The host site of the Delta Force video did some updat­ing yes­ter­day which affected the video feed on DT.

We pulled the post until the glitch was fixed.

So now it’s back up and we’ve got it for you again…Enjoy.

– Christian

During a Pentagon brief­ing yes­ter­day, the Joint Chiefs head of regional oper­a­tions, BGEN Perry Wiggins, decon­structed a recent oper­a­tion to take out Taliban fight­ers hid­ing among children. 

The expla­na­tion comes as the mil­i­tary takes fire from the Afghan gov­ern­ment on civil­ians killed in the cross­fire between coali­tion troops and Talib holdouts. 

And its also inter­est­ing to note, the detailed descrip­tion of the Special Forces troops avoid­ance of friendly fire comes in sharp con­trast to the Armys con­dem­na­tion of the Marine Corps com­man­dos who were booted from Afghanistan after their response to a road­side ambush killed civil­ians in the cross­fire in March.

BGEN Wiggins:

I’m sure all you know, there’s been a lot of recent cov­er­age about civil­ian casu­al­ties asso­ci­ated with the coun­terin­sur­gency oper­a­tions against the Taliban. Here’s an illus­tra­tion of how we actu­ally oper­ate against the bar­baric enemy that we face in the Afghanistan the­ater, and shows the restraint and pre­ci­sion exer­cised by our forces with respect to the civil­ian pop­u­lace.

(more…)

Interesting news on the infowar front, in two parts. First, Declan McCullagh has stum­bled onto a previously-​​undisclosed FBI Net-​​monitoring pro­gram that’s “broader and poten­tially more intru­sive than the FBI’s [infa­mous] Carnivore sur­veil­lance sys­tem.“

Instead of record­ing only what a par­tic­u­lar sus­pect is doing, agents con­duct­ing inves­ti­ga­tions appear to be assem­bling the activ­i­ties of thou­sands of Internet users at a time into mas­sive data­bases, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials. That data­base can sub­se­quently be queried for names, e-​​mail addresses or key­words…
Call it the vacuum-​​cleaner approach. It’s employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet ser­vice provider can’t “iso­late the par­tic­u­lar per­son or IP address” because of tech­ni­cal con­straints, says Paul Ohm, a for­mer trial attor­ney at the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section…
That kind of full-​​pipe sur­veil­lance can record all Internet traf­fic, includ­ing Web browsing–or, option­ally, only cer­tain sub­sets such as all e-​​mail mes­sages flow­ing through the net­work. Interception typ­i­cally takes place inside an Internet provider’s net­work at the junc­tion point of a router or net­work switch. 

Top data-​​miners and social net­work ana­lysts have ques­tioned whether this kind of broad-​​brush sur­veil­lance works at all. And while we’re all get­ting caught in the FBI’s elec­tronic drag­net, the real bad guys are get­ting smarter about hid­ing their tracks. The Middle East Media Research Institute notes:

The Global Islamic Media Front [recently] announced the immi­nent release of new com­puter soft­ware called “Mujahideen Secrets.. [allegedly] the first Islamic com­puter pro­gram for secure exchange [of infor­ma­tion] on the Internet,” and it pro­vides users with “the five best encryp­tion algo­rithms, and with sym­met­ri­cal encryp­tion keys (256 bit), asym­met­ri­cal encryp­tion keys (2048 bit) and data com­pres­sion [tools].”

The pack­age “is com­pa­ra­ble to any num­ber of com­mer­cial prod­ucts avail­able here in the United States,” says ZDNet blog­ger Mitch Ratcliffe. “The dif­fer­ence is an Islamist skin, which seems more a gim­mick to inspire con­fi­dence in the soft­ware than a guar­an­tee it will be effec­tive.“
But “‘Mujahedin Secrets’ is the lat­est exam­ple of the grow­ing tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence of online sup­port­ers of al-​​Qaida and other Islamic ter­ror net­works, but encryp­tion capa­bil­i­ties are not new in the world of cyber-​​jihadis,” IntelCenter’s Ben Venzke tells UPI.

“This is con­sis­tent with the ongo­ing efforts of jihadist sym­pa­thiz­ers online… Encryption is used by some (Islamic ter­ror­ists)” and some al-​​Qaida man­u­als have addressed the ques­tion.
He said encryp­tion is “a stan­dard part of the oper­a­tional secu­rity prac­ticed (online) by those (Islamic ter­ror­ists) who take the time to use it.

