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The United States on Tuesday sued former national securityadviserJohnBolton, seeking toblockhim from publishing abookabout his time in the White House that it said contained classified information and would compromise national security.

The civil lawsuit came one day after USPresident DonaldTrumpsaidBoltonwould be breaking the law if thebookwere published.

The White House National Security Council (NSC) has determined that the manuscript in its present form contains certain passages some up to several paragraphs in length that contain classified national security information, the lawsuit said.

Publicationof thebookwould cause irreparable harm, because the disclosure of instances of classified information in the manuscript reasonably could beexpected to cause serious damage, orexceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States, according to the lawsuit.

TrumpfiredBoltonlast September after roughly 17 months as national securityadviser.

Trumpsaid on Monday thatBoltonknows he has classified information in hisbook, and that he had not completed a clearing process required for anybookwritten by former government officials who had access to sensitive information.

Attorney general William Barr said the Justice Department was trying to getBoltonto complete the clearance process and make the necessary deletions of classified information.

Boltons lawyer Charles Cooper said they were reviewing the lawsuit and will respond in due course.

The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoiris set to be published on June 23.

Publisher Simon and Schuster said the lawsuit is an attempt by theTrumpadministration to stop publicationof abookit deems unflattering to the President. It saidBoltonhas fully cooperated with the NSC pre-publicationreview.

Thebookprovides an insider account ofTrumps inconsistent, scattershot decision-making process, the publisher has said.

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US Government Sues Former Trump NSA John Bolton to Block Book Publication - The Wire

Image: Juniper, ZDNet

A group of 13 US government officials has sent an open letter today to networking equipment vendor Juniper Networks, asking the company to publish the results of its internal investigation into the origins of a suspected NSA backdoor mechanism discovered in its firewall products in late 2015.

"It has now been over four years since Juniper announced it was conducting an investigation, but your company has still not revealed what, if anything, it uncovered," the group wrote.

The group is seeking answers about what happened at Juniper behind closed doors and what made the company skip on publishing a public report, as it initially promised.

Their inquiry and letter come amid actions from Attorney General William Barr and other senior US government officials who've been seeking to pressure US technology companies to weaken their encryption and assist US government surveillance efforts.

"Juniper's experiences can provide a valuable case study about the dangers of backdoors, as well as the apparent ease with which government backdoors can be covertly subverted by a sophisticated actor," the US officials said.

Details about a backdoor in Juniper products first came to light in December 2015. Members of the cyber-security community discovered what looked like a change of a secret access key inside the source code of ScreenOS, an operating system running on NetScreen, Juniper's line of firewall and VPN products.

Following public pressure, Juniper later admitted that "unauthorized code" made its way into the ScreenOS source code, and that the unauthorized code could have allowed attackers to take over devices and decrypt VPN traffic.

While Juniper initially shied away from providing any details, members of the public cyber-security community later discovered that the unauthorized code referred to the use of Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG) algorithm as the random number generator (RNG) component inside ScreenOS.

Dual_EC_DRBG is a lesser-known algorithm that was developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2006 and which received almost an immediate FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) certification despite some security experts warning that initial audits revealed signs of a potential backdoor mechanism.

However, despite criticism, Dual_EC_DRBG remained certified until 2013, until the Edward Snowden revelations, when the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) intervened to withdraw its FIPS certification.

But investigators discovered that Juniper quietly added support for Dual_EC_DRBG in 2008, and did not publicly disclose it in any subsequent audits and promotional material.

It was only after members of the public discovered that an unknown individual changed an access key associated with the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm that Juniper admitted to the issue and promised to investigate the unauthorized code. But the company never published any in-depth report on the matter, despite the severity of the original accusations levied against it.

Now, the group of US officials wants answers. They want to know:

The group requested that Juniper provide answers to these questions by July 10, this year.

"The American people - and the companies and U.S. government agencies that trusted Juniper's products with their sensitive data - still have no information about why Juniper quietly added an NSA-designed, likely-backdoored encryption algorithm, or how, years later, the keys to that probable backdoor were changed by an unknown entity, likely to the detriment of U.S. national security," they said.

