Analysis of BlueLeaks trove also shows police received training on domestic ‘Muslim extremists’ from pro-Israel groups
Hacked police files show US law enforcement agencies for decades received analysis of incidents in the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli thinktanks, training on domestic “Muslim extremists” from pro-Israel non-profits, and surveilled social media accounts of pro-Palestine activists in the US.
The Guardian’s analysis of documents from the BlueLeaks trove of internal law enforcement documents found no indication that this was balanced by information from other Middle Eastern sources or US Muslim community groups. Nor is there any indication that pro-Israel activists were subject to any specific scrutiny.
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Elsewhere in the BlueLeaks trove, there is ample evidence of a close relationship between law enforcement agencies and US-based pro-Israel organizations.
The archive shows how close the relationship is between a range of law enforcement agencies and the pro-Israel civil rights non-profit the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
JUNE 22, 2020: Anonymous hacked law enforcement agencies and DDoSecrets combed through it before releasing this to the public. Keep your eyes on this as a lot of stories that are about to come out. Thread.
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A collective that hosts leaked data in the public interests published BlueLeaks, a collection of hundreds of thousands of internal documents from police departments across the country.
Distributed Denial Of Secrets, a collective of journalists, activists and technologists that provide a platform to leak sensitive data in service of the public interest, posted the collection on Friday, Juneteenth. The collective described the collection—codenamed BlueLeaks—as “ten years of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources. Among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more.”
Security journalist Brian Krebs reported that a document he obtained from the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) confirms the validity of the leaked data, and notes it contains highly sensitive information.
“Our initial analysis revealed that some of these files contain highly sensitive information such as ACH routing numbers, international bank account numbers (IBANs), and other financial data as well as personally identifiable information (PII) and images of suspects listed in Requests for Information (RFIs) and other law enforcement and government agency reports.”
"It's the largest leak of US law enforcement data, and because of its nature it lets people look at policing on the local, state and national levels," Emma Best, the founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, told Motherboard in an online chat. "It shows how law enforcement has reacted to the protests, it shows government handling of COVID, and it shows a lot of things that are entirely legal and normal and horrifying."
On this edition of Parallax Views, new documents show that the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and other federal agencies are targeti
In addition to discussing the federal targeting of the BlueLeaks publisher Distributed Denial of Secrets, Ali also discusses with us:
- How he got involved in journalism; specifically journalism related to surveillance
- Ali's coverage of far-right white supremacist extremist terrorist groups like The Base and the Satanic neo-nazi Order of Nine Angles. Ali notes how The Base's founder is ex-FBI analyst Ronaldo Nazzaro and relays how the Order of Nine Angles recently had a member, Ethan Melzer, infiltrate the military. Additionally, Ali briefly covers how members of the U.S. far-right are tied to international far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion in the Ukraine. In this regard we note how federal agencies focusing on organization like DDoSecrets or Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seems a bit misguided in light of the threat that these far-right groups represent.
- Joe Biden's picking Kamala Harris as VP; Kamala Harris's framing of racism as a "National Security" issue due to allegations of Russian propaganda operations seeking to amplify existing social tensions in the U.S.; the history of the National Security State; how the National Security State is a reactionary force that has been supported by bipartisan efforts on the parts of both Republicans and Democrats; the employment of war-time language in the age of coronavirus ("The War on COVID")
- The implications of DDoSecrets being targeted by the DHS and other federal agencies; Emma Best, the DDoS's founder, and her response to the documents; what this means for publishers of information and data as well as journalists and the media as a whole
The rapid global spread and persistent threat of the coronavirus has presented an obvious roadblock to facial recognition’s similar global expansion.
While doctors and politicians still struggle to convince Americans to take the barest of precautions against Covid-19 by wearing a mask, the Department of Homeland Security has an opposite concern, according to an “intelligence note” found among the BlueLeaks trove of law enforcement documents: Masks are breaking police facial recognition.
