Disinformation » FOIA

Homeland Security Hires Military Contractor To Monitor Social Media

aaroncynic — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:40:55 +0000

A Freedom of Information Act request has revealed the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract in 2010 to General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems in order to provide constant surveillance of social media, according to The Washington Post.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the request, and according to a training manual that was among the documents they received, DHS engaged in monitoring comments on Facebook, Twitter and blogs to obtain public sentiment on a proposed transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a town in Michigan. The $11 million contract awarded to General Dynamics is expected to produce “reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS,” according to Computer World.

An unnamed senior DHS official denied any such snooping or out of bounds monitoring and said the training manual is no longer in use. John Cohen, a senior counterterrorism adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Post he hadn’t seen any reports on negative views of a governmental agency and that reports of this nature “would not be the type of reporting I would consider helpful.”

Read the full post at Diatribe Media.

Can Undercover Investigators Legally Be Indefinitely Detained or Assassinated?

Good German — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:35:49 +0000

Now that the Presidency has dictatorial powers, will civil disobedience and investigative journalism become capital offenses? Dean Kuipers writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has recommended for many years that animal activists who carry out undercover investigations on farms could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by activist Ryan Shapiro show the FBI advising that activists – including Shapiro – who walked onto a farm, videotaped animals there and “rescued” an animal had violated terrorism statutes.

The documents, which were first published on Will Potter’s website, Green Is the New Red, were issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2003 in response to an article in an animal rights publication in which Shapiro and two other activists (whose names were redacted from the document), openly claimed responsibility for shooting video and taking animals from a farm.

The FBI notes discuss the videotaping, illegal entry and the removal of animals, then concludes with “there is a reasonable indication that [Subject 1] and other members of the [redacted] have violated the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).”

Curiously, the name of the act seems to be an error; the act was called the Animal Enterprise Protection Act until 2006, when it was largely superseded by an act called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The crime named in the original 1992 act, however, was always called terrorism. The penalties for such a conviction can include terrorism enhancements which can add decades to a sentence.

Later, in 2004, Shapiro and a colleague, Sarahjane Blum, working as a group called Gourmet Cruelty, were prosecuted for a different but similar act in which they walked onto a fois gras farm, videotaped the operation and took a few ducks. They were prosecuted for felony burglary and pleaded to misdemeanor trespassing.

“Sarahjane and I and everyone with Gourmet Cruelty – the undercover investigation and especially the open rescue were acts of civil disobedience,” said Shapiro by phone. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at MIT. “We openly took credit for the things that we were doing in order to expose the horrific cruelty on factory farms and to educate the public about it. So a trespassing charge seemed like a perfectly reasonable price to pay.”

“However, it’s simply outrageous to consider civil disobedience as terrorism,” Shapiro adds. “Civil disobedience is not terrorism. It has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the AETA takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”

What The Government Told Gizmodo About Osama Bin Laden’s Body

HAL9000 — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:27:14 +0000

Amazing read. Sam Biddle writes on Gizmodo:

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.

The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.

Anarchist’s FOIA Requests Reveal FBI Infiltration

majestic — Sun, 29 May 2011 13:02:58 +0000

Colin Moynihan and Scott Shane make anarchists look pretty smart in this report for the New York Times (or is it just that the FBI is utterly clueless?):

AUSTIN, Tex. — A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and “may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he received, many bearing the rubric “Domestic Terrorism,” provide a revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal, state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems dangerous…

[continues in the New York Times]

The CIA’s Six Oldest Secret Documents

majestic — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:48:14 +0000

Don’t get too excited, but the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has decided to unveil what it terms “the United States Government’s six oldest classified documents, dating from 1917 and 1918.” They mostly have to do with secret ink formulae and while the processes may have been a big deal a century ago, your local spy store will have cooler stuff today.

Here’s what the Agency has to say:

These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA’s purview to declassify.

“These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them,” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. “When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people.”

One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 – written in French – reveals the formula used for German secret ink.

“The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public,” said Joseph Lambert, the Agency’s Director of Information Management Services. “In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents.”

