by Declan McCullagh, CNet

WASHINGTON–The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

The FBI is not alone in renewing its push for data retention. As CNET reported earlier this week, a survey of state computer crime investigators found them to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea. Matt Dunn, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Department of Homeland Security, also expressed support for the idea during the task force meeting.

Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI’s digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to “retain for a period of 18 months” records including “the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call.”

At Thursday’s meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.

“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”

Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the “retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community.”

Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.

“We’re not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network,” said Drew Arena, Verizon’s vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

And, Arena added, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.”

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.

Read the rest here.

by Aaron Dykes

Is Austin-area FBI Informant Brandon Darby, who allegedly provoked anarchists into plotting with ‘molotov cocktails’ at the RNC 2008 connected to plans to “firebomb” patriot bookstore Brave New Books and a sting on “suicided” Palestinian activist Riad Hamad?

Aaron Dykes
Prisonplanet.com
December 8, 2009

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Remember Riad Hamad, the Palestinian man who’s “suicide” left him at the bottom of Lady Bird Lake in Austin with his mouth gagged and arms duct-taped behind his back?(Kurt Nimmo, Did Palestinian Activist Riad Hamad Commit Suicide? )

According to reports, he was observed at meetings with now-outed FBI informant/provocateur Brandon Darby, who admittedly set up two anarchist/leftists from Austin with “molotov cocktails” who were subsequently arrested for alleged plans to attack police cars outside the RNC 2008 in Minnesota in connection with the “RNC Welcoming Committee.”

Since Darby’s exposure as an admitted FBI informant, flyers have been seen in coffeehouses across Austin reading “Wanted: Brandon Darby An Informant Rat Loose in Austin.”

Flyers circulated across Austin coffeehouses reading “Wanted: Brandon Darby An Informant Rat Loose in Austin.”

WHAT’S MORE– Scott Crow, anarchist/leftist who formed the Hurricane Katrina relief group “Common Ground Collective” has made a number of interesting connections with fellow member Brandon Darby, whose role in Common Ground may have coincided with his FBI/Police Informant role, which may have begun in 2004, 2005 or 2006.

Scott Crow claims that in 2006, after Brandon Darby was admittedly an FBI informant, Darby attempted to recruit Crow on a plot to “firebomb” Brave New Books of Austin, Texas. Crow writes:

In Darby’s ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ over the years he tried to get numerous people, including myself, to do the things the two men were eventually taken down for. I believe now he tried to set me up in 2006 (after he, according to FBI documents began informing and provoking) to firebomb a bookstore called Brave New Books in Austin. I was NOT interested at all and thought it was stupid. I tried to talk him out of it. The event never happened. He was allowed to change his mind and move on. What if the Feds had raided him at the time?

This astonishing information was brought to my attention by Harlan of Brave New Books, but the connection to Riad Hamad I found only afterwards in Crow’s posts. Harlan writes:

The vitriol that seems to chase Darby to this day is due to the fact that two young activists David McKay and Bradley Crowder have been sentenced to a combined six years in prison for possessing several Molotov cocktails that were to be used during demonstrations at the 2008 Republican National Convention and were convicted in large part through the testimony of Brandon Darby. The possession of the cocktails is not in question, but what seems peculiar is why Darby an older, seasoned activist would agree to take part in a plan to firebomb a flock of police cars at the RNC, according to the FBI, and not just persuade the younger protégés to avoid instigating violent action? According to the defendants, Darby had encouraged the violence and had provoked the younger activists to take this direction, an allegation Darby denies. Darby admits that he was asked by the bureau to be the “eyes and ears” to monitor the small, loose-knit group of activists that included McKay.

Scott Crow (left) with Brandon Darby (right)

Crow initially defended Darby against allegations that he was reporting to the FBI , warning against ‘divisive rumors’ and COINTELPRO, even after claims had spread that he was an FBI informant. After Darby publicly admitted his role as an informant, Crow expressed regret for his support in a post titled “Eating Crow”, and then later expressed several suggestive claims about the extent of Brandon Darby’s political provocateuring in the Austin political scene, as posted on the PM Press.

Darby has appeared on ‘This American Life’/ NPR and in papers like the Austin Chronicle to talk about his background as an activist and his account of how he became an FBI informant through a New Orleans cop– once opposed to his groups’ actions until he was swayed by community relief efforts he witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Or so the story goes…

Crow claims that Darby began contacting the FBI earlier, however, when he traveled to New Orleans in 2004 (prior to Hurricane Katrina) to “see what [the FBI] had on him” in their files. Clearly, in light of certain revelations, this may demonstrate a much longer-lasting relationship inside the FBI.

