TBR News May 11, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 11, 2017: “When Napoleon had the Duke of Enghien shot for perhaps wanting to supplant him, his foreign minister, Talleyrand, said, ‘Sire, it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.’

This, I think, sums up Trump’s firing the head of the FBI.

It is becoming apparent that the new President has a monumental ego and cannot stand anyone, in what he considers his employ, of opposition.

In the present age, diplomacy is by far the better course but diplomacy died with Bismarck and was replaced with force or the threat of force.

Bismarck created an empire by diplomacy but the German military machine destroyed it by force. The United States is run by what President Eisenhower referred to as the ‘military/industrial complex’ and Trump is just beginning to discover this.

Diplomacy, gentlemen, not force.”

Table of Contents

• Number of American Jews reclaiming German citizenship spikes
• A hint of Watergate
• Comey infuriated Trump with refusal to preview Senate testimony: aides
• Why Was Comey Fired?
• FBI refuses to disclose documents on Trump’s call to Russia to hack Clinton
• Comey invited to testify before Senate Intel Committee meeting next Tuesday: reports
• Trump Agrees to Arm Kurds in Hugely Significant Move for Syria
• ‘Trump’s only ideology is ‘me’, deeply authoritarian & very dangerous’ – Noam Chomsky
• The Call of the Loons
• NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-breaking Computer Project to Entire Internet

 

Number of American Jews reclaiming German citizenship spikes

Since Donald Trump was elected US president, Germany’s New York consulate has seen an increase in citizenship applications under Article 116, which allows former nationals and their descendants to reclaim citizenship.

May 10. 2017

by Maya Shwayder

DW

Since Donald Trump was elected US president, Germany’s New York consulate has seen an increase in citizenship applications under Article 116, which allows former nationals and their descendants to reclaim citizenship.

American Jews, it seems, want out.

Or at least, they want the option of out.

Seventy-five percent of the Jewish community voted for Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election, many spurred by rhetoric coming from Donald Trump that recalled Germany before the Nazis took power.

“We can confirm that there has been a perceptible increase in the number of people claiming German citizenship under Article 116, Paragraph 2 of the German Basic Law,” said Bradford Elder, a spokesman for the German consulate in New York. The city has the largest population of Jews in the US, and is second only to Israel in the world.

Article 116, Paragraph 2 of the German Basic Law allows people who were stripped of their German citizenship between 1933 and 1945 to reclaim the passports revoked by the Nazis. That right also applies to their descendents.

Between 50 and 70 people in New York applied for German citizenship in the years 2014 and in 2015, according to the consulate. That figure jumped to 124 alone in November 2016, the month of the US presidential election, and it has climbed every month since then, according to the data provided to DW by the German consulate. In March 2017, 235 people applied to reclaim their or their ancestors’ German citizenship.

A personal connection – and a way out

It appears to be a trend for Jews elsewhere in the US as well. For Terry Mandel, 63, of Berkeley, California, the reason to get German citizenship was clear and simple.

“It was 99 percent motivated by wanting to have a way out,” Mandel told DW. “It’s about having a plan B. I’ve always referred to it as plan B.”

Mandel first applied for a German passport back in 2000, when conservative Republican George W. Bush was named president in the wake of a controversial and hotly contested electoral college victory after he, like Trump, lost the popular vote. Then in September of 2016, while working on her submission to a book about Jews who were reclaiming German citizenship, Mandel realized her German passport had expired.

“Like many progressive Americans, I didn’t think there was a chance that Trump could win,” she said. “But I still thought: Why take the risk?” She started the process to renew her passport right before Election Day 2016.

Trump’s electoral college victory and ascension to the presidency made renewing the passport feel “a lot more urgent and meaningful.”

For Ilana and Rena Sufrin, 26-year-old twins from Pittsburgh, a German passport is less about politics and more about an easy way into the European Union, but also an insurance policy of sorts. While growing up, Rena Sufrin felt very connected to their German heritage, which they have through their grandmother – more so than Ilana, who felt more Jewish. Rena took German in high school and studied abroad in Cologne, Germany, during college.

The sisters started the application process in 2015, long before Trump announced his candidacy for president.

“When we initially applied, Obama was president,” said Ilana. “I’m a pretty liberal person. I had a lot of hope. I didn’t think there was going to be any potential problem. But I would say now …”

“It’s definitely a good thing to have,” Rena finished.

Now their other set of twin sisters are also thinking about applying.

The luxury of choice

Adam Bencan, 26, originally from Philadelphia, is going through the application process now. He submitted his paperwork to the New York consulate in January, but his motivation was less about the political situation and more a deep personal connection to his German heritage through his grandfather, who he knew as Opa.

I just wanted to have German citizenship and fulfill the full circle of what my grandfather lost.”

He said he had been planning to spend a year living in Germany at some point.

“The change in the political climate could play into how quickly I do move,” Bencan said. Trump’s victory did intensify his desire to leave a bit, he added.

For the Sufrins, the idea of moving permanently to Europe is less appealing. Ilana said she planned to spend a year hopping between major European cities and working remotely, but didn’t intend to stay.

“I don’t think I would live there permanently,” Ilana said. “I don’t think I want to raise my kids in Germany. The US still affords the most opportunities. Unless that changes, and everything goes to hell.”

“I feel like people don’t really believe that something [horrible] could happen,” said Rena, “but I feel like it’s at the back of everyone’s mind, especially when you start hearing the way people like Trump talk. It gets a little unnerving.”

For Mandel, the idea of actually moving to Germany was becoming less and less foreign.

“It’s really 50/50,” she said. “I have the option to leave and the curiosity about relocating. In the current political climate, globally, in Europe and the US, Germany feels safer and more receptive and accommodating and welcoming than many, many other places.”

