Posted on 02/08/2014 11:38:15 AM PST by markomalley
At the start of this week, documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed DDOS attacks on chatrooms by a British online intelligence unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). Now he has released a new trove showing that JTRIG is about much more than purely online annoyances.
According to the documents, released to NBC News, JTRIG's role is to "deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible. These techniques include destroying an individual's computer with a custom virus dubbed "Ambassador's Reception", setting up social media honey traps to harvest embarrassing information, actively attacking companies online and off, and planting data on people's systems.
A PowerPoint presentation from 2010 states that JTRIG activities account for five per cent of GCHQ's operations budget and uses a variety of techniques. These include "call bombing" to drown out a target's ability to receive messages, attacking targets in hotels, Psyops (psychological operations) against individuals, and going all the way up to disrupting a country's critical infrastructure.
One system, called "Royal Concierge", involves tapping into hotel bookings data to see where a target is staying and determine if the hotel in question is "SIGINT [signals intelligence] friendly." If not, GCHQ has a Close Access Technical Operations team who can take further action to enable extra monitoring tools.
According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence has tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up Royal Concierge. It was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.
Foreign news agencies are also listed as a target in this latest batch of documents. SIGNIT techniques can be used for employee profiling and harvesting credentials, which can then be used to influence the agency's output by persuasion – a "social, not technical solution," the slide states.
The second leak is an annotated 2012 presentation given by GCHQ at the NSA's SIGINT 2012 conference, and shows JTRIG has become more advanced and underhand in their techniques. It has also set up an "Online Covert Action Accreditation" program that is being used to train analysts in "using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world."
The presentation describes successes in actions against the Taliban in Afghanistan, where targets had their phones called automatically or were bombarded with text messages every 10 seconds. JTING could also block up older technologies, such as fax machines, it said and delete someone's entire online persona.
Targets can also be discredited with a "honey trap", whereby a fake social media profile is created, maybe backed up by a personal blog to provide credibility. This could be used to entice someone into making embarrassing confessions, which the presentation notes described as "a great option" and "very successful when it works."
JTRIG can also be used against companies, the presentation states, to discredit businesses. This can involve leaking selected piece of damaging SIGINT to the press and bloggers, posting negative information about a firm on online firms or actively trying to ruin business relationships.
False-flag operations are also handled by the unit. If GCHQ wants to deceive another country's intelligence services, it will plant seemingly secret information on a system it knows to be compromised and let it be scooped up.
JTRIG also used the custom "Ambassador's Reception" virus to make a target's computer unusable. The virus, which the presentation says has been used many times, can encrypt files, delete emails, or even cause the screen image to shake so much as to be unusable.
Attacks could be varied to suit the purpose. The document describes "blitz" attacks aimed at maximum disruption over a short period of time, as well as longer-term operations that influence the target more subtly and which are harder to recognize and militate against.
"All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework," said the agency in a statement, "which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position." ®
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The formerly free powers are now in the throes of a totalitarianism made possible by the success of technology combined with the cynicism of those who handle it. Sad to see.
No doubt MI-6 (or is it MI-5?) deployed Elizabeth Hurley to entrap Bill Clinton.
Very well put.
Burkas for all women!! Men are the victims here.
Too bad Liz didn’t go all “Fembot” on Bill.
Snowden Bombshell: Seems he downloaded entire roster of U.S. government – all names, home addresses and other personal info of **all** officials and gov’t employees — including law enforcement — plus bankers, corporate boards of directors and more!
Posted on February 8, 2014
February 6, 2014 — (TRN) — Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the National Security Agency took with him multiple “Doomsday” packages of information when he departed the country and began revealing how intensely the US Government is spying on its own citizens. He has the personal home info for all Elected Officials, Law Enforcement, Judges, Bankers, Corporate Boards of Directors and more!
At a classified briefing for members of Congress which took place on Wednesday, members found out that Snowden took with him:
■a complete roster of absolutely every employee and official of the entire US Government.
■The names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone and personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US Government.
■The files include elected officials, Cabinet appointees, Judges, and **ALL** law enforcement agency employees including sworn officers.
■Similar files with the personal information of EVERY government contractor and all employees of that contractor!
