#BlueLeaks

[probablyasocialecologist]

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.

[...]

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).

[theoutcastrogue]

Distributed Denial of Secrets — the nonprofit transparency collective that hosts an ever-growing public library of leaked and hacked datasets for journalists and researchers to investigate — has been a major source of news for organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BBC News, Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Fox News, among others. It has published datasets that shed light on law enforcement fusion centers spying on Black Lives Matter activists, revealed Oath Keepers supporters among law enforcement and elected officials, and exposed thousands of videos from January 6 rioters, including many that were used as evidence in Donald Trump’s second impeachment inquiry. (Disclosure: I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.) But not everyone is a fan. DDoSecrets has powerful enemies and has found itself censored by some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit. The governments of Russia and Indonesia are also censoring access to its website. Shortly before the 2020 election, Twitter prevented users from posting links to a New York Post article based on documents stolen from Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing a violation of the company’s hacked materials policy. After intense pressure from Republicans, Twitter reversed course two days later. This was widely covered in the media and even led to congressional hearings. What’s less well known is that earlier in 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising, Twitter used the same hacked materials policy to not only permanently ban the @DDoSecrets account, but also prevent users from posting any links to ddosecrets.com. This was in response to the collective publishing the BlueLeaks dataset, a collection of 270GB of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies. (German authorities also seized a DDoSecrets server after the release of BlueLeaks, bringing the collective’s data server temporarily offline.) When Elon Musk bought Twitter, which he has since renamed X, he promised that he would restore “free speech” to the platform. But Musk’s company is still censoring DDoSecrets; links to the website have been blocked on the platform for over three years. Lorax Horne, an editor at DDoSecrets, told The Intercept that they are “not surprised” that Musk isn’t interested in ending the censorship. “We afflict the comfortable, and we include a lot of trans people,” they said. “Transparency is not comforting to the richest people in the world.” [keep reading]

[silicacid]

US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show

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.

At a time of polarized reactions to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the analysis raises questions about the scope of police intelligence-gathering in the US and the influence of Israel and its supporters on those efforts, and how this has shaped the treatment of activists and social movements, especially those who are pro-Palestinian.

Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, former FBI undercover agent and author of Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy, said the use of such documents and receipt of such training was damaging the practice of good law enforcement.

“It’s frustrating that we’ve developed this national law enforcement intelligence-sharing network that basically takes disinformation straight from the rightwing social media fever swamps and puts it out under the imprimatur of law enforcement intelligence, so it becomes an amplifier of disinformation rather than a corrective to that disinformation,” German said.

The BlueLeaks trove was obtained and released by self-described hacktivists in June 2020. It contains material from more than 200 law enforcement agencies, including intelligence material disseminated by federally sponsored umbrella bodies such as fusion centers and high-intensity drug-trafficking area (Hidta) programs.

One body whose internal archives were exposed in the hack, LA Clear, is tasked with providing “analytical and case support” in narcotics investigations in southern California, according to its website. It was established as a joint project between the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association, the California department of justice, and the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department in 1992.

Despite its ostensible mission to combat drug trafficking, the LA Clear archive of training materials (labeled “lacleartraining”) included in the BlueLeaks trove has several analyses of previous episodes of widespread conflict in Gaza and the West Bank that are sourced directly from the IDF and closely aligned Israeli thinktanks.

One of the documents is a reproduction of a PowerPoint-style presentation dated 11 April 2011, badged with the insignia and name of the Strategic Division of the IDF, and entitled “Escalation in the Gaza Strip”.

The presentation is marked “for official use only”, a US government designation for documents which are not for public release.

The document asserts that “there has recently been a sharp increase in terrorist attacks emanating from the Gaza Strip intentionally directed at Israeli civilians in southern Israel”. The presentation offers evidence including Israeli counts of rocket attacks from Hamas, the Sha’ar HaNegev school bus attack and the killing of a family in “the Jewish community of Itamar” on 11 March 2011. (Later in 2011, two cousins from the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta were convicted of the murders and sentenced to multiple consecutive life sentences.)

The document does not present the long history of conflict between residents of Itamar, which the international community considers an illegal West Bank settlement, and neighboring villages. In 2010, a Human Rights Watch report singled out Itamar’s settlers with allegations of land theft, raids on Palestinian villages and extrajudicial killings.

Elsewhere in LA Clear’s training materials is another PowerPoint-style presentation authored by the Dado Center, a military studies department of the IDF. The presentation offers a retrospective analysis of “Operation Cast Lead”, the IDF’s name for the 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip that commenced on 27 December 2008.

That document is labeled “FOUO”, an abbreviation of “for official use only” and appears to be a cursory visual aid for a spoken presentation. It points to “unique geo-strategic conditions (Gaza encircled by Egypt and Israel)”; “unique operational conditions (air supremacy, intelligence superiority)”; and “unique adversary (multiple identities, limited capabilities)”.

