Secure Liberties Newsletter

Cavan Kharrazian on October 6, 2021

TOP LINE

CIA leadership reportedly considered kidnapping, poisoning, and assassinating Julian Assange and other members of Wikileaks, reports Yahoo News. This story is immense, and there are many questions that remain, but at least this much is true: when Director Pompeo called Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” and when SSCI snuck it into the Intelligence Authorization Act, it meant a whole lot more than what the public was told. What Congress will do about it is anyone’s question.

The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous, according to Vice. The story puts the sights back on the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, as we all await more information about how many more parts of the government are buying what information about how many people in the United States from data brokers.

DOJ IG Investigation Into FISA Abuse: It gets worse, according to a new scathing report examining thousands of surveillance applications. Among the alarming failures IG Horowitz identified are completely missing Woods Files (where FBI agents are required to put documentation that supports a given FISA application), “widespread Woods Procedures non-compliance,” and a failure by Supervisory Special Agents to spot any of these issues even as they certified that FISA applications satisfied precisely these requirements. In sum, this review depicts a system that is dangerously ripe for abuse. WaPo’s short form here.

It’s alive! It’s alive! House FY2022 NDAA passes, with defeats and victories for progressive foreign policy. After a Frankenstein mix of hundreds of amendments were considered and voted on, the $778 billion dollar authorization bill finally passed the House 316-113. The amount is $25 billion dollars more than Biden’s proposed budget. House progressives attempted to roll back the $25 billion increase and also shave the topline budget by 10% — but were ultimately unsuccessful. However, the biggest win was the passage of Rep. Khanna’s amendment to end all support for the Saudi-led coalition’s war and blockade on Yemen, which passed 219-207 with 11 Republicans supporting and 11 Democrats voting against. Jordan Cohen at the Cato Institute helped us keep track of other amendments passed regarding arms sales and security assistance.

AT HOME

Are keyword dragnets legal? Turns out the government is “secretly ordering Google to provide data on anyone typing in certain search terms,” pursuant to sealed “keyword warrants,” according to Forbes. Reminder: how to protect browsing and search histories was central to the Patriot Act dumpster fire of 2020, and there are still open questions as to whether the Pentagon and other agencies are buying this kind of information without any process whatsoever.

We have nothing to add: Clearview AI subpoenaed watchdog groups for their contacts with journalists, including Open The Government and Lucy Parsons Labs, which were among the first to reveal the facial recognition company was actually a repugnant, privacy-eating monster. What? It’s Halloween month, and we all know who the monster of this story is. Per Politico, the groups argue the subpoenas “dissuade others from taking on Clearview.” It doesn’t help that Cleaveiw’s cybersecurity is bad.

Scorched State: an outgoing senior State official, Harold Koh, sent a “scathing internal memo criticizing” the Biden admin’s use of Title 42 to deport people, including migrants from Haiti, on the basis of public health. We saw it in Politico first. The memo, decrying the “current illegal and inhumane policy,” is here. There’s an important security theater argument at play here, too, given that border authorities had weeks of warnings.

Palantir’s worker surveillance program isn’t enough for ICE, which is now working to replace that software with “a custom-built tool that Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google,” and others are trying to work on. More at Insider.

And Amazon’s worker surveillance program isn’t enough for… Amazon, according to Open Markets. They allege the use of spies, cameras in third-party delivery vans, and social media surveillance.

The Center for Democracy & Technology held a panel about the 20th anniversary of the Patriot Act that included ODNI General Counsel Chris Fonzone. Toward the end, Sharon Bradford Franklin pushed on the purchase of information, and Fonzone revealed other governments’ purchase of data on Americans is a big consideration driving the US government.

Following up on the border: The National Immmigration Project at the National Lawyers Guild, on behalf of No More Deaths, joined the chorus of those demanding “Border Patrol immediately cease raids, harassment, and surveillance” of immigration activists. Read their letter here. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the government targeting immigrant activists.

While we’re following up, Apple: The Center for Public Integrity covered concerns that Apple’s new plans to undermine its own encryption would put LGBTQ youth at risk.

$25M worth of military gear has gone to police through the 1033 program since July, according to Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute. Including his time as VP, this brings the total under Biden to above $1.2 billion.

Did Baylor College of Medicine fire two medical school scientists because their spouses worked in China? The big question from ScienceInsider follows up on monthly reports of dropped cases against, vastly outnumbered by ongoing investigations into, American scientists with apparently innocuous connections to China. Spouses are indeed an important line of inquiry: just ask Keith Gartenlaub (who still has never seen the FISA application targeting him). For those with a Law360 sub, this story paints a damning picture of the “China Initiative.” Committee of 100, a group composed of prominent Chinese Americans, recently released a related report: Racial Disparities in Economic Espionage Act Prosecutions: A Window into the New Red Scare.

Interested in these stories? Then check out and sign up for the APA Justice newsletter.

Why not Signal? Per Vice, Customs and Border Protection is “deploying encrypted messaging app platform Wickr across ‘all components’ of the organization.” CBP now has a $900,000 contract with Wicker, following up on one for $700,000, for software licenses and professional support. Amazon bought Wickr earlier this year.

Cato is suing the DOJ and FBI for records on “assessments,” per The Washington Times. Assessments are an investigatory stage designed to allow investigation/surveillance of Americans before any allegation of wrongdoing. Cato fellow Pat Eddington is pursuing evidence that the FBI has investigated groups because of their political orientation, including Concerned Women for America, a chapter of the League of Women Voters, and the Muslim Justice League.

Eddington’s FOIA work also produced shocking reporting as he chased down the detention in Kenya of one of his boss’s former constituents. The result is this important piece about how profoundly intelligence agencies can impact the life of an American citizen in their pursuit of coercion: The Government Let a U.S. Citizen Spend Months in a Foreign Prison for No Good Reason.

Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and Thomas Drake joined Defending Rights & Dissent in this open letter to President Biden. Sent by 25 prominent critics of the War on Terror, they call on Biden to “not just end the war on terror abroad, but at home too.” You can check out their related panel here.

Interesting story: DRAD was founded by Frank Wilkinson, subject of the seminal case on Congress’s subpoena power, Wilkinson v. US. Notable considering the January 6th Committee news.

ABROAD

This should be bigger news: The majority of House Democrats voted in favor of requiring a vote on troop presence in Syria. Rep. Bowman’s amendment to the NDAA would have given the President one year to ask for congressional approval for US military involvement in Syria, as required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. While the amendment failed, 120 Members of Congress in the President’s own party voted in favor, and 98 in opposition. Former Obama-era ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, writes on the implications of this vote here.

Bank documents provide further examples of US sanctions hindering medical shipments. The Portuguese bank Novo Banco has been holding up a $12.7 million order for medical supplies — including syringes and vaccines for various diseases — for more than two months, writes Cole Stangler at The Intercept. It is the latest example that despite much touted ‘humanitarian exemptions’ by the US Treasury Department, broad US sanctions can still impede trade in humanitarian goods such as medicines and food. In a win for advocates, Representative Chuy García’s NDAA amendment mandating a comprehensive report on the impacts of sanctions, including impacts on civilian populations and humanitarian trade, passed in the second en bloc package.

Bi-partisan legislation aims at reforming war powers, arms sales, and emergency powers. Last week, Representatives McGovern and Meijer introduced the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act (NSRAA), which aims at giving Congress more checks to executive national security actions, including: requiring affirmative votes for certain arm sales; automatically cutting off funds for unauthorized military engagement and sunsetting all current authorizations of military force; limiting the duration of national emergencies and automatically sunsetting them without congressional approval. The bill is a companion to the National Security Powers Act introduced by Senators Murphy, Lee, and Sanders, however, there are key differences between the texts, especially in the section on war powers.

France confirms cabinet ministers’ phones had traces of Pegasus spyware, according to French outlet Mediapart and WaPo. Prime Minister Macron already changed his number.

After the Afghanistan withdrawal, the US public sides against militarism. A recent Eurasia Group Foundation survey found that the majority of Americans feel that the US should increase diplomatic engagement; a plurality believes we “the biggest lesson from the war in Afghanistan was that the United States should not be in the business of nation-building” or “that it should only send troops into harm’s way if vital national interests are threatened.” On the issue of war powers, 76% of respondents believe the president should be required to seek Congressional approval before ordering military actions overseas.

Senators Durbin and Leahy speak out against use of lethal force outside of warzones. In a letter sent to the Biden Administration last Monday, the Senators pointed to the US’s August 28th airstrike, which killed 10 civilians, as the latest example of why reform is needed in US lethal force and counterrorism policies. The letter poses a series of questions asking the admin to clarify its steps towards reforming war-based lethal force policies (such as rolling back the Trump administration’s loosened restrictions) and mitigating civilian casualties; if and how it is assessing the impacts of current policy; and what it plans on doing to make amends to the family of those killed on August 29. We’d like to supplement this story with Andrew Prasow’s short yet poignant piece in The Progressive, which calls for a “real reckoning with a U.S. approach to global terrorism that sees so many Muslim lives as dispensable.”

Groups rebuke CNN for role in UAE-run expo. A group of foreign policy and anti-war groups have raised concern with CNN for its collaborating role as the official broadcaster of the UAE government-sponsored Expo 2020 Dubai – rather than independently covering the expo. The group’s letter to CNN executives lambasts the event as an attempt to whitewash the monarchy’s human rights record, especially in its war on Yemen, and calls on CNN to reveal its financial arrangement with the UAE. Eli Clifton’s piece for Responsible Statecraft explains the issue further.

The US’s global spy network has a problem. Per the New York Times, a counterintelligence cable warns of the unusually large number of C.I.A. informants around the world who have been killed, arrested, or otherwise compromised in recent years. The difficulty in recruiting reliable spies, the cable notes, stems from a combination of poor agency vetting practices and the fact that the countries we are spying on, well, don’t like it and are getting better at counterintelligence operations themselves.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Webinar: #nowaytotreatachild Understanding U.S. Funding to Israel (hosted by Defense for Children International – Palestine and American Friends Service Committee) Tuesday, October 12 @ 8 pm ET

Understanding the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act (NSRAA), Part 1: War Powers Reform (hosted by Demand Progress) Wednesday, October 13 @ 1 pm ET

The State of Surveillance: 20 Years After the PATRIOT Act (hosted by the Fourth Amendment Advisory Committee) Tuesday, October 26 @ 10:30 am ET

RELEVANT, TOO

New Eurasia Group report: “More than twice as many people want to decrease as increase the defense budget”

Audit: Pentagon lags in fight against fraud in Roll Call (+ statement from Sen. Sanders)

“A Horrible Mistake” Recovering from America’s Imperial Delusions by Andrew Bacevich

When Targeted Killings Become ‘Tragic Mistakes’ by Andrea Prasow

The United States’ Role in Colombia’s Forever War by Caleb Brennan

WaPo Oppo OLC: This little-known but surprisingly powerful government office should be more transparent

Bipartisan criticism grows over the FBI delaying aid to Kaseya ransomware victims

Freedom House: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech

BOTTOM LINE