Link:
Congress asks Juniper for the results of its 2015 NSA backdoor investigation - ZDNet

Attorney General William Barr at a White House press briefing. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

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On the afternoon of June 1, as President Donald Trump raged about the Black Lives Matter protests outside his gates, reporters noticed a familiar figure in Lafayette Park across from the White House. William Barr, Trumps attorney general, was scoping out the scene with top military and law enforcement officers. It was an ominous sight, coming just hours after the president promised the nations governors that we will activate Bill Barr and activate him strongly.1Ad Policy

What happened next would transform the outcry and anger about racial injustice into a national uprising against Trump and his white nationalist agenda. Over the next few days, starting with Barrs brazen order to clear the park, Washington experienced an unprecedented military operation and occupation. Nearly 8,000 troops from the Armys National Guard and an astounding array of federal security forces and intelligence assets were assembled to confront the protesters.2

With US military leaders hesitant to use their troops against Americans, Barr has emerged as Trumps wartime consiglierean attorney generalissimo for the times. There are few people in Washington more suited for this task: Servility to presidential power, mixed with fealty to the institutions of government control, have long been hallmarks of Barrs career.3

You can rise fast when youre willing to tell your boss whatever he wants to know, says Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years in the FBI before leaving in 2004. Barr spent a lot of time working in these agencies, so his knowledge of how they operate is helpful to using them in an aggressive manner.4

In fact, a deep look into Barrs career exposes a deep commitment to what Dick Cheney called the dark sidethe insidious world of covert operations, executive action, and mass surveillance. Moreover, his experiences in the national security state and the private telecommunications industry reveal a man who has operated at the pinnacle of Americas privatized intelligence system since the dawn of the digital age.5No Intel

As attorney general for President George H.W. Bush in 1992, Barr authorized one of the nations first domestic spying operations. The Department of Justice (DOJ) program, first disclosed by USA Today in 2015, was a giant database that amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking. The bulk collection system was operated secretly by the DOJs Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) until it was suspended in 2013.6

The DEA program ultimately became a model for the NSAs phone records collection program, which the agency used to collect the domestic calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens after 9/11, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote last year in a critical analysis of Barrs career.7Current Issue

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Barr was part of the NSA spying program, too, not as a government official but as a top executive with Verizon, the company formed from a merger with NSA contractor GTE, where Barr worked for many years. Like Cheney, who was instrumental to the NSAs secret operation, Barr seems to know every lever of power available to a president willing to use them. (The DOJ did not respond to questions about Barrs career.)8

William Barr is one of four sons of Donald Barr, a former member of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1968, he enrolled at Columbia University, where his father taught for many years. There, he had his first experience in confronting the American left when a group of radicals seized campus buildings to protest Columbias role in gentrifying black neighborhoods and the universitys close ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis.9

The Institute is a military think tank that, according to an insiders account of the Columbia struggle, developed weapons for the counterinsurgency wars the United States was fighting in Vietnam and across the world. Barr hated the protests. In a recent profile, the historian Paul Cronin remembered Barr as part of a gang of upper-class thugs called the Majority Coalition that physically fought and threatened anti-war demonstrators.10

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From Columbia, Barr went straight into the CIA, where he worked from 1973 to 1977 as an analyst and assistant legislative counsel. After a stint working domestic policy for President Reagan, he joined the first Bush administration, where he rose from deputy AG to Attorney General. He quickly became known as a determined advocate for the expansive use of presidential and military power. This was also his entre into the early surveillance state, which began with the domestic spying program he ordered at the DEA.11

In 1993, Barr was hired as general counsel and executive vice president of GTE, the worlds third largest telecommunications network. After GTE merged in 1999 with Bell Atlantic, it was renamed Verizon, and Barr stayed on as general counsel, where he remained until 2008. This period of his careerwhere he made the bulk of his $40 million fortuneis typically described as a shift towards antitrust and industry regulation issues.12

President Donald Trump walks with US Attorney General William Barr (L), US Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper (C), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley (R), and others from the White House to visit St. John's Church on June 1, 2020, after the area was cleared of people protesting the murder of George Floyd. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

But thats only part of the story. When Barr joined GTE, he also became counsel for GTEs government services division. Created in 1984, it had become, through a series of acquisitions, one of the Pentagons largest contractors, providing secure communications systems to the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as the NSA. Barr hinted at GTEs classified work in 1996, when he testified before a hearing of a commission on the roles and capabilities of US intelligence after the Cold War.13