A hint of Watergate

President Trump has allegedly fired FBI head James Comey due to his investigations in the Hillary Clinton email scandal. But he may have unleashed a political earthquake

May 10, 2017

by Miodrag Soric

DW

There has never before in American history been anything like this: The head of the White House has fired the head of the FBI at a time when he is leading investigations which may turn out to be dangerous to the president.  James Comey has been investigating attempts by Russia to influence the US election, the ultimate goal being to pave the way for Donald Trump to enter the White House and to undermine his political opponent, Hillary Clinton.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has rejected all allegations that it cooperated with the Kremlin during the election campaign in 2016. Yet FBI investigations were still ongoing. To fire the FBI head before they had been concluded leaves a bitter political aftertaste. It is not only the Democrats who are afraid of the possibility that Donald Trump will appoint a new FBI director who will bring the investigations to a swift end. This would also bring to an end ever finding out the whole truth about any political influence exerted by Moscow.

US president in difficulties

Trump’s decision has shattered the credibility of the political institutions in Washington. The reputation of the political class will reach new low levels, and with it will come an increase in political disenchantment. The president allegedly wants the FBI to have a fresh start. Trump’s reason for firing Comey is his conduct regarding the Hillary Clinton email affair.

But no one is buying that, not even his own party members. After all, it was none other than Trump himself who praised Comey’s conduct on that matter – after the investigations heavily affected his rival’s election campaign in its final stages. Heaven forbid that there may have been ulterior motives behind firing the head of the FBI now, months later.

Comey’s forced retirement could cause a political earthquake in Washington. The decision evokes memories of the Watergate scandal. It was in the early 1970s that Richard Nixon recalled a special investigator who had got wind of his sinister scheme. It didn’t help: Nixon was forced to resign. He could not stop the truth from eventually getting out. Trump may be able to fire Comey, but the Democrats – and also some Republicans – will continue to try and find out if Trump’s election campaign team had consultations with Russian representatives. So far there is no proof. But that could change.

Comey infuriated Trump with refusal to preview Senate testimony: aides

May 11, 2017

by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason

Reuters

The anger behind Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday had been building for months, but a turning point came when Comey refused to preview for top Trump aides his planned testimony to a Senate panel, White House officials said.

Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had wanted a heads-up from Comey about what he would say at a May 3 hearing about his handling of an investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

When Comey refused, Trump and his aides considered that an act of insubordination and it was one of the catalysts to Trump’s decision this week to fire the FBI director, the officials said.

“It gave the impression that he was no longer capable of carrying out his duties,” one official said. Previews of congressional testimony to superiors are generally considered courteous.

Comey, who testified for four hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it made him feel “mildly nauseous” that his decision to make public his reopening of a probe into Clinton’s handling of classified information might have affected the outcome of the Nov. 8 presidential election. But he said he had no regrets and would make the same decision again.

Trump’s sudden firing of Comey shocked Washington and plunged Trump deeper into a controversy over his campaign’s alleged ties with Russia that has dogged the early days of his presidency.

Democrats accused the Republican president of firing Comey to try to undermine the FBI’s probe into Russia’s alleged efforts to meddle in the 2016 election and possible collusion with members of the Trump campaign, and demanded an independent investigation. Some of Trump’s fellow Republicans called his dismissal of Comey troubling.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday Comey was fired because of his handling of the Clinton email probe.

Before he axed Comey, Trump had publicly expressed frustration with the FBI and congressional probes into the Russia matter. Moscow has denied meddling in the election and the Trump administration denies allegations of collusion with Russia.

A former Trump adviser said Trump was also angry because Comey had never offered a public exoneration of Trump in the FBI probe into contacts between the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergei Kislyak, and Trump campaign advisers last year.

According to this former adviser, Comey’s Senate testimony on the Clinton emails likely reinforced in Trump’s mind that “Comey was against him.”

“He regretted what he did to Hillary but not what he did to Trump,” the former Trump adviser said of Comey.

Clinton has said that the Comey decision to announce the renewed inquiry days before the election was a likely factor in her loss to Trump.

Aides said Trump moved quickly after receiving a recommendation on Monday to terminate Comey from Rosenstein, who began reviewing the situation at the FBI shortly after taking office two weeks ago.

Trump’s move was so sudden that his White House staff, accustomed to his impromptu style, was caught off guard. Stunned aides scrambled to put together a plan to explain what happened.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer ended up briefing reporters about the move in the dark on Tuesday night near a patch of bushes steps away from the West Wing.

Comey, who was in Los Angeles meeting with FBI employees on Tuesday and returned later to Washington, has made no public comment on his firing.

‘FIG LEAF’

Many questions remained about what caused Trump to move so quickly.

Two former senior Justice Department officials said it made little sense to fire Comey while the Justice Department Inspector General was still doing a review of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

“I take Rod (Rosenstein) at his word that be believed everything in that memo but he must know that it’s going to be used as a fig leaf to fire Comey,” one former official said.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters it was her “understanding” Comey had been seeking more resources for his investigation into the tangled Russia controversy.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had pondered dumping Comey as soon as he took office on Jan. 20, but decided to stick with him.

Trump shrugged off the political firestorm he created with Comey’s dismissal as he met with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Asked by reporters why he fired Comey, Trump said, “He wasn’t doing a good job, very simply. He wasn’t doing a good job.”

(Additional reporting by Joel Shectman, Julia Edwards Ainsley and Susan Cornwell; Editing by Caren Bohan and Frances Kerry)

 Why Was Comey Fired?

The simplest explanation is that Trump doesn’t like him much and doesn’t trust him at all.

May 10, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The American Conservative

The firing of FBI Director James Comey may have been a surprise to some, most particularly in the media, but there was a certain inevitability about it given the bureau’s clear inability to navigate the troubled political waters that developed early last summer and have continued ever since. The initial reaction that it may have been triggered by Comey’s recent maladroit comments regarding the Huma Abedin emails would appear to miss the mark as that issue was not raised either by Attorney General Jeff Sessions or by the White House in their written explanations of what had taken place and why.

