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McCarthyism Down Under
McCarthyism Down Under
UPDATE: 5 Eyes media have been amplifying the story. BBC quoted Sydney Morning Herald saying, “No allegations had been proven.” The New York Times, which rarely reports on Australia, ran a staff-written story, writes Joe Lauria.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison held a somber press conference on Friday to announce that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had conducted a raid on a sitting member of the New South Wales parliament all because, so far, he’d said favorable things about China and had traveled to the country.
The Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper reported that the office and Sydney home of NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane had been raided because he “has repeatedly praised Beijing, even describing Chinese President Xi Jingping’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as ’emphatic’ and ‘decisive.’”
Moslemane was portrayed as an “extremely serious” threat because he had written about China: “Failure to contain the epidemic could mean thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost. The combined phenomenal effort of the state and the people in the fight to contain the virus was breathtaking.” The MP was also deemed a threat because, as The Australian reported:
“In April, Mr Moselmane resigned as Upper House assistant president after being caught on camera again praising President Xi’s handling of the virus, even as concerns arose that China had underplayed the severity of the crisis.
He has also said China needed to ‘force a change to the rules and create a new world order’. Mr Moselmane was the honorary chair of the Australian Shanghainese Association and a member of the Australian Chinese Association, both linked to Beijing’s secretive network of foreign influence operations known as the United Front.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canadian RCMP Official’s Arrest Could Compromise ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence Alliance
Canadian RCMP Official’s Arrest Could Compromise ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence Alliance
There’s something rotten in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, an intelligence sharing community that includes the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Canada on Friday revealed that it had arrested the former director general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Center, one of the country’s top intelligence officials, but Canada wouldn’t say exactly what he had done.
That has allowed unsavory suspicions that he was some how in league with Russian criminals who laundered money through Canada to fester.
All we know is that Cameron Ortis, a director general with the RCMP’s intelligence unit, has been charged under a 2012 security of information law used to prosecute spies. According to Reuters, his arrest on what amounts to charges of leaking secret information could hurt intelligence operations by “allied nations,” the RCMP said on Monday. And that could hurt Canada’s standing inside five-eyes.
Here’s the RCMP’s only comment on the arrest so far:
“We are assessing the impacts of the alleged activities as information becomes available,” RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki said in a statement. “We are aware of the potential risk to agency operations of our partners in Canada and abroad and we thank them for their continued collaboration.”
[…]
“Mr. Ortis had access to information the Canadian intelligence community possessed,” said Lucki. “He also had access to intelligence coming from our allies both domestically and internationally.”
Creating even more suspense, RCMP Commissioner Lucki told Reuters that the “extremely unsettling” allegations against Ortis have “shaken many people throughout the RCMP.”
Lucki is expected to provide an update on Tuesday.
But this didn’t stop Reuters from quoting Bill Browder, the UK money manager who became a booster for the Russia collusion narrative that afflicted the first two years of the Trump Administration.
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NATO Coordinates Information War on Russia
NATO Coordinates Information War on Russia
The US, Britain and other NATO allies upped the ante this week with a coordinated campaign of information war to criminalize Russia. Moscow dismissed the wide-ranging claims as “spy mania”. But the implications amount to a grave assault recklessly escalating international tensions with Russia.
The accusations that the Kremlin is running a global cyberattack operation are tantamount to accusing Russia of “acts of war”. That, in turn, is creating a pretext for NATO powers to carry out “defensive” actions on Moscow, including increased economic and diplomatic sanctions against Russia, as well as “counter” cyberattacks on Russian territory.
This is a highly dangerous dynamic that could ultimately lead to military confrontation between nuclear-armed states.
There are notably suspicious signs that the latest accusations against Russia are a coordinated effort to contrive false charges.
First, there is the concerted nature of the claims. British state intelligence initiated the latest phase of information war by claiming that Russian military intelligence, GRU, was conducting cyberattacks on infrastructure and industries in various countries, costing national economies “millions of pounds” in damages.
Then, within hours of the British claims, the United States and Canada, as well as NATO partners Australia and New Zealand followed up with similar highly publicized accusations against Russia. It is significant that those Anglophone countries, known as the “Five Eyes”, have a long history of intelligence collaboration going back to the Cold War years against the Soviet Union.
The Netherlands, another NATO member, added to the “spy mania” by claiming it had expelled four members of Russian state intelligence earlier this year for allegedly trying to hack into the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based in The Hague.
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How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan.
