WikiLeaks Stirs Global Fears on Antiterrorist Software

[HiPointDem]

WASHINGTON — A new release of stolen corporate e-mails by WikiLeaks has set off a flurry of concern and speculation around the world about a counterterrorist software program called TrapWire, which analyzes images from surveillance cameras and other data to try to identify terrorists planning attacks.

“U.S. government is secretly spying on EVERYONE using civilian security cameras, say WikiLeaks,” read a headline on Monday at the British newspaper Web site Mail Online... PC Magazine described TrapWire as “a secret, comprehensive U.S. surveillance effort.”

Though TrapWire Inc., the Virginia company that sells the software, would not comment on Monday, the reports appear to be wildly exaggerated...A claim in the leaked e-mails that 500 cameras in the New York subway were linked to TrapWire is false, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. “We don’t use TrapWire.”

TrapWire is discussed in dozens of e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private security firm in Austin, Tex., that were posted online last week by WikiLeaks...

TrapWire was originally developed in 2004 by the Abraxas Corporation, which was founded by several former C.I.A. employees. It later spun off TrapWire, but the C.I.A. connection, along with the company’s vague but impressive descriptions of the program’s capabilities, appears to have fueled the furor on the Web that it was a sort of automated Big Brother.

TrapWire’s marketing materials say it uses video cameras and observations by security guards to develop a 10-point description of people near a potential terrorist target and an eight-point description of vehicles. It also records “potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signaling,” combining in a TrapWire database “this human-entered data with information collected by sensors.”

If the same person or car is picked up in multiple locations engaging in suspicious behavior, the software is supposed to make the connection. But a privacy statement on the TrapWire Web site says the software does not capture “personal information...”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/us/trapwire-antiterrorist-software-leaks-set-off-web-furor.html


TrapWire Spooks Dangled Their Wares in Front of Google, Salesforce

TrapWire is a predictive software system designed to detect patterns indicative of terrorist attacks or criminal operations using video surveillance systems. It was developed by former CIA staffers. The owners of TrapWire often sell to government law enforcement agencies, but it appears they've also offered their wares to tech firms such as Google and Salesforce.com...

Abraxas and Stratfor entered a deal for Stratfor to provide Abraxas' situation reports to clients, Stratfor president Don Kuykendall apparently wrote in an email dated May 2009 that has also been published by Wikileaks.

TrapWire's roots lie in a company named "Abraxas," which was set up by former CIA employee Richard "Hollis" Helms, who worked in counter-terrorism. Another Richard Helms headed the CIA under the late President Nixon.

Clients include the White House, Scotland Yard, the British Prime Minister's official residence at 10 Downing Street, and many multinational corporations. Stratfor wanted to introduce the Abraxas service to companies such as WalMart and Dell, whose executives were Burton's "cronies," Kuykendall said.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/75889.html


TrapWire: Wikileaks reveals ex-CIA agents running a face-recognition profiling company that surveils NYC subways, London stock exchange, Vegas casinos and more

Newly released WikiLeaks publications from the Stratfor leak reveal much about Trapwire, a multi-country surveillance network run by a private US company, Abraxas, led by ex-CIA operatives. The network operates in NYC subways, the London Stock Exchange, Las Vegas casinos, and more. It uses real-time video facial profiling and is linked to red-flag databases.

Here is a US GOV pdf diagramming its workings. Here is an RT article on the subject.

The WikiLeaks publications related to Trapwire are difficult to access now because WikiLeaks.org and many of its mirrors are under heavy DDOS attack. (Good time to donate!) However you can see the publications here via Tor.

Australian activist @Asher_Wolf is organizing a nonviolent campaign against Trapwire, including an effort to spam the network with creative false positives.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/11/trapwire-wikileaks-reveals-ex.html


NYPD & Microsoft Unveil Crime- And Terror-Fighting ‘Domain Awareness System’

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A dramatic new way to track criminals and potential terrorists was unveiled Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

It melds cameras, computers and data bases capable of nabbing bad guys before they even know they’re under suspicion...

If a suspicious package is left at a location by a terrorist the NYPD will now be able to instantly tap into video feeds to look back in time to see who left it there, and that’s just one of the many things the NYPD’s new high-tech “Domain Awareness System” can do, CBS 2?s Marcia Kramer reported

“We are not your mom and pop police department anymore. We are in the next century. We are leading the pack,” Bloomberg said.

The new crime-fighting apparatus was built by the NYPD and Microsoft, developed by police officers for police officers. Officials said it represents a sea change for the NYPD...

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/08/08/nypd-unveils-crime-and-terror-fighting-domain-awareness-system/

[Zalatix]

1. Your system of law enforcement, working for you as usual!

Our response to this will be to call for investigations and a few new acts of legislation.

All superficial remedies, carving the skin off an apple that is worm-infested to its core.

[lapfog_1]

2. well duh...

what do you think this place is for...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

It's not enough to split the Optical links of the internet in secret closets in major NAPs around the country, you need a place to store the data long enough to analyze it.

[xchrom]

3. Du rec. Nt

[MattSh]

4. Of course!

A claim in the leaked e-mails that 500 cameras in the New York subway were linked to TrapWire is false, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. “We don’t use TrapWire.”

Of course you don't, you good little stooge. Say just exactly what you were taught to say.

[starroute]

5. Here's some older stuff on Abraxas and the CIA

Abraxas was not just founded by former CIA employees. It's been at the heart of CIA outsourcing. The name comes up in allegations of everything from warrantless surveillance to CIA rendition. If Abraxas never really stopped being CIA, what reason is there to believe that TrapWire did either?

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/17/nation/na-contractors17

Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs

Contractors, many of them former employees, are doing sensitive work, such as handling agents. A review of the practice has been ordered.

September 17, 2006

WASHINGTON — At the National Counterterrorism Center -- the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 -- more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers -- nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs.

Some of the work being outsourced is extremely sensitive. Abraxas Corp., a private company in McLean, Va., founded by a group of CIA veterans, devises "covers," or false identities, for an elite group of overseas case officers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR2007070601993.html

Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced.

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. . . .

Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I'm told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. One problem with privatization is there is NO accountability.

When our government does stuff, we can at least scream and yell and sometimes not re-elect the bad guys.
But there are NO citizen controls over private businesses who essentially are running many of government's functions now.

[HiPointDem]

7. interesting. the extent to which the military -- and now intelligence, apparently -- have been

outsourced is always so surprising to me. you'd think it would be a security risk.

it makes me question to what extent "the united states" exists in the way we are taught it does.

the new york + microsoft partnership is interesting too. i've often wondered whether bill gates was intelligence.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. This sentence buried in one of the articles:

"Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas."

http://rt.com/usa/news/stratfor-trapwire-abraxas-wikileaks-313/

Gee, wonder why the head of NSA would deny that...