The most widely accepted explanation for the firing is that it was carried out by the White House to disrupt the ongoing investigation into apparent Russian meddling into the U.S. presidential election and suggestions that there may have been collusion between some Trump campaign officials and the Russians. But that argument lacks credibility in that the action will have the opposite effect, energizing both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to agitate for an independent counsel to look into the issue. And FBI professionals on the investigative team certainly will not stop their work now that Comey is gone. As Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins put it, “The president didn’t fire the entire FBI. He fired the director of the FBI.” She added she had “every confidence” the investigation will continue apace.

The statements by the White House and Sessions cite two issues. The first is Comey’s unprofessional handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, where he first decided not to prosecute her over the mishandling of classified information and then subsequently revealed to the public that the investigation had been reopened shortly before the election, possibly influencing the outcome. This is a serious matter, as Comey broke with precedent by going public with details of bureau investigations that normally are considered confidential. One might argue that it is certainly an odd assertion for the White House to be making, as the reopening of the investigation undoubtedly helped Trump, but it perhaps should be seen as an attempt to create some kind of bipartisan consensus about Comey having overreached by exposing bureau activities that might well have remained secret.

The second issue raised by both Sessions and the White House is Comey’s inability to “effectively lead the Bureau” given what has occurred since last summer. That is a legitimate concern. When the Clinton investigation was shelved, there was considerable dissent in the bureau, with many among the rank-and-file believing that the egregious mishandling of classified information should have some consequences even if Comey was correct that a prosecution would not produce a conviction.

And the handling of “Russiagate” also angered some experienced agents who believed that the reliance on electronic surveillance and information derived from intelligence agencies was the wrong way to go. Some called for questioning the Trump-campaign suspects who had surfaced in the initial phases of the investigation, a move that was vetoed by Comey and his team. It would be safe to say that FBI morale plummeted as a result, with many junior and mid-level officers leaving their jobs to exploit their security clearances in the lucrative government contractor business.

There has been considerable smoke about both the Clinton emails and the allegations of Russian interference in last year’s election, but I suspect that there is relatively little fire. As Comey asserted, the attempt to convict a former secretary of state on charges of mishandling information without any ability to demonstrate intent would be a mistake and would ultimately fail. No additional investigation will change that reality.

As for the Russians, we are still waiting for the evidence demonstrating that Moscow intended to change the course of the U.S. election. Further investigation will likely not produce anything new, though it will undoubtedly result in considerable political spin to explain what we already know. It is unimaginable that Michael Flynn, for all his failings, agreed to work on behalf of Russian interests, while other names that have surfaced as being of interest in the case were hardly in a position to influence what the Trump administration might agree to do. There is no evidence of any Manchurian Candidate here.

I believe that the simplest explanation for the firing of Comey is the most likely: Donald Trump doesn’t like him much and doesn’t trust him at all. While it is convenient to believe that the FBI director operates independently from the politicians who run the country, the reality is that he or she works for the attorney general, who in turn works for the president. That is the chain of command, like it or not. Any U.S. president can insist on a national-security team that he is comfortable with, and if Trump is willing to take the heat from Congress and the media over the issue he certainly is entitled to do what he must to have someone he can work with at the FBI.

FBI refuses to disclose documents on Trump’s call to Russia to hack Clinton

FBI decision to withhold records suggests Trump’s provocative election-year comments are being seen as relevant to its own ongoing investigation

May 11, 2017

by Ed Pilkington

The Guardian

New York-The US justice department is refusing to disclose FBI documents relating to Donald Trump’s highly contentious election year call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Senior DoJ officials have declined to release the documents on grounds that such disclosure could “interfere with enforcement proceedings”. In a filing to a federal court in Washington DC, the DoJ states that “because of the existence of an active, ongoing investigation, the FBI anticipates that it will … withhold all records”.

The statement suggests that Trump’s provocative comment last July is being seen by the FBI as relevant to its own ongoing investigation.

In March, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, confirmed the existence of that investigation in a congressional hearing. On Tuesday, Comey was summarily sacked by Trump in a move that sent shockwaves across the capital and provoked widespread calls for an independent inquiry into allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump associates.

In his dismissal letter to Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” But the FBI’s refusal to hand over the documents implies that it believes Trump’s call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails was at least relevant to their ongoing inquiries.

The then Republican presidential candidate ignited an instant uproar when he made his controversial comment at a press conference in Florida on 27 July. By that time Russia had already been accused by US officials of hacking Democratic National Committee emails in a bid to sway the election.

“I will tell you this, Russia: if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to a stash of emails that Clinton had deleted from her personal server dating from her time as US secretary of state.

Later that day, the Republican candidate posted a similarly incendiary remark on Twitter: “If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!”

The FBI’s refusal to disclose documents relating to Trump’s Russia hacking invitation was made in response to a freedom of information lawsuit lodged by Ryan Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and the journalist Jason Leopold. They jointly submitted a Foia request last August requesting from the FBI “disclosure of any and all records, including investigative records, mentioning or referring to Donald Trump’s statement on 27 July 2016”.

The FBI initially declined either to confirm or deny the existence of any documents on this matter, but later reversed its position, in effect admitting that records relating to Trump’s provocative remark were in the agency’s possession.

A joint status report, prepared by counsel for both the defendants and the plaintiffs in the freedom of information case, said: “Although initial searches began only as recently as the week of March 20, 2017, and definitive information is not yet available, the FBI expects that it possesses at least some records that are responsive to Plaintiff’s Russia Request and subject to FOIA.”

Shapiro said: “The DoJ/FBI’s latest filing makes plain that Donald Trump’s campaign trail call for Russian hacking of Secretary Clinton’s emails is of investigative interest to the FBI.” He added: “In light of Trump’s sudden termination of Director Comey, this fact should significantly reinforce the widespread perception that the president of the United States is unabashedly seeking to cover up his and his associates’ crimes.”

Comey invited to testify before Senate Intel Committee meeting next Tuesday: reports

May 10, 2017

by Brad Reed

Raw Story

Fired FBI Director James Comey has been invited to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee next Tuesday, according to multiple reports.

