"New Advanced Democracy" - Turkish intelligence agency to screen telecommunications staff.

"New Advanced Democracy" - Turkish intelligence agency to screen telecommunications staff. (Bugun).

Personnel being hired by private telecommunications firms will now require approval by the Turkish Intelligence Agency.

Minister of Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communications Lütfi Elvan announced that Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT) will now be screening personnel hired by private telecommunications firms according to media reports.

“The government will be taking some precautions regarding Turkcell, Avea, Vodafone and Turk Telekom,” said Elvan, adding that anyone to work at GSM operators would be subject to approval by MİT and relevant security agencies. Elvan cited the December 2013 wiretaps that had exposed alleged government corruption as justification for this decision.

Critics are concerned that this degree of intrustion into GSM personnel would give MİT the opportunity to monitor the conversations of anyone with a cell phone in Turkey.

MİT has previously been accused of illegally monitoring the conversations of journalists, including reporters and columnists of Turkish daily Taraf. Hmmm.....It's becoming obvious Islamist Turkey is turning in to a Dictatorship where only 'trusted' AKP members will get a state job.

Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia bans use of internet

Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia bans use of internet.(Taz).

An Islamist militia controlling parts of Somalia has banned the use of the internet for fear of spying and surveillance on its operations in the Horn of Africa country, dpa reported.

Internet providers must sever services on mobile phones and using fibre optic communications within 15 days, al-Shabaab said in a statement aired on Andulus, one of its radio stations, late Wednesday.

Companies refusing to comply with the ban "would be seen as collaborating with the enemy and necessary steps would be taken against them in compliance with sharia, or Islamic law," the statement said.

Al-Shabaab controls mainly rural areas in central and southern Somalia, but there was concern that the internet ban could have a wider effect.

"Some of the main antennas transmitting the signals belong to companies here in Mogadishu" and they would have to be disabled for the ban to enter into force, one operator for a local telecommunications company said on the condition of anonymity.

Somalia's largest telecommunications operator, Hormuud Telecom, which has signed an agreement with South Africa's Liquid Telecom to link Somalia with an African fibre optic network, did not issue an immediate comment.

African Union peacekeepers in Somalia and Kenyan troops have stepped up their operations against al-Shabaab, which is believed to be linked with al-Qaeda, after its attack on a Nairobi shopping mall that left 67 people dead in September.

Growing Alarm: German Prosecutors To Review Allegations of US Spying, One criminal complaint has already been filed in Germany.

Growing Alarm: German Prosecutors To Review Allegations of US Spying, One criminal complaint has already been filed in Germany. HT: Spiegel.

Germany's Federal Prosecutors' Office confirmed to SPIEGEL on Sunday that it is looking into whether systematic data spying against the country conducted by America's National Security Agency violated laws aimed at protecting German citizens.

A spokeswoman at the Federal Prosecutors' Office, which is responsible for domestic security issues, told SPIEGEL that all available and relevant information about the Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant spying programs is currently being reviewed by the agency. The spokeswoman said the office was seeking to form a reliable understanding of the facts. However, the agency has not indicated when or if it will launch a formal investigation.

Nevertheless, the spokeswoman said that "criminal complaints" relating to the scandal appear "likely". One criminal complaint has already been filed in Germany. SPIEGEL has learned that a provision was used at the local public prosecutor's office in the city of Giessen to lodge a criminal complaint against an unknown perpetrator over the spying.

Meanwhile, the British government -- whose Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence service operates the Tempora spying program that is in part directed at Germany -- has shifted away from its strict policy of silence on the issue. In response to requests from the German government for additional information during the past week, officials in London said only that they fundamentally do not address issues pertaining to intelligence operations publicly . Any inquiries were directed by the government to the British intelligence agencies.

The response angered politicians in Germany, especially Justice Minister Sabine Leuthheusser-Schnarrenberger, who complained of having only received "three meager sentences" in reply. The politician, with the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), said the terse response didn't go far enough to contain a scandal of this proportion.

