John Kerry’s Iran Relations Deeper that Reported

Posted on May 8, 2015May 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Afternoon tea with Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif at the Upper East Side in New York on Park Avenue is a first in over 20 years. There is also Wendy Sherman and Ernest Moniz that are working the streets at the behest of the White House to get a nuclear agreement signed with Iran. Then there is the matter of gratuity with regard to new embassy locations including that (never-neutral) Switzerland. Imagine the non-reported and secretive discussions.

Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif this afternoon at the official residence of the Iranian ambassador to the UN in New York City. This is a rare symbolic move to have a secretary of state entering Iran’s soil for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is accompanying Kerry in his visit to the Upper East Side residence.

When asked by reporters how Iran nuclear talks were progressing, Kerry replied, “We’re plugging away, we’re plugging away.” Earlier in the day, speaking at the UN on the opening day of a month-long conference on nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Kerry said Iran and world powers were closer than ever to a historic Iran nuclear deal.

Iran and U.S. cut deal on new diplomatic offices in Washington, Tehran

The United States, in what may be among the first negotiated deals with Iran since relations broke off in 1980, is allowing the Iranian Interests Section in Washington to move to new headquarters on 23rd Street Northwest in West End.

In exchange, Switzerland, which had been looking for new space for the U.S. Interests Section in Tehran — because the current offices, we were told, were “no longer viable and pretty decrepit” — will be getting new offices as well for the U.S. facility.

“Reciprocity is the hallmark of diplomacy,” one source told us. “This was a swap.”

This news comes after Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s visit in New York last week to the elegant second-floor parlor in the residence of the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations — making Kerry the first senior American official to, at least technically, set foot on Iranian soil in decades.

We asked whether the deal indicated a thaw in relations and was related to negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programs.

A State Department official, in an e-mail reply Thursday, said “there is no connection that we are aware of between this long-planned relocation and the ongoing . . . negotiations to address the international community’s concerns over Iran’s nuclear program.”

“The Iranian Interests Section requested last year to relocate to a new address,” the official said, “and permission was granted, per standard protocol.” (The Iranians say they’ve been trying to move to new space for about 30 years.)

The Iranian mission here, which is technically under the auspices of Pakistan, basically handles visas, passports and some cultural matters for the estimated 1.5 million Iranian Americans in this country. It’s currently housed on Wisconsin Avenue north of the Georgetown Social Safeway and above the Wide World of Wines.

Well, this is one deal the Senate won’t get to review.

In part from al Monitor: There will be a “very detailed understanding of the process to resolve the IAEA’s [International Atomic Energy Agency] Iran requirements for satisfying and clarifying the [past] possible military dimensions” of its program.

Moniz also reiterated that under the framework deal reached earlier this month with Iran, the only enrichment site Iran will operate will be at Natanz, and that the underground Fordow facility will have no enrichment, no fissile material and also no advanced centrifuge research and development.

Under the agreement, “Fordow is shut down as an enrichment facility,” Moniz said. “Nearly two-third of its apparatus will be shipped out. There will be continuous surveillance and monitoring.”

“There will be no enrichment at Fordow,” Moniz said. “There will be no enrichment research and development at Fordow. There will be no uranium at Fordow.”

He added, “All of the enrichment and enrichment research and development will be at Natanz.”

Al Jazeera Trouble, al Qaeda and Anti-Semitism

Posted on May 8, 2015May 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

The news outlet from the Middle East, al Jazeera which is the primary news source in the region also reaches into the United States with journalists and a television division. But lately they are in real trouble, ethically and financially. What is worse it appears they have al Qaeda on the payroll.

The embattled CEO of Al Jazeera America was pushed aside Wednesday, ending more than a week of public turmoil that included the resignations of three top female executives.
The announcement capped a turbulent week for Ehab Al Shihabi. His company was sued for $15 million, AJAM was cited for alleged sexism and anti-Semitism and al Shihabi was blamed by one departing executive for presiding over a ‘culture of fear’. Full article here.

But it gets worse.

U.S. Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda”

The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata.

The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.”

The presentation was among the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a brief phone interview with The Intercept, Zaidan “absolutely” denied that he is a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement provided through Al Jazeera, Zaidan noted that his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and required interviewing key people in the region — a normal part of any journalist’s job.

“For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.”