One source tells ABC News’ Michael Del Moro that while Comey has been invited to testify, he has not yet given word about whether he will accept the invitation.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) confirmed to local news station NBC 4 on Wednesday that both he and Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) had invited Comey to speak next week.

Comey was fired on Tuesday evening after a controversial tenure that drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans. Despite this, Comey’s dismissal has now drawn bipartisan criticism due to his role in investigating the role that Russian intelligence services played in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump Agrees to Arm Kurds in Hugely Significant Move for Syria

May 10, 2017

by Patrick Cockburn

The Unz Review

President Trump’s decision to provide weapons to the Syrian Kurds, who are fighting Isis, potentially marks a crucial change in the political geography of the Middle East. In effect, the US is choosing to support its Kurdish ally in Syria, in defiance of Turkey, whose aim is to prevent the establishment of a quasi-independent Kurdish state there.

Mr Trump approved a plan on Monday to arm the Kurds directly, in order to enable the People’s Mobilisation Units (YPG) Kurdish militia and its Arab allies to assault and capture Raqqa, the de facto capital of Isis in Syria. The US will send heavy machine guns, anti-tank weapons, mortars, armoured cars and engineering equipment to bolster the attack.

Turkey has sought in vain to persuade the US to break its alliance with the Syrian Kurds, accusing the YPG of being the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has been waging a guerrilla war against the Turkish state since 1984. “Both the PKK and the YPG are terrorist organisations and they are no different, apart from their names,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavasoglu on Tuesday. “Every weapon seized by them is a threat to Turkey.”

Mr Trump has always said that he gives priority to defeating Isis, leading him to agree to a long-delayed plan to capture Raqqa with ground forces led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This was said by a US official last December to have 45,000 fighters of whom 13,000 are Arabs and the rest Kurdish. It has defeated Isis repeatedly when backed by air strikes by the US-led air coalition ever since Isis besieged but failed to take the Kurdish city of Kobani in late 2014.

The US wants to inflict a double defeat on Isis by capturing both Raqqa and Mosul in Iraq over the next few months. Isis fighters are still holding out in the Old City of Mosul after a siege by Iraqi government forces that has lasted almost seven months. Most of the city has ready fallen with heavy casualties on all sides and severe destruction. The loss of Raqqa and Mosul will not be the end for Isis, which is reverting to being a guerrilla organisation, but the self-declared Caliphate will no longer exist as a state with an administration and extensive territory.

Raqqa, once a city of 300,000 people on the northern bank of the Euphrates River, is already isolated from the south bank by air strikes destroying bridges. The road south to Deir Ezzor, the biggest city in eastern Syria, has been cut by the SDF. Isis fighters can only move in and out of Raqqa by boat, though they have proved in Mosul that they are skilled in urban warfare using sniper teams, suicide bombers and booby traps to slow down and inflict losses on a more numerous and better armed enemy.

But the fate of Raqqa is not the only issue being decided in the fighting in northern Syria. Turkey is facing a disastrous outcome of the wars in Syria and Iraq which it once hoped would extend its influence in the northern Middle East. Since 2011, it has been seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and to stop the two million Syrian Kurdish minority gaining control of a broad band of territory along Turkey’s southern frontier.

Turkish efforts to stop the Kurdish advance have largely failed and the intervention of Turkish ground troops west of the Euphrates in August 2016 has only been a qualified success. Its local Arab and Turkman allies were unable to take the Isis stronghold of al-Bab without Turkish army intervention. Though Turkey has offered its services to the US as an ally capable of replacing the YPG in the battle against Isis, this always looked a dubious option. It has long been obvious that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is more interested in targeting the Kurds than in fighting Isis.

Turkey’s response to the YPG and SDF successes has been to step up military engagement in northern Syria and to threaten much tougher action. On 25 April, Turkish planes launched air strikes against YPG positions killing 20 fighters, half of them women. Mr Erdogan threatened that similar action might happen “at any time”. The US said the Turkish action was “unacceptable” and was so concerned about a Turkish ground invasion that it sent patrols of US special forces in vehicles to monitor the Syrian side of the border. For their part, the Syrian Kurdish leaders said they would not take Raqqa if Turkish military action continued.

The public decision by Mr Trump to send heavier weapons to the YPG is important primarily as a sign that the US is ignoring Turkish threats and will stick to its military alliance with the Syrian Kurds, which has served it well. This makes it difficult for the Turkish army and air force to escalate its attacks on the YPG.

Mr Erdogan is to see Mr Trump for the first time in Washington on 16-17 May and will seek to persuade him to reverse his policy towards the Syrian Kurds, but he is unlikely to succeed. In his final days in office, President Obama had also decided to send heavier equipment to the YPG, indicating that the pro-Kurdish policy has broad support in the US. At the same time, the Americans are trying to reassure the Turks by saying that the new weapons will be only used against Isis and the quantity of ammunition delivered will be limited to what is needed for that operation. The Turks say they fear that the arms will be handed over to the PKK and used against their soldiers.

The Syrian Kurds are worried that, once Isis is defeated, the US will no longer need them and will revert to its old alliance with Turkey as a member of Nato and a major power. This would leave them vulnerable to a Turkish ground attack aimed at extinguishing their semi-independence. For now, however, the Kurds in Syria will be relieved that the US has decided to stick with them.

‘Trump’s only ideology is ‘me’, deeply authoritarian & very dangerous’ – Noam Chomsky

May 11, 2017

BBC News

World-famous linguist, philosopher and political thinker Noam Chomsky has described US President Donald Trump’s ideology simply as ‘me’, adding that while it’s not fascist, it’s still “deeply authoritarian and very dangerous.”

However, there is no other option in the eyes of the people, Chomsky added in his interview to BBC.

“What is the alternative to Trump? The democrats gave up on the working class 40 years ago. It’s not their constituency, no one in the political system is. The Republicans claim to be, but they are basically their class enemy. However they can appeal to people on the basis of claims ‘We’re gonna help you economically, even when we kick you in the face’?”