National Journal sur­veil­lance reporter Shane Harris has been watch­ing Attorney General Gonzales tes­ti­mony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He calls an exchange with Senators Feingold and with Schumer about the NSA domes­tic wire­tap­ping program’s new legal sta­tus “espe­cially illu­mi­nat­ing.” Harris sees a new kind of order for the eaves­drop­ping, issued by a sin­gle — likely Administration-​​friendly — judge.
First, the attor­ney gen­eral referred to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge who issued this recent autho­riza­tion as he, when Gonzales said, He was very care­ful. That means that the pre­sid­ing judge, Colleen Kollar-​​Kotelly, who report­edly has expressed con­cerns about the NSA pro­gram taint­ing other FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] war­rant appli­ca­tions, was not the judge who issued this order that appar­ently allows the NSA pro­gram to con­tinue. Of course, Kollar-​​Kottelly is the only woman on the 11-​​member court, so that doesnt much nar­row down the ques­tion of which judge gave the order.
When Feingold asked Gonzales how long it took the court to issue this order, Gonzales replied that it took longer than a nor­mal FISA appli­ca­tion. There are vary­ing accounts of how long it takes to secure and exe­cute a FISA war­rant, but admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have said in the past that they didnt orig­i­nally seek FISA war­rants for the NSA pro­gram, in part, because the process took too long. So, it sounds as if Gonzales is say­ing that this most recent order from the judge came after longer than usual delib­er­a­tion on his part.
Gonzales also said that the admin­is­tra­tion sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion for this order to the judge, and that it was inno­v­a­tive. To the first par­tap­pli­ca­tion­this raises the ques­tion, which the Justice Department hasnt answered, of whether this recent order applied to one par­tic­u­lar inter­cept, to more than one, or to the entire pro­gram. Sen. Schumer pressed Gonzales for some speci­ficity on this point, but the attor­ney gen­eral declined to dis­cuss what he said were oper­a­tional details of the mat­ter. But read­ing between the lines a bit, I sus­pect that Gonzales means the admin­is­tra­tion has come up with an appli­ca­tion for elec­tronic sur­veil­lance, one that that fits the spe­cial para­me­ters of the NSA pro­gram, and that this inno­v­a­tive appli­ca­tion is dif­fer­ent from a tra­di­tional FISA appli­ca­tion. It took some time for a judge to get com­fort­able with this appli­ca­tion, Gonzales said, which I think implies that this appli­ca­tion is, indeed, unusual. Whether it will be used on a case-​​by-​​case basis, or whether it will cover any and all sur­veil­lance con­ducted under the para­me­ters of the NSA pro­gram is unclear. But pre­sum­ably, if a judge has found this new appli­ca­tion accept­able, and has ruled that it does work under the intel­li­gence sur­veil­lance law, then the admin­is­tra­tion would use it again if nec­es­sary.
One final note, Gonzales did refer to orders, plural, from the judge. He said that these orders meet the legal require­ments under FISA and that they also include min­i­miza­tion pro­ce­dures [to pro­tect per­sonal pri­vacy] above-​​and-​​beyond what is nor­mally required under law. Gonzales also acknowl­edged that, until the judge issued his recent order, the admin­is­tra­tion did not believe that FISA was avail­able to cover the NSA pro­gram. At times, offi­cials have said that they thought FISA did not apply, indi­cat­ing that they had made a legal judg­ment inde­pen­dent of the courts rul­ing. But Gonzales now seems to be say­ing that offi­cials were unsure whether FISA applied or not, which is what prompted them to work up this new, inno­v­a­tive appli­ca­tion to the court.
One other note: In yesterday’s back­ground brief­ing by senior Justice Department offi­cials, one of the them said that the new orders “take advan­tage of use of the use of the FISA statute and devel­op­ments in the law. I can’t really get into devel­op­ments in the law before the FISA court. But it’s a process that began nearly two years ago, and it’s just now that the court has approved these orders.“
“Developments in the law” implies that the recent court order is based not only on FISA, but on recent law, as well. Could be the Patriot Act, which includes elec­tronic sur­veil­lance pro­vi­sions. It sounds as if the judge con­sid­ered statutes other than FISA in mak­ing his deci­sion.
– Shane Harris
UPDATE 9:33 AM: As TPM Muckracker notes, “Rep. Heather Wilson (R-​​NM) out-​​and-​​out called Gonzales a liar.” The AG claimed he briefed Congress on the sur­veil­lance program’s new legal bound­aries. “She was never told of the plan, she said, and from what she heard yes­ter­day it likely stinks:

