The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

The website Wikileaks contains a vast collection of secret documents culled from governments and organizations worldwide. The site has no official headquarters.

The website Wikileaks publishes secret documents submitted by anonymous sources and makes them available to the public. The site, which went public in January 2007, has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The website has leaked a variety of formerly secret documents, including "everything from investigative reports about corruption in the nation of Kenya to manuals from the Church of Scientology to Sarah Palin's hacked e-mails," explains journalist Philip Shenon. "They very famously released the so-called Climategate memos that were from a group of climate scientists that were seized upon by a group of conservatives to argue that global warming was a fraud."

Shenon, an investigative reporter who contributes to The Daily Beast, joined Fresh Air's Dave Davies for a conversation about the website and rumors of its demise, following the release of a video showing a U.S. military massacre in Baghdad. Shenon recently wrote a series of articles about Julian Assange, the site's founder.

"He believes that when he puts material out, it should be put out to some degree in context," says Shenon. "And he should, in putting that material out, prove that it's a) authentic and b) significant. He has a very difficult relationship with most mainstream news organizations because he believes they do not do that — they do not prove the truth of what they are offering to their readers or viewers."

Shenon is a former reporter for The New York Times, where he led the investigation of the Sept. 11 commission and was chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, congressional correspondent and Justice Department correspondent. He is also the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.

Philip Shenon spent many years with The New York Times where he led the investigation of the Sept. 11 commission.

Interview Highlights

On releasing footage from a 2007 classified military video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew shooting civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007

"He wanted to put it out in context so he released the video with an awful lot of documents — military documents about the attack — and he packaged the video itself in a variety of formats including shorter versions and longer versions. And he put it on a special website that had the domain name collateralmurder.com, and his decision to label this collateral murder suggests that he had a strong view as to what this video represented."

On the Pentagon's response to the classified video release

"Defense Secretary [Robert] Gates was hugely annoyed by [the video's] release. He said to see this video is to see war through a soda straw. That it was presented without the real context of what had happened in that attack. And the context, as far as the Pentagon is concerned, is these young soldiers aboard the helicopter were in an extremely dire situation. They'd come under attack earlier in the day and they had every reason to believe that the folks on the ground meant them harm."

On national security concerns

"That's the larger fear of Wikileaks, that down the road they're going to come up with more explosive material that really could harm national security and they'll put it out without much filtering. They have come under criticism in the past for that. They put out some time ago a text from Army material about [improvised explosive devices] in Iraq and how they functioned and American efforts to try to overcome the IED threat in Iraq, and this was scientific material that, if available to the insurgents in Iraq, could have presumably put American soldiers' lives at risk."

On the arrest of Bradley Manning, the potential leak of the 2007 classified military video

"A young solider, Bradley Manning, working in Iraq was arrested in June and accused of leaking classified material. It emerged pretty quickly that he is believed to be the principal source for Wikileaks. That he leaked the 2007 Iraq video and the 2009 Afghanistan video and he may have also leaked as many as a quarter-million State Department cables to Wikileaks. We learned that he apparently confessed much of this in an e-mail chat with a former computer hacker in California whose name came to Bradley Manning through press reports. These voluminous Internet chats really do suggest that Manning was the source of all of this material that Wikileaks has put out and intends to put out in the future."

On the Obama administration's position on government leakers

"They've been very tough and it's been greatly disappointing to a lot of my colleagues in the news business and to First Amendment advocates that the Obama administration, just as much as the Bush administration, seems determined to crack down on leaks."

On the Cybersecurity Act of 2009

"This is a bill that is moving very quickly through Congress that would allow the White House, in a period of national emergency, to declare something called a 'cyber-emergency' and, in extreme situations, shut down portions of the Internet or at least block Americans from having access to them. And that's produced an awful lot of concern among civil liberties groups."