A spokesman for Al Jazeera, a global news service funded by the government of Qatar, cited a long list of instances in which its journalists have been targeted by governments on which it reports, and described the labeling and surveillance of Zaidan as “yet another attempt at using questionable techniques to target our journalists, and in doing so, enforce a gross breach of press freedom.”

The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns.

In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors.

According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.

It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.

The presentation contains no evidence to explain the designation.

Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.”

“He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.

The NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to answer questions about the basis of Zaidan’s inclusion on the watch list and alleged Al Qaeda affiliation. The NSA also declined to answer a set of detailed questions about SKYNET, and how it uses the information about the people that it identifies.

What is clear from the presentation is that in the NSA’s eyes, Zaidan’s movements and calls mirrored those of known Al Qaeda couriers.

According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”

That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained.

The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.”

For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states.

The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.

The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.”

As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.”

Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.

Yet U.S. drone strikes have killed many hundreds of civilians and unidentified alleged “militants” who may have been marked based on the patterns their cell phones gave up.

People whose work requires contact with extremists and groups that the U.S. government regards as terrorists have long worried that they themselves could look suspicious in metadata analysis.

“Prominent American journalists have interviewed members of blacklisted terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It would surprise me if journalists in Pakistan hadn’t done the same. Part of the job of journalists and human rights advocates is to talk to people the government doesn’t want them to talk to.”

A History of Targeting Al Jazeera

The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.”

That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.

During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets.

So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003.

But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”

A Journalist and Al Qaeda

Zaidan first came to international prominence after the 9/11 attacks because of his access to senior Al Qaeda leadership. Zaidan wrote an Arabic-language book on bin Laden, and interviewed him in person multiple times.

“He covered the wedding of bin Laden’s son which was shortly after the [U.S.S.] Cole attack, and I think it was a very useful piece of journalism, because bin Laden declaimed a poem about the Cole which implied him taking responsibility for the attacks, which of course he later did,” said Bergen.

Zaidan also received a number of bin Laden’s taped messages to Americans, which were broadcast on Al Jazeera.

In 2002, he met a mysterious man with a “half-covered face,” who handed him a cassette tape with bin Laden’s voice, Zaidan told Bergen in an interview. In 2004, another bin Laden tape was dropped off at the office gate, Zaidan told the Associated Press. “The guard brought it to me along with other mail. It was in an envelope, I opened it and it was a big scoop,” Zaidan recounted.

Zaidan, right, in a 2011 Al Jazeera documentary he made about bin Laden.

Files collected from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound after his death — a portion of which were released this year — indicate that Al Qaeda members viewed Zaidan as a journalist they felt comfortable dealing with.

In an August 2010 missive, discussing Zaidan’s plans for a documentary, bin Laden directs his deputies to get “brother Ahmad Zaydan’s” questions and “tell him it would be good if it was on the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.” Any other input should come in “an indirect way,” bin Laden cautions. “If we want this program to be a success, then we should not get involved in the details of how it is run, except that I don’t want him to interview any of my family,” he wrote.

Zaidan released his documentary on Al Jazeera in December 2011, an oral history of bin Laden’s years in Pakistan and Afghanistan comprised of interviews with a range of people who had known him, including Taliban fighters, government officials, and many journalists.

Bin Laden had also grown paranoid about meetings with Zaidan, although he did not think the U.S. government had managed to kill anyone “from surveying Ahmad Zaydan,” he wrote in May 2010.

He continued, “keep in mind, the possibility, though remote, that the journalists may be involuntarily monitored in a way that we or they do not know about, either on ground or by satellite, especially Ahmad Zaydan of Al Jazeera, and it is possible that a tracking chip could be put into some of their personal effects before coming to the meeting place.”

Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”

ThreatCon Bravo and Background Information

Posted on May 8, 2015May 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Today, the military bases across the homeland have taken an extraordinary measure not seen since 2011, declaring ThreatCon Bravo.

