveillance products including the AmberJack, StingRay, StingRay II, Harpoon and KingFish products. The terms and conditions document was included in a contract signed with Tempe, Arizona on October 8, 2012 for $60,321.15 worth of surveillance software, equipment and training.

The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded “intelligence” of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism. Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead this initiative. A bipartisan investigation by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found, however, that DHS’ work with those state and local fusion centers has not produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.

A document produced by the Department of Health and Human Services as part of their “Now Trending Challenge” to develop applications for monitoring disease outbreaks via Twitter. The document contains lists of various terms that are associated with a number of diseases from the common cold to diphtheria.

This Statement of Work (SOW) involves purchasing and installing a Lawful Intercept (LI) capability for the Government of Iraq (GOI). The capability shall include: providing installation, system engineering, system administration, terminal operations support, and mentoring/training Iraqi system operators. The solution should include a disaster recovery feature/configuration that would replicate (backup) the server and database storage at a physically separate facility. LI will provide the GOI a powerful communications intelligence tool to assist in combating criminal organizations and insurgencies by supporting evidence-based prosecutions, warrant-based targeting, and intelligence-based operations.

This document contains detailed recommendations on how to implement the best practices identified in the Clean IT project. It will be developed further in the months ahead. After the end of the Clean IT project it will only be shared with organizations that have committed to implementing the best practices. It will be developed further with these organizations participating in the Clean IT permanent public-private dialogue platform.

‘Going Dark’ is a Law Enforcement (LE) initiative to address the gap between the legal authority and practical ability of LE to conduct lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance. Problems highlighted by the Going Dark initiative include LE’s difficulty in receiving information from some technology companies, and criminal’s use of advanced technologies and techniques that can complicate carrying out of lawfully-authorized court orders to conduct electronic surveillance.

Last month, Cryptome quietly posted a 2007 draft of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s vision statement for the Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC). The document, which has received no media attention, offers the most in depth view yet of the DCAC and its functions. In May, CNET correspondent Declan McCullagh disclosed the existence of the DCAC, which he described as having a mandate “covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order.” The vision statement obtained by Cryptome describes the general functions and organization of the DCAC as well as the FBI’s national electronic surveillance (ELSUR) strategy.

With internet traffic growing exponentially, attacks on government and commercial computers by cyber terrorists and rogue states have escalated. Those wishing harm have espionage programs targeting the data systems used by the United States and allies. Drug traffickers and weapons dealers use the internet with encrypted communications. To counter these activities, the National Security Agency, an agency of the U.S. government, is building a fortified data center deep inside a mountain in Utah. This complex will house the world’s most sophisticated supercomputers dedicated to code breaking and data traffic analysis. Another site will eventually take delivery of the latest Cray supercomputer called Cascade to support the NSA’s need to crack codes faster to protect the nation and its allies.

Security guards at large facilities, such as airports, monitor multiple screens that display images from individual surveillance cameras dispersed throughout the facility. If a guard zooms with a particular camera, he may lose image resolution, along with perspective on the surrounding area. Embodiments of the inventive Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (ISIS) solve these problems by combining multiple cameras in one device. When properly mounted, example ISIS systems offer up to 360-degree, 240-megapixel views on a single screen. (Other fields of view and resolutions are also possible.) Image-stitching software merges multiple video feeds into one scene. The system also allows operators to tag and follow targets, and can monitor restricted areas and sound an alert when intruders breach them.

A number of hacked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor have shed light on a global suspicious activity surveillance system called TrapWire, that is reportedly in use in locations around the world from the London Stock Exchange to the White House. The emails, which were released yesterday by WikiLeaks, provide information on the extent and operations of a system designed to correlate suspicious activity reports and other evidence that may indicate surveillance connected with a potential terrorist attack.

Trap Wire dramatically increases the ability to detect pre-attack preparations and to take appropriate action to detect, deter and intercept tenorist attacks. A visual monitor of the entire system-a map with dynamic status indicators for each entity connected to the Trap Wire network- facilitates the ability of decisionmakers to absorb vast quantities of information quickly and efficiently. The dynamic status indicators show the threat level at each facility and highlight those that have moved to a higher threat level over the preceding 24 hours. Security officials can thus focus on the highest priorities first, taking a proactive and collaborative approach to defense against attacks. The information collected by Trap Wire can also be shared with law enforcement agencies to assist in their counterterrorism efforts.