In his book, Chomsky branded the Republican Party as “the most dangerous organization on Earth,” and when asked to explain, he pointed out that it’s about something they refuse to admit exists.

“Trump will do damage to the world, and it’s already happening. The most significant aspect of the Trump election is not just Trump, but the whole Republican Party as they are departing from the rest of the world on climate change, a crucial issue, an existential threat,” Chomsky said.

He called the denial “an astonishing spectacle,” in which “the US, alone in the world, not only refuses to participate in efforts to deal with climate change, but is dedicated to undermining them. And it’s not just Trump – every single Republican leader is the same and it goes down to local levels.”

And US popular opinion isn’t exactly of any help, according to Chomsky.

“Roughly 40 percent of the population think it can’t be a problem, because Jesus is coming in a couple of decades.”

Isn’t Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) more of a threat? It would seem so, but Chomsky isn’t sure about that.

“Is ISIS dedicated to destroy the prospects for organized human existence? What does it mean to say is Not only we’re not doing anything about climate change, but we’re trying to accelerate the race to the precipice. Doesn’t matter whether they genuinely believe it or not, if the consequence of that is, let’s use more fossil fuel, let’s refuse to subsidize developing countries, let’s eliminate regulations that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — if that’s the consequence, that’s extremely dangerous.”

“Trump’s only ideology is ‘me’, it’s not Hitler or Mussolini, but deeply authoritarian and very dangerous,” the philosopher concluded.

The process happening in the US is universal, though, and is taking place worldwide, Chomsky told BBC, due to “a massive assault on the large part of the population, an assault on democracy” which led to “not just anger, but contempt for centrist institutions.”

“A large part of the population feels that they are just not responsive to them,” and Chomsky enumerates the results of this: Trump, Brexit, Le Pen.

Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election is “by no means the end to the populism in Europe,” he said. In fact, “Macron is an example of populism, because he came from the outside, because the institutions have collapsed. The vote for him was substantially the vote against Le Pen.”

Last, but not least, Chomsky spoke out on WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, calling his persecution and threats against him to be “completely wrong.”

“What’s keeping him in prison – and in fact he is in prison [holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London] – is the threat that the United States will go after him. Same thing that’s keeping [security whistleblower Edward] Snowden in Russia. And he is right to worry about it and it is the threat that is wrong.”

The Call of the Loons

They proclaim their lunacy throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof

May 11, 2017

by Harry von Jonston, PhD

 

Modern Pentecostals trace their origins, not to the New Testament but rather, to the Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, where a certain Agnes Ozman began to speak in “tongues” in 1901 when hands were laid on her. It was claimed (though certainly not credibly confirmed) that Ozman ‘spoke in Chinese for three days’, unable to speak English, and on the second day she ‘spoke in Bohemian.’ Soon, most of the others at the school were speaking and singing “in tongues.” Parham claimed that language professors and other linguistically educated people confirmed that the tongues were languages, but this was not confirmed outside of the movement. Newspaper reporters of the day described the phenomenon, with some acumen and certainly accuracy, as “gibberish.”

In 1914, Charles Shumway diligently sought evidence to prove that early Pentecostal tongues were real languages. He failed to find even one person to corroborate the claims which had been “In his 1919 Ph.D. dissertation, Shumway censured the local Houston Chronicle for credulous reporting and stated that ‘letters are on hand from several men who were government interpreters in or near Houston at the time [when Parham conducted a Bible school there], and they are unanimous in denying all knowledge of the alleged facts'”

Parham’s Bible school students jotted down strange writings which they claimed were the product of the gift of tongues. They claimed these writings were foreign languages, such as Chinese, but when they were examined by linguists, they were found to be mere indecipherable scratchings The press called these writings “quaint and indistinguishable hieroglyphics”

Parham was so enthused that he said missionaries would go to the ends of the earth and would not have to learn the languages. In fact, most of the early Pentecostals believed this. It didn’t work that way, though. When A.G. Garr traveled to India and attempted to speak to the people in supernatural tongues, he quickly found that he could not communicate.

Parham, the founder of Pentecostalism, was riddled with doctrinal heresies. He believed in annihilation of the unsaved and denied the Bible doctrine of eternal torment. He believed in the unscriptural doctrine of anglo-Israelism. He taught that there were two separate creations, and that Adam and Eve were of a different race than people who allegedly lived outside of the Garden of Eden. The first race of men did not have souls, he claimed, and this race of unsouled people was destroyed in the flood. Parham believed that those who received the latter days ‘spirit baptism’and ‘spoke in tongues’ have a special place of authority at Christ’s hopeful return.

Parham believed that physical healing is the Christian’s birthright. In spite of his teaching that it was always God’s will to heal and that medicine and doctors must be shunned, one of Parham’s sons died at age 16 of a sickness which was not healed. His other son died at age 37. Most of those who attended Parham’s meetings were not healed, saving for those whose “illnesses” were psychosomatic in nature. In October 1904 a nine-year-old girl named Nettie Smith died. Her father was an avid follower of Parham and refused medical treatment for his daughter. Nettie’s death turned local public opinion against Parham because the little girl’s sickness was treatable and the community therefore considered her death unnecessary. Parham himself suffered various sicknesses throughout his life and at times was too sick to preach or travel. For example, he spent the entire winter of 1904-05 sick and bedridden (James Goff Jr, in spite of his own preaching that healing is guaranteed in the atonement. Parham was the first Pentecostal preacher to pray over handkerchiefs and mail them to those who desired his ministrations .

Naturally, Parham charged money for these energized handkerchiefs.

In 1907 Parham encountered legal difficulties that did terrible harm to his reputation. He was arrested and charged in Texas for sexual misconduct involving young boys.

In 1908 Parham raised funds from among his deluded parishioners to travel to the Holy Land on an “archaeological expedition to search for the lost ark of the covenant.” He claimed to the press that he had information about its location and that his finding the ark would fit into the end times biblical scheme. By December he announced that he had sufficient funds and he traveled to New York allegedly to begin his journey to Jerusalem. He never purchased a ticket to the Middle East and returned home dejectedly in January, claiming he was robbed after arriving in New York.