Ms. Wilson, who has scru­ti­nized the pro­gram for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blan­ket, pro­gram­matic approval of the pres­i­dents sur­veil­lance pro­gram, rather than approval of indi­vid­ual war­rants.
Administration offi­cials have con­vinced a sin­gle judge in a secret ses­sion, in a non­ad­ver­sar­ial ses­sion, to issue a court order to cover the pres­i­dents ter­ror­ism sur­veil­lance pro­gram, Ms. Wilson said in a tele­phone inter­view. She said Congress needed to inves­ti­gate fur­ther to deter­mine how the pro­gram is run.

UPDATE 9:38 AM: Gonzales has met the enemy. And he blogs.

Great news: The NSA’s domes­tic spy­ing pro­gram is finally being brought within the bounds of the law, more than a year after it was revealed.
The Justice Department has decided to let the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — the tra­di­tional, and legal, mon­i­tor of gov­ern­ment wire­tap pro­grams — start exam­in­ing the spy efforts. Before, the Bush Administration said no such review was needed — a legal read­ing that even for­mer NSA chiefs said was wildly off-​​base.
The court has already “approved one request for mon­i­tor­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of a per­son believed to be linked to al-​​Qaida or an asso­ci­ated ter­ror group,” the AP says.
It’s a huge (and wel­come) turn­around for an admin­is­tra­tion that said pre­vi­ously that the pres­i­dent had the power to order almost any­thing in the name of fight­ing ter­ror. (And “still believes that,” accord­ing to flack-​​in-​​chief Tony Snow.) So why the change? Snow mum­bled some­thing about the court’s increased “agility.” But you can bet your ass the new Congress had a whole lot to do with it.
UPDATE 3:28 PM: Shocker. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in his let­ter describ­ing the rule change, appears to be lying through his teeth shad­ing the truth, say­ing that the admin­is­tra­tion has been try­ing to put the wire­taps under the court’s author­ity since the spring of 2005. If that’s the case, Glenn Greenwald asks, “why didn’t they say so when the con­tro­versy arose?“
UPDATE 3:35 PM: Patrick Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, is tak­ing a wait-​​and-​​see approach to Gonzales’s announce­ment. “It’s just not clear what it means,” he tells Defense Tech.

There have already been pro­pos­als for the FISA court to grant blan­ket retroac­tive approval to the pro­gram, and if that’s what this is, then it’s not much of a con­ces­sion from the admin­is­tra­tion. If, on the other hand, it’s actu­ally case-​​by-​​case approval by FISA judges we’re talk­ing about, I’m not sure how that’s going to square with the reported scope of the pro­gram. The osten­si­ble grounds for cir­cum­vent­ing the FISA in the first place were that this pro­gram didn’t fit in the FISA frame­work. And given that it report­edly does a kind of mile-​​wide-​​and-​​inch-​​deep net­work analy­sis that is anti­thet­i­cal to the per­son­al­ized, legally sanc­tioned sur­veil­lance con­tem­plated by the FISA, I’m not sure how you can make the two pro­ce­dures fit. Unless what they’re really say­ing here is that they’re aban­don­ing the pro­gram alto­gether, and return­ing to one-​​target-​​at-​​a-​​time, retail-​​rather-​​than-​​wholesale sur­veil­lance. Which some­how I doubt.

UPDATE 3:35 PM: “It sounds to me like this court just re-​​wrote the law and made a sec­ond cat­e­gory of wire­taps (one that is eas­ier to get but only tar­geted at over­seas com­mu­ni­ca­tions),” writes Ryan Singel.
He also notes that Gonzales’s announce­ment comes just a day before he is sup­posed to tes­tify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Pretty sneaky, sis,” Ryan says.
UPDATE 4:51 PM: “Another ques­tion raised by Gonzales let­ter indeed, in the first sen­tence is which FISC judge issued this order?” sur­veil­lance scoop­mas­ter Shane Harris tells Defense Tech.