■Similar files with all the personal information of EVERY Bank Corporation, their operating officers and their Boards of Directors, including all current and former members of the Federal Reserve
■Similar files with all the personal information about anyone holding any type of license from the Government such as Doctors, Lawyers, Stock Brokers, Commodities Traders . . . . and many more.
■Similar files with all the personal information of EVERY non-bank Corporation in the U.S., including their operating officers and Boards of Directors.
Snowden has made it clear that if he is arrested, if he vanishes, or if he “dies” from any cause whatsoever, ALL of the information in his possession will be published publicly.
TRN has confirmed that, working through Julian Assange and his “WikiLeaks” organization, copies of the encrypted data have already been distributed to more than one-thousand, two hundred (1200) web sites around the world. Those sites have agreed to conceal the information until such time as contact with Snowden is “lost.” Once contact is lost, the sites have been told they will receive the Decryption keys via CD ROM, E-mail and P2P / Bit-Torrent file transfer. Once the decryption keys are sent, the sites have been instructed to wait a specific amount of time to confirm Snowden’s disappearance, arrest or death and upon expiration of that time period, to publish the decrypted materials.
Making the situation all the more dire for the government is that Snowden has made clear he will release some of the information under certain “other” circumstances. For instance, if Martial Law is declared in the US or if any elections are canceled for any reason, all the government employee info goes out. If an economic collapse takes place, all the Banker/Stock Broker/Commodities Trader information goes out. If Corporations start hyper-inflating prices, all the information about them, their officers and Board of Directors will go out.
Snowden literally has the most powerful people in the United States in an inescapable stranglehold. If any of the things articulated above take place, everyone throughout the country will know exactly who to blame and exactly where they live. One can only speculate that under the right conditions, it might not be long until those responsible for the problems of our country, faced consequences for their actions; consequences delivered one at a time, in the dark of night, when there is no help . . . . and no escape.
Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from the classified briefing “shocked” at the amount of information he reportedly took with him beyond the NSA surveillance programs.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the Armed Service panel’s Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the briefing on the defense consequences of Snowden’s leaks was “very highly classified,” and therefore details couldn’t be discussed.
Thornberry did say that lawmakers “left the briefing disturbed and angered” after hearing that the leaks by the former Booz Allen Hamilton employee “went well beyond programs associated with the NSA and data collection.”
He characterized the leaks as so severe that they “compromise military capability and defense of the country” and “could cost lives” — while they “will certainly cost billions to repair.”
“His actions were espionage, plain and simple,” Thornberry said.
Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) read his statement rather than making comments on the fly “because of the seriousness of this issue and the sensitivity” of the information they’d just heard.
“Ed Snowden isn’t a whistleblower; he’s a traitor,” McKeon said.
No matter what opinion people hold of the data collection programs, he added, people should be “shocked and outraged to find that a substantial amount of the information has nothing to do with the NSA.
“people should be “shocked and outraged to find that a substantial amount of the information has nothing to do with the NSA. “
Then how was it supposedly on NSA systems?
In any manufacturing process, it is important to keep track of parameters in order to avoid witting or unwitting small sabotage at one hand resulting in garbage being produced. Globalist corporations know that.
What is surprizing is that they would sabotage people and exploit others with such powers, sitting them down. Obviously a greedy CEO would not want hi toys taken away, while a communist would love to abuse them and a government agent would dream to whet his beak in this.
Integrity requires State generalist representatikn, and not some war time like mobilizations of machineries to feed a monster.
The NSA is another branch of the IRS. DC greed knows no bound.
Snowden is a bit of an idealist too. Something is not normal with that guy. I undedstand him getting upset about the lies of Congressmen regarding this program, but the truth is that manufacturing requires high supervision of parameters in the complex decomposition of the algebra of production.
The NSA’s main problem is its unfocused political dysfunctions typical of government and government abuse. The only idiot spy in this is Obama and the NSA employees who do not understand the real goal of surveillance beyond their paycheck and some abstract “National” security idea.
Snowden does not seem to have a clue about capitalism and manufacturing and how important it is to track parameters. So why would he take the job other than knowingly wishing to pervertedly track people?
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