Parham attempted to influence or possibly even take over the strange ministry of Alexander Dowie, the man the Dictionary of Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements calls the father of modern healing evangelism, at his Zion City north of Chicago. Dowie had proclaimed himself Elijah the Restorer and the first apostle of the end times church.

In most Pentecostal histories Parham is listed as one of the chief founding fathers of Pentecostalism.

The Rapture is a term most commonly used to describe an event in certain systems of Christian eschatology (study of the end times) whereby all true Christians are taken from Earth by God into Heaven. Although almost all forms of Christianity believe that those who are “saved” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the term “rapture” is usually applied specifically to those theories saying that “Christians alive before the end of the world will be taken into heaven,” and there will be an intermediate time frame where non-Christians will be still left on earth before Christ arrives to set up his earthly kingdom.

The word “Rapture” is not found in the Bible. There is also no single word used by the numerous biblical authors to describe the prophetic factors which comprise the doctrine. Roman Catholics and nearly all of the main-line Protestants do not accept the concept of a rapture in which some are “taken up into Heaven” before the end of the world; this idea did not exist in the teachings of any Christians whatsoever until the late18th, and early 19th centuries, so it cannot be said to belong to Apostolic Tradition.

The legend of the Rapture is not mentioned in any Christian writings, until after the year 1830. Whether the early writers were Greek or Latin, Armenian or Coptic, Syrian or Ethiopian, English or German, orthodox or heretic, no one mentioned a syllable about it. Of course, those who feel the origin of the teaching is in the Bible would say that it only ceased being taught (for some unknown reason) at the close of the apostolic age only to reappear in 1830.

But if the doctrine were so clearly stated in Scripture, it seems incredible that no one should have referred to it before the 19th  and early 20th century. This does not, in and of itself prove conclusively that the story is wrong, but it does mean that thousands of eminent scholars who lived over a span of seventeen centuries (including some of the most astute of the religious scholars of the early Christian and, later of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods) must be considered as grossly incompetent for not having  either knowledge or understanding  of a teaching viewed by fringe religious groups as so central to their beliefs. This lapse of seventeen centuries when no one mentioned anything about it is certainly a serious obstacle to its reliability or its acceptance by the less credulous.

Dominion Theology is a grouping of extreme theoretical theological systems with the common belief that society should be governed exclusively by the law of God as codified in the Christian Bible, to the total exclusion of any and all secular law. The two main streams of Dominion Theology are Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. Though these two differ greatly in their general theological orientation (the first is strongly Reformed and Neo-Calvinistic, the second is Charismatic), they share a postmillenial vision in which the kingdom of God must be established on Earth through political and even military means, implying force.

All strains of Dominion Theology are small minorities, and are rejected by all mainstream Christians as quite radical. However, Dominion Theology is seen by some as a subset of Dominionism, a term used by some social scientists and journalists to describe a theological form of political ideology, which they claim has broadly influenced the Christian Right in the United States, Canada, and Europe, within Protestant Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

1. Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
2. Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
3. Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believe that the Ten Commandments, or “biblical law,” should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles

What is astonishing about this marriage of convenience is that their version of evangelical Christianity believes that biblical prophecy leads to Armageddon and finally to the conversion of the Jews to Christ. According to the most influential of the Christian Zionists, Hal Lindsey, the valley from Galilee to Eilat will flow with blood and “144,000 Jews would bow down before Jesus and be saved, but the rest of Jewry would perish in the mother of all holocausts”. These lunatic ravings would matter little were they not so influential. Lindsey’s book, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” has sold nearly 20m copies in English and another 30m-plus worldwide.

Against this crazy theological background, an ideological battle is now being waged. Despite the fact that apocalyptic prophecy as read by the Christian right ends with another holocaust, some Israeli politicians and journalists are encouraging fundamentalists to stick by the implications of their narrative.

 

NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-breaking Computer Project to Entire Internet

May 11 2017,

by Sam Biddle

The Intercept

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the project, a joint supercomputing initiative administered by NYU, the Department of Defense, and IBM. And they were available for the entire world to download.

The supercomputer described in the trove, “WindsorGreen,” was a system designed to excel at the sort of complex mathematics that underlies encryption, the technology that keeps data private, and almost certainly intended for use by the Defense Department’s signals intelligence wing, the National Security Agency. WindsorGreen was the successor to another password-cracking machine used by the NSA, “WindsorBlue,” which was also documented in the material leaked from NYU and which had been previously described in the Norwegian press thanks to a document provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Both systems were intended for use by the Pentagon and a select few other Western governments, including Canada and Norway.

Adam, an American digital security researcher, requested that his real name not be published out of fear of losing his day job. Although he deals constantly with digital carelessness, Adam was nonetheless stunned by what NYU had made available to the world. “The fact that this software, these spec sheets, and all the manuals to go with it were sitting out in the open for anyone to copy is just simply mind blowing,” he said.

He described to The Intercept how easy it would have been for someone to obtain the material, which was marked with warnings like “DISTRIBUTION LIMITED TO U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ONLY,” “REQUESTS FOR THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE REFERRED TO AND APPROVED BY THE DOD,” and “IBM Confidential.” At the time of his discovery, Adam wrote to me in an email:

All of this leaky data is courtesy of what I can only assume are misconfigurations in the IMAS (Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing) department at NYU. Not even a single username or password separates these files from the public internet right now. It’s absolute insanity.

The files were taken down after Adam notified NYU.