Berlin officials have since been invited by the British government to participate in a video conference on Monday at 4 p.m. in the British Embassy in Berlin. SPIEGEL has learned that the German government will be represented by senior officials from the Interior Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND. Government sources said that in light of the revelations, tough questions are likely to be posed at the meeting.Read the full story here.

US taps half-billion German phone and internet activities a month – report.

US taps half-billion German phone and internet activities a month – report.HT: RussiaToday.

The NSA document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel classified Germany as a “third-class” partner, on the same level as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, meaning that the US surveillance in Germany was stronger than in any other EU country. "We can attack the signals of most foreign third-class partners, and we do it too," the document states.

It revealed that NSA monitors phone calls, text messages, emails and internet chat contributions and has saved the metadata (connections and not the content) at its headquarters.
NSA snooped through 20-60 million German phone connections and 10 million internet data sets a day, Der Spiegel claims.In comparison, US tapped around 2 million connection data a day in France.

The only countries exempt from the surveillance attacks were Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand.Snowden’s documents already revealed that NSA had spied on EU, including Germany, but the extent of surveillance was not known.

Spiegel’s earlier report, which revealed that European citizens, employees of the EU diplomatic missions in Washington and the UN were under electronic surveillance from the NSA, was met with anger from EU policymakers.
Germany demanded an “immediate” US response over bugging allegations, adding that this kind of surveillance was reminiscent of the Cold War.
"It must ultimately be immediately and extensively explained by the American side whether media reports about completely disproportionate tapping measures by the US in the EU are accurate or not," Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement.
The president of the European parliament has also demanded an explanation from US authorities over the latest revelation.

“I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices,” said Martin Schulz. “If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.”
The whistleblower behind the leaked documents, Snowden, has left US for Hong Kong in May and currently remains in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport while Ecuador reviews his asylum request.
Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and ex-staff member of a private contractor working for the NSA, disclosed secret documents revealing US surveillance program PRISM and British secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) sharing its intelligence with NSA, as part of the Tempora data collection project.The US has charged Snowden with espionage and is trying to extradite him.

Related:  Spiegel - 'Out of Control': Europe Furious over NSA Spying on EU Facilities

Former Stasi lieutenant colonel on NSA surveillance: "You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true."

Former Stasi lieutenant colonel on NSA surveillance: "You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true."HT: InfiniteUnknown.

Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs (McClatchy, June 26, 2013):

BERLIN — Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.
Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.

As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”

The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”
“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”

For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”

Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.

“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.” 

Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.
Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.

“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”

Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”

Read the full story here.

Snowden Documents Show NSA Spied on EU Officials.

Snowden Documents Show NSA Spied on EU Officials.HT: RaiNovosti.

The National Security Agency bugged European Union offices in the United States, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said on Sunday citing “secret documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that Spiegel has in part seen.”

An NSA document, dated 2010, names the European Union a "location target."

“The document suggests that in addition to installing bugs in the building in downtown Washington, DC, the EU representation's computer network was also infiltrated. In this way, the Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as emails and internal documents on computers,” Der Spiegel wrote in an English-language article.

According to the document, the EU mission to the United Nations was under a similar surveillance.
The information obtained by Der Spiegel also suggests that NSA was behind an “electronic eavesdropping operation” which apparently targeted the Justus Lipsius Building, home to the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council.
Without citing sources, Der Spiegel says that approximately five years ago European security officials had noticed “several telephone calls that were apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the Justus Lipsius Building.”

“Security officials managed to track the calls to NATO headquarters in the Brussels suburb of Evere. A precise analysis showed that the attacks on the telecommunications system had originated from a building complex separated from the rest of the NATO headquarters that is used by NSA experts,” the magazine said.

Reuters quoted Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, as saying that if the report was correct, it would have a "severe impact" on relations between the EU and the United States.
"On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the U.S. authorities with regard to these allegations," he said in an emailed statement.Hmmm.......Read the full story here.

Iranian Lawmaker: Iran Resolved to Continue 20% Uranium Enrichment.

Iranian Lawmaker: Iran Resolved to Continue 20% Uranium Enrichment.(Fars).A ranking member of the Iranian parliament said Tehran is determined to continue uranium enrichment to the purity level of 20% as an indispensible right of the Iranian nation and it would never exchange this right with the world powers' content.
The remarks were made by Member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mansour Haqiqatpour on Saturday.
"Irrespective of agreement or disagreement of the Group 5+1 (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany), the Islamic Republic of Iran will not surrender its right to achieve nuclear technology and produce 20-percent enriched uranium, which is needed for radio medicines," he added.
In mid-September, Iranian nuclear experts, in an unprecedented move, utilized their utmost knowledge, endeavor and ambition to enrich the uranium to the purity level of 20% for the Tehran research reactor to defuse the Western sanctions against Tehran, said a senior Iranian nuclear official.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the 56th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and after a meeting with the IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, Vice President and Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereydoun Abbasi said when the country faced sanctions and failed to provide the 20 percent enriched uranium needed by the Tehran research reactor from the world market, through endeavors of Iranian technicians, it managed to change chains of centrifuges, thus doing 20 percent enrichment and providing necessary fuel for the Tehran reactor.
Abbasi said that Iran has gained significant nuclear achievements over the past one year and the achievements have been despite sanctions issued against Iran by a few western states on the false hope that they are crippling.
He said that the main part of Iran's enrichment is at the level of 3.5 percent and added that Iran will determine the amount of the enriched uranium based on its needs in the future.
Abbasi noted that the 20 percent enrichment in Iran is for production of radio medicine while certain people try to link it to non-peaceful goals.
Israel and its close ally the United States accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Both Washington and Tel Aviv possess advanced weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear warheads.
In the meantime, in September, Iran announced that it plans to synthesize 20 kinds of radiomedicine inside the country, stressing that its scientists are capable of supplying the 20%-enriched uranium needed for the production of such drugs.
"Iran has gained the necessary preparedness to produce 20 radiomedicines and we will provide the 20% (enriched) fuel needed for the production of these medicines this year," Deputy Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) for Planning, International and Parliamentary Affairs Massoud Akhavan-Fard told FNA in September.
In addition to the Tehran research reactor which has long been used by radioisotope production, Iran also plans to build four other research reactors in the other parts of the country, he added.Read the full story here.

Iran, critical of cutting Iranian TV broadcasts, seeks satellite services from Obama's BFF Turkey.

Iran, critical of cutting Iranian TV broadcasts, seeks satellite services from Obama's BFF Turkey.(TI).Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, on Wednesday sought satellite services from Turkey for Iranian TV broadcasts, IRNA reported.
He criticized the western satellite service providers for refusing service for Iranian TV broadcasts.
He said that the move is a clear violation of freedom of expression, and that the Turkish satellite service providers are expected to help Iranian TV broadcasts with satellite services.
In a meeting with Ibrahim Shahin, director general of the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), Mehmanparast pointed to historical and cultural commonalties of Iran and Turkey and said there are many fields for Iranian and Turkish media cooperation.
He said that introduction of the culture, history and tourist attractions of the two countries would provide a common ground for media cooperation.
"Exchange of the media and TV products would serve as an important and practical area for cooperation."
He said that Iranian and Turkish media shoulder a grave role in outlining the sensitive situation of the Middle East region and reflecting the concerns of the public opinion and measures the governments must take in this respect.
Mehmanparst said western media by disseminating false news and reports are after sowing discord among Muslim states.
"Using capacities in the field of mass media would serve transparency for the public opinion in both Iran and Turkey."
He called for forming direct links of the Iranian and Turkish reporters with the government officials would serve clarity of the national and international issues, so that the public would get access to accurate information.
Shahin for his part called for media cooperation between Iran and Turkey and said there are common cultural and historical affinities which must be utilized for cooperation.
He welcomed Mehmanparast's proposal for direct dialogue between reporters and Iranian and Turkish government officials.Hmmmm......Oil ....Gold and now Telecommunications.."Sanctions that Benefit"Read the full story here.