Theres never been a greater need for a robust intelligence capability in this country than now, he said. I would include not only the function of collection of intelligence, but also my view that we need a very strong covert action capability. It was an illuminating choice of words, because both collection and covert were key to one of the programs that Barr inherited when he took over in 1993.14

In 1989, GTEs government unit was tapped by NSAs Operations Directorate to develop a digital storage system for voice communications collected by NSA listening posts. At the time, of course, the NSAs secret work and its system of global surveillance were little known to Americans.15Outside Agitators

MINSTREL, its code name, was the largest Automated Data Processing contract to date for NSA at that time, says Tom Drake, the prominent whistle-blower, who worked on the project as a contractor and later exposed corruption at an NSA program run by military giant Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). (See Obamas Crackdown on Whistleblowers, The Nation, March 2013.)16

Drake was hired by GTE in 1989 and soon discovered that MINSTRELs costs were out of control. The award was for $144 million, but with lots of cost overruns, NSA ended up spending closer to $250 million.17

Much of that, he believed, was due to outright fraud. Moreover, the program didnt work, forcing the NSA to keep extending the contract. When Drake asked a top GTE executive about its failure to deliver MINSTREL on time, he said he was told that were under no obligation to show anythingall we need to show is best effort.18

In 1991, disgusted at what hed seen, Drake took his complaints to the Pentagons Office of Inspector General (OIG) as well as GTEs general counselBarrs immediate predecessor. Thats how I became a whistle-blower, Drake told me. This is where, to my horror, I really began to appreciate how run amuck the military-industrial complex had become.19

MINSTREL, which was just one of the contracts GTE held with the NSA, was eventually canceled due in part to Drakes IG complaint. In 1996, Barr helped orchestrate the government units merger with General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). Following its recent acquisition of CSRA Inc., GDIT is now one of the nations five largest intelligence contractors, with a strong presence at the NSA.20

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After he moved from GTE to Verizon, Barr turned his knowledge of the mechanics of intelligence collection to domestic surveillance. In 2001, the phone giant was one of a handful of companies that participated in Stellar Wind, the massive warrantless-surveillance program launched by the George W. Bush administration.21

Under Barrs watch, Verizon allowed the NSA without any court approval to intercept the contents of Americans phone calls and emails and to vacuum up in bulk the metadata associated with Americans phone calls and internet activities, the ACLU wrote in 2019.22Related Article

Some of Barrs hard-line policies on dissent may have come into play in recent weeks. On May 31, he activated a network of 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to confront what he called the violent agenda pursued by anarchistic and far left extremists using Antifa-like tactics. Basically, this was Barrs attempt to mollify Trump, said German, the former FBI agent.23

Meanwhile, reports that surveillance drones and airplanes were observed over both Minneapolis and Washington have sparked concerns in Congress that federal agencies might be conducting illegal surveillance. In response, on June 11, a top Pentagon official informed the House that none of the collection agencies, including NSA, had been asked by the White House to undertake any unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities.24

With Barr in charge, theres a good possibility that the DEA might be up to its old tricks again. On June 2, Buzzfeed News obtained a memorandum from the agencys acting administrator, Timothy J. Shea, stating that DEA had been granted sweeping new authority to conduct covert surveillance of the protests. That prompted Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to ask Barr to immediately rescind the authorities, which he called unwarranted and antithetical to civil rights.25

Meanwhile, the protests in Washington continue day after day, and the crossroads near the White House where Barrs security forces attacked demonstrators and reporters has been named Black Lives Matter Place. Chances are good that the new title will last much longer than Barrs ugly legacy of providing legal cover for Trump, arguably the most hated president in the citys history.26

More here:
How Bill Barr Became Trumps Generalissimo - The Nation

New Delhi: One of Indias most renowned China experts has said the present border skirmishes and tension between India and China are very worrying.

Although what we know is based on unverified newspaper reports which quote unnamed officials but, importantly, have not been denied by the government turns out to be actually true then we are seeing a massive escalation by China and an attempt to fundamentally change the status quo, says former National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon.

Menon, who demitted office as NSA in 2014 and also served as foreign secretary (2006-2009) and Indian ambassador to China (2000-2003), says the present situation is very different to the past and not comparable to the sort of incidents that happened in 2013 or 2017. As he put it, On this occasion China is occupying what it has never occupied before.