The documents will be available on CIA.gov and in the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. CREST currently houses over 10 million pages of declassified Agency documents. Since 1995, the Agency has released over 30 million pages as a result of Executive Orders, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Privacy Act, and mandatory declassification reviews.

Here are links to the documents:

Secret writing document one
Secret writing document two
Secret writing document three
Secret writing document four
Secret writing document five
Secret writing document six

U.S. Government Only Responds To A Third Of FOIA Requests

majestic — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:46:31 +0000

So much for transparency of government: AP/Yahoo News reports that only a third of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests resulted in any information being released (let alone the full amount requested). One thing to bear in mind, of course, is that the United States is one of the very few nations to actually grant its citizens any right to review government documents.

Two years into its pledge to improve government transparency, the Obama administration took action on fewer requests for federal records from citizens, journalists, companies and others last year even as significantly more people asked for information. The administration disclosed at least some of what people wanted at about the same rate as the previous year.

People requested information 544,360 times last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act from the 35 largest agencies, up nearly 41,000 more than the previous year, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of new federal data. But the government responded to nearly 12,400 fewer requests.

The administration refused to release any sought-after materials in more than 1-in-3 information requests, including cases when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law. It refused more often to quickly consider information requests about subjects described as urgent or especially newsworthy. And nearly half the agencies that AP examined took longer — weeks more, in some cases — to give out records last year than during the previous year…

[continues at AP/Yahoo News]

Newly Released FBI Documents Support Sibel Edmonds’ Allegations

5by5 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Thanks to a FOIA request, new evidence has emerged from the FBI’s own internal communications that appear to support many of the claims made by Sibel Edmonds regarding (largely though not exclusively) GOP collusion in the spying activities of the Turkish government.

This is no small matter, as it involves blackmail and bribery of high-level officials like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, PNAC signatory Richard Perle, Congressman Roy Blunt, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Turkish Ambassador Marc Grossman, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Asst. Sec. Def. Douglas Feith, Congressman Dan Burton and others to “look the other way” from those engaged in spying activities with a foreign government against the United States.

Per the report from the Boiling Frogs website:

Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.

The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted, but they do support many of Edmonds’ claims, including:

There were a number of very serious FBI investigations into “Turkish activity in Chicago” involving a number of targets, including TACA.

These investigations were related to “National Security” among other things.

These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.

Congressional corruption was involved.

The FBI repeatedly conducted actual “physical surveillance” against Turkish and American targets.
Some of these investigations were shut down in 2001.

What makes it more suspicious is the near universal silence on the part of the corporate media about this whole affair. They spent more energy investigating the deaths of Lacey Peterson or Michael Jackson than they have on this.

It should also be noted that this incident is also tied up with the events surrounding the Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings outing. More on that can be found over at Bradblog:

…The American Turkish Council and the Turkish clients who were about to hire Brewster Jennings as an analyst … and [U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Marc] Grossman found out about it, and tipped off his diplomatic contact who was a target of the FBI counter-intelligence, and that person notified the ISI [Pakistani intelligence agency].

Brewster Jennings was then dismantled as soon as the FBI notified the CIA, after which the FBI requested CIA to do a damage assessment, to see if lives would be lost.

Grossman and [Richard] Armitage, they are the only two people involved. Later on Cheney and his people may have used it, but it had nothing to do with those other things, [Brewster Jennings] was completely destroyed and gone by the summer of 2001.

Edmonds has long been silenced from revealing the full import of what she discovered due to so-called “state secrets privileges” being invoked by the Bush White House.

Now that this information has come out, it remains to be seen whether Eric Holder’s Justice Department will do a better job at honestly investigating this, or if they will merely continue the suspiciously incurious behavior of the previous administration.

Feds Charge $522K for FOIA Request

Raymond — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:41:50 +0000

From Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

The Treasury Department, Wood said, is “downright telling us where we can stick it.”

Wood wants the government to produce documents he hopes show where are perhaps millions of dollars of once-frozen assets of a former Libyan-backed company in the United States, which Wood says owes his law firm legal fees. To that end, he is suing the government (.pdf) to comply with the FOIA request and to reduce the bill.

Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill (.pdf).

[Read more at Wired]