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WASHINGTON The U.S. military is heavily dependent on Egypt

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is heavily dependent on Egypt to move personnel and equipment to Afghanistan and around volatile parts of the Middle East, complicating U.S. efforts to place pressure on the Egyptian military in the wake of its violent crackdown on protesters.

"Egypt has been a cornerstone for the U.S. military presence in the Middle East," said James Phillips, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

During the past year, more than 2,000 U.S. military aircraft flew through Egyptian airspace, supporting missions in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, according to U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the region.

About 35 to 45 U.S. 5th Fleet naval ships pass through the Suez Canal annually, including carrier strike groups, according to the Bahrain-based fleet. Egypt has allowed U.S. warships to be expedited, which often means getting to the head of a very long line of ships waiting for access to the canal.

"The Egyptian military has always been good to us," said Kenneth Pollack, an analyst at the Brookings Institution.

EGYPT: Latest on deadly clashes

Egyptian cooperation is particularly critical at a time when the Pentagon is facing budget pressures and tensions with Iran remain high.

In response to the Egyptian military's bloody crackdown on protesters, President Obama announced this week that the United States would cancel Bright Star, a training exercise with Egypt that had been scheduled for next month. Washington has also suspended the delivery of a shipment of F-16 fighter aircraft.

Obama stopped short of cutting off the $1.3 billion in annual military aid it supplies to Egypt, though some in Congress, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have called for cutting the aid.

In canceling the exercise, the president said he was balancing the need to advance U.S. interests with "the principles that we believe in."

If Egypt cut off its airspace and canal access, the U.S. military would face heavier costs and much longer transit times as it positions troops and equipment in the Middle East.

For example, without access to the canal, which connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, warships would generally have to sail around Africa in order to get to the Persian Gulf.

Analysts say Egypt's ruling military would probably not cut off air and sea access immediately if U.S. aid were cut, but the relationship might deteriorate rapidly, particularly if Egypt's generals feel they don't need the aid.

Persian Gulf states may take up some of the slack if the United States cuts its aid. Relieved that Egypt's military removed a Muslim Brotherhood government, Gulf nations, including Saudi Arabia, have already pledged billions of dollars to Egypt.

Historically, Egypt's leaders have been sensitive to the appearance that outside powers are pushing them around. Egypt closed the 120-mile-long Suez Canal after the Six Day Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

"Egyptian nationalism is a critical factor," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

U.S. military leaders have remained in touch with their Egyptian counterparts throughout the crisis in an effort to maintain the close relationship and communicate Washington's concerns.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi after the crackdown that led to the deaths of hundreds of Egyptians.

"The Department of Defense will continue to maintain a military relationship with Egypt, but I made it clear that the violence and inadequate steps towards reconciliation are putting important elements of our longstanding defense cooperation at risk," Hagel said in a statement.

In Washington, the Pentagon will emphasize the importance of the military relationship in discussions with the White House as the president considers further steps to deal with the Egyptian crisis.

But U.S. military leaders will not want to be seen as trying to unduly influence Obama's decisions, analysts say.

"In this administration, the Department of Defense has been incredibly wary to be seen as pushing the White House to do anything," Pollack said.

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FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software

CNET has learned the FBI has developed custom "port reader" software to intercept Internet metadata in real time. And, in some cases, it wants to force Internet providers to use the software.

by Declan McCullagh

 August 2, 2013 12:26 PM PDT

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FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C.

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The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.

FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI's legal position during these discussions is that the software's real-time interception of metadata is authorized under thePatriot Act.

Attempts by the FBI to install what it internally refers to as "port reader" software, which have not been previously disclosed, were described to CNET in interviews over the last few weeks. One former government official said the software used to be known internally as the "harvesting program."

Carriers are "extra-cautious" and are resisting installation of the FBI's port reader software, an industry participant in the discussions said, in part because of the privacy and security risks of unknown surveillance technology operating on an sensitive internal network.

It's "an interception device by definition," said the industry participant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because court proceedings are sealed. "If magistrates knew more, they would approve less." It's unclear whether any carriers have installed port readers, and at least one is actively opposing the installation.

In a statement from a spokesman, the FBI said it has the legal authority to use alternate methods to collect Internet metadata, including source and destination IP addresses: "In circumstances where a provider is unable to comply with a court order utilizing its own technical solution(s), law enforcement may offer to provide technical assistance to meet the obligation of the court order."

AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Comcast, and Sprint declined to comment. A government source familiar with the port reader software said it is not used on an industry-wide basis, and only in situations where carriers' own wiretap compliance technology is insufficient to provide agents with what they are seeking.