In an interview to The Wire, Shivshankar Menon spoke specifically about developments in the Galwan River Valley and Pangong Lake. He said the situation in Galwan has not changed since 1962 but now if reports that suggest there are a few thousand Chinese soldiers occupying Indian territory, backed up with artillery and heavy vehicles and satellite images of tented accommodation, are true, this represents a fundamental change in the status quo. He pointedly added that these newspaper reports have not been officially denied. We may be in a situation where China is trying to change the situation on the ground, he said.

Speaking about Pangong Lake, where reports suggest the Chinese have built defence structures and stopped India patrolling in a 50 square kilometre area where previously it had access are true, Menon said this is extremely serious. It means the Chinese are patrolling where India used to patrol in the past. This is another instance of China changing the status quo. He said reports that China has built permanent defence structures are worrying.

Menon told The Wire that the Indian government must absolutely insist on the restoration of the status quo ante i.e. the position on the ground prior to the present developments which, perhaps, date back to April. However, he pointedly added that this looks like another instance of Chinas two-step-forward-one-step-back strategy which permits China to retreat one step, thus suggesting a concession to the Indian side, while ending up with a net gain of one step.

Menon said this is precisely what happened in Doklam in 2017. After a 72-day face off, both sides withdrew but after that China occupied the rest of the Valley and has since then built 36 structures, three helipads and a number of metal tarred roads. Menon said he was worried that a similar outcome could be the end result of the present stand-off between India and China.

Menon said that he was concerned the government has not made its position clear even though the present situation has continued since April. Its silence suggests that everything is negotiable and that is not a good strategy for the Indian side. He said the government needs more and better strategic communication both internally and to the rest of the world so that China too could read and hear the message.

Menon made clear he had no doubt President Xi Jinping was aware of what was happening and, additionally, that it was happening with his approval. He added that this has serious implications for Indias relationship with China. He also pointed out that how the present problem is solved will affect the future course of the relationship.

Asked about reports in Fridays newspapers that both armies have moved their soldiers closer to the LAC right across its 3,500 kilometres length from Ladakh in the west and Arunachal Pradesh in the east, Menon said that the army can handle the military situation. He said the effective military balance has improved in Indias favour since 1962. However, he emphasized that this would have political and diplomatic repercussions that would significantly affect Indias relationship with China.

Asked by The Wire if he was worried that the situation, if not quickly resolved, could lead to conflict, Menon replied not yet. When it was put to him that this meant that there was a potential for the situation slipping out of control and an unintended accident happening, he replied You said it, not me.

However, Menon underlined that what China has done is fundamentally different to the Depsang problem of 2013. He pointed out Depsang was localised and only lasted for two or three weeks. Now it seems there is military activity possibly right across the 3,500-km LAC. He also added the wider relationship between Beijing and Delhi has altered over the past seven years. He said there are more points of contention today than common points between the two countries.

Asked for his assessment of the way the Modi government has handled the situation, Menon said it was difficult to comment because he did not know what the government has done. He said we are all relying on unverified newspaper reports based on interviews with unnamed officials.

Questioned about reports in several papers that the Indian army might have dropped its guard, either because it delayed annual exercises usually held in March because some soldiers got COVID-19 or because it was taken by surprise by the Chinese army, Menon said that now was not the time to go into this issue. At the moment we have a crisis that must be resolved. However, he added that afterwards we need an analysis of what happened, of what was done right and what was done wrong. He said we needed a proper post-mortem along the lines of what happened after Kargil in 2001.

Speaking to The Wire about why the Chinese had acted in the way they have and at this time when there is a pandemic alongside an economic crisis Menon suggested that this was part of a general shift in Chinas behaviour. He said for a variety of internal and external reasons, China was behaving more assertively and its response relies on ultra-nationalism. In this context, he cited Chinas tariff war with Australia, its various disputes with the US, its behaviour in Hong Kong, its attitude to Taiwan and its action in the South China Sea. What was happening on the India-China border was part of this general pattern.

Menon said he did not believe that this was just signalling by China because its a most inefficient way of doing so We are all guessing what the signal is.

Menon said some people hold the view that China senses this is her moment because the rest of the world has been weakened by COVID-19. However, he added, this is not a view he subscribes to.