On the nature of secrecy and disclosure

"There probably are some secrets worth keeping. And as somebody who worked at a large news organization for many years, I can tell you that when national security information came into The New York Times, there was a big debate within the paper about how to handle that material and whether or not the value of the release outweighed whatever damage might be done to national security. The warrantless wiretapping scoop from a couple years ago, the Times had that scoop for about a year — or more than a year — before it made it public. And you certainly hear at the Pentagon, at the White House, concern that one of these days somebody is going to leak something really important to an organization like Wikileaks. The example given to me is American nuclear secrets or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Would Wikileaks put that out to the world without much filtering, and isn't there a threat in that?"

In the early 1970s, when Daniel Ellsberg wanted to get top-secret information about the Vietnam War to the public, he leaked the bombshell Pentagon Papers to elected officials and national newspapers.

But if Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst, wanted to leak secret documents today, he probably would send them to a powerful and controversial new venue for whistle-blowing: a website called WikiLeaks.org.

"People should definitely think of WikiLeaks as the way to go" when other methods of leaking information fail, he said recently.

WikiLeaks, a nonprofit site run by a loose band of tech-savvy volunteers, is quickly becoming one of the internet's go-to locations for government whistle-blowers, replacing, or at least supplementing, older methods of making sensitive government information public.

Some have praised the site as a beacon of free speech, while others have criticized it as a threat to national security.

The site gained international attention in April when it posted a 2007 video said to show a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq killing a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists.

 

At the time, Maj. Shawn Turner, a U.S. military spokesman, said that "all evidence available supported the conclusion by those forces that they were engaging armed insurgents and not civilians."

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, has been charged by the U.S. military with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military this week.

Manning's military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, is not speaking with the media about the charges, said U.S. Army Col. Tom Collins. Bouchard did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment. WikiLeaks may also offer an attorney for Manning, according to Wired.com.

The high-profile video has led some observers to say that WikiLeaks is forcing a new era of government transparency.

"It's a whole new world of how stories get out," Columbia University journalism professor Sree Sreenivasan told British newspaper The Independent in April.

Others have said the website may be a threat to society and the rule of law.

A 2008 U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center report (PDF), which was classified until it was uploaded to WikiLeaks in March, says that information posted to WikiLeaks.org could "aid enemy forces in planning terrorist attacks."

The report "is authentic, and it speaks for itself," Collins said.

What is WikiLeaks?

The premise of the WikiLeaks, which has been operating largely out of the public spotlight since 2007, is simple: Anyone can leak documents, videos or photographs, and they can do so while remaining anonymous.

The site says that none of its whistle-blowers has been outed because of WikiLeaks.

Visitors to the site will notice a large link that simply says "submit documents." Reports, photographs and videos given to the site are reviewed by a global network of editors and then, if deemed to be important and real, are posted online.

"Every submitted article and change is reviewed by our editorial team of professional journalists and anti-corruption analysts," WikiLeaks says on its website. "Articles that are not of high standard are rejected and non-editorial articles are fully attributed."

But the site does differ from traditional media outlets..

In The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote that WikiLeaks is "not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency."

In part, this is because of the technology employed by the site.

The site's documents and other leaks are backed up on computer servers in several countries. WikiLeaks also maintains several Web addresses to make it difficult -- the site claims impossible -- to remove the secret documents from the internet once they are posted on WikiLeaks.

The website is run by an organization called Sunshine Press, which takes public donations. Time.com reported that WikiLeaks has a $600,000 annual budget.

Who manages the site?

WikiLeaks' elusive editor and co-founder is an Australian named Julian Assange. In profiles, writers describe him as an eccentric who wanders the globe, carries all of his belongings and keeps semi-residences in Kenya, Iceland and Sweden, where the site's Web servers are reportedly located.

"In my role as WikiLeaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks," Assange told BBC News. "To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions."

Lately, Assange is reported to be living in Iceland, which recently passed laws to protect anonymous speech like that promoted by WikiLeaks.

Assange -- who has stark white hair and a deep voice, and appears only occasionally in YouTube videos and in media interviews -- tells reporters that the aim of WikiLeaks is to promote a more open democracy, where government officials and bureaucrats can't keep dark secrets from the public.

"We have a mission to promote political reforms by releasing suppressed information," he said in April.

Assange did not respond to an e-mail about this story.