For criminal investigations, police are generally required to obtain a wiretap order from a judge tointercept the contents of real-time communication streams, including e-mail bodies, Facebook messages, or streaming video. Similar procedures exist for intelligence investigations under theForeign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has received intense scrutiny after Edward Snowden's disclosures about the National Security Agency's PRISM database.

There's a significant exception to both sets of laws: large quantities of metadata can be intercepted in real time through a so-called pen register and trap and trace order with minimal judicial review or oversight. That metadata includes IP addresses, e-mail addresses, identities of Facebook correspondents, Web sites visited, and possibly Internet search terms as well.

"The statute hasn't caught up with the realties of electronic communication," says Colleen Boothby, a partner at the Washington, D.C. firm of Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby who represents technology companies and industry associations. Judges are not always in a position, Boothby said, to understand how technology has outpaced the law.

Judges have concluded in the past that they have virtually no ability to deny pen register and trap and trace requests. "The court under the Act seemingly provides nothing more than a rubber stamp," wrote a federal magistrate judge in Florida, referring to the pen register law. A federal appeals court has ruled that the "judicial role in approving use of trap and trace devices is ministerial in nature."

(Credit: Getty Images)

A little-noticed section of the Patriot Act that added one word -- "process" -- to existing law authorized the FBI to implant its own surveillance technology on carriers' networks. It was in part an effort to put the bureau's Carnivore device, which also had a pen register mode, on a firmer legal footing.

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A 2003 compliance guide prepared by the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association reported that the Patriot Act's revisions permitted "law enforcement agencies to use software instead of physical mechanisms to collect relevant pen register" information.

Even though the Patriot Act would authorize the FBI to deploy port reader software with a pen register order, the legal boundaries between permissible metadata and impermissible content remain fuzzy.

"Can you get things like packet size or other information that falls somewhere in the grey area between traditional pen register and content?" says Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "How does the judge know the box is actually doing? How does the service provider know? How does anyone except the technician know what's going on?"

An industry source said the FBI wants providers to use their existing CALEA compliance hardware to route the targeted customer's communications through the port reader software. The software discards the content data and extracts the metadata, which is then provided to the bureau. (The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, requires that communication providers adopt standard practices to comply with lawful intercepts.)

Whether the FBI believes its port reader software should be able to capture Subject: lines, URLs that can reveal search terms, Facebook "likes" and Google+ "+1s," and so on remains ambiguous, and the bureau declined to elaborate this week. The Justice Department's 2009 manual (PDF) requires "prior consultation" with the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section before prosecutors use a pen register to "collect all or part of a URL."

"The last time I had to ask anybody that, they refused to answer," says Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland Security official and founder of Red Branch Consulting, referring to Subject: lines. "They liked creative ambiguity."

James Comey prepares for his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in July on Capitol Hill. He was confirmed as the new FBI director this week.

(Credit: Getty Images)

Some metadata may, however, not be legally accessible through a pen register. Federal lawsays law enforcement may acquire only "dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information" without obtaining a wiretap. That clearly covers, for instance, the Internet Protocol address of a Web site that a targeted user is visiting. The industry-created CALEA standard also permits law enforcement to acquire timestamp information and other data.

But the FBI has configured its port reader to intercept all metadata -- including packet size, port label, and IPv6 flow data -- that exceeds what the law permits, according to one industry source.

In 2007, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Drug Enforcement Administration asked the Federal Communications Commission for an "expedited rulemaking" process to expand what wireless providers are required to do under CALEA.

The agencies said they wanted companies to be required to provide more information about Internet packets, including the "field identifying the next level protocol used in the data portion of the Internet datagram," which could reveal what applications a customer is using. The FCC never ruled on the law enforcement request.

Because it's relatively easy to secure a pen register and trap and trace order -- they only require a law enforcement officer to certify the results will likely be "relevant" to an investigation -- they're becoming more common. The Justice Department conducted 1,661 such intercepts in 2011 (PDF), up from only 922 a year earlier (PDF).

That less privacy-protective standard is no accident. A U.S. Senate report accompanying the pen register and trap and trace law said its authors did "not envision an independent judicial review of whether the application meets the relevance standard." Rather, the report said, judges are only permitted to "review the completeness" of the paperwork.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former federal public defender, said he's concerned about port reader software doing more than the carriers know. "The bigger fear is that the boxes are secretly storing something," he said, "or that they're doing more than just simply allowing traffic to sift through and pulling out the routing information."