Terrorist Threat Conditions

A Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-approved program standardizes the military services’ identification of and recommended responses to terrorist threats against U.S. personnel and facilities. This program facilitates interservice coordination and support for antiterrorism activities. Also called THREATCONs. There are four THREATCONs above normal:

THREATCON ALPHA		THREATCON BRAVO		THREATCON CHARLIE		THREATCON DELTA
This condition applies when there is a general threat of possible terrorist activity against personnel and facilities, the nature and extent of which are unpredictable, and circumstances do not justify full implementation of THREATCON BRAVO measures. However, it may be necessary to implement certain measures from higher THREATCONS resulting from intelligence received or as a deterrent. The measures in this THREATCON must be capable of being maintained indefinitely.		This condition applies when an increased and more predictable threat of terrorist activity exists. The measures in this THREATCON must be capable of being maintained for weeks without causing undue hardship, affecting operational capability, and aggravating relations with local authorities.		This condition applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action against personnel and facilities is imminent. Implementation of measures in this THREATCON for more than a short period probably will create hardship and affect the peacetime activities of the unit and its personnel.		This condition applies in the immediate area where a terrorist attack has occurred or when intelligence has been received that terrorist action against a specific location or person is likely. Normally, this THREATCON is declared as a localized condition. See also antiterrorism.

Texas incident fuels concern about lone-wolf terror attacks

DAVID CRARY and ERIC TUCKE, Associated Press

By DAVID CRARY and ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The attempted attack on a provocative cartoon contest in Texas appears to reflect a scenario that has long troubled national security officials: a do-it-yourself terror plot, inspired by the Islamic State extremist group and facilitated through the ease of social media.

Trying to gauge which individuals in the United States pose such threats — and how vigorously they should be monitored — is a daunting challenge for counterterrorism agencies. Some experts caution that a limited number of small-scale attacks are likely to continue.

Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said federal authorities are aware of “thousands” of potential extremists living in the U.S., only a small portion of whom are under active surveillance.

Concerns have been intensifying since the rise of the Islamic State group and were heightened this week after two gunmen were shot dead while trying to attack the event in Garland, Texas, that featured cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad. One of the men, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, was charged in 2010 after being the focus of a terror investigation; investigators are trying to determine the extent of any terror-related ties involving him or his accomplice, Nadir Soofi.

At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said intelligence officials would be investigating Islamic State’s claim of responsibility.

“This is consistent with what has previously been described as a lone-wolf attack,” Earnest said. “Essentially you have two individuals that don’t appear to be part of a broader conspiracy, and identifying those individuals and keeping tabs on them is difficult work.”

Terrorism experts say the spread of social media, and savvy use of it by extremist groups, has facilitated a new wave of relatively small-scale plots that are potentially easy to carry out and harder for law enforcement to anticipate.

While plots orchestrated by al-Qaida have historically involved grandiose plans designed to yield mass carnage — including airline bombings or attacks on transportation systems — the Islamic State group has endorsed less ambitious efforts that its leaders say can have the same terrorizing effect.

“If you can get your hands on a weapon, how is the state security apparatus supposed to find you?” said Will McCants, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It’s attractive because it gets just as much attention as a small- to mid-size bomb.”

A public forum like Twitter, with its millions of users, means those who might otherwise have had limited exposure to terrorist ideologies now have ample access to what FBI Director James Comey has described as the “siren song” of the Islamic State. Social media provides a venue for agitators to exhort each other to action, recruit followers for violence and scout locations for potential attacks.

A former Minneapolis man who goes by the name Mujahid Miski on Twitter was among those urging an attack on the event in Garland. A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Associated Press that Mujahid Miski is Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, who left the U.S. in 2008 to join al-Shabab in Somalia. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation are not public.

Hassan has been prolific on social media in recent months — urging his Twitter followers to carry out acts of violence in the U.S., including beheadings — commending attacks elsewhere, and using protests of police activity in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, to try to recruit others.

The phenomenon poses a challenge for investigators as they sift through countless online communications.

“Where is the threshold of saying this is more than just an avid consumer of propaganda?” asked William Braniff, executive director of a terrorism research center at the University of Maryland and a former instructor at the U.S. Military Academy‘s Combating Terrorism Center.

“It’s exceptionally difficult to estimate of the number of people who’ve considered becoming foreign fighters,” he said. “Often you’re not dealing with specific behaviors, but with expressions of belief, which are constitutionally protected.”

U.S. officials say that more than 3,400 people from Western countries — including nearly 180 from the U.S. — have gone to Syria or Iraq, or attempted to do so, to fight on behalf of Islamic State or other extremists groups.

Although there is concern that fighters returning to the U.S. might pose a terrorism threat, some experts say a more immediate danger is posed by individuals in America who are inspired by these extremist groups yet have no direct ties to them.

Such individuals “can be motivated to action, with little to no warning,” National Counterterrorism Center director Nicholas Rasmussen told the House Committee on Homeland Security in February. “Many of these so-called homegrown violent extremists are lone actors, who can potentially operate undetected and plan and execute a simple attack.”