Site causes controversy

In its attempts to unearth and publicize this hidden information, however, the site has stirred a number of controversies.

WikiLeaks has published information as varied as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mails; manuals from the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; e-mails that spawned the "Climategate" global-warming controversy late last year; and documents that Assange reportedly says altered the outcome of the 2007 presidential election in Kenya.

Ari Schwartz, vice president and chief executive officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said it's unclear what WikiLeaks' lasting impact will be. If the site publishes state secrets without cause, a public backlash could quickly kill the following the site is trying to build.

"If they're publishing just to publish ... the public reaction against that information is going to be so negative," he said.

Schwartz said his group has benefited from WikiLeaks, which was able to obtain some congressional public records his organization could not.

"They are effective in terms of getting to documents that people have trouble accessing in other ways," he said.

Ellsberg , the former U.S. Department of Defense official who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the '70s and who now donates to WikiLeaks, said the site has the potential to change the way the world's governments operate.

He says the site will make leaders more accountable to the public.

The recently released military videos are "a very small door, so far, into the huge library of broadly withheld information," he said.

He called Assange a hero for trying to shed light on those hidden catalogues.

FESCHUK: I’ve been to the G8, and I’m here to tell you it’s more entertaining than ‘The Bachelor’

By: Scott Feschuk

We are spending more than $1 billion to host this month’s G8 and G20 summits, which Liberal MP Mark Holland has taken to describing as “the most expensive 72 hours in Canadian history.” Obviously he never saw Brian Mulroney’s mini-bar bill after Meech collapsed.

Think of the upside, Mark Holland: dignitaries! And entourages! If a life-threatening crisis were to break out, we could rely on the wonks to recommend a working group to investigate creating a sub-committee to formulate a draft interim policy pursuant to—oops, we’re already dead.

The G8 Summit (aka The Good One) will be held in Huntsville, Ont., at the Deerhurst Resort. I spent some time at Deerhurst last year and have disturbing news for the international community. Extensive efforts at carbon dating indicate my hotel room was last decorated in 1978. This may seem irrelevant, but don’t underestimate the ability of the decor to guide the summit toward the ethos of the 1970s, as manifested in wage-and-price controls and the German chancellor adopting Farrah Fawcett hair. The curtains alone had me craving fondue for days.

Here’s how the billion dollars we’re spending on summitry breaks down:

Pomp: $500 million. Epaulets? Surprisingly expensive.

Circumstance: $400 million. (We got a good deal on circumstance.)

Security: $75 million. At least half that sum will be devoted to ensuring world leaders are at all times protected from terror (i.e. the close-ups in Sex and the City 2).

Ambiguity: $20 million. You can’t write the G8 final communiqué without a fresh supply of vague. Why risk vowing that you “will” achieve a goal when, with the power of vague, you can pledge to “work toward” it? Back when I was a government speech writer, I gave this type of commitment a name: it was a promise-ish—a “promish.” In 2005, for instance, the G8 promished to fight climate change by “taking the dialogue forward.” And today, five years later, global warming has been defeated. (That’s the truthesque.)

Making sure Stephen Harper doesn’t miss another G8 group photo: $2 million. Twenty bucks for an alarm clock and $1,999,980 for a team of stout men to follow around the Prime Minister carrying a porta-potty.

Loot bags: $40. Everyone goes home with Twizzlers and a super ball.
Food safety: $1 million. This is actually true: we are spending $1 million to keep safe the food that will be served to G8 leaders. And you know what—I think I could do it for less. A million seems like a lot. Are we renting the tuna its own safe house?

I guess the costs add up. They’re probably hiring food tasters to ensure the meals served to G8 leaders aren’t poisoned. Attention G8 leaders: I will taste your meals FOR FREE. I’ll even cut up your ham just how you like it, Mr. Harper.

Or there’s another solution: mice. During the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese used mice to detect impurities in meals being served to athletes and officials. The animals were fed milk, alcohol, rice and a variety of other foods. They ate and ate and ate for weeks and the whole thing cost, like, 40 bucks—plus $5 for more mice when the first ones exploded.

I think the reason regular folks are cheesed about the cost of the summits is that, as taxpayers, we get no apparent benefit. If world leaders want to continue to meet in style every year, they need to give something back to the people. By which I mean they need to turn the summit into a reality show.

I’ve been to the G8 (when I worked for Paul Martin) and I am here to tell you that nothing on network television tops the real-life sight of Tony Blair fast-walking down a hallway, arms pumping, to avoid having to talk to Bob Geldof. And remember when George W. Bush got all frisky with Angela Merkel, squeezing her shoulders while she made the “Get it off! GET IT OFF!” face? More entertainment than five seasons of The Bachelor.

So here’s the deal, G8 leaders. Pull back the curtain. Welcome in the cameras. Show us the behind-the-scenes stuff like heated Middle East policy arguments and Silvio Berlusconi hitting on all the waitresses. Do that and we’ll continue forking out billions so you get your military-band welcomes and your motorcades and your bunk beds (Cameron and Clegg only). We promish.

For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone.

New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.

"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.

Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.

Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) annually, he said.

Another nearby island, Lohachara, was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland, while almost half the land of Ghoramara island was underwater, he said. At least 10 other islands in the area were at risk as well, Hazra said.

"We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water," he said.

Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is one of the countries worst-affected by global warming. Officials estimate 18 percent of Bangladesh's coastal area will be underwater and 20 million people will be displaced if sea levels rise 1 meter (3.3 feet) by 2050 as projected by some climate models.

India and Bangladesh both claimed the empty New Moore Island, which is about 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) long and 3 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide. Bangladesh referred to the island as South Talpatti.

There were no permanent structures on New Moore, but India sent some paramilitary soldiers to its rocky shores in 1981 to hoist its national flag.

The demarcation of the maritime boundary -- and who controls the remaining islands -- remains an open issue between the two South Asian neighbors, despite the disappearance of New Moore, said an official in India's foreign ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on international disputes.

Bangladesh officials were not available for comment Wednesday.

Medical marijuana activist Richard Lee at a rally in January in Oakland, Calif. Lee is one of the main backers of pot legalization in California.

California has just authorized a ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. If it's approved in November, the state will become the first to make pot legal for fun and profit. The measure is the result of a months-long petition drive, which went over the top in signatures on Wednesday.

There was a certain buzz in the air Wednesday night in downtown Oakland, Calif. That's where the main backer of pot legalization, Richard Lee, was celebrating. Lee bankrolled the petition drive and was happy to see the measure had more than enough signatures to get on California's November ballot.

"Tax Cannabis 2010 does two things," Lee says. "First of all, it allows adults 21 and over in California to posses and cultivate small amounts of cannabis for their own personal consumption. Second, it allows cities and counties in California to tax and regulate sales and commercial cultivation how they want to, and if they want to."

It's been 14 years since California voters approved medical marijuana, which prompted 13 other states to follow suit. Now this new proposal that would legalize recreational pot is bound to reignite the debate over the country's drug laws and test the idea that America is ready to legalize pot.

But not so fast, says John Lovell, who represents a variety of California law enforcement groups who oppose legalizing cannabis.

"We have serious problems right now caused by alcohol abuse, caused by pharmaceutical abuse; tobacco actually kills people," he says. "Given those realities, what earthly public good is served by adding yet another mind-altering substance to the array of legal substances that are available?"

Lovell says his side isn't as well-financed as supporters of legalized pot, but with the help of law enforcement groups, he believes the opponents will prevail.

But supporters have police officers on their side, too.

"Like many other cops and law enforcement professionals, I've seen firsthand that the current approach on cannabis is certainly not working," says former L.A. Deputy Sheriff Jeffrey Stoddard in a new radio ad that will hit airwaves next week. "It's led to violent drug cartels, dealers in our schools and our streets, and cost millions of dollars without reducing consumption. That's why cops support Tax Cannabis 2010."

A Field Poll conducted last year indicates that 56 percent of California voters favor legalizing marijuana. But Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo says that support may be soft. The wild card, he says, may be the economy.

