Can you trust your ISP?

Which Internet Service providers are passing along information to the NSA? There's no way to be sure, but CNET asked the question of several and got the following official answers:

We asked them: "Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?"
Company	Response
Adelphia Communications	Declined comment
AOL Time Warner	No [1]
AT&T	Declined comment
BellSouth Communications	No
Cable & Wireless*	No response
Cablevision Systems	No
CenturyTel	No
Charter Communications	No [1]
Cingular Wireless	No [2]
Citizens Communications	No response
Cogent Communications*	No [1]
Comcast	No
Cox Communications	No
EarthLink	No
Global Crossing*	Inconclusive
Google	Declined comment
Level 3*	No response
Microsoft	No [3]
NTT Communications*	Inconclusive [4]
Qwest Communications	No [2]
SAVVIS Communications*	No response
Sprint Nextel	No [2]
T-Mobile USA	No [2]
United Online	No response
Verizon Communications	Inconclusive [5]
XO Communications*	No [1]
Yahoo	Declined comment
* = Not a company contacted by Rep. John Conyers. [1] The answer did not explicitly address NSA but said that compliance happens only if required by law. [2] Provided by a source with knowledge of what this company is telling Conyers. In the case of Sprint Nextel, the source was familiar with Nextel's operations. [3] As part of an answer to a closely related question for a different survey. [4] The response was "NTT Communications respects the privacy rights of our customers and complies fully with law enforcement requests as permitted and required by law." [5] The response was "Verizon complies with applicable laws and does not comment on law enforcement or national security matters."

Note--this is only responding to voluntary compliance. It says nothing about requests made under the provisions of law and/or executive order.

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued AT&T and provided evidence that the telecom has provided its customer records to the NSA:

EFF claims that it has a sworn statement by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician -- and several internal AT&T documents -- that show a "dragnet surveillance" has been put into place to facilitate the NSA's controversial surveillance scheme. (Here's our survey of telecom companies regarding NSA cooperation.)

Alas, we likely won't know details until the judge decides to release them.

Even if the documents prove everything that EFF claims, it's not a slam dunk for the group.

The state secrets privilege, outlined by the Supreme Court in a 1953 case, permits the government to derail a lawsuit that might otherwise lead to the disclosure of military secrets.

In 1998, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals elaborated on the state secret privilege in a case where former workers at the Air Force's classified Groom Lake, Nev., facility alleged hazardous waste violations. When requested by the workers' lawyers to turn over information, the Air Force refused.

The 9th Circuit upheld a summary judgment on behalf of the Air Force, saying that once the state secrets "privilege is properly invoked and the court is satisfied as to the danger of divulging state secrets, the privilege is absolute" and the case will generally be dismissed.

That "absolute privilege" case is still good law and is binding on the judge that will hear EFF's case.

Privacy? We don' need no stinkin' privacy!

Training the Al-Qaida soldier

The jamestown Foundation (reprinted by ISN) has a very interesting piece on the training of the al-Qaida operative and what it tells us about motives and assumptions. For example:

Piety

When training each mujahid, al-Qaida's doctrine declares that the first priority must be "spiritual preparation […] because it is necessary to attain victory". The key to this preparation is two-fold, al-Qaida's Ma'adh al-Mansur explained. First, each fighter must completely accept the fact that God has promised victory to the Muslims if they obey His word. Second, the fighter must recognize that victory has not yet come because most Muslims love life and hate death, and thus have strayed from God's path, most specifically from the path of jihad. As a result, al-Mansur directs that each trainee be taught that "God has set the infidel nations against them [the Muslims] to inflict on them humiliation and lowly status. This is an inevitable and ordained punishment that befalls those who abandon jihad". For this degraded status, each Muslim man should be deeply ashamed, and should "die of grief if he does not ward off the calamities inflicted on his fellow Muslims and Kinsmen".

In other words, al-Qaida doctrine does not argue that the current predicament of Muslims is the fault of what Al-Faruq al-Amiri calls "the campaign and reality of the crusader enemy". Rather, that predicament flows from the refusal of Muslims to resist the infidels' attack. The commonly held Western view that al-Qaida and its followers blame the West for all of Islam's woes - an understanding most stridently advocated by Bernard Lewis - thus falls by the wayside. Al-Qaida trainees are taught that the humiliation God has inflicted on Muslims for their failure to obey Him can only be lifted by Muslims accepting God's word and "returning to jihad". If they do so, they will win victories like those the Prophet Muhammad and his companions won in the battles of Badr and The Trench in Islam's first years of existence. "Although the Muslims [with Muhammad] were few and had scanty military means, and the infidels were many and well-equipped," al-Mansur reminds today's mujahedin, "victory was in the hands of God."

Well worth a look.

Who's the enemy?

A report (heavily redacted, of course) finds that the inter-agency squabbles between the FBI and the Coast Guard threatens to reduce the effectiveness of an American response to a terrorist threat from the sea. Not surprising, just disappointing.

Revising the Geneva Conventions

Still another call--this time from the British defense secretary--for a revision of the Geneva Conventions to deal with non-state combatants. It's a good idea as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the basic problem: how can one create and maintain a regime to limit violence if one side has no particular interest in doing so? It is notoriously difficult to deter suicide bombers...

Cartoons, again.

The Islamic cartoon controversy seems to be getting its second wind. Normally I wouldn't bother with it, but I'm amazed to learn from my students that most of them haven't seen the cartoons in question. From my point of view, some are mildly funny, some are a little stupid, and most of them are too trivial to get worked up over. (The cartoons, that is--not the students.) Make up your own mind. The whole collection is on Wikipedia.

Zawahiri's advice

Following up on some ideas we discussed in class today, I recommend the Global Guerrillas blog as a place to find unconventional wisdom that is actually wisdom. In particular, the reference to Zawahiri's contribution to Al-Qaeda's grand strategy is here, and the original source of the interview he cites is here. A small sample:

...in late 1997 they decided to form a completely new strategy based on global and cosmic confrontation with America….

TM: What do you mean by “cosmic”?

SF: Global and full scale confrontation! They decided to conduct their actions relying not on their own resources but by manipulating those of their enemies. In short they decided to convert their enemy into a powerful tool for their own use...

***

...they decided that this idea of confronting the Americans in the Arabian Peninsula is not going to produce anything. Zawahiri impressed upon Bin Laden the importance of understanding the American mentality. The American mentality is a cowboy mentality-- if you confront them with their identity theoretically and practically they will react in an extreme manner. In other words, America with all its resources and establishments will shrink into a cowboy when irritated successfully. They will then elevate you and this will satisfy the Muslim longing for a leader who can successfully challenge the West. Zawahiri advised Bin Laden to forget about the 12 page statement as nobody had read it and instead issue a short statement identifying every American as a target. Even though this was controversial from an Islamic perspective, Zawahiri argued on pragmatic grounds that it had to be sanctioned. The statement in February 1998, which was only 3 or 4 lines, effectively sanctioned shedding the blood of every American.

TM: It seems that Zawahiri had a huge transformative effect on Bin Laden.

SF: Yes! If Bin Laden had persisted in solely attacking U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia he would have shared the destiny of those groups in South America and Africa that nobody cares to remember anymore. This challenge to American identity itself was a result of a huge transformation...

Read the whole thing. It's worth the time.

Everything you always wanted to know

...about Arab culture, that is, can be found in a very straightforward (and only occasionally stereotypical) handbook for U.S. troops. The original source is the U.S. Army, reprinted by the Federation of American Scientists. A sample:

WHAT IS AN ARAB?

• Over 200 million Arabs worldwide.
• To be an Arab, is not to come from a particular race or lineage.
• To be an Arab, like an American, is a cultural trait rather than racial.
• The Arab world includes Muslims, Christians and Jews.
• Any person who adopts the Arabic language is typically called an Arab.
• Arabic is the official and the original language of the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book.

I can think of a lot of people who could find something of value in these factsheets.

Blackstar

According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, the U.S. is shelving an extremely classified spaceplane, sometimes code-named "Blackstar". There have been rumors about this for years, but AWST is now going public with all that it knows and/or suspects. Read the details here.

Really, read it. Then I'll comment.

Commentary: Budget, my ass. The reasons to build this vehicle are just as real and significant now as they were twenty years ago. If this is being cancelled, what do they have to replace it?

An insider's perspective on nonproliferation

Issue as many resolutions like this as you want and make yourselves happy.

You can't prevent the progress of the Iranian nation.

-- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Should we call this intelligence?

There are still certain techniques and pieces of know-how that we do not believe that they have -- simply by the fact that they don't have a nuclear weapon yet.

-- U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, on Washington's evidence of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons capability.