Secret Dossiers Kept on Muslims ?

[Nur]

Secret Dossiers Kept on Muslims ?

 

Former Marine outlines secret dossiers

 

Muslims, Arabs not targeted, FBI says

 

By Rick Rogers

 

November 21, 2008 "Union Tribune" -- -OCEANSIDE — Two years after his arrest, a former Marine gunnery sergeant is talking about the FBI, CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement files he stole from Camp Pendleton for a civilian agency.

 

In interviews with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Maziarz, 39, said “dozens of files” he gave the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group while serving as an intelligence specialist at the base were dossiers on Muslims and Arabs living in Southern California.

 

This marks the first time Maziarz has spoken to the media about the files since pleading guilty in July 2007 to mishandling classified material and stealing government property.

 

He agreed to the interviews despite signing a plea agreement with the government limiting his comments on the security breach, which might involve a decade's worth of intelligence culled from domestic and foreign sources. The deal also requires him to testify if called on.

 

“Most of the (monitored) people were from Los Angeles. The ties they had to San Diego were, like, maybe they had a house down here or a relative or came down to visit or went on vacation here,” said Maziarz, who splits his time between North County and Arizona as he looks for work and tries to move on with his life.

 

Many of the stolen files centered on the meeting spots of “people of interest,” including places of worship, businesses and travel plans, he said.

 

Maziarz's case could have repercussions well beyond Camp Pendleton.

 

The existence of CIA, FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents profiling specific minority and religious groups in the United States could undermine contentions by the FBI, the primary federal agency for domestic security, that no programs target upstanding Muslims and Arabs.

 

“The FBI does not monitor the lawful activities of individuals in the United States, nor does the FBI have a surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected activities of houses of worship,” FBI spokesman Darrell Foxworth said in an e-mail.

 

Maziarz's arrest in October 2006 sparked multiple investigations, including those by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Federal agents testifying at his trial said the files found in his possession could not be shared legally with civilian law enforcement.

 

Essentially, Maziarz said, he used computer networks at Camp Pendleton to tap into classified information that he then passed along to a higher-ranking Marine or one of that person's subordinates. Maziarz and federal investigative documents have identified that individual as reserve Col. Larry Richards, the base's former intelligence chief and co-founder of the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group.

 

Maziarz said he and others broke national-security protocols out of concern that FBI officials were not sharing anti-terrorism intelligence with local law enforcement or were doing it slowly because of bureaucracy. There was a feeling that lack of cooperation prevented aggressive efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks.

 

The Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group is composed of two dozen local, state and federal agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the Secret Service and the FBI.

 

The Union-Tribune first reported on the Maziarz case in October 2007, after it obtained unclassified records from his court-martial.

 

Maziarz originally was charged with stealing Iraq war souvenirs from a base armory. That investigation evolved into the document-theft case.

 

He received a 26-month jail sentence. He was released in July after serving less than two years in Camp Pendleton's brig.

 

In accepting Maziarz's guilty plea, Marine judge Lt. Col. Jeffrey Meeks avoided revealing specific contents of the stolen files. Two federal agents attended the plea-agreement sessions to make sure classified details stayed secret.

 

While sitting recently at a café in Carlsbad, Maziarz explained how officials from the Los Angeles counter-terrorism group used him for years to steal highly sensitive FBI, CIA and immigration files to track and foil terrorist operations.

 

He was more tight-lipped about classified files known as TIGER documents.

 

TIGER, or the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, is a database developed at the U.S. Census Bureau. It can be customized to identify special demographic centers, such as areas where certain ethnic groups live.

 

The Union-Tribune asked FBI officials whether any of the files Maziarz stole were were related to this system. They did not respond.

 

Days after the newspaper made its TIGER inquiry to the bureau, Maziarz said, federal investigators gave him a lie-detector test to see whether he had talked to the media.

 

Maziarz's claims about profiling have raised concerns among some Islamic, Arab-American and civil-liberty groups. The organizations' leaders said his statements underscore their longtime contention that government agencies are violating Americans' privacy rights with little to no congressional oversight.

 

The Maziarz case could be “hugely important,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego & Imperial Counties.

 

In July, the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Defense Department, the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the National Security Agency and the U.S. Northern Command to flesh out its understanding of the government's domestic surveillance activities.

 

“What was in these documents (that Maziarz took) is precisely the question we have been asking. What has the government been doing and who authorized it?” Blair-Loy said.

 

On the criminal-justice front, the document-theft case involving Maziarz has moved slowly and unexpectedly.

 

On July 18, the Marine Corps brought charges against Gunnery Sgt. Eric Froboese and Master Sgt. Reinaldo Pagan in connection with it. Pagan is accused of dereliction of duty and violation of orders. Froboese is facing charges of dereliction of duty, orders violations, conspiracy and wrongful transmission of classified information.

 

Before they were charged, neither of the enlisted Marines had been mentioned in court records related to the Maziarz trial. Maziarz said he is angry that no Marine officer has faced the same legal scrutiny.