Some may remember East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, or reference China’s extensive Internet censorship. But few would express fear that western democratic governments like the U.S., Britain, and Canada were engaged in the mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
That all changed in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the spying activities of the NSA and its Five Eyes partners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. Since then, we’ve seen a long stream of revelations about how Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is engaged in extensive spying on private online activities.
To give just a few examples, we learned that CSE spied on law-abiding Canadians using the free Wi-Fi at Pearson airport, and monitored their movements for weeks afterward. We learned that CSE is monitoring an astonishing 15 million file downloads a day, with Canadian Internet addresses among the targets.
Even emails Canadians send to the government or their local MP are monitored — up to 400,000 a day according to CBC News. Just last week we discovered CSE targets widely-used mobile web browsers and app stores. Many of these activities are not authorized by a judge, but by secret ministerial directives like the ones MP Peter MacKay signed in 2011.
CSE is not the only part of the government engaged in mass surveillance. Late last year, the feds sought contractors to build a new monitoring system that will collect and analyze what Canadians say on Facebook and other social media sites. As a result, the fear of getting caught in the government’s dragnet surveillance is one more and more Canadians may soon face.
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Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
The most important self-help step? Get into encryption
Another week, another revelation originating from the seemingly unlimited trove of Edward Snowden documents. Last week, the CBC reported that Canada was among several countries whose surveillance agencies actively exploited security vulnerabilities in a popular mobile web browser used by hundreds of millions of people. Rather than alerting the company and the public that the software was leaking personal information, they viewed the security gaps as a surveillance opportunity.
In the days before Snowden, these reports would have sparked a huge uproar. More than half a billion people around the world use UC Browser, the mobile browser in question, suggesting that this represents a massive security leak. At stake was information related to users’ identity, communication activities, and location data — all accessible to telecom companies, network providers, and surveillance agencies.
Yet coming on the heels of global revelations of surveillance of network exchange points and internet giants along with Canadian disclosures of daily mass surveillance of millions of internet downloads and airport wireless networks, nothing surprises anymore. Instead, there is a resigned belief that privacy on the network has been lost to surveillance agencies who use every measure at their disposal to monitor or gather virtually all communications.
While the surveillance stories become blurred over time, there is an important distinction with the latest reports. The public has long been told that sacrificing some privacy may be part of a necessary trade-off to provide effective security. However, by failing to safeguard the security of more than 500 million mobile users, the Five Eyes surveillance agencies — Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand — have sent the message that the public must perversely sacrifice their personal security as well.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Spy agencies target mobile phones, app stores to implant spyware
Users of millions of smartphones put at risk by certain mobile browser gaps, Snowden file shows
Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows.
Electronic intelligence agencies began targeting UC Browser — a massively popular app in China and India with growing use in North America — in late 2011 after discovering it leaked revealing details about its half-billion users.
Their goal, in tapping into UC Browser and also looking for larger app store vulnerabilities, was to collect data on suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets — and, in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.
The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn’t alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments’ agencies, hackers or criminals.
“All of this is being done in the name of providing safety and yet … Canadians or people around the world are put at risk,” says the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist, one of Canada’s foremost experts on internet law.
CBC News analysed the top secret document in collaboration with U.S. news site The Intercept, a website that is devoted in part to reporting on the classified documents leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the spy group comprising Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand — specifically sought ways to find and hijack data links to servers used by Google and Samsung’s mobile app stores, according to the document obtained by Snowden.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones
NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones
The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.
The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration withThe Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.
The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. (Google declined to comment for this story. Samsung said it would not be commenting “at this time.”)
As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.
Previous disclosures from the Snowden files have shown agencies in the Five Eyes alliance designed spyware for iPhones and Android smartphones, enabling them to infect targeted phones and grab emails, texts, web history, call records, videos, photos and other files stored on them. But methods used by the agencies to get the spyware onto phones in the first place have remained unclear.
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‘Five Eyes’ countries to meet on anti-terrorism fight: Canada
‘Five Eyes’ countries to meet on anti-terrorism fight: Canada
OTTAWA (Reuters) – The five nations that make up the world’s leading intelligence-sharing network will meet in London next month to confer on strategies to fight terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks, Canada said on Tuesday.
Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said the so-called Five Eyes – the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand – had scheduled a meeting for Jan 22.
A Canadian government official later said the five would actually meet in London some time in February.
Blaney’s comments were unusual, since members of the Five Eyes network rarely talk about its activity.
“We’re going to have a meeting with our Five Eyes allies in London … and this is serious stuff. Terrorism will be there” on the agenda, he told CTV television.
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