A map and list of possible locations of NSA domestic interception points inside the United States. The list was presented by computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum at a recent event held at the Whitney Museum in New York along with filmmaker Laura Poitras and ex-NSA employee William Binney. One of the addresses, an AT&T building on Folsom Street in San Francisco, is the location of Room 641A which was the subject of multiple lawsuits regarding warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. A recent article in Wired quoted Binney as estimating that there are likely ten to twenty of these locations around the country.

Catalyst, a component of DDNI/A’s Analytical Transformation Program, will process unstructured, semistructured, and structured data to produce a knowledge base of entities (people, organizations, places, events, …) with associated attributes and the relationships among them. It will perform functions such as entity extraction, relationship extraction, semantic integration, persistent storage of entities, disambiguation, and related functions (these are defined in the body of the report). The objective of this study is to assess the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in these areas.

A 2010 price list for Harris Corporation wireless surveillance products was included in contract documentation for the purchase of multiple KingFish Dual Mode wireless measurement systems that went to Maricopa County, Arizona.

A manual for the Department of Homeland Security’s Media Monitoring Capability that was reportedly obtained by EPIC via a FOIA request. The manual has been slightly redacted by DHS to remove names and contact information and the URL of the Network Operations Center Media Monitoring Capability reporting website. This website has been listed in three of the four publicly available manuals as an example of a website monitored by DHS.

Social media are web-based and mobile technologies that turn communication into an interactive dialogue in a variety of online fora. It may be appropriate for the government, including DHS, to use social media for a variety of reasons. The President has challenged his Administration to use technology and tools to create a more efficient, effective, and transparent government1. DHS recognizes that the use of social media by government actors must occur with appropriate privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties protections; whether DHS is disclosing its informationand press releases via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, reviewing news feeds for situational awareness, or researching identified, discrete targets for legitimate investigatory purposes. Accordingly, DHS has created Department-wide standards designed to protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties in each category of its use.

As a former head of the US Secret Service, Ronald Noble knows only too well how terrorism, drug-smuggling and people-trafficking cross borders which individual police forces cannot. He is now Secretary General of Interpol, and a specialist team from the organisation he has spent 11 years rebuilding will next summer help the Metropolitan Police combat those crimes and others, during the huge security operation protecting the 2012 Olympic Games. Meeting The Independent before visiting Scotland Yard to discuss arrangements for the Games, Mr Noble said he recognised that some people are scared the event could bring an increased threat of violence to the UK. “In terms of terrorist activity, there is talk, there is chatter, that follows any major event,” he says, but adds Interpol has “not seen or heard terrorists saying we’re going to target this event”.

If the U.S. military wants live video of a missile launcher vehicle halfway around the world, it must rely on spy planes or drones in danger of being shot down. Tomorrow, the Pentagon wants space telescopes hovering in geosynchronous orbit that could take real-time images or live video of any spot on Earth. Contrary to Hollywood’s ideas, today’s spy satellites that orbit the Earth at fast speeds and relatively lower altitudes can only snap photos for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Taking live video of a single location would require satellites to hover by matching the Earth’s rotation in geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) high — but creating and launching a space telescope with the huge optics arrays capable of seeing ground details from such high orbit has proven difficult.

A “Sales Playbook” for distributors of Blue Coat equipment includes pricelists and a guide to selling web filtering technology including some of the very same models discovered by Telecomix to be in use by the Syrian government for spying on their population. These models include the SG-400 and SG-810, among others, which have a price range of $3,999 up to $34,999 depending on the specific model.

There are 13,000 surveillance cameras dispersed across this megalopolis, capturing everything in view, in real time and around the clock. The cameras peek at streets and people from the tops of light poles, inside buses and over subway platforms, watching in the name of public safety. The local government, headed by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, this week unveiled an intelligence center where all these video feeds are monitored. It is a state-of-the-art “integrated” hub with a name that sounds like a futuristic space vessel: the C4I4. Speaking inside the building’s circular nerve center — where 600 video screens carried scenes of residential streets and choked intersections — Ebrard told reporters that the C4I4 is one of the largest and most advanced public-safety command centers in the world.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“FRBNY”) is extending to suppliers an invitation to participate in an Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution RFP bid process. The intent is to establish a fair and equitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and news sources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY. This Request for Proposal (“RFP”) was created in an effort to support FRBNY’s Social Media Listening Platforms initiative.

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries. A stingray’s role in nabbing the alleged “Hacker”—Daniel David Rigmaiden—is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use the device.