Re: 12/23/03 - Free and Clear Foundations: Evidence Indicates Raging Bull Being used for Covert Surveillance Operations on Private Thoughts and Opinions of Americans by US Government Agents
December 23, 2003
Evidence Indicates Raging Bull Being used for Covert Surveillance Operations on Private Thoughts and Opinions of Americans by US Government Agents
The International Bank Activities Reform Commission has revealed that Chat rooms, Bulletin Boards and Message Boards run by Lycos, Microsoft, and Yahoo such as Raging Bull and others are being used by government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Bank, the FBI, the CIA, Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security to spy on Americans without their knowledge.
London, England (PRWEB) December 23 2003--A developer mistake in the United States had left a sensitive database with detailed personal information, including Social Security numbers, open to public Internet access for a few hours.
The database--frequently used by law enforcement, credit agencies and private investigators--was accessible through a simple search form on the Web and contained millions of names, social security numbers, phone records and public records such as residential histories.
Security analysts at Symantec discovered the glitch when someone posted the address of the database to an Internet relay chat. Symantec notified the FBI, and soon after, LocatePlus was notified of the incident.
The International Bank Activities Reform Commission has revealed that Chat rooms, Bulletin Boards and Message Boards run by Lycos, Microsoft, and Yahoo such as Raging Bull and others are being used by government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Bank, the FBI, the CIA, Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security to spy on Americans without their knowledge.
Government agents have used the boards for counter intelligence operations in an attempt to discredit information being posted by whistle blowers who have been ferreting out government crimes and wrongdoing with the full knowledge of President Bush and the intelligence community.
Yet acccording to a recent GAO report, Federal agencies are still far behind where they need to be on information security, scoring a government wide grade of D for 2003 based on grades released by Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.).
Putnam's scorecard follows three years of grading performed by former Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) and the staff of his subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee.
Grades are based self-assessments each agency submits to the Office of Management and Budget under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Putnam is the Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census.
Public web surfers, who visit government controlled web sites can, in many cases, have the entire contents of a person’s computer siphoned out and transferred to a massive database in Virginia for further analysis and additional counter intelligence measures.
Information sharing under these covert intelligence operations violates certain Congressional Acts related to domestic spying on Americans under the cover of the Patriot Act and other recently passed legislation designed to reign in the power of government to monitor the daily lives of Americans.
OMB's report on agency assessments is due March 1, 2004. The subcommittee will hold a hearing at that point to, among other things, examine differences between the OMB evaluation and the grades. The two viewpoints differed greatly in the past, and it will be important to explain discrepancies, Putnam said.
Over the coming months, the subcommittee will meet with chief information officers from every agency to get detailed remediation plans. The goal is to provide oversight and get failing agencies to learn from those that scored well or made significant improvements, Putnam said.
The biggest area of concern is that only five of the 24 agencies reviewed have completed inventories of critical information technology assets, a listing required for the last four years by FISMA and its predecessor, the Government Information Security Reform Act of 2000.
"That is a clear part of the law, and it is disturbing that 19 of the agencies are still out of line," Putnam said. "I don't underestimate the challenge, but the fact of the matter is they need to do it.... Some folks have proved it can be done, and not just small agencies."
Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, expressed their concerns. Collins said the low grades were unacceptable for agencies that oversee many portions of the nation's critical infrastructure.
Government web sites are used to record the IP addresses of persons visiting them. Those IP addresses are registered and monitored by the government through services provided by World Comm and other major carriers of Internet traffic such as AOL to the US government agencies.
The Internet, originally developed by the US Government, is in reality the largest intelligence gathering information system in the world and has cost US taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
The government has been working hard to spend billions more on homeland security and defense against hackers who are aware that the U.S. government has become the “Big Brother” to the world in the true Orwellian sense, as written in the book by George Orwell titled 1984.
The legal military industrial financial media complex paints such hackers as evildoers, but in fact some may turn out be the heroes of the future who bring to light the abuses of government information gathering on the general populace.
Volunteers for the International Bank Activities Reform Commission are planning to put greater pressure on public disclosures of interagency transfers of private information between government agencies such as the SEC, IRS, and CIA.
The CIA is barred from domestic surveillance under its original charter, but has been using information-gathering techniques developed by other agencies to spy on American citizens indirectly to avoid any Congressional oversight or investigation.
It is estimated that various US government agencies have gathered over 700 trillion pages of information on American citizens during the past decade alone that is stored on magnetic tapes and online storage information retrieval systems.
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