Tag: InternationalNews

{{A National Security Agency surveillance system illegally gathered up to 56,000 personal emails by Americans annually, declassified court documents show.}}

Officials revealed that a judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the programme illegal in 2011.

The communications were between people with no links to terror suspects.

The US government faces mounting criticism over its surveillance operations after the leaks of US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The court, whose rulings are normally kept secret, said the NSA may have violated US law for collecting as many as 56,000 emails on an annual basis between 2008 and 2011.

But intelligence officials speaking to reporters anonymously say the scooping of emails was unintentional, blaming it on a technological problem.

The NSA was unable to separate out emails between Americans with no direct connection to terrorism, so the agency was collecting tens of thousands of “wholly domestic communications” every year, the court documents said.

In the ruling, Judge John Bates criticised the NSA over the breach of privacy, marking it as “the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection programme”.

The court found that the data gathering violated the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, prohibiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”.

The court’s opinions, which are usually kept secret, were revealed by the government in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Government officials said that the court rulings had been declassified to show that eavesdropping programmes at fault had been found and fixed, highlighting its oversight measures.

The scope of the NSA’s massive surveillance programme, which sweeps up internet traffic and phone records, was exposed in June in leaks to media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama promised to be more transparent about US spying programmes, with “appropriate reforms” to guarantee greater oversight.

BBC

{{The US government is pushing for an acceleration of preliminary hearings in the case of five alleged September 11 plotters as proceedings resumed in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.}}

Lead prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins told the court on Tuesday he hoped to see progress “this week” after prosecutors filed a motion calling for a September 2014 trial date.

Self-declared mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wearing camouflage garb and his beard tinted with henna, appeared in the military court at the US prison in Cuba with his four co-defendants.

All face the death penalty if convicted of plotting the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. Preliminary hearings in the case began in May 2012.

“The current practice of being in court for five days approximately every six weeks is inefficient and will result in litigation that is unnecessarily prolonged, and does not serve the interests of justice,” the prosecutors’ motion said.

Defence lawyers countered, however, that their efforts had been hindered by a variety of factors.

wirestory

{{As officials scowl at the cargo that goes out through foreign harbors, the government is making headway on a plan to build a $7 billion port on the Black Sea.}}

The Port of Taman will open in 2019 to handle dry cargoes, such as grain and coal, Transportation Minister Maxim Sokolov said Tuesday.

Sokolov updated President Vladimir Putin on the work to build the port in the first of a series of port-related meetings with the head of state, the Kremlin said.

Putin said he initiated the meetings because of high congestion at most of the country’s key ports, which hamstrings foreign trade, he said.

“The terminals are now strained to the limit,” Putin said.

A substantial chunk of the cargoes travels through the ports in the Baltic countries like Latvia and Estonia.

“It’s a downright loss of revenues for Russia,” Putin said.

Out of 660 million metric tons of Russian exports, the foreign Baltic ports account for 100 million tons, or 15 percent. Sokolov said Russia was moving to scale down its dependence on the Baltic countries.

A consortium of Russian and Dutch design companies developed a concept for the Port of Taman last year, Sokolov said. The Main State Evaluation Agency is examining its feasibility, he said.

Taman is Russia’s most expensive port project on the Black Sea, according to Sokolov. Federal spending will amount to 76 billion rubles ($2.3 billion), while private investors are expected to contribute the remaining 152 billion rubles, he said.

When the port reaches its full capacity in 2025, it will handle 94 million metric tons of dry cargo per year, Sokolov said.

The Port of South Louisiana, the largest U.S. harbor by the volume of cargo, handled 222 million metric tons of cargo in 2011.

Private investors have bid to build 20 percent more terminals than the Port of Taman can accommodate, which enables the government to select the best options, Sokolov said. The port is designed to have 10 terminals for shipping steel, containers and other dry cargoes in addition to coal and grain.

The government also plans to boost capacity at the Novorossiisk Seaport, the largest Russian sea gateway, Sokolov said. The effort will focus on constructing new terminals for containers and bulk cargoes, as well as an upgrade of the equipment at the existing terminals and expanding roads and railways for better access to the ships.

In a separate plan, the government allowed a private investor to build a smaller port near the Port of Taman to handle coal, primarily from Kazakhstan, and oil. The 45 billion ruble oil terminal has already been completed, Sokolov said without naming the investor.

Russian Railways Company chief Vladimir Yakunin said at the meeting that the state-owned company would expand its network in the area in a bid to remove bottlenecks for the anticipated increase in the volume of cargoes.

{The Moscow Times }

{{More than 1,000 migrants have arrived in Sicily aboard rickety boats in the past two days, after braving the dangerous voyage from Africa in search of work in the European Union, Italian officials said on Tuesday.}}

Many thousands of migrants try to reach the southern shores of Italy every summer, when Mediterranean waters are sufficiently calm for small boats to make the crossing.