Intelligence agencies like the NSA hide code-breaking advances like WindsorGreen because their disclosure might accelerate what has become a cryptographic arms race. Encrypting information on a computer used to be a dark art shared between militaries and mathematicians. But advances in cryptography, and rapidly swelling interest in privacy in the wake of Snowden, have helped make encryption tech an effortless, everyday commodity for consumers. Web connections are increasingly shielded using the HTTPS protocol, end-to-end encryption has come to popular chat platforms like WhatsApp, and secure phone calls can now be enabled simply by downloading some software to your device. The average person viewing their checking account online or chatting on iMessage might not realize the mathematical complexity that’s gone into making eavesdropping impractical.

The spread of encryption is a good thing — unless you’re the one trying to eavesdrop. Spy shops like the NSA can sometimes thwart encryption by going around it, finding flaws in the way programmers build their apps or taking advantage of improperly configured devices. When that fails, they may try and deduce encryption keys through extraordinarily complex math or repeated guessing. This is where specialized systems like WindsorGreen can give the NSA an edge, particularly when the agency’s targets aren’t aware of just how much code-breaking computing power they’re up against.

Adam declined to comment on the specifics of any conversations he might have had with the Department of Defense or IBM. He added that NYU, at the very least, expressed its gratitude to him for notifying it of the leak by mailing him a poster.

While he was trying to figure out who exactly the Windsor files belonged to and just how they’d wound up on a completely naked folder on the internet, Adam called David Chudnovsky, the world-renowned mathematician and IMAS co-director at NYU. Reaching Chudnovsky was a cinch, because his entire email outbox, including correspondence with active members of the U.S. military, was for some reason stored on the NYU drive and made publicly available alongside the Windsor documents. According to Adam, Chudnovsky confirmed his knowledge of and the university’s involvement in the supercomputing project; The Intercept was unable to reach Chudnovsky directly to confirm this. The school’s association is also strongly indicated by the fact that David’s brother Gregory, himself an eminent mathematician and professor at NYU, is listed as an author of a 164-page document from the cache describing the capabilities of WindsorGreen in great detail. Although the brothers clearly have ties to WindsorGreen, there is no indication they were responsible for the leak. Indeed, the identity of the person or persons responsible for putting a box filled with military secrets on the public internet remains utterly unclear.

An NYU spokesperson would not comment on the university’s relationship with the Department of Defense, IBM, or the Windsor programs in general. When The Intercept initially asked about WindsorGreen the spokesperson seemed unfamiliar with the project, saying they were “unable to find anything that meets your description.” This same spokesperson later added that “no NYU or NYU Tandon system was breached,” referring to the Tandon School of Engineering, which houses the IMAS. This statement is something of a non sequitur, since, according to Adam, the files leaked simply by being exposed to the open internet — none of the material was protected by a username, password, or firewall of any kind, so no “breach” would have been necessary. You can’t kick down a wide open door.

The documents, replete with intricate processor diagrams, lengthy mathematical proofs, and other exhaustive technical schematics, are dated from 2005 to 2012, when WindsorGreen appears to have been in development. Some documents are clearly marked as drafts, with notes that they were to be reviewed again in 2013. Project progress estimates suggest the computer wouldn’t have been ready for use until 2014 at the earliest. All of the documents appear to be proprietary to IBM and not classified by any government agency, although some are stamped with the aforementioned warnings restricting distribution to within the U.S. government. According to one WindsorGreen document, work on the project was restricted to American citizens, with some positions requiring a top-secret security clearance — which as Adam explains, makes the NYU hard drive an even greater blunder:

Let’s, just for hypotheticals, say that China found the same exposed NYU lab server that I did and downloaded all the stuff I downloaded. That simple act alone, to a large degree, negates a humongous competitive advantage we thought the U.S. had over other countries when it comes to supercomputing.

The only tool Adam used to find the NYU trove was Shodan.io, a website that’s roughly equivalent to Google for internet-connected, and typically unsecured, computers and appliances around the world, famous for turning up everything from baby monitors to farming equipment. Shodan has plenty of constructive technical uses but also serves as a constant reminder that we really ought to stop plugging things into the internet that have no business being there.

The WindsorGreen documents are mostly inscrutable to anyone without a Ph.D. in a related field, but they make clear that the computer is the successor to WindsorBlue, a next generation of specialized IBM hardware that would excel at cracking encryption, whose known customers are the U.S. government and its partners.

Experts who reviewed the IBM documents said WindsorGreen possesses substantially greater computing power than WindsorBlue, making it particularly adept at compromising encryption and passwords. In an overview of WindsorGreen, the computer is described as a “redesign” centered around an improved version of its processor, known as an “application specific integrated circuit,” or ASIC, a type of chip built to do one task, like mining bitcoin, extremely well, as opposed to being relatively good at accomplishing the wide range of tasks that, say, a typical MacBook would handle. One of the upgrades was to switch the processor to smaller transistors, allowing more circuitry to be crammed into the same area, a change quantified by measuring the reduction in nanometers (nm) between certain chip features. The overview states:

The WindsorGreen ASIC is a second-generation redesign of the WindsorBlue ASIC that moves from 90 nm to 32 nm ASIC technology and incorporates performance enhancements based on our experience with WindsorBlue. We expect to achieve at least twice the performance of the WindsorBlue ASIC with half the area, reduced cost, and an objective of half the power. We also expect our system development cost to be only a small fraction of the WindsorBlue development cost because we carry forward intact much of the WindsorBlue infrastructure.

Çetin Kaya Koç is the director of the Koç Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which conducts cryptographic research. Koç reviewed the Windsor documents and told The Intercept that he has “not seen anything like [WindsorGreen],” and that “it is beyond what is commercially or academically available.” He added that outside of computational biology applications like complex gene sequencing (which it’s probably safe to say the NSA is not involved in), the only other purpose for such a machine would be code-breaking: “Probably no other problem deserves this much attention to design an expensive computer like this.”

Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, a hacker and computer hardware researcher who reviewed the documents at The Intercept’s request, said that WindsorGreen would surpass many of the most powerful code-breaking systems in the world: “My guess is this thing, compared to the TOP500 supercomputers at the time (and probably even today) pretty much wipes the floor with them for anything crypto-related.” Conducting a “cursory inspection of power and performance metrics,” according to Huang, puts WindsorGreen “heads and shoulders above any publicly disclosed capability” on the TOP500, a global ranking of supercomputers. Like all computers that use specialized processors, or ASICs, WindsorGreen appears to be a niche computer that excels at one kind of task but performs miserably at anything else. Still, when it comes to crypto-breaking, Huang believes WindsorGreen would be “many orders of magnitude … ahead of the fastest machines I previously knew of.”

But even with expert analysis, no one beyond those who built the thing can be entirely certain of how exactly an agency like the NSA might use WindsorGreen. To get a better sense of why a spy agency would do business with IBM, and how WindsorGreen might evolve into WindsorOrange (or whatever the next generation may be called), it helps to look at documents provided by Snowden that show how WindsorBlue was viewed in the intelligence community. Internal memos from Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s British counterpart, show that the agency was interested in purchasing WindsorBlue as part of its High Performance Computing initiative, which sought to help with a major problem: People around the world were getting too good at keeping unwanted eyes out of their data.

Under the header “what is it, and why,” one 2012 HPC document explains, “Over the past 18 months, the Password Recovery Service has seen rapidly increasing volumes of encrypted traffic … the use of much greater range of encryption techniques by our targets, and improved sophistication of both the techniques themselves and the passwords targets are using (due to improved OPSec awareness).” Accordingly, GCHQ had begun to “investigate the acquisition of WINDSORBLUE … and, subject to project board approval, the procurement of the infrastructure required to host the a [sic] WINDSORBLUE system at Benhall,” where the organization is headquartered.

In April 2014, Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper reported that the Norwegian Intelligence Service had purchased a cryptographic computer system code-named STEELWINTER, based on WindsorBlue, as part of a $100 million overhaul of the agency’s intelligence-processing capabilities. The report was based on a document provided by Snowden:

The document does not say when the computer will be delivered, but in addition to the actual purchase, NIS has entered into a partnership with NSA to develop software for decryption. Some of the most interesting data NIS collects are encrypted, and the extensive processes for decryption require huge amounts of computing power.

Widespread modern encryption methods like RSA, named for the initials of the cryptographers who developed it, rely on the use of hugely complex numbers derived from prime numbers. Speaking very roughly, so long as those original prime numbers remain secret, the integrity of the encoded data will remain safe. But were someone able to factor the hugely complex number — a process identical to the sort of math exercise children are taught to do on a chalkboard, but on a massive scale — they would be able to decode the data on their own. Luckily for those using encryption, the numbers in question are so long that they can only be factored down to their prime numbers with an extremely large amount of computing power. Unluckily for those using encryption, government agencies in the U.S., Norway, and around the globe are keenly interested in computers designed to excel at exactly this purpose.

Given the billions of signals intelligence records collected by Western intelligence agencies every day, enormous computing power is required to sift through this data and crack what can be broken so that it can be further analyzed, whether through the factoring method mentioned above or via what’s known as a “brute force” attack, wherein a computer essentially guesses possible keys at a tremendous rate until one works. The NIS commented only to Dagbladet that the agency “handles large amounts of data and needs a relatively high computing power.” Details about how exactly such “high computing power” is achieved are typically held very close — finding hundreds of pages of documentation on a U.S. military code-breaking box, completely unguarded, is virtually unheard of.

A very important question remains: What exactly could WindsorBlue, and then WindsorGreen, crack? Are modern privacy mainstays like PGP, used to encrypt email, or the ciphers behind encrypted chat apps like Signal under threat? The experts who spoke to The Intercept don’t think there’s any reason to assume the worst.

“As long as you use long keys and recent-generation hashes, you should be OK,” said Huang. “Even if [WindsorGreen] gave a 100x advantage in cracking strength, it’s a pittance compared to the additional strength conferred by going from say, 1024-bit RSA to 4096-bit RSA or going from SHA-1 to SHA-256.”

Translation: Older encryption methods based on shorter strings of numbers, which are easier to factor, would be more vulnerable, but anyone using the strongest contemporary encryption software (which uses much longer numbers) should still be safe and confident in their privacy.

Still, “there are certainly classes of algorithms that got, wildly guessing, about 100x weaker from a brute force standpoint,” according to Huang, so “this computer’s greatest operation benefit would have come from a combination of algorithmic weakness and brute force. For example, SHA-1, which today is well-known to be too weak, but around the time of 2013 when this computer might have come online, it would have been pretty valuable to be able to ‘routinely’ collide SHA-1 as SHA-1 was still very popular and widely used.”

A third expert in computer architecture and security, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the documents and a concern for their future livelihood, told The Intercept that “most likely, the system is intended for brute-forcing password-protected data,” and that it “might also have applications for things like … breaking older/weaker (1024 bit) RSA keys.” Although there’s no explicit reference to a particular agency in the documents, this expert added, “I’m assuming NSA judging by the obvious use of the system.”

Huang and Koç both speculated that aside from breaking encryption, WindsorGreen could be used to fake the cryptographic signature used to mark software updates as authentic, so that a targeted computer could be tricked into believing a malicious software update was the real thing. For the NSA, getting a target to install software they shouldn’t be installing is about as great as intelligence-gathering gifts come.

The true silver bullet against encryption, a technology that doesn’t just threaten weaker forms of data protection but all available forms, will not be a computer like WindsorGreen, but something that doesn’t exist yet: a quantum computer. In 2014, the Washington Post reported on a Snowden document that revealed the NSA’s ongoing efforts to build a “quantum” computer processor that’s not confined to just ones and zeroes but can exist in multiple states at once, allowing for computing power incomparable to anything that exists today. Luckily for the privacy concerned, the world is still far from seeing a functional quantum computer. Luckily for the NSA and its partners, IBM is working hard on one right now.

Repeated requests for comment sent to over a dozen members of the IBM media relations team were not returned, nor was a request for comment sent to a Department of Defense spokesperson. The NSA declined to comment. GCHQ declined to comment beyond its standard response that all its work “is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”