Gemalto presents the findings of its investigations into the alleged hacking of SIM card encryption keys by GCHQ and the NSA

GEMALTO

Amsterdam, February 25, 2015 - Following the release of a report by a news website on February 19, 2015, Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), has conducted a thorough investigation, based in particular on two elements: the purported NSA and GCHQ documents which were made public by this website, and our internal monitoring tools and their past records of attempts of attacks.

All comments in this publication assume that the published documents are real and refer accurately to events that occurred during 2010 and 2011.

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Spy Cables: Trying to suppress the Goldstone Report

Leaked secret South Africa intelligence reports – dubbed the Spy Cables - include an account of the head of Israeli intelligence, Meir Dagan, lobbying on behalf of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in an effort to suppress the Goldstone Report.

The Spy Cables which have been obtained by news organisation Al Jazeera, span a period from 2006 to the end of 2014, and include detailed briefings and analyses written by the operatives. The broadcaster began breaking details of the documents on Monday.

Jurist Richard Goldstone had led a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission that established war crimes were committed by both sides during Israel's 2008-2009 assault on Gaza which killed 1400 Palestinians.

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Spy Cables expose 'desperate' US approach to Hamas

A CIA agent "desperate" to make contact with Hamas in Gaza pleaded for help from a South African spy in the summer of 2012, according to intelligence files leaked to Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit. The US lists Hamas as a terrorist organisation and, officially at least, has no contact with the group.

That was just one of the revelations of extensive back-channel politicking involving the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority as they navigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amid a stalled peace process.

Classified South African documents obtained by Al Jazeera also reveal an approach by Israel's then-secret service chief, Meir Dagan, seeking Pretoria's help in its efforts to scupper a landmark UN-authorised probe into alleged war crimes in Gaza, which was headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone.

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SA spooks red-faced from latest spy data leak

NEWS 24

A mass leak of South African espionage secrets will cause many foreign agencies to think twice before sharing information with Pretoria, hampering its efforts to walk a delicate diplomatic tightrope between East and West, experts said on Tuesday. 

Britain's The Guardian paper and news organisation Al Jazeera said they had obtained hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world's top spy agencies to and from South Africa, dubbing it "one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times".

The biggest revelation so far is an assessment by Mossad that counters Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - backed by a cartoon picture of a bomb - asserting at the UN in 2012 that Iran was a year away from making a nuclear device.

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The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

The Guardian

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units.

Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

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States predict inmates' future crimes with secretive surveys

AP

 States are trying to reduce prison populations with secretive, new psychological assessments to predict which inmates will commit future crimes and who might be safe to release, despite serious problems and high-profile failures, an Associated Press investigation found.

These programs are part of a national, data-driven movement to drive down prison populations, reduce recidivism and save billions. They include questionnaires often with more than 100 questions about an offender's education, family, income, job status, history of moving, parents' arrest history — or whether he or she has a phone. A score is affixed to each answer and the result helps shape how the offender will be supervised in the system — or released from custody.

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Ex-FCC chief shocked by Obama net rules meddling

CNBC

The net neutrality rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission and expected to be voted on this week are a "sad example of unreasoned decision-making," former FCC Chairman Michael Powell told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. 

"Watching the president of the United States come on a YouTube video and direct the FCC to adopt a very specific regulatory result, I think … was shocking and put the commission in an untenable position," said Powell, who served under President George W. Bush.

In November, President Barack Obama urged the FCC to take up the "strongest possible rules" to make sure all Internet traffic is treated equally.

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Obama's regs will make Internet slow as in Europe, warn FCC, FEC commissioners

As the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission toy with regulating aspects of the Internet, critics on those agencies are warning that speed and freedom of speech are in jeopardy.

In a joint column, Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai and Federal Election Commission member Lee Goodman, leveled the boom on the Obama-favored regulations, essentially charging that it will muck up the freedom the nation has come to expect from the Internet.

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Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”.

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DHS staff would remain on job with no pay if Congress does not fund agency

Once again, it is federal employees who could take a hit because Uncle Sam can’t get his budget act together.

Temporary funding for the Department of Homeland Security expires Friday. If Congress and President Obama can’t agree on an appropriations bill by then, it will drape the agency in confusion.

But it won’t shut down, as DHS says, because about 85 percent of its employees would stay on the job.

What would shut down is the pay for all DHS staffers — more than 200,000 of them. Those who remain on the job would get paid eventually, but who knows when? The 15 percent facing furlough might get paid, but they can’t take “might” to the bank.

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Google Blasts DOJ's Request For Expanded Search Powers; Calls Proposal A Threat To The Fourth Amendment

TECH DIRT

The DOJ wants to amend Rule 41 (Search and Seizure) to grant its agencies unilateral powers to hack any computer in the world. This would expand its reach beyond the US, using warrants granted by magistrate judges to facilitate searches and seizures of remote data. This would obviously open up a whole diplomatic can of worms, what with the FBI hacking into computers whose locations it can't ascertain until after the fact.

Not that the DOJ is bothered by the implications of the amendment it's pushing. It argues that the law already has determined searches in known jurisdictions legal.

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Police secretly spy on phones

WASHINGTON POST

The case against Tadrae McKenzie looked like an easy win for prosecutors. He and two buddies robbed a small-time pot dealer of $130 worth of weed using BB guns.

Under Florida law, that was robbery with a deadly weapon, with a sentence of at least four years in prison.

But before trial, his defense team detected investigators’ use of a secret surveillance tool, one that raises significant privacy concerns.

In an unprecedented move, a state judge ordered the police to show the device — a cell-tower simulator sometimes called a StingRay — to the attorneys.

Rather than show the equipment, the state offered McKenzie a plea bargain.

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CIA Tried to Plant Fake Nuke Evidence in Iran for the IAEA to Find

(Bloomberg) -- Details of a 15-year-old Central Intelligence Agency sting emerging from a court case in the U.S. may prompt United Nations monitors to reassess some evidence related to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons work, two western diplomats said.

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Vienna will probably review intelligence they received about Iran as a result of the revelations, said the two diplomats who are familiar with the IAEA’s Iran file and asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

The CIA passed doctored blueprints for nuclear-weapon components to Iran in February 2000, trial documents have shown.

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ISIS' army of 7-footers? Experts say video of Copt beheadings IS FAKE

FOX NEWS

Video of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians being marched along a Libyan beach before being beheaded by black-clad members of ISIS is hard for any civilized person to watch, but experts who made it through the sickening, five-minute clip told FoxNews.com Friday they came to the same conclusion: The footage was faked.

No one holds out hope the victims, mostly poor fishermen who had gone to Libya to scratch out a living, are still alive.

But several anomalies in the video, which was posted online Feb. 15, indicated to trained eyes that at least some of the production was done on "green screen" with background added later, perhaps to disguise the real location of the atrocity.

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Against the odds by Blooded the Brave

The album features 14 new songs and it's available on itunes.

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Iranian VP: CIA Behind Islamic State

“Well, I think there’s a lot of skepticism about the role of the United States in dealing with ISIS, because the support they initially provided for ISIS in Syria strengthened this group at that time, and then also other reasons to believe this is not a genuine group, it somehow instigated or created by, I don’t know, a certain intelligence agency,” Ebtekar said when asked about IS during an interview conducted by ABC News.

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ISIS Leader: We Are Being Funded By The United States

Law enforcing agencies on January 22 claimed that they arrested al Salafi, along with his two companions, during a joint raid in Lahore. However, sources revealed that al Salafi was actually arrested sometime in December last year and it was only disclosed on January 22.

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Iran has stopped questionable nuclear centrifuge testing: IAEA

(Reuters) - Iran has refrained from expanding tests of more efficient models of a machine used to refine uranium under a nuclear agreement with six world powers, a U.N. report shows, allaying concerns it might be violating the accord.

Tehran's development of advanced centrifuges is sensitive because, if successful, it could enable it to produce potential nuclear bomb material at a rate several times that of the decades-old version of the machine now in use.

An interim accord in 2013 between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia stipulated Tehran could continue its "current enrichment R&D (research and development) practices", implying they should not be stepped up.

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False Flag Weekly News with Kevin Barrett and Jim Fetzer

False flag weekly news is uploaded every Thursday!

Don't miss it!

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How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle

The Intercept

AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

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