The migrants, mostly from Africa, usually embark in Libya or Tunisia in an exodus increased by political turmoil in North Africa and the Syrian civil war.

About 325 migrants, among them 64 women and four children, were sighted on Tuesday morning on a fishing boat off the coast of Porto Empedocle on Sicily’s southern coast. They were transferred to coastguard boats and taken to shore, police said.

Another 230 were brought ashore after they were intercepted off the coast of the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s most southern point, while a group of about 110 reached the shores of Siracusa, in Sicily. Tuesday’s arrivals followed those of about 400 migrants on Monday afternoon.

The flow of migrant boats has been intense this summer, but roughly in line with the past two years. Almost 9,000 immigrants reached Italy by boat between July 1 and August 10, the Interior Ministry said last week.

In the past 12 months, more than 24,000 have come, compared with more than 17,000 in the same period a year earlier, and almost 25,000 in the 12 months before that, the ministry said.

The flood of migrants is drawn by the prospect of finding work in the European Union and many do not remain in Italy.

Illegal migrants intercepted by Italian authorities are taken to state-run immigration centers. Some leave the often lightly guarded buildings to seek work, and those who remain and cannot prove that they are political refugees can be sent home.

Some of the migrants who arrived on Tuesday said they were from Syria, where the civil war has been raging for two years.

{reuters}

{{Syrian activists accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of launching a nerve gas attack that killed at least 213 people on Wednesday, in what would, if confirmed, be by far the worst reported use of poison gas in the two-year-old civil war.}}

Reuters was not able to verify the accounts independently and they were denied by Syrian state television, which said they were disseminated deliberately to distract a team of United Nations chemical weapons experts which arrived three days ago.

The U.N. team is in Syria investigating allegations that both rebels and army forces used poison gas in the past, one of the main disputes in international diplomacy over Syria.

Activists said rockets with chemical agents hit the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar before dawn.

A nurse at Douma Emergency Collection facility, Bayan Baker, said the death toll, as collated from medical centers in the suburbs east of Damascus, was 213.

“Many of the casualties are women and children. They arrived with their pupil dilated, cold limbs and foam in their mouths. The doctors say these are typical symptoms of nerve gas victims,” the nurse said.

Extensive amateur video and photographs purporting to show victims appeared on the Internet. A video purportedly shot in the Kafr Batna neighborhood showed a room filled with more than 90 bodies, many of them children and a few women and elderly men. Most of the bodies appeared ashen or pale but with no visible injuries. About a dozen were wrapped in blankets.

Other footage showed doctors treating people in makeshift clinics. One video showed the bodies of a dozen people lying on the floor of a clinic, with no visible wounds. The narrator in the video said they were all members of a single family. In a corridor outside lay another five bodies.

A photograph taken by activists in Douma showed the bodies of at least 16 children and three adults, one wearing combat fatigues, laid at the floor of a room in a medical facility where bodies were collected.

Syrian state television quoted a source as saying there was “no truth whatsoever” to the reports.

reuters

{{The CIA has released documents which for the first time formally acknowledge its key role in the 1953 coup which ousted Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq.}}

The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup.

They come from the CIA’s internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s.

“The military coup… was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy,” says one excerpt.

The US role in the coup was openly referred to by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, and by President Barack Obama in a 2009 speech in Cairo.

But until now the intelligence agencies have issued “blanket denials” of their role, says the editor of the trove of documents, Malcolm Byrne.

This is believed to be the first time the CIA has itself admitted the part it played in concert with the British intelligence agency, MI6.

Mr Byrne says the documents are important not only for providing “new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency’s actions before and after the operation”, but because “political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup”.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institution based at George Washington University.

Iranians elected Mossadeq in 1951 and he quickly moved to renationalise the country’s oil production, which had been under British control through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – which later became British Petroleum or BP.

That was a source of serious concern to the US and the UK, which saw Iranian oil as key to its post-war economic rebuilding.

The Cold War was also a factor in the calculations.

“[I]t was estimated that Iran was in real danger of falling behind the Iron Curtain; if that happened it would mean a victory for the Soviets in the Cold War and a major setback for the West in the Middle East,” says coup planner Donald Wilber in one document written within months of the overthrow.

“No remedial action other than the covert action plan set forth below could be found to improve the existing state of affairs.”

The documents show how the CIA prepared for the coup by placing anti-Mossadeq stories in both the Iranian and US media.

The coup strengthened the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – who had just fled Iran following a power struggle with Mossadeq and returned following the coup, becoming a close ally of the US.

The US and UK intelligence agencies bolstered pro-Shah forces and helped organise anti-Mossadeq protests.

“The Army very soon joined the pro-Shah movement and by noon that day it was clear that Tehran, as well as certain provincial areas, were controlled by pro-Shah street groups and Army units,” Wilber wrote.

“By the end of 19 August… members of the Mossadeq government were either in hiding or were incarcerated.”

The Shah returned to Iran after the coup and only left power in 1979, when he was overthrown in the Islamic revolution.

Source: BBC