"For the Feds to try to push the envelope is to be expected," Fakhoury said. "But that doesn't change the fact that we have laws in place to govern this behavior for a good reason."

Update 2:30 p.m. PT: Here's a link to a 2006 court case elaborating on what counts as metadata for pen register and trap and trace orders. In it, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that federal law "unambiguously authorize[s]" the government to use such an order to obtain all information about an e-mail account except "the Subject: line and body of the communication."

Topics:

Internet,

Technology,

Policy,

Privacy,

Regulation,

Legal

Tags:

fbi,

port reader,

trap and trace,

foreign intelligence surveillance act,

surveillance,

justice department,

pen register,

wiretap,

national security agency

Declan McCullagh

Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.

CRAWFORD BLOG | Bilas screenshoots, scores on NCAA

CRAWFORD BLOG | Bilas screenshoots, scores on NCAA

Posted: Aug 07, 2013 9:59 AM ISTUpdated: Aug 07, 2013 10:02 AM IST

By Eric Crawford - email

 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- ESPN analyst Jay Bilas remains a practicing attorney. This little piece of research, however, was pro bono.
When he heard what the NCAA, and in particular Collegiate Licensing Company, a corporate partner, had said in a legal filing in advance of the federal antitrust lawsuit against it brought by former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon and others, Bilas got curious.

CLC said that its jersey sales were simply sales of team jerseys, and had nothing to do with any individual players.

So Bilas did a natural thing. He went onto the NCAA merchandise website, entered "Johnny Manziel" into the search window, and got this:

Emboldened, Bilas then spent much of the afternoon searching for players and finding that their corresponding jerseys would pop up on the screen.

Jadaveon Clowney, Teddy Bridgewater, Tajh Boyd, A.J. McCarron, Silas Redd, Deanthony Thomas, Marqise Lee, Nerlens Noel, Shabazz Muhammad, they were all there, even suspended players, like Notre Dame's Everett Golson, and the departed, like LSU's Tyrann Mathieu.

In response, the NCAA did the most upstanding and natural thing.

It got rid of the search box.

Didn't matter. Bilas came back with a workaround, noting that you could still enter the "shopncaasports.com" site name, then /search/braxtonmiller and the same thing would appear.

In other words, Bilas in the matter of a dozen tweets destroyed a major plank of NCAA reasoning. And exposed a major dose of NCAA hypocrisy.

Players aren't allowed to profit off their position as college athletes, yet the NCAA is allowed to profit greatly off marketing and selling their jerseys and other memorabilia.

The NCAA had no comment on Bilas' Tweets today.

After practice on Tuesday, the subject came up with University of Louisville coach Charlie Strong. He said, "With the money being made right now with the TV contracts, we've got to find a way to pay players. Eventually I think it's going to happen, if enough coaches take a stance, it will work its way out. . . . You look at us as coaches, we're overpaid. We make a lot of money and the players aren't making anything, so I'd like to see that happen for them."

Several proposals have been put forward. A proposal for a school-provided "stipend" for student-athletes was rejected last year, but remains on the table with an NCAA summit of Division I conferences coming up. Such a stipend, however, poses issues for smaller schools and would be required to be paid to athletes in sports across the board.

Much more simple is the notion of allowing players, in some way, to receive money or education credit from sales of items bearing their number. The compensation could be deferred and linked to academic progress, or any number of factors.

Regardless, Louisville quarterback Teddy Bridgewater was well-drilled on the question. And he wasn't touching it.

"I'm here getting my education and that's the most important thing," Bridgewater said. "That's priceless. You can't put a price on that. So, you know, as far as being paid to play sports, I feel like we are being paid, academically."

Still, Bilas won the day with his search-box maneuver. And the NCAA took another public relations pummeling.

Copyright 2013 WDRB News. All Rights Reserved.

Iran News - Latest Updates and Breaking News from Iran | اخبار ايران

Congressman Ed Royce slams Iranian regime lobby

BY: Adam Kredo

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee chastised a self-described representative of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) on Capitol Hill Tuesday for disseminating Iranian “propaganda.”

During a press briefing on Iran sanctions, Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) sharply rebuked a woman who identified herself as being from NIAC after she claimed ...

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Iran: Three prisoners sentenced to hand amputation or lashes

NCRI - The head of the  Iranian regime's judiciary in southern city of Abadan has sentenced a man to hand amputation. He has also been sentenced to 10 months of imprisonment and 99 lashes for alleged financial crimes.

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