Whistleblowers and The Criminal Activities of The US Military and The Insecurity Industry

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US drone whistleblower Daniel Hale sentenced to 45 months in prison

27 Jul, 2021 17:42

A Predator drone is prepared for operations in this November 9, 2001 file photo at an undisclosed location.

©  US Air Force/Handout

Daniel Hale, a former US Air Force intelligence analyst who leaked information about civilian deaths caused by drone strikes overseas, has been sentenced to almost four years in prison under the Espionage Act.

US District Judge Liam O’Grady passed the sentence on Tuesday in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, saying that the 45-month sentence was needed as a deterrent to others from disclosing government secrets. O’Grady told Hale he had other options than to share classified documents with a reporter.

Hale, 33, pleaded guilty in March to one count of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, admitting to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. The documents were leaked to the Intercept, which published them in October 2015 as ‘The Drone Papers’.

Under the plea deal, Hale faced up to 10 years in prison – far less than the 50 years the original charges would have carried, had he gone to trial.

Other whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Daniel Ellsberg and WikiLeaks have advocated on Hale’s behalf, but prominent human rights organizations such as the ACLU and PEN have mostly remained silent. Freedom of the Press Foundation called his punishment “shamefully excessive.”

The ACLU reacted after the sentencing, saying Hale "helped the public learn about a lethal program that never should have been kept secret. He should be thanked, not sentenced as a spy."

As Kiriakou told RT in April, prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act robs them of the opportunity to explain their motivations. 

“He did it because he was exposing a war crime. He is not allowed to say that. And he really doesn't have any chance of acquittal,” Kiriakou said.

While working as a private contractor, Hale leaked a number of documents to the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, showing the extent to which President Barack Obama’s drone warfare program in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen resulted in civilian casualties. 

Documents showed that, of the 200 people killed between January 2012 and February 2013, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period, nearly 90% of those killed were innocents, who were nonetheless classified as “enemies killed in action.”

Hale is the third Intercept source to be arrested and put on trial by US authorities. The FBI’s Terry Albury and the NSA’s Reality Winner – only recently released on parole for good behavior – were both caught due to errors on part of the outlet’s staff. It wasn’t clear whether the same happened to Hale, but his attorney blamed “failure of source protection” for his 2014 arrest.

Snowden skewers Big Tech, ‘amoral’ capital firms for enabling

‘Insecurity Industry’ & calls for urgent action before it’s too late

27 Jul, 2021 12:00

Warning that companies that claim to protect national security are the “greatest danger” to it, Edward Snowden has urged the dismantling of this ‘Insecurity Industry’ by banning trade in intrusive software and penalizing enablers.

In a searing post on his blog, ‘Continuing Ed’, the NSA whistleblower pointed to the Pegasus scandal as a “turning point” that exposed the “fatal consequences” of private-sector companies like the NSO Group that are part of this “out-of-control” industry – whose “sole purpose is the production of vulnerability.”

“The phone in your hand exists in a state of perpetual insecurity, open to infection by anyone willing to put money in the hand of this new Insecurity Industry,” Snowden noted, adding that its clients range from countries to “sex-criminal Hollywood producers who can dig a few million out of their couch cushions.”

The entirety of this industry’s business involves cooking up new kinds of infections that will bypass the very latest digital vaccines (security updates) and then selling them to countries that occupy the red-hot intersection of a Venn Diagram between ‘desperately craves the tools of oppression’ and ‘sorely lacks the sophistication to produce them domestically.’

As news of the Pegasus scandal broke last week, it emerged that over 50,000 phones were infected by Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group’s flagship malware. Many of the numbers on the leaked list reportedly belong to political opponents of these client countries.

The former US intelligence contractor described the mobile ecosystem as a “dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation.” Similarly, he stated that the world is “in the midst of the greatest crisis of computer security in computer history.”

This is partly because, he noted, software developers and device manufacturers like “Apple, Google, Microsoft (and) miserly chipmakers who want to sell...not fix things” are still writing code in “unsafe” programming languages because it is easier and more cost-effective than modernizing.