The presentation, which only includes the IDF’s perspective, also highlights challenges including “legitimacy (external & internal, strategic narrative)” and “media coverage (a controlled information environment)”.

Amnesty International alleged in a 2009 report that during Operation Cast Lead, the IDF targeted civilians, carried out “indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilian objects”, and used munitions containing white phosphorus, the use of which against civilians is a violation of international law, according to the World Health Organization.

Another document in the trove is a longer 2011 report assessing “terrorism from the Gaza Strip since Operation Cast Lead” produced by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC). The ITIC is an Israeli research group whose founding director and current director were previously IDF intelligence officers. The thinktank reportedly maintains an office at the Israeli defense ministry.

None of these documents mention narcotics trafficking or criminal activity in the US. LA Clear’s archive and the BlueLeaks trove do not appear to contain any alternative accounts of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Guardian contacted LA Clear for comment through the body’s website but received no response.

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).

Emails preserved in BlueLeaks show various agencies promoting ADL training sessions for law enforcement officers, including a January 2013 session on “screening of persons by observational techniques” and a seminar at the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center on the “evolving nature of Islamic extremists”.

ADL staff are shown as registered attendees at events run by fusion centers, offering bios that advise the organization that “we facilitate workshops for law enforcement on extremism, hate crime and (in Washington DC and Israel) counter-terrorism”.

The ADL, whose website banner heading at the time of reporting read “We stand with Israel”, is one of very few community organizations who train or are consulted by law enforcement officers. They are frequently cited throughout BlueLeaks as an authority on extremism and terrorism.

The Guardian contacted the ADL for comment but received no response.

There is no evidence in BlueLeaks that Muslim community groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (Cair) are consulted on issues involving Muslims; Cair is barely mentioned outside a series of four newsletters from the Omaha Terrorism Early Warning Group describing it as “unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land terror funding trial”.

In 2007, Cair was named alongside other organizations as an unindicted co-conspirator in an FBI indictment concerning a land trust it alleged was funding Hamas. In 2010, a federal judge found that the agency had violated the organization’s rights, though there was evidence connecting the groups to the trust. A 2013 Office of the Inspector General report found “significant issues with the way the FBI implemented and managed its Cair policy and guidance” in connection with the case.

There are indications that this emphasis shaped investigations: in at least two instances, the National Criminal Intelligence Resource Center archived social media feeds of Palestinian American pro-Palestine activists. The feeds indicated no apparent wrongdoing.

The Guardian previously reported revelations from the trove including that Google was passing user data directly to law enforcement authorities; that law enforcement officials baselessly linked “antifa” activists to arson attacks; that officials were characterizing the Proud Boys as an extremist group in private long before the events of 6 January 2021; and the private firms profiting from police militarization.

On the scope of the latest revelations, German said: “At a time where there’s much more public sensitivity to foreign influence in domestic affairs, having a foreign country’s security services aligned with the beat cop on the streets of American neighborhoods is concerning.”

[silicacid]

no bc u guys are pissing me off, u guys dont really understand how the free palestine movement and blm are related... israel both oppresses palenstians and black people but yall wanna bring down blm to uplift a movement

[readingsquotes]

"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 ADL, whose website banner heading at the time of reporting read “We stand with Israel”, is one of very few community organizations who train or are consulted by law enforcement officers. They are frequently cited throughout BlueLeaks as an authority on extremism and terrorism. ...

The Guardian previously reported revelations from the trove including that Google was passing user data directly to law enforcement authorities; that law enforcement officials baselessly linked “antifa” activists to arson attacks; that officials were characterizing the Proud Boys as an extremist group in private long before the events of 6 January 2021; and the private firms profiting from police militarization.

On the scope of the latest revelations, German said: “At a time where there’s much more public sensitivity to foreign influence in domestic affairs, having a foreign country’s security services aligned with the beat cop on the streets of American neighborhoods is concerning.”

US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show

Analysis of BlueLeaks trove also shows police received training on domestic ‘Muslim extremists’ from pro-Israel groups

Jason Wilson Fri 8 Dec 2023 07.00 EST

[mongowheelie]

US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show

[anarchistcommunism]

‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments

[noabuseofpower-tisfightback]

THE DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT TAKES AIM AT FUSION CENTERS AND MASS SURVEILLANCE

THE DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT TAKES AIM AT FUSION CENTERS AND MASS SURVEILLANCE

[toastmcroasty]

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

[mirrorontheworld]

The so-called BlueLeaks collection includes internal memos, financial records, and more from over 200 state, local, and federal agencies.

[kreuzaderny]

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.

[siennastewart2020]

Twitter has permanently suspended the Twitter account of a group of journalists and activists ‘Distributed Denial of Secrets’.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“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.”” - Mara Hvistendahl and Sam Biddle, “HOMELAND SECURITY WORRIES COVID-19 MASKS ARE BREAKING FACIAL RECOGNITION, LEAKED DOCUMENT SHOWS.” The Intercept. July 16, 2020.

[anarchistcommunism]

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."