 

“I don't think the government is interested in really finding out the truth . . . because the implications are too vast and involve too many senior people for them to really pursue it,” he said.

 

More than 30 interviews with FBI and naval investigators, spanning hundreds of hours over the past two years, have convinced Maziarz that prosecutors plan to pin the national-security breach on those considered least culpable and most vulnerable: the enlisted men.

 

“If Pagan is getting charged with dereliction of duty, then why not General Conway?” Maziarz said.

 

He was referring to Gen. James Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps. Conway served as commanding general of the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force when Maziarz worked in the intelligence unit and Richards ran it.

 

A statement from Conway's office said in part: “Generally speaking, a subordinate who is accused of violating a commander's orders . . . and has done so without the knowledge or consent of that commander is not really in a position to place any portion of the blame for their own actions upon the commander.”

 

Federal agents have warned Maziarz that he could be put back behind bars if he violates his plea agreement. While he is cautious, Maziarz said his intention is to set the record straight.

 

“I have a pretty good memory,” Maziarz said, “and that's what bothers a lot of people.”

 

Rick Rogers: (760) 476-8212; rick.rogers@uniontrib.com

 

© Copyright 1995-2008 Union-Tribune Publishing Co

[Nur]

The New Thought Police:

 

The NSA Wants to Know How You Think— Maybe Even What You Think

 

by James Bamford

 

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

 

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

 

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

Getting Aquaint

 

Known as Aquaint, which stands for "Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence," the project was run for many years by John Prange, an NSA scientist at the Advanced Research and Development Activity. Headquartered in Room 12A69 in the NSA's Research and Engineering Building at 1 National Business Park, ARDA was set up by the agency to serve as a sort of intelligence community DARPA, the place where former Reagan national security advisor John Poindexter's infamous Total Information Awareness project was born. [Editor's note: TIA was a short-lived project founded in 2002 to apply information technology to counter terrorist and other threats to national security.] Later named the Disruptive Technology Office, ARDA has now morphed into the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

 

A sort of national laboratory for eavesdropping and other spycraft, IARPA will move into its new 120,000-square-foot home in 2009. The building will be part of the new M Square Research Park in College Park, Maryland. A mammoth two million-square-foot, 128-acre complex, it is operated in collaboration with the University of Maryland. "Their budget is classified, but I understand it's very well funded," said Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland's assistant vice president of research and economic development, referring to IARPA. "They'll be in their own building here, and they're going to grow. Their mission is expanding."

 

If IARPA is the spy world's DARPA, Aquaint may be the reincarnation of Poindexter's TIA. After a briefing by NSA Director Michael Hayden, Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA Director George Tenet of some of the NSA's data mining programs in July 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a concerned letter to Cheney. "As I reflected on the meeting today," he said, "John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."

Building "Hal"

 

The original goal of Aquaint, which dates back to the 1990s, was simply to develop a sophisticated method of picking the right needles out of a vast haystack of information and coming up with the answer to a question. As with TIA, many universities were invited to contribute brainpower to the project. But in the aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, with the creation of the NSA's secret warrantless eavesdropping program and the buildup of massive databases, the project began taking on a more urgent tone.

 

"Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000. We are building HAL."

 

In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news stories taken from the New York Times, the AP news wire, and the English portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire covering 1998 to 2000. Then, 13 U.S. military intelligence analysts searched the data and came up with a number of scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of those topics created a series of questions for Aquaint's computerized brain to answer. "Will the Japanese use force to defend the Senkakus?" was one. "What types of disputes or conflict between the PLA [People's Liberation Army] and Hong Kong residents have been reported?" was another. And "Who were the participants in this spy ring, and how are they related to each other?" was a third. Since then, the NSA has attempted to build both on the complexity of the system—more essay-like answers rather than yes or no—and on attacking greater volumes of data.

 

"The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions," said a former Aquaint researcher. "Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL." A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years but eventually left due to moral concerns. "The system can answer the question, 'What does X think about Y?'" she said. "Working for the government is great, but I don't like looking into other people's secrets. I am interested in helping people and helping physicians and patients for the quality of people's lives." The researcher now focuses on developing similar search techniques for the medical community.

Thought policeman

 

A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions such as "What were the major issues in the last 10 presidential elections?" would be very useful for the public. But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA—absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information about Americans—could be a privacy and civil liberties nightmare. "We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to transfer research results into operational use," said Aquaint project leader John Prange, in charge of information exploitation for IARPA.

 

Once up and running, the database of old newspapers could quickly be expanded to include an inland sea of personal information scooped up by the agency's warrantless data suction hoses. Unregulated, they could ask it to determine which Americans might likely pose a security risk—or have sympathies toward a particular cause, such as the antiwar movement, as was done during the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquaint robospy might then base its decision on the type of books a person purchased online, or chat room talk, or websites visited—or a similar combination of data. Such a system would have an enormous chilling effect on everyone's everyday activities—what will the Aquaint computer think if I buy this book, or go to that website, or make this comment? Will I be suspected of being a terrorist or a spy or a subversive?