Brandon Darby has some wild claims, as stated in ‘This American Life,’ that he traveled to Venezuela to convince Chavez to fund their Hurricane Katrina relief effort. While there, he says he was referred to a meeting with the FARC rebels who tried to recruit him to start a revolutionary group ‘in the swamps of Louisiana.’ Darby says he turned them down.

FBI Informant Brandon Darby claims he went undercover to stop Riad Hamad from ‘recruiting people for ‘terroristic’ like activities. Could Darby have been really entrapping Hamad? Why was Hamad found dead, gagged and duct-taped at the bottom of a lake?

Shortly afterwards, while back in Austin, he admits to having reported to the FBI what he claims was a Palestinian man trying to recruit himfor a bombing. This may have been connected to Riad Hamad. Crow mentions the NPR story’s account of the interaction with Riad Hamad:

In the ['This American Life']/NPR story, they mention Darby going undercover to stop a Palestinian peace activist named Riad Hammad [sic] from recruiting people for potentially ‘terroristic’ like activities. They don’t mention that Riad was found dead at the bottom of a river here in Austin under very unusual circumstances which the Feds ruled a suicide, but looked like was done to him. And that there is NO public evidence that anything that Darby is saying is true. I don’t know myself, but Riad cannot defend himself against the accusations.

Scott Crow claims that Brandon Darby introduced him to Riad Hamad and other Palestinians at Green Muse Cafe coffee shop in Austin, telling him that “these were real revolutionaries” and not just “anarchists.”

This inciting rhetoric, which Crow believes was another attempt to provocateur him into revolutionary action/violence was very similar to supposed accounts of Darby’s goading the “Texas 2? prior to the RNC 2008 that they were ‘weakling vegetarians’ and ‘couldn’t handle potentially violent revolutionary acts at the RNC.’ McKay claims Darby further goaded them to find out if they would take ‘revolutionary’ action or not once the RNC was underway. When he apparently agreed, and stated an apparently unplanned assault on a line of police cars, it led to the bust. Crow writes:

They also don’t mention that when I went to meet Darby at the Green Mews [sic] coffee shop in Austin during this time he was often with Riad and some men he described in excited tones as ‘real revolutionaries’ not activists. He could not wait to tell me, as if I would be impressed. I told him, as always that he needed to watch out for people he didn’t know, but what I didn’t know was working for the Feds. Silly me. So he is bragging about this in a public place, did he entrap Riad for the Feds like Brad and David? I have know idea, but I know that Riad is dead either because he took his own life because he thought someone was after him, or someone else took his life, because they figured there was an informer in their midst. Either of those scenarios are completely sad and scary, and not the world I want to create or be a part of.

Read the rest at this link.

from The National Expositor

“Report: FBI paid controversial NJ blogger for help” The AP is apparently trying to downplay this back page story’s significance by intimating that Hal Turner was just a blogger.  No, Hal Turner was a widely listened to talk radio host who was paid by the FBI to incite violence against the government.

The Record of Bergen County reported Sunday that Hal Turner received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups and was sent undercover to Brazil.

Turner also claims the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements on his radio show, but the newspaper also found many federal officials were concerned that his audience might follow up on his violence rhetoric.

The newspaper reviewed numerous government documents, e-mails, court records and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews with Turner.

He goes on trial Tuesday in New York, accused of making death threats against three Chicago-based federal appeals judges after saying in Internet postings in June the judges “deserve to be killed” because they had refused to overturn handgun bans in Chicago and suburban Oak Park.

The postings included the photos and work addresses of the judges — Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, and William Bauer — along with a picture of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago and notations indicating the placement of “anti-truck bomb barriers.”

Turner’s FBI connections began in 2003 with the Newark-based Joint Terrorism Task Force and continued on and off until this year, according to the newspaper. He claims his postings and other inflammatory statements were part of an undercover operation to ferret out violent left-wing radicals.

His lawyer, Michael Orozco, has subpoenaed Chris Christie, the former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and the state’s governor-elect, to testify on Turner’s behalf.

In an affidavit filed with the subpoena, Orozco says Christie knew of Turner’s activities between 2002 and 2008 while Christie held his federal post. Orozco says Christie issued a letter saying he would not prosecute Turner for his statements.

It was not known whether Christie would be called to testify.

He said last week that he had not yet seen the subpoena, but said “any advice I gave as U.S. attorney regarding prosecutions is something I am not going to talk about publicly.”

Federal prosecutors and FBI officials declined comment on Turner’s claims.

“We do not comment on matters before the courts, and will not address Mr. Turner’s allegations in the press,” said Weysan Dun, who runs the FBI’s Newark field office.