"This initiative is promising to raise a significant amount of money," he says. "Some have estimated a billion dollars for the state if it were to pass. That actually might add a certain element of support that might not otherwise be there, since the state is $20 billion in deficit, and it's going to be hard to fill that deficit.

Regardless of what California voters say, marijuana remains illegal under federal law. And so far, the three major candidates for governor, two Republicans and one Democrat, all oppose the measure.

Britain took the extraordinary step Tuesday of expelling an Israeli diplomat for the first time in more than 20 years, after concluding there was compelling evidence that Israel was responsible for the use of forged British passports in the plot to slay a senior Hamas operative in Dubai.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said trust between the two countries had been badly dented, demanded formal assurances it never happen again and — in an unusual step — issued travel advice to U.K. citizens warning their identity details may be at risk if they visit Israel.

Miliband told the House of Commons that the expelled diplomat, who has not been named, was removed following an investigation into the use of 12 fake U.K. passports in the Jan 20. slaying in Dubai. 

"We have concluded that there are compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of the British passports," Miliband said.

Britain's Serious and Organized Crime Agency found the forged British passports were copies of authentic documents handed to Israeli officials for inspection either in Israel or other countries, Miliband said. He said the fakes were high-quality and almost certainly "made by a state intelligence service."

"The actions in this case are completely unacceptable and they must stop," Miliband said.

However, Miliband insisted Britain has drawn no conclusions over who is responsible for the killing of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, saying investigation by Dubai authorities was continuing.

Dubai authorities accuse Israel's Mossad of carrying out al-Mabhouh's killing in a luxury hotel room, and have identified at least 26 suspects in an alleged hit squad — members of which used forged European and Australian passports.

Interpol has a wanted list of 27 people in connection with the slaying. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any involvement in al-Mabhouh's death.

Israel's ambassador to London Ron Prosor said he was "disappointed by the decision of the British government" but pledged that the two countries would retain close ties. "The relationship between Israel and the United Kingdom is of mutual importance," he said.

France and Ireland are also carrying out inquiries into the use of four forged French and six Irish passports. Ireland's foreign ministry said it would consider further action once an investigation with Irish police is completed.

Dubai police believe three Australian passports and a German one were also used in the killing.

At least 15 of the names used by the suspected killers match those of Israeli citizens who are dual nationals of Western countries. All have denied involvement.

Miliband said in the cases of the 12 British citizens, there was "no evidence to suggest that those 12 were anything other than wholly innocent victims of identity theft."

He said one victim told investigators "to go to bed a citizen and wake up as a wanted terrorist is shocking."

"The fact that this was done by a country which is a friend, with significant diplomatic, cultural, business and personal ties to the UK, only adds insult to injury," Miliband said.

Miliband had been due to attend a reception Tuesday to mark the refurbishment of the Israeli Embassy in London, but was forced to cancel in order to make his statement to Parliament.

The expulsion of an Israeli diplomat from London is the first since 1988, when attache Arie Regev was removed for "activities incompatible with diplomatic duties," a euphemism for espionage. Britain also barred a second Israeli, Jacob Barad, from returning to Britain in 1987. Both men were suspected of coordinating Mossad activity in the U.K. and of involvement in the forgery of British passports.

At the time, Shimon Peres — now Israel's president — promised Britain it would never again forge British documents.

Miliband, who said he discussed the case Monday with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, confirmed that Britain had chosen which diplomat would be expelled and said "it was not a random" choice.

But British and Israeli officials declined to confirm reports that the diplomat was Mossad's London station chief.

Arieh Eldad, a lawmaker from Israel's National Union — a hardline opposition party — called Friday for the military attache of the British Embassy in Israel to be expelled in response.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declined to comment on whether Israel would take retaliatory action.

Diplomatic expulsions are a rare sanction against foreign governments. Britain kicked out four Russian diplomats in 2007 over the country's refusal to extradite to London a suspect in the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko.

EFF has posted documents shedding light on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gather information in investigations. The records, obtained from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division, are the first in a series of documents that will be released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that EFF filed with the help of the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic.

One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools -- including social networking sites and Google Street View -- to investigate taxpayers.

The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information. The good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