The conflict between secrecy and marketing within defense/security contractors has led to some entertaining gaffs in the U.S. The Spy Who Billed Me has followed up on some of the organisations openly monitoring the blog and made some interesting findings. Security contractors have to advertise their wares whilst attempting not to give away too much about the work they already do. The Spy Who Billed Me has decoded the marketing on one contractor’s web site (referred to as ‘Heckle and Jeckle’), using only publicly available contextual knowledge to reach the following conclusions:

…Heckle and Jeckle teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems.  This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.

In other words, they set up black sites albeit a different type than has been in the news lately.  To put it into context, such black sites such as covert listening posts in hostile territories and even in friendlier ones where discovery could create international tensions count among the Intelligence Community’s blackest secrets.  And now, thanks to the About page on Heckle and Jeckle’s website, we know that the CIA is outsourcing this to Heckle and Jeckle, whose identity would make it somewhat easier to uncover the black collection sites.

…

Heckle and Jeckle also brag about a micro-electromechanical facility which becomes particularly interesting in conjunction with their job openings announcements.  Reviewing the skill sets they’re looking for, it quickly becomes apparent that they design and program their own computer chips, so they’re clearly creating proprietary cutting-edge gadgets.  It’s notable how frequently they’re searching for engineers with experience in one of the most miserable operating systems for mobile devices:  Windows mobile.  They’re also regularly seeking programmers versed in another mobile device language:  Symbian.  Now this information taken in conjunction with their specialty and their prior claims of micro-electromechanical facilities suggests they’re designing and creating a lot of mobile, hand held covert communications devices.

And here I’d venture a pure guess that these are probably designed to look like standard run-of-the-mill Treos and other smart phones, blending their “intelligent phones” into the mobile world.  The largest consumer of such gizmos is, of course, the CIA’s DS&T, adding to suspicions that Heckle and Jeckle is a major DS&T contractor.  The primary use of such covert communications gear is for communications with nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) and agents.  So the information on Heckle and Jeckle’s site suggests that they are likely designing and creating the latest must-have accessories for NOCs and agents, a far cry from the clunky COVCOM gear of yesteryear.   (And from the Agency’s point of view, knowledge of this would be a serious security breech.  Keep in mind the CIA does not even allow contractors to acknowledge their affiliation with the Agency, let alone divulge the programs they are working on, particularly such sensitivities ones.)

…

Not only have CIA programs been compromised, so have SOCOMs.  Judging from the job postings for positions in Florida, Heckle and Jeckle are doing data mining and analytical work for SOCOM.  Among other things that can be deduced, they search for relational patterns of terrorist activity and affiliations, looking at a wide array of seemingly innocuous relationships using open source and clandestinely gathered data, particularly focusing upon financial transactional data.  I’m betting they have a very sophisticated quantitative model that they’re constantly tweaking that underlies this process.

Again, Heckle and Jeckle job postings give us hints to other SOCOM programs.  It appears that Heckle and Jeckle are involved in tracking SOCOM assets worldwide.  Moving beyond Heckle and Jeckle’s own website to other open sources, it’s possible to learn some of the specs of related handhelds including whose low-earth orbiting satellites they use.  Digging a little deeper, it’s also possible to discover the code name of Heckle and Jeckle’s RF geolocation program…

[The Spy Who Billed Me]

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Thanks to Spyblog for promoting this. Several Parliamentary committees have finally decided to take a serious look at the implications of surveillance and data collection on British Society. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution are going to investigate

the constitutional implications of the collection and use of surveillance and other personal data by the State and (insofar as they can be used by the State) private companies, particularly with regard to the impact on the relationship between citizen and state. [Parliamentary Call for Evidence via Spyblog]

The specific remit of the committee focuses on the technological and policy changes underpinning the collection of data, and is particularly interested in the impact of these changes on the relation between the citizen and the state. The committee will also consider the impact of current data protection legislation. This is the detail from the call for evidence:

• How has the range and quantity of surveillance and data collection by public and private organisations changed the balance between citizen and state in recent years, whether due to policy developments or technological developments? Which specific forms of surveillance and data collection have the greatest potential impact on this balance?
• What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Can the claimed administrative, security or service benefits of such activities outweigh concerns about constitutional propriety? If so, under what circumstances? Is there a line that should not be crossed? If so, how might that line be identified?
• What effect do public or private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy? Are there any constitutional rights or principles affected?
• What impact do surveillance and data collection have on the character of citizenship in the 21st century, in terms of relations with the State?
• To what extent are the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient in safeguarding constitutional rights in relation to the collection and use of surveillance or personal data?
• Is there a need for any additional constitutional protection of citizens in relation to the collection and use of surveillance material and personal data? If so, what form might such protection take?

The call for evidence can be downloaded from here. Submissions should be received by June 8th. Submissions should be emailed to constitution@parliament.uk. A single hard copy (single-sided, unbound) should also be sent to The Clerk to the Constitution Committee, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW. Concise submissions of 1500 words or fewer are preferred.

If anyone would prefer to remain anonymous to the committee then you can send your submission to SpyBlog for inclusion in theirs.

[Thanks to SpyBlog]

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We are never surprised to discover that the arms trade uses the tactics of the military intelligence communities. Their interests are often linked and there is large scale traffic of employees from one to the other. Anger (or admiration depending on your political persuasion) might be a typical response to the discovery that BAE was spying on anti-arms trade groups [the Guardian] but not surprise. However, something seems utterly wrong with retail multi-nationals creating military intelligence units - despite their balance sheets operating on the scales of nation states. Wal-Mart seem to be creating a military intelligence unit, recruiting staff from the intelligence services with the intention of using their military contacts as part of their work.