In recent years, both Google and Microsoft engineers have said that roughly 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase and Microsoft products respectively are related to memory safety problems – that Snowden puts down to the lack of incentive to switch to a safer programming language.

“The vast majority of vulnerabilities that are later discovered and exploited by the Insecurity Industry are introduced, for technical reasons related to how a computer keeps track of what it’s supposed to be doing, at the exact time the code is written,” he noted.

As examples of “incentivizing change,” Snowden suggests that “defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product” would give Microsoft a “heart attack.” As well, he noted, make Facebook legally liable for any leaks of its users’ “unnecessarily collected” personal records and “Mark Zuckerberg would start smashing the delete key.”

Similar liability clauses needed to be applied to “amoral” global capital firms that bankroll companies like the NSO Group. Without these funds, Snowden noted, neither the scale nor the global consequences of ‘Insecurity industry’ activities would be possible.

However, the “first digital step” must be to “ban the commercial trade in intrusion software.” By “eliminating the profit motive” there would be a reduction in the risk of proliferation by private companies while preserving avenues for genuine research.

“If we don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets: It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect,” Snowden noted, warning of a future where “people (are) too busy playing with their phones to even notice that someone else controls them.”

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'Foreign Funding Gave Big Power to Small Groups in Syria, Flipped Everything on Its Head’

© Erik De Castro / Reuters

In Syria, there are different interests sometimes running parallel or are completely inconsistent, says former CIA officer Jack Rice. He adds that the proxy wars, with funding rolling out of the US and other powers, have led to the morass seen today.

According to a leaked document from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Saudi Arabia ordered Syrian opposition forces to 'Light-up Damascus’ in 2013 while providing them with tons of weapons for the assault.

RT spoke to former CIA officer Jack Rice who explains the international players changed the balance of power in the region.

RT: What was Saudi Arabia trying to achieve by ordering this attack?

Jack Rice: It is very clear here that the Saudis are trying to have enormous influence in Syria. That is one of the problems that we have in the region, the region that is so difficult right now. Inside of Syria, there are all these different interests running sometimes parallel, sometimes completely inconsistent. You can have a revolution, you can have a civil war, which you absolutely had. Right alongside it you had a proxy war where you found that there was funding rolling out of the US, out of Western Europe, out of the Saudis, out of the Iranians and out of others because they all had a certain agenda in place, but the problem was they were absolutely inconsistent which led to the morass that we see today.

Syria has a close relationship with Iran. Iran is attempting to increase its influence in the region and Saudi Arabia is fighting proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to try and prevent this.

RT: In 2013 the conflict in Syria spread across the whole country. Do you think it could have reached such a scale without Saudi Arabia's involvement?

JR: I think it could have because what we did see was this revolution really did rise up against the Damascus regime in 2011. And we saw this consistency that was working its way across the country. It was slow, but it was consistent. The problem is that when you start seeing proxy wars; when you start seeing Riyadh stepping into this, and you see others step into this, what happens is that it will take one small group, one schism in that entire revolution, if you will, and fund it dramatically, which gives them enormous power frequently over everybody else. Because remember in the middle of a civil war like this, there was a turnover of some weapons from the Damascus army, but those were relatively small when you look at it in the big picture. It is when you see outside forces coming and dumping, as in this case “tons of weapons into the region,” it changes and really flips everything on its head. And it makes it that much worse. And that is exactly what happened in this case.

RT: According to the report, the US knew about the attack several days in advance. Why did they let it happen?

JR: It is a great question because at this point it is unclear about what that is. Again this is a report that came out allegedly from Snowden but again it doesn’t clarify the American motivation behind this. Let’s also be clear, back in 2011 and 2012 under President Obama, it was very uncertain as to exactly what it was the US was going to do. And again, they have frequently done this themselves where they may want to be involved in some sort of revolution of sorts or involved in the funding of some groups. But what they have done is they have used proxies of their own and the proxies they have frequently used are the Saudis. So, that is not exactly shocking is it?

This being an RT report, there was little mention of Russian involvement with Tehran in this proxy war. Of course, they came in much later and their involvement precipitated the approaching conclusion of the war rather than its escalation and the reckless destruction that resulted in the mass migration of millions of Syrians.