Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung, Rufmordkampagnen, Realitätsverzerrung

“Manipulation of public opinion, calumny campaigns and reality distortion… rigging online polls and altering view counts for websites.”

How described some of G.C.H.Q.’s “weaponized capabilities” from a July 2012 list that Glenn Greenwald published on Bastille Day, 2014.

(Mon EEP eula SEE OWN   dare   if ent lichh en   MINE oong,   ROOF moahd comp ON yen,   ray all lee TATES faired SERR oong.)

Ohne uns nichts

“Without us, nothing.” Since the George W. Bush administration, the former U.S. phone monopoly AT&T appears to have provided cooperation in constitutionally questionable surveillance projects to such a degree that one might conclude the company thinks no one can be elected president of the U.S.A. without its support.

In addition to the famous access to a key internet node that AT&T was caught providing in San Francisco in 2002 and then granted retroactive immunity for by Congress, reporting and others’ follow-ups appear to indicate AT&T has been keeping its own copies of phone communications which people have used to access e.g. a 26-year-old phone call. AT&T let government agents hire and even “embed” AT&T employees to help search the phone company’s difficult-to-use database providing access to these calls. described the expensive database consultants as having to sit next to the government agents as they attempted to use the software; if this is so it makes you wonder how and if AT&T managed to keep the N.S.A. and G.C.H.Q. from having remote access to its computers.

AT&T also appears to be gradually re-acquiring the Baby Bell phone companies it was split into. Were that the case, the company might leave ~1.5 competitors in the market to avoid appearing monopolistic.

(OH neh   OONTS   NIX.)

Das SIGAD-Sharing

Signals intelligence activity designator sharing, i.e. data-collection-site data sharing between intelligence agencies from different countries.

Germany: Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or B.N.D., has been sharing on a massive scale communications data collected at e.g. its Bavarian Bad Aibling S.I.G.A.D. site with the U.S.A.’s National Security Agency. The data include mobile phone numbers that the B.N.D. admitted they’ve been passing on to the N.S.A. for years now supposedly under the strict condition that said phone numbers must not be used to kill people (e.g. via phone towers triangulation + drone strike); the B.N.D. also denied that it’s technologically possible to use for location purposes the G.S.M. mobile phone numbers they’ve been passing on (“G.S.M.-Mobilfunknummern sind für eine zielgenaue Lokalisierung nicht geeignet”). The German foreign intelligence agency furthermore is said to have given software it developed to the N.S.A. And the N.S.A. gave the B.N.D. its X-Keyscore software and X-Keyscore software training, including in “behavior detection.”

In an interesting parallel, the Washington Post report on 15 Aug 2013 about an audit of just a few N.S.A. branch offices which found thousands of violations of U.S. privacy rules each year also included a similarly scarcely credible excuse saying phone technology limitations were keeping the N.S.A. from snooping more: “One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.”

England: The N.S.A. has apparently been paying money, such as 100 million pounds, to Britain’s G.C.H.Q., a disproportionately über-representational intelligence-gathering partner for a country of that size. The N.S.A. receives so much communications data from the U.K. that reporters said “it’s almost the same thing” whether G.C.H.Q. or the N.S.A. initially collects it.

(Doss   ZIG odd   CHER ingk.)

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