He predicted that the threat posed by these individuals will remain stable, “resulting in fewer than 10 uncoordinated and unsophisticated plots annually from a pool of up to a few hundred individuals.”

The online propaganda can be alluring, even to U.S. residents leading comfortable lives, said Peter Bergen, director of International Security Program at the public policy institute New America.

In testimony Bergen planned to give Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, he says some Islamic State group recruits are motivated by the same level of idealism as young people who join the Marines or the Peace Corps. In their view, Bergen asserts, the extremist group “is doing something that is of cosmic importance.”

Daniel Benjamin, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department and now director of a global issues center at Dartmouth College, said the lone-wolf terrorist phenomenon is not new, but has taken on a new character due to the aggressive military and propaganda activities of the group also known as ISIS.

“What is new is the level of excitement among extremists,” Benjamin said. “The feeling is that ISIS has done what al-Qaida couldn’t — it has held territory, it has damaged armies much larger than it is.”

Benjamin cautions that low-level, lone-wolf attacks may be difficult to stamp out, and said Americans should not let such attacks demoralize them.

Long before this week, the lone-wolf scenario manifested itself when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who had been inspired by a radical Yemen-based preacher, killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Government officials have acknowledged that surveillance programs, however diligent, aren’t the full answer to thwarting terrorism. Among the preventive strategies is a federal program launched last fall called Countering Violent Extremism, which aims to encourage community engagement to thwart radicalization. It’s been tested in Los Angeles, Boston and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
[3:24:28 PM] The Denise Simon Experience: Bergen, in his prepared testimony for the Senate committee, said relatives of potential Islamic state group recruits might be more willing to inform authorities if the family member faced options other than a long prison term. He suggested some sort of mix of a token prison term, followed by probation and counseling services.

Court Case Reveals What Google Does to You

Posted on May 2, 2015May 2, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are countless companies across America that are harvesting your online data without your knowledge or permission. Once the data is collected, it is analyzed and it is sold. Institutions know more about you than you know about you as even predictions are made about your life and family. Hide the kids, well you cant do that either. Can you opt out? Kinda. Can you find alternatives for a search engine? Kinda. Is this legal? Kinda.

Courts docs show how Google slices users into “millions of buckets

Jeff Gould

Jeff Gould, CEO Peerstone Research

The online giant probably knows more about you than the NSA — including things you might not even tell your mother

The first law of selling is to know your customer. This simple maxim has made Google into the world’s largest purveyor of advertisements, bringing in more ad revenue this year than all the world’s newspapers combined. What makes Google so valuable to advertisers is that it knows more about their customers — that is to say, about you — than anyone else.

Where does Google get this knowledge? Simple. It watches most everything you do and say online — reads your email (paying special attention to purchase confirmations), peers over your shoulder while you browse, knows what you watch on YouTube, and — by tracking your devices — even knows where you are at this very moment. Then it assembles all these bits of information into a constantly updated profile that tells advertisers when, where and what you may hanker to buy.

Your Google profile contains far more than basic facts such as age, gender and product categories you might be interested in. It also makes statistically plausible guesses about things you didn’t voluntarily disclose. It estimates how much you earn by looking up IRS income data for your zip code. It knows if you have children at home — a trick it performs by surveying hundreds of thousands of parents, observing their online behavior, then extrapolating to millions of other users. Google also offers advertisers over 1,000 “interest-based advertising” categories to target users by their web browsing habits. When advertisers are ready to buy ads they can review all these attributes in a convenient browser interface and select exactly the users they want to target.

But these explicit attributes only scratch the surface. The online ad giant knows much more about you than it can put into a form easily understandable by humans. Just how much it knows came to light last year, when a Federal judge ordered the publication of some remarkable internal Google emails discussing how Gmail data mining works. Google’s lawyers fought the disclosure tooth and nail, but they were ultimately overruled. The emails reveal that Gmail can sort users not just into a few thousand demographic and interest categories, but into literally millions of distinct “buckets”. A “bucket” is just a cluster of users, however small, who share some feature in common that might interest advertisers.

Gmail profiling is performed by a mysterious device known as the Content OneBox, or COB for short. The COB’s inner workings are shrouded in mystery — the court documents describing it are heavily redacted. But we know that it deploys many distinct data mining methods to place users into these “buckets”. In addition to exploiting demographic or interest-based observables, the COB tries to understand the actual meaning of email messages with advanced “machine learning” algorithms.

