New York man who refused to spy for the FBI put on the "No-Fly" list
New York - A Muslim man says he has been unable to visit his ailing mother for over two years because he refused to spy for the FBI and is now on the no-fly list.
Muhammad Tanvir says he is not the only one who the FBI unlawfully placed on the no-fly list "in retaliation for their refusal to work as informants against their communities and submit to questioning."
The Queens man says his predicament has left him unable to visit his ailing mother in Pakistan for over two years, and that it has burdened his practice of Islam.
He notes that he is a lawful permanent resident employed at a 99-cent store in the Bronx who has "never been convicted of a crime nor does he pose any threat to aviation safety."
The FBI declined to comment.
Though the no-fly list is supposed to represent a list of suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union call it "a draconian tool to coerce Americans into spying on their communities."
After refusing FBI agents' request that he serve as an informant in his predominantly Muslim community and landing on the no-fly list, Tanvir says he reached out to the FBI to clear things up.
Instead of helping, FBI agents offered to take him off the list in exchange for information.
Tanvir, who has lived in the United States since 2002, again refused.
"Mr. Tanvir has been prevented from flying despite the fact that he does not present any threat to aviation security," the lawsuit states. "Instead, defendants sought to exploit the draconian burden posed by the No Fly List - including the inability to travel for work, or to visit family overseas - in order to coerce him into serving the FBI as a spy with American Muslim communities and places of worship."
Named as defendants are FBI Director James Comey; Terrorist Screening Center Director Christopher Piehota; Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Rand Beers; and Transportation Security Administration Administrator John Pistole.
The FBI agencies are responsible maintaining the Terrorist Screening Database, which includes the no-fly list.
Tanvir wants the court to declare as unconstitutional the FBI's alleged practice of placing people on the no-fly list for not cooperating, then using an offer to remove them as a bribe for information.
He also wants off the list, along with damages.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/10/03/61750.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/fbi-spy-no-fly-list-lawsuit-muslims-_n_4045791.html
The FBI's Fusion Centers are monitoring activists and anarchists:
DBA Press releases an additional 1,784 pages of Phoenix Police Department Homeland Defense Bureau (PPDHDB) records pertaining to Occupy Phoenix and other Phoenix area activist groups.
Access records here (filed under "records relating to PPD/ACTIC and other fusion center monitoring of activists, Part 4").
These records complete a public records request filed by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy in June of 2012 as part of a joint project, “Dissent or Terror: how the nation’s counter-terrorism apparatus, in partnership with corporate America, turned on Occupy Wall Street.”
Much of this final set of records – which were only recently released by PPD, on September 16, 2013– detail the efforts of counter-terrorism/law enforcement personnel involved in the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC) in tracking the activities of Phoenix area activists through the first half of 2012.
Some key points of interest include:
– FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force personnel, along with ACTIC and Scottsdale Police Department “terrorism liaison officers” actively investigated Phoenix area anarchists and other activists who were organizing a February, 2012 rally in protest of the murder of a Scottsdale man by Scottsdale Police Department officer James Peters.
Peters had killed six other citizens prior to his shooting of John Loxas in early February of 2012. The activists investigated by the FBI and ACTIC personnel were calling for the immediate dismissal of Peters from the police department, Peters’ indictment for murder, and an investigation into whether the Scottsdale Police Department was engaged in a conspiracy to shelter the actions of Peters.
Records do not indicate any alleged or suspected criminal activity on the part of these activists who were investigated by ACTIC and FBI personnel.
– FBI, Tempe Police Department, PPDHDB/ACTIC monitoring of an Occupy Phoenix Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protest held in June, 2012. Communications pertaining to this event disclose the fact that ACTIC “terrorism liaison officers” shared the names of several specific Occupy Phoenix activists with the FBI, as well as other information pertaining to these individuals. Again, records do not indicate that the activists whose names were given to the FBI were accused, or even suspected, of any crime.
– Communications disclose that PPDHDB/ACTIC personnel, Scottsdale Police Department personnel and FBI personnel attempted to identify Phoenix area anarchists and other activists who took part in a 2012 May Day march. This identification was attempted through the use of open source videos posted by activists to YouTube. Again, no alleged or suspected crime on the part of activists was disclosed as an impetus for this investigative activity.
– Open source intelligence products created by PPDHDB/ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Brenda Dowhan were shared during the course of 2012 with the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. These open source intelligence products created by Dowhan were a distillation of information gathered from Occupy Phoenix/Occupy Wall Street-related social media sites, such as the Facebook pages of both activist organizations and individuals. These open source intelligence products did not disclose any illegal activity on the part of activists.
– The sharing of information between the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and PPDHDB/ACTIC, as pertained to an Occupy Phoenix promotional event held on Phoenix light rail in November, 2011.
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/10/new-records-detailing-fbi-fusion-center.html#more
BBC Glenn Greenwald interview on Eric Snowden and NSA spying:
The NSA is targeting Tor networks that protect the anonymity of web users:
The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.
Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.
But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.
Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity".
Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.
It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.
Privacy and human rights groups have been concerned about the security of Tor following revelations in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica about widespread NSA efforts to undermine privacy and security software. A report by Brazilian newspaper Globo also contained hints that the agencies had capabilities against the network.
While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale online surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps.
One such technique is based on trying to spot patterns in the signals entering and leaving the Tor network, to try to de-anonymise its users. The effort was based on a long-discussed theoretical weakness of the network: that if one agency controlled a large number of the "exits" from the Tor network, they could identify a large amount of the traffic passing through it.
The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated in the documents would rely on the NSA's cable-tapping operation, and the agency secretly operating computers, or 'nodes', in the Tor system. However, one presentation stated that the success of this technique was "negligible" because the NSA has "access to very few nodes" and that it is "difficult to combine meaningfully with passive Sigint".
While the documents confirm the NSA does indeed operate and collect traffic from some nodes in the Tor network, they contain no detail as to how many, and there are no indications that the proposed de-anonymization technique was ever implemented.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption