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Ocho millones de espiados por Yahoo!

 

 

Fuente:  Pagina12

 

En base a filtraciones de Edward Snowden, el diario The Guardian reveló documentos sobre el programa denominado Nervio Optico, que el Reino Unido impulsó desde 2008 hasta al menos 2012, con ayuda del NSA estadounidense.

 

 

 

 

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El centro de comunicación británico GCHQ, con la ayuda de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional (NSA) de Estados Unidos, interceptó y almacenó imágenes de webcams de 8 millones de usuarios de Yahoo!, reveló ayer el diario The Guardian en base a filtraciones de Edward Snowden. Los documentos indican que, desde 2008 hasta al menos 2012, el Reino Unido impulsó el programa denominado Nervio Optico para capturar fotos obtenidas en chats realizados vía webcam y guardarlas en su base de datos, fueran un objetivo de inteligencia o no.

 

A través de esa técnica, solamente en un semestre de 2008 la agencia obtuvo imágenes, algunas de contenido sexual explícito, de casi dos millones de usuarios del servicio de Yahoo!. GCHQ indicó que entre un 3 y 11 por ciento de las fotos recolectadas contenían “un nivel no deseado de desnudez” y reconoció las dificultades operativas de mantener esas imágenes fuera del alcance de la vista de sus empleados.

 

Consultado por The Guardian, Yahoo!, el segundo servidor de correos electrónicos más importante del mundo (tras Gmail, de Google), negó tener conocimientos del espionaje y responsabilizó a las agencias “de alcanzar un nuevo nivel de violación de la privacidad”.

 

GCHQ no dispone de los medios técnicos para asegurarse de que las imágenes de los ciudadanos del Reino Unido o de los Estados Unidos no sean recogidas y almacenadas por el sistema, y no hay restricciones, en virtud de la legislación británica, para que se acceda a las imágenes de los estadounidenses por parte de los analistas británicos sin orden individual.

 

Los documentos también muestran la lucha sostenida de GCHQ para mantener el gran conjunto de imágenes sexualmente explícitas recogidas por el Nervio Optico lejos de los ojos de su personal, aunque en principio no se discuten las implicaciones de privacidad de almacenar este material.

 

Esto último tira abajo la defensa que hizo en reiteradas oportunidades el ministro de Relaciones Exteriores británico, William Hague, quien negó que Londres haya violado “la privacidad de las personas”. Además sería una violación a la ley del Reino Unido que exige la firma de un funcionario del gabinete para interceptar una comunicación.

 

El sistema Nervio Optico comenzó como un prototipo en 2008 y era un inquietante recuerdo de las pantallas de televisión evocadas en 1984, de George Orwell. Los documentos filtrados por el “topo” Snowden explican que el programa capturaba cada cinco minutos una fotografía de una conversación realizada a través de webcams y llevaba adelante un sistema de reconocimiento facial para detectar personas buscadas por el Reino Unido. Snowden, quien trabajaba para los servicios de inteligencia de Estados Unidos y actualmente está exiliado en Moscú, reveló en junio del 2013 los programas con que su país intervenía las comunicaciones telefónicas y electrónicas.

 

Los documentos divulgados por Snowden indican que las imágenes se interceptaban de forma azarosa y masiva, por lo que no se tenía en cuenta si los individuos espiados representaban un objetivo o no para los servicios de inteligencia. Las mejores imágenes son aquellas en las que la persona enfrenta a la cámara a la altura del rostro y está de pie.

 

La agencia hizo esfuerzos por limitar la capacidad de los analistas para ver imágenes de webcams, y restringir las búsquedas a granel a los metadatos solamente. Sin embargo, los analistas se mostraron los rostros de las personas con nombres de usuarios similares a los objetivos de vigilancia, lo que podría arrastrar a un gran número de personas inocentes. Según un documento, personal de la agencia dice que se le permitió mostrar “imágenes de webcams asociadas con identificadores de Yahoo! similares a su destino conocido”.

 

Nervio Optico se basa en la recopilación de información de la enorme red de derivaciones de cable de Internet, que luego se procesan y se introducen en los sistemas proporcionados por la NSA del GCHQ. La información de webcam se introduce en la herramienta de búsqueda de NSA XKeyscore, y la investigación de la NSA se utilizó para construir la herramienta que identifica el tráfico de la webcam de Yahoo!.

 

Se inició la vigilancia masiva de usuarios de Yahoo!, decían los documentos, porque “el webcam de Yahoo! es conocido por ser utilizado por objetivos de GCHQ”. Este insiste en que todas sus actividades son necesarias, adecuadas y de acuerdo con la ley del Reino Unido.

 

La NSA y GCHQ hace tiempo que conocen los riesgos para la privacidad de la recogida masiva de fuentes de video, como apuntaba un documento de la investigación a partir de mediados del decenio de 2000: “Uno de los mayores obstáculos para la explotación de los datos de video es el hecho de que la gran mayoría de los videos recibidos no tiene ningún valor de inteligencia, como por ejemplo la pornografía, anuncios, videos y películas caseras de la familia”.

 

No queda del todo claro, a partir de los documentos, cuánto acceso tiene la NSA para la cámara web en sí de Yahoo!, aunque todos los documentos de política estaban disponibles para los analistas de la NSA a través de su rutina de intercambio de información.

 

Yahoo! ha sido una de las empresas de tecnología más críticas, que se oponen a una vigilancia mayor de la NSA. Presentó una demanda de transparencia en el tribunal, secreto, de vigilancia de agencias de inteligencia de Estados Unidos. Pidió que se revele un caso de 2007, en el que se vio obligado a proporcionar los datos del cliente a la agencia de inteligencia, y arremetió contra la intercepción notificada por la NSA de la información en tránsito entre sus centros de datos.

 

 

 

Gran Bretaña, estado policial (1)

Undercover soldiers 'killed unarmed civilians in Belfast'

Fuente: BBC

Soldiers from an undercover unit used by the British army in Northern Ireland killed unarmed civilians, former members have told BBC One's Panorama.
 

Speaking publicly for the first time, the ex-members of the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which was disbanded in 1973, said they had been tasked with "hunting down" IRA members in Belfast. The former soldiers said they believed the unit had saved many lives.The Ministry of Defence said it had referred the disclosures to police.

The details have emerged a day after Northern Ireland's attorney general, John Larkin, suggested ending any prosecutions over Troubles-related killings that took place before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
 

 

The soldiers appeared on Panorama on condition their identities were disguised The proposal has been criticised by groups representing relatives of victims. Panorama has been told the MRF consisted of about 40 men handpicked from across the British army.

 

Before it was disbanded 40 years ago, after 18 months, plain-clothes soldiers carried out round-the-clock patrols of west Belfast - the heartland of the IRA - in unmarked cars.

 

Three former members of the unit, who agreed to be interviewed on condition their identities were disguised, said they had posed as Belfast City Council road sweepers, dustmen and even "meths drinkers", carrying out surveillance from street gutters.

 

But surveillance was just one part of their work. One of the soldiers said they had also fired on suspected IRA members. He described their mission as "to draw out the IRA and to minimise their activities... if they needed shooting, they'd be shot".
 

For 15 years, Northern Ireland has been divided about how to deal with the legacy of three decades of conflict. The compromise has been the establishment of the Historical Enquiries Team, a group of former detectives, who are reviewing all deaths in Northern Ireland during the conflict, primarily to answer questions from their relatives.
 

But now the Northern Ireland attorney general has reignited the vexed issue of whether truth recovery through a virtual amnesty is preferable to prosecution.
 

John Larkin has called for an end to all prosecutions and inquiries in relation to Troubles-related killings. The disclosures by Panorama are bound to add to this debate.

 

The closest former MRF soldiers have previously come to breaking cover is as the pseudonymous authors of two semi-fictionalised paperbacks, one of whom has referred to the MRF as a "legalised death squad".
 

The factual account of the MRF may not be quite as colourful. Nonetheless, the evidence gleaned from seven former members, declassified files and witnesses, does point to a central truth - that MRF tactics did sometimes mirror the IRA's.

 

'Targets taken down'

Another former member of the unit said: "We never wore uniform - very few people knew what rank anyone was anyway. "We were hunting down hardcore baby-killers, terrorists, people that would kill you without even thinking about it."

 

A third former MRF soldier said: "If you had a player who was a well-known shooter who carried out quite a lot of assassinations... then he had to be taken out. "[They were] killers themselves, and they had no mercy for anybody."

 

In 1972 there were more than 10,600 shootings in Northern Ireland. It is not possible to say how many the unit was involved in. The MRF's operational records have been destroyed and its former members refused to incriminate themselves or their comrades in specific incidents when interviewed by Panorama.

 

But they admitted shooting and killing unarmed civilians. When asked if on occasion the MRF would make an assumption that someone had a weapon, even if they could not see one, one of the former soldiers replied "occasionally".



"We didn't go around town blasting, shooting all over the place like you see on the TV, we were going down there and finding, looking for our targets, finding them and taking them down," he said.

 

Patricia McVeigh says her father Patrick was shot in the back as he stopped to talk to men at a checkpoint  "We may not have seen a weapon, but there more than likely would have been weapons there in a vigilante patrol."

 

Panorama has identified 10 unarmed civilians shot, according to witnesses, by the MRF:

• Brothers John and Gerry Conway, on the way to their fruit stall in Belfast city centre on 15 April 1972
• Aiden McAloon and Eugene Devlin, in a taxi taking them home from a disco on 12 May 1972
• Joe Smith, Hugh Kenny, Patrick Murray and Tommy Shaw, on Glen Road on 22 June 1972
• Daniel Rooney and Brendan Brennan, on the Falls Road on 27 September 1972

 

Patricia McVeigh told the BBC she believed her father, Patrick McVeigh, had been shot in the back and killed by plain clothes soldiers on 12 May 1972 and said she wanted justice for him. "He was an innocent man, he had every right to be on the street walking home. He didn't deserve to die like this," she said.

 

Her solicitor Padraig O'Muirigh said he was considering civil action against the Ministry of Defence in light of Panorama's revelations. The MoD refused to say whether soldiers involved in specific shootings had been members of the MRF.

 'Pretty gruesome'

It said it had referred allegations that MRF soldiers shot unarmed men to police in Northern Ireland. But the members of the MRF who Panorama interviewed said their actions had ultimately helped bring about the IRA's decision to lay down arms.

 

Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the British army, and a young paratrooper captain in 1972, said he had known little of the unit's activities at the time, but admired the bravery of soldiers involved in undercover work. He said: "That takes a lot of courage and it's a cold courage. It's not the courage of hot blood [used by] soldiers in a firefight. "You know if you are discovered, a pretty gruesome fate may well await you - torture followed by murder."

 

The IRA planted nearly 1,800 bombs - an average of five a day - in 1972 

 

Col Richard Kemp, who carried out 10 tours of Northern Ireland between 1979 and 2001, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme charges could be brought if there was new evidence unarmed civilians had been killed. But he added: "Soldiers often speak with bravado and I wonder how many of those soldiers are saying that they themselves shot and killed unarmed civilians."

 

Panorama has learnt a Ministry of Defence review concluded the MRF had "no provision for detailed command and control". Forty years later and families and victims are still looking for answers as to who carried out shootings.

 

Former detectives are reviewing all of the deaths in Northern Ireland during the conflict as part of the Historical Enquiries Team set up following the peace process. 

 

Around 11% of the 3,260 deaths being reviewed were the responsibility of the state.