Turner said he feels double-crossed by the bureau after his June arrest.

But other documents show federal agents growing more anxious about his extremist views while valuing his ties to right-wing hate groups, the newspaper said. It noted one memo that stated Turner “has proven highly reliable and is in a unique position to provide vital information on multiple subversive domestic organizations.”

In a separate case, Turner was charged with “inciting injury to persons” for urging blog readers to “take up arms” against Connecticut lawmakers who proposed legislation to give Roman Catholic lay members more control over parish finances.

by Noah Shachtman, Wired

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”

Read the rest at this link.

by Brad Friedman

Just over two weeks ago, FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds was finally allowed to speak about much of what the Bush Administration spent years trying to keep her from discussing publicly on the record. Twice gagged by the Bush Dept. of Justice’s invocation of the so-called “State Secrets Privilege,” Edmonds has been attempting to tell her story, about the crimes she became aware of while working for the FBI, for years.

Thanks to a subpoena issued by the campaign of Ohio’s 2nd District Democratic U.S. Congressional candidate David Krikorian, her remarkable allegations of blackmail, bribery, espionage, infiltration, and criminal conspiracy by current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials, and agents of the government of Turkey are seen and heard here, in full, for the first time, in her under-oath deposition. Both the complete video tape and transcript of the deposition follow below.

Though there was much concern, prior to her testimony, that the Obama Dept. of Justice might re-invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” to keep her from speaking, they did not do so. Nor did they choose to be present at the Washington D.C. deposition.

The BRAD BLOG covered details of some of Edmonds’ startling disclosures made during the deposition, as it happened, in our live blog coverage from August 8th. The deposition included criminal allegations against specifically named members of Congress. Among those named by Edmonds as part of a broad criminal conspiracy: Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Bob Livingston (R-LA), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Tom Lantos (D-CA), as well as an unnamed, still-serving Congresswoman (D) said to have been secretly videotaped, for blackmail purposes, during a lesbian affair.

High-ranking officials from the Bush Administration named in her testimony, as part of the criminal conspiracy on behalf of agents of the Government of Turkey, include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, and others.

During the deposition — which we are still going through ourselves — Edmonds discusses covert “activities” by Turkish entities “that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records…recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery.”

Speaking about current members of Congress during a break in the testimony,Krikorian told The BRAD BLOG that “for people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don’t take action against it, in my opinion, it’s negligence.” (More video statements from Krikorian, Edmonds and attorneys from all parties, taped before, during, and after the 8/8/09 testimony, areavailable here.)

Edmonds’ on-the-record disclosures also include bombshell details concerning outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings. Edmonds alleges the front company had actually been shut down in August of 2001 — three years prior to Bob Novak’s public disclosure of the covert operative’s identity — following a tip-off to a wire-tap target about the true nature of the CIA front company. The cover was blown, Edmonds alleges, by Marc Grossman, who was, at the time, the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. State Department. Prior to that, Grossman served as ambassador to Turkey. He now works “for a Turkish company called Ihals Holding,” according to Edmonds’ testimony.

An unclassified FBI Inspector General’s report, released on her case in 2005, declared Edmonds’ classified allegations to be “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” In 2002, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), then the senior members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, co-wrote letters on Edmonds’ behalf to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and DoJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, calling on all of them to take action in respect to her allegations. And in a 2002 60 Minutes reporton Edmonds’ case, Grassley noted: “Absolutely, she’s credible…And the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.”

The 8/8/09 deposition was brought by Krikorian as part of his defense in a case filed against him before the Ohio Election Commission (OEC) by Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH). The 2nd district Congresswoman has accused Krikorian, an Armenian-American who ran against her as an independent in 2008, of “false statements” during the campaign last year alleging that she had accepted “blood money” from Turkish interests. Krikorian says that Schmidt, co-chair of the Congressional Turkish Committee, accepted more money from Turkish interests during last year’s campaign than any other member of Congress, despite few, if any, ethnic Turks among her local constituency. He has suggested she may have been instrumental in helping to hold off a Congressional vote on a long-proposed, much-disputed resolution declaring the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during WWI as a “genocide” by the Turks.

Edmonds herself happens to be a Turkish-American, though she was recentlyattacked by the Turkish Lobby, following her long-sought, long-blocked testimony.

The complete transcript of Sibel Edmonds’ under-oath testimony, may now bedownloaded here [PDF]. The complete video-taped testimony follows, in five parts, below…

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 1 of 5 from Velvet Revolution on Vimeo.

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 2 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 3 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 4 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 5 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.