The COB lets Google peer into the most intimate aspects of your life. To see why, think about the math. Gmail has a billion users who collectively receive several trillion messages per year (not counting spam). The COB analyzes every one of those messages, even the ones it classifies as spam and the ones you delete before opening. With such a vast sea of data pouring into its algorithms every day, Google can make incredibly fine-grained distinctions among users. Inevitably some of these distinctions will correspond to sensitive personal attributes that few of us would voluntarily disclose. Most “buckets” that Google creates have no names — they are just nodes in a vast network of associations. But Google can also sort advertising messages into the same buckets and then match them to similar users, without the need for overt labels. All it takes to connect an advertiser to the right customer is a fleeting pattern of affinity between some group of users and a particular sales pitch.

Google doesn’t allow advertisers to target explicitly on sensitive categories such as race, religion, health status or sexual preference. But nothing prevents the COB’s matching algorithms from performing such targeting implicitly. When you have millions of target buckets and can perform thousands of statistical experiments every day, you can achieve the same result. Want to attract young gay men of color in certain tough urban neighborhoods to your new line of expensive athletic shoes? Google won’t let you target those keywords directly, but millions of buckets can do it for you — implicitly. Want to offer fast food discount coupons to overweight single women with children, heart surgery to middle-aged men with chest pain and high incomes, or steroid pills to teenage body builders? Millions of buckets can do that too.

In the ten years since it was launched Gmail has morphed from a simple email service into a gigantic user profiling machine. The power of its profiling algorithms increases each year as new ideas from machine learning research are made operational. At the same time, the amount of data the algorithms have to work on swells constantly. Google execs say that Gmail will soon reach one billion users.

Today the market for such data-mined personal profiles is essentially unregulated. Neither Congress nor the FTC know what to do about it. A few state legislatures, notably California, have put stakes in the ground trying to protect consumers and especially vulnerable populations such as school children. The European Union is also debating new, stricter regulations. At the same time, surveys shows that consumers care about privacy but are easily lured into giving it up for free services.

This wild west of unrestrained online profiling can’t go on indefinitely. It is particularly ironic that the National Security Agency — despite all the recent controversy — is subject to far tighter legal oversight than online advertisers like Google or Facebook. Sooner or later regulation must come to online profiling. Europe is likely to lead the way, though not necessarily in a manner that meshes well with American views on innovation and freedom of expression. In the United States, considering Congressional gridlock and the risk of inconsistency among state legislatures, the best near-term hope for regulation that is both reasonable and effective may lie with the FTC or perhaps even the White House. Time will tell, but time is growing short in a world where machines grow more intelligent every day.

Iran’s Free Pass on Hijacking Cargo Ships

Posted on April 29, 2015April 29, 2015 by Denise Simon

Members of the U.S. Congress insist on reviewing any agreement with Iran before it takes effect, largely over Israeli concerns shared by many in Congress over Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Zarif said Tehran does not want “to get bogged down into the domestic procedures of the United States” and was negotiating with the government.

He also said Iran was committed to maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf in the aftermath of the seizure of a commercial ship by Iranian forces on Tuesday. “For us, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf is a must,” he said. More here.

A few days ago, Iran seized a cargo ship. The U.S. has no plan nor responsibility to free the ship as told by the U.S. State Department. The ship is owned by the United States by flies a Marshall Island flag. There is more intrigue.

Here’s Why Iran’s Seizure of a Cargo Ship Is So Odd, and Disturbing

While Revolutionary Guard boats often harass passing vessels, the capture of the MV Maersk Tigris appears to be something new:

No one knows why Iranian military forces seized a 52,000-ton container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and that’s worrying. Nor is it clear what the U.S. Navy or anyone else can do about it.

The strait is one of the world’s great maritime chokepoints; among other cargo, nearly 20 percent of the world’s annual supply of crude oil passes through its 6-mile-wide shipping channel. From time to time, Iran threatens to close the strait to shipping, though any such move would be vigorously contested by the United States and other countries, and it’s doubtful that the passage would remain closed for long. Still, news about maritime threats in the strait can send tremors through global markets.