Continue reading here:
Watch | 'This Could Be Massive Escalation by China to Fundamentally Alter Status Quo': Former NSA - The Wire

Pine Gap. Photo by Felicity Ruby.

COMMENT by DAVID ROSENBERG

Mr Rosenberg (pictured) is a retired National Security Agency (NSA) signals intelligence manager, and a former employee of Pine Gap, who wrote Pine Gap: The Inside Story Of The NSA In Australia. He spoke with the Alice Springs News for a report on July 17, 2011. He is the technical and creative consultant for the Netflix TV series, Pine Gap.

Perhaps no other signals intelligence relationship in history has been as controversial as the presence of the Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap just outside Alice Springs.

Established by a treaty signed in 1966, it became operational 50 years ago on 19 June 1970 with the launch of its first satellite, codenamed Rhyolite.

It is the NSAs most significant satellite intelligence collection facility, know as The Jewel In The Crown within the intelligence community.

With news of the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic and protests over racial inequality dominating headlines, the anniversary might have gone unrecognised within Australia.

Pine Gap has always been shrouded in secrecy, with misleading initial claims that it existed to conduct upper atmospheric research a vague term that avoided disclosing its true mission: to collect signals intelligence related to missile and weapons development programs from the former Soviet Union.

Much has changed since then, particularly the main reason for that first satellite launch.

In addition to continuing to collect weapons related signals from Russia and other weapons producing countries, the Pine Gap satellite mission has evolved, with many more resources focusing on collecting communications intelligence in support of military operations and to identify terrorist networks.

Unsurprisingly, Pine Gap maintains a low profile, although it appears in news stories from time to time, most sensationally when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed the NSAs domestic surveillance programme a development that launched a worldwide debate about the legality of governments seeking to access individual personal and/or telecommunications information.

It is, therefore, important that Australians know more about Pine Gap: its purpose; what it does; what it does not do.

Many rumours have linked Pine Gaps capabilities to offensive military action involving civilian casualties.

These rumours, in turn, have caused journalists or conspiracy theorists to express concern over American and Australian culpability in this action.

Importantly, any intelligence from Pine Gap in these scenarios is not used in isolation.

It is fused with other intelligence such as imagery or human intelligence on the ground (HUMINT) before a decision to act is initiated, yet Pine Gap has no capability or responsibility in making decisions to initiate offensive strikes.

Its role is to passively collect and report signals intelligence.

Information and intelligence contributed by Pine Gap in any military operation would minimise harm with the goal to eliminate the unnecessary deaths of non-combatants.

Australia has looked to the United States as a military ally since World War II, and Australians may well ask what their country gets from this intelligence alliance at Pine Gap.

How does it benefit and what is the cost?

Incredibly, the financial cost to Australia is low, last disclosed as about $14m in 2011-2012.

For that small amount, Australias security benefit is immense Australia may task Pine Gap to collect information on anything it believes is necessary for its security.

Some information may be unique to Pine Gap, and so this relationship remains a crucial part of Australias defence strategy.

Since the first satellite launch 50 years ago, significant political changes in the United States has some Australians questioning the wisdom of continuing the close alliance with a country that was once looked at as the leader of the free world, but has initiated policies under Donald Trump that are more authoritarian and restrictive, less tolerant of freedom of expression and peaceful protests, and one that cannot be trusted to provide truthful and accurate information.

Pine Gap, however appears to have been shielded from any fallout from the policies and action of the current, as well as previous administrations.

This is good for both countries, as the strategic, economic and defence partnership have been mutually beneficial much longer than the 50 years since the launch of the first satellite.

We also share a historical kinship and have fought and died alongside each other.

It is the leadership of the United States and Australia that will determine the future direction of Pine Gap.

The current agreement permitting Pine Gap to remain operating now requires one country to give the other three-years notice to terminate operations at the joint facility.

Only once in its history has there been serious consideration by the Australian government of terminating the operations at Pine Gap during the prime-ministership of Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s.

Polling has shown that the majority of Americans do not approve of the direction the leadership within the United States has chosen, and this may manifest itself in the upcoming election in November.

Fortunately, Pine Gap has always shown itself to be a presence that is greater than any single leader it is a symbol of the ties that bind the United States and Australia.

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The Base turns 50, will survive Trump Alice Springs News - Alice Springs News Online