Controlling brain waves

 

Collecting information, however, has always been far less of a problem for the NSA than understanding it, and that means knowing the language. To expand its linguistic capabilities, the agency established another new organization, the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), and housed it in a building near IARPA at the M Square Research Park. But far from simply learning the meaning of foreign words, CASL, like Aquaint, attempts to find ways to get into someone's mind and understand what he or she is thinking.

 

One area of study is to attempt to determine if people are lying simply by watching their behavior and listening to them speak. According to one CASL document, "Many deception cues are difficult to identify, particularly when they are subtle, such as changes in verb tense or extremely brief facial expressions. CASL researchers are studying these cues in detail with advanced measurement and statistical analysis techniques in order to recommend ways to identify deceptive cue combinations."

 

Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even training employees to control their own brain waves.

 

Another area of focus explores the "growing need to work with foreign text that is incomplete," such as partly deciphered messages or a corrupted hard drive or the intercept of only one side of a conversation. The center is thus attempting to find ways to prod the agency's cipher-brains to fill in the missing blanks. "In response," says the report, "CASL's cognitive neuroscience team has been studying the cognitive basis of working memory's capacity for filling in incomplete areas of text. They have made significant headway in this research by using a powerful high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) machine acquired in 2006." The effort is apparently directed at discovering what parts of the brain are used when very good cryptanalysts are able to guess correctly the missing words and phrases in a message.

 

Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even trying to turn dull minds into creative geniuses by training employees to control their own brain waves: "The cognitive neuroscience team has also been researching divergent thinking: creative, innovative and flexible thinking valuable for language work. They are exploring ways to improve divergent thinking using the EEG and neurobiological feedback. A change in brain-wave activity is believed to be critical for generating creative ideas, so the team trains its subjects to change their brain-wave activity."

 

The National Security Agency's eavesdropping on phone calls, e-mails, and other communications skyrocketed after 9/11. But that was only the beginning of its high-tech invasiveness, as Bamford reports. Above, NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

 

Bamford calls the widespread (and warrantless) monitoring of average citizens' communications overseen by the NSA "the surveillance-industrial complex."

 

The NSA would essentially like to create the spy-agency equivalent of "HAL 9000," the computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey that converses with the astronaut David Bowman (played by Keir Dullea, above).

 

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a civil servant named Winston Smith (played in the 1955 movie by Edmond O'Brien, above) loses all privacy as Big Brother and his Thought Police bring him under constant surveillance. Is the NSA today's Big Brother?

 

Ever watching and listening: a control room at NSA headquarters.

 

The Spy Factory

* Ask the Expert

* The New Thought Police

* Investigating 9/11

* Decoding Speech

* Watch the Program

 

James Bamford is the author of three books on the National Security Agency, including the 2008 The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, from which this article was adapted with kind permission of Doubleday. Bamford coproduced, with Scott Willis, NOVA's "The Spy Factory," which was based on this book

[S.O.S]

A very interesting topic sh. Nur, indeed!

 

I saved the link to the University of Maryland website of LCCD (Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics) under my 'Favorites' in November last year, in the hope to examine their works at some point in the future. If I knew you (or anyone else for that matter) were interested in these developments and as well as following possible ramifications in Somalia as a result, I wouldn't have felt obliged to keep one eye on these things.

 

I became interested in this when I read an article called Jana Shakarian or How to Bomb for a Ph.D.. Jana Shakarian seems to be the most likely individual working on the development of algorithm-based software within Somali context. So far, they have been active in Pakistan and Afghanistan only (I think not!) by their own admission as an important advisory and policy contributors. As the LCCD director Dana Nau states in this presentation, one of their major objectives is: "how can we get different tribes/groups in a region to do what we’d like them to do?"

[Nur]

Jazaakalahu Kheiran SOS bro.

 

A treasure! I juts saved Dana Nau's presentation, and went through the Jana Shakarian's report linking Somali pirates with the Al Shabab, and the subsequent responses from her academic peers, one of them even ( David Axe) says he confronted Shakarian and she knows nothing about Somalia.

 

Like they say, to err is human, to make a mommoth blunder of facts, you need a computer, and that is what the LCCD is all about, collection of many Shakarians and computers getting paid millions of Dollars to creat "Virtual Truth" for Neoconservatives Politicians.

 

The human thinking capacity is far superior than any computer program, and that is what politicians lack, money does not buy intelligence, if it did, the biggest lie of Iraq's WMD wouldn't have wasted 1.3 Million lives in Iraq triggering an avalanche of Financial Disaster and great depression in the US and from there to the entire world.

 

A classic joke about intellectual stoopidity goes like this:

 

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... " If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one? " The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered " sure".

 

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, " You have exactly 1586 sheep. " says the yuppie, That is correct; take one of the sheep.." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.

 

Then the shepherd says: " If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", " OK, why not " answered the young man. " Clearly, you are a consultant. " said the shepherd. " That's correct." says the yuppie, " but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. " You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."

 

 

Innalllaaha Laa Yuslixu Camalal Mufsidiin!

 

 

Nur