The MV Maersk Tigris — a brand-new cargo ship built to carry more than 5,400 standard shipping containers — was heading westward through the strait in Iranian territorial waters on Tuesday, according to Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren. It was approached by several patrol vessels of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, or IRGCN, the maritime arm of the paramilitary unit that is generally tasked with “preserving the Islamic revolution.”

So far, nothing terribly unusual. The IRGCN, assigned to patrol the Gulf, routinely sends boats to shadow — some say “harass” — vessels of other nationalities as they transit the strait. Just three days ago, CNN reported, four IRGCN boats surrounded the U.S.-flagged Maersk Kensington in the Strait of Hormuz and followed it closely for some time. The U.S. Fifth Fleet subsequently issued a notice to mariners.

What happened next to the MV Maersk Tigris, however, was quite out of the ordinary.

“The master was contacted and directed to proceed further into Iranian territorial waters,” said Warren. “He declined and one of the IRGCN craft fired shots across the bridge of the Maersk Tigris. The master complied with the Iranian demand and proceeded into Iranian waters in the vicinity of Larak Island.”

William Watson, a maritime consultant based in Washington, D.C., called the situation “very strange and peculiar.”

Iran, which claims the entire strait as its territorial waters, might legally board a vessel if it deviated substantially toward the Iranian coast, Watson said. But ships moving normally through the strait have the right of innocent passage, a right routinely and firmly asserted by U.S. warships, among thousands of other vessels.

Via its Fars News Agency, the Iranian government said, “The ship is a trade vessel and has been seized by the Iranian navy at the request of Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization…The ship was seized after a relevant court order was issued for its confiscation.” The article said the IPMO had monetary differences with the ship owner.

Watson found this mystifying. If someone has a financial claim against a vessel’s owners, the claimant can “arrest” the vessel, or hold it until the dispute is resolved. But he added that in his decades of watching the world’s maritime trade, he’d never heard of such a thing done on the high seas. Arrests happen in port or at anchor, he said.

Soon after the container ship encountered the IRGCN boats, it sent a distress signal. The U.S. Navy responded by dispatching a guided missile destroyer, the USS Farragut, to have a look. As well, it sent a maritime patrol aircraft (the Navy has two kinds, the propellor-driven P-3 Orion and the jet-powered P-8 Poseidon).

It’s unclear what the Navy might do from here. The U.S. can act forcefully to protect ships under U.S. flag, and generally must lay off when a vessel is sailing under some other country’s banner. The Maersk Tigris is a bit in the middle; it flies the flag of the Marshall Islands, which in the wake of World War II placed itself under the military protection of the United States.

“NAVCENT [U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command] is communicating with representatives of the shipping company and we continue to monitor the situation,” Warren said. “According to information received from the vessel’s operators, there are no Americans aboard.”

The incident comes just days after the U.S. Navy dispatched an aircraft carrier and escort to ward off Iranian ships headed for the civil-war-wracked country of Yemen, and amid tense and ongoing negotiations surrounding the framework nuclear deal between Iran and other nations. It is also part of a long history of naval confrontations between the U.S. and Iranian forces; most dramatically, the daylong naval battle in 1988 in which the U.S. retaliated for the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts by sinking two Iranian warships and damaging other assets.

Update (4/29): The day after the seizure, Maersk officials told Reuters they still did not know why their ship had been taken, and that they were working with Danish diplomats to learn more. The world’s largest shipping company, Maersk is based in Copenhagen.

Update 2 (4/29): Via the government’s IRNA news agency, Iran added a bit to its explanation for the seizure, saying that “the decree was issued upon a complaint lodged by a private company named ‘Pars-Talaeeyeh Oil Products Company’ against MAERSK Shipping Line. The case passed its legal proceedings and finally MAERSK was sentenced to pay financial damages….The [Navigation and Ports Organization] underlined that the issue is merely a legal case and has nothing to do with political issues.”

Update 3 (4/29): The website MarineTraffic produced this video showing the course of the MV Maersk Tigris before, during, and after its interception.

Now there are talks with the Marshall Islands about future interceptions. Officials from the United States and the Marshall Islands are discussing “the way ahead” after Iranian patrol boats forcibly diverted a cargo ship flying a Marshall Islands flag into an anchorage in Iranian waters, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

A US Navy destroyer, the Farragut, and three coastal patrol ships, the Thunderbolt, Firebolt and Typhoon, were operating in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz conducting maritime security operations following the detention of the cargo ship, the MV Maersk Tigris, the Pentagon said.