The let­ter states that a judge issued the order. Does Gonzales mean the courts pre­sid­ing (or chief) judge, Colleen Kollar-​​Kotelly? Presumably he would have said so if that were the case. Kottelly has been briefed on the NSA pro­gram pre­vi­ously. She report­edly has been con­cerned that infor­ma­tion obtained with­out war­rants under the NSA pro­gram could taint other war­rant appli­ca­tions before the court.
The FISC is made up of 11 sit­ting fed­eral judges hail­ing from judi­cial dis­tricts across the coun­try. Did the admin­is­tra­tion select a par­tic­u­lar judge to approach for this order? Heres the break­down on how many judges were appointed by a par­tic­u­lar president:

Jimmy Carter: 1
Ronald Reagan: 4
George H.W. Bush: 3
Bill Clinton: 2
George W. Bush: 1

The mil­i­tary team track­ing anti-​​war pro­test­ers is now dig­ging through bank records, too.
“The Pentagon has been using a little-​​known power to obtain bank­ing and credit records of hun­dreds of Americans and oth­ers sus­pected of ter­ror­ism or espi­onage inside the United States,” the Times reports. It’s “part of an aggres­sive expan­sion by the mil­i­tary into domes­tic intel­li­gence gath­er­ing. And the CIA is join­ing in, also “issu­ing what are known as national secu­rity let­ters to gain access to finan­cial records from American companies.”

The let­ters pro­vide tremen­dous leads to fol­low and often with which to cor­rob­o­rate other evi­dence in the con­text of coun­teres­pi­onage and coun­tert­er­ror­ism, said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman…
But even when the ini­tial sus­pi­cions are unproven, the doc­u­ments have intel­li­gence value, mil­i­tary offi­cials say. In the next year, they plan to incor­po­rate the records into a data­base at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track pos­si­ble threats against the mil­i­tary, Pentagon offi­cials said…
Some national secu­rity experts and civil lib­er­ties advo­cates are trou­bled by the C.I.A. and mil­i­tary tak­ing on domes­tic intel­li­gence activ­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly in light of recent dis­clo­sures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had main­tained files on Iraq war pro­test­ers in the United States in vio­la­tion of the mil­i­tarys own guide­lines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expan­sive view of its domes­tic role under the guise of force pro­tec­tion, or efforts to guard mil­i­tary instal­la­tions…
One promi­nent case in which let­ters were used to obtain finan­cial records, accord­ing to two mil­i­tary offi­cials, was that of a Muslim chap­lain at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, who was sus­pected in 2003 of aid­ing ter­ror sus­pects impris­oned at the facil­ity. The espi­onage case against the chap­lain, James J. Yee, soon col­lapsed, and he was even­tu­ally con­victed on lesser charges of adul­tery and down­load­ing pornog­ra­phy.
Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the for­mer chap­lain and a mil­i­tary law expert, said he was unaware that mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tors may have used national secu­rity let­ters to obtain finan­cial infor­ma­tion about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the mil­i­tary had ever claimed the author­ity to issue the let­ters.
Mr. Fidell said he found the prac­tice dis­turb­ing,? in part because the mil­i­tary does not have the same checks and bal­ances when it comes to Americans civil rights as does the F.B.I. Where is the account­abil­ity? he asked. Thats the evil of it it doesnt leave fingerprints.

(Big ups: DK)

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which over­sees all U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies, has for nearly three months been hold­ing a series of low-​​profile “pri­vacy work­shops” with a range of experts on tech­nol­ogy and pri­vacy.
The stated pur­pose to edu­cate DNI offi­cials, their tech­nol­o­gists, and civil lib­er­ties watch­dogs on what cur­rent and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies could be used to pro­tect pri­vacy rights dur­ing the col­lec­tion and analy­sis of intel­li­gence. These broad and largely infor­mal dis­cus­sions are being held against the back­drop of increased sur­veil­lance and elec­tronic mon­i­tor­ing by the gov­ern­ment as it pur­sues ter­ror­ist sus­pects.
Some of the work­shop atten­dees praised the DNI for seek­ing checks against poten­tial abuses, par­tic­u­larly as the gov­ern­ments appetite for data min­ing and pro­fil­ing sys­tems increases. But sev­eral well-​​known and highly regarded experts — who include vocal crit­ics of the Bush admin­is­tra­tions coun­tert­er­ror­ism poli­cies — were not invited to attend.
The final work­shop will be held next week, out­side Washington. Officials arent ask­ing atten­dees to rec­om­mend a par­tic­u­lar way for­ward on privacy-​​protection, but they say theyll use what theyve learned to help chart the DNIs research agenda.
Check out the full story in the cur­rent National Journal, out now.
– Shane Harris