The rapid global spread and persistent threat of the coronavirus has presented an obvious roadblock to facial recognition’s similar global expansion. Suddenly everyone is covering their faces. Even in ideal conditions, facial recognition technologies often struggle with accuracy and have a particularly dismal track record when it comes to identifying faces that aren’t white or male. Some municipalities, startled by the civil liberties implications of inaccurate and opaque software in the hands of unaccountable and overly aggressive police, have begun banning facial recognition software outright. But the global pandemic may have inadvertently provided a privacy fix of its own — or for police, a brand new crisis.
A Homeland Security intelligence note dated May 22 expresses this law enforcement anxiety, as public health wisdom clashes with the prerogatives of local and federal police who increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools. The bulletin, drafted by the DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counterterrorism Mission Center in conjunction with a variety of other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “examines the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems — such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms — to monitor public spaces during the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency and in the months after the pandemic subsides.”
The Minnesota Fusion Center, a post-9/11 intelligence agency that is part of a controversial national network, distributed the notice on May 26, as protests were forming over the killing of George Floyd. In the weeks that followed, the center actively monitored the protests and pushed the narrative that law enforcement was under attack. Email logs included in the BlueLeaks archive show that the note was also sent to city and state government officials and private security officers in Colorado and, inexplicably, to a hospital and a community college.
Curiously, the bulletin fixates on a strange scenario: “violent adversaries” of U.S. law enforcement evading facial recognition by cynically exploiting the current public health guidelines about mask usage. “We assess violent extremists and other criminals who have historically maintained an interest in avoiding face recognition,” the bulletin reads, “are likely to opportunistically seize upon public safety measures recommending the wearing of face masks to hinder the effectiveness of face recognition systems in public spaces by security partners.” The notice concedes that “while we have no specific information that violent extremists or other criminals in the United States are using protective face coverings to conduct attacks, some of these entities have previously expressed interest in avoiding face recognition and promulgated simple instructions to conceal one’s identity, both prior to and during the current Covid-19 pandemic.” This claim is supported by a single reference to a member of an unnamed “white supremacist extremist online forum” who suggested attacks on critical infrastructure sites “while wearing a breathing mask to hide a perpetrators [sic] identity.” The only other evidence given is internet chatter from before the pandemic.
But the bulletin also reflects a broader surveillance angst: “Face Recognition Systems Likely to be Less Effective as Widespread Wear of Face Coverings for Public Safety Purposes Continue,” reads another header. Even if Homeland Security seems focused on hypothetical instances of violent terrorists using cloth masks to dodge smart cameras, the new public health status quo represents a clear threat to algorithmic policing: “We assess face recognition systems used to support security operations in public spaces will be less effective while widespread public use of facemasks, including partial and full face covering, is practiced by the public to limit the spread of Covid-19.” Even after mandatory mask orders are lifted, the bulletin frets, the newly epidemiologically aware American public is likely to keep wearing them, which would “continue to impact the effectiveness of face recognition systems.”
Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops
After failing to prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government realized it had an information sharing problem. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies had their own separate surveillance databases that possibly could have prevented the attacks, but they didn’t communicate any of this information with each other. So Congress directed the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to form “fusion centers” across the country, collaborations between federal agencies like DHS and the FBI with state and local police departments, to share intelligence and prevent future terrorist attacks.
Yet in 2012 the Senate found that fusion centers have “not produced useful intelligence to support Federal counterterrorism efforts,” that the majority of the reports fusion centers produced had no connection to terrorism at all, and that the reports were low quality and often not about illegal activity. Fusion centers have also been criticized for privacy and civil liberties violations such as infiltrating and spying on anti-war activists.
Last month, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data on its website and using the peer-to-peer file sharing technology BitTorrent. The data, stolen from 251 different law enforcement websites by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, was mostly taken from fusion center websites (including many of those listed on DHS’s website), though some of the hacked websites were for local police departments, police training organizations, members-only associations for cops or retired FBI agents, and law enforcement groups specifically dedicated to investigating organized retail crime, drug trafficking, and working with industry.