[Business Week via Global Guerillas]

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Space News have reported that the six months of jamming suffered by a Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications satellite in 2006 was engineered by the Libyan government in an attempt to prevent cigarette smugglers’ use of satellite phones.

Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications are a United Arab Emirates company based in Abu Dhabi. The Libyan government is one of their major share holders. Apparently the jamming was only intended to disrupt the communications of smugglers working in Libyan waters.

The jamming incident was not the first in the commercial sector, but does appear to be one of the most systematic:

In perhaps one of the most persistent jamming events ever recorded in the commercial satellite sector, Libyan nationals operating from three widely separated locations inside Libya—at least one of them a restricted military site—compromised the L-band communications signals from Thuraya for more than six months in 2006, officials said. [Space News]

Diplomatic efforts on the part of the United Arab Emirates government eventually persuaded the Libyan government to stop the jamming.

The Space News article also mentions some of the preceeding cases involving jamming of commercial satellites:

In Asia, both APT Satellite Holdings Ltd. and AsiaSat of Hong Kong have suffered the occasional TV-signal hijacking by groups believed to be in support of the Falun Gong dissident group in China.

In France, operators of the French Syracuse military telecommunications system say their satellites’ signals in the Middle East have been subject to attempted jamming. [Space News]

[from Space News]

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The Guardian’s leader column reiterates some truths about surveillance that are worth repeating and repeating so they are not drowned out by the volume of the UK’s ubiquitous surveillance tendencies.

Speed cameras and lie-detection tests are not analogous. Speed cameras can reliably detect speed and their implementation has lowered the casualty rates for reckless driving. Lie detectors are not reliable and their proposed application is not to the general population, but to people who may be in the most vulnerable positions.

The view that everyone could be a liar, the paranoid mode of government, is one component of the equation, the other is the simplistic performance measure. The latter often insidiously leads to the former by the simple but brutal logic that, when you judge a ministry on its ability to cut costs then it will accept the collateral damage of discouraged, legitimate, claimants. The logic that every tactic successfully (measured in $$) catching the liars is legitimate is the same logic that accepts executing people who can’t afford good quality legal defense because at least we’ll get the real killlers too.

Does anyone really believe that appearing on a government lie detection database is not a discouragement to use the service? Perhaps the poor and vulnerable should not be the only people eligible for inclusion on government ‘honesty’ databases? We could include all the people convicted of fraud, deception, libel, adultery and plagiarism (who have probably gone through rather more rigorous investigtions with rights of appeal). That way we could all read their mendacity ratings just by swiping their indentity cards.

The most sage advice the next generations may receive will be to ’stay invisible’.

[From the Guardian via Blogzilla]

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A recent Bloomberg.com article [via: slashdot] reports that police in Middlesbrough, UK have begun equipping CCTV cameras with loudhailers so council surveillance operatives can chastise wrongdoers caught in the act:

It’s Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers’ Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

“You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'’The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

“People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'’ said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.[Bloomberg.com]

The article reminds us that in the UK ‘about 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world’s largest DNA database’. In an earlier article I linked to a story on spyblog referring to parliamentary revelations that that more than one million innocent people have their DNA held by the police in the UK.

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According to the Journal of Net-Centric Warfare:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a collaboration of Next Wave Systems, of Pekin, Ind. and Purdue University with a grant to design a “Rosetta phone,” an application to run on commercial camera phones and portable computing devices to capture and translate foreign language text.

DARPA envisions such a tool used by soldiers in the field to decipher street signs, captured documents, or other materials, across a range of languages such as Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, Greek, Korean han’gul or Chinese.

[via defensetech]

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Military failure is forcing strategic analysis to bridge the chasm between the social sciences and military thinking that has existed since the Vietnam war. A couple of articles have been published this year highlighting the increasing influence of social theorists on the US’ anti-terrorist and anti-insurgency strategies [source: Mind Hacks]. Both articles mentioned below are worth reading. Keefe’s article is concerned with counter-intelligence work, Packer’s with counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

Ref:

Keefe, Patrick Radden (2006) ” Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?”. New York Times. 12 Feb 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.tcf.org (Accessed: 22 Dec 2006 )

Packer, George (2006) “Knowing the Enemy”. The New Yorker. 18 Dec 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.newyorker.com (Accessed: 21 Dec 2006 )

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The home office sneaked out the admission that over 1 million innocent people, who had never been cautioned or charged with any offences, have their DNA held in the national police DNA database. While the media’s attention was focused on the hunt for a serial killer the statistics emerged as a parliamentary written answer to a question by the Tory MP Bob Spink. spyblog point out that the answer is buried amongst other, more innocuous, questions about the administration of the DNA database.

[source: spyblog]

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MIT are testing a social-network technology designed to use the MIT campus’ WiFi network to identify the locations of contacts.

iFIND, a project developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, aims to improve social networking through some kind of digitally augmented serendipity. Using iFIND, you and your buddies can instantaneously exchange your locations on campus, talk to users nearby, and microcoordinate more effectively. If you are a geek, you will even be able to arrange meetings in real time using the group’s center of gravity! [Source: iFind at MIT]

[Via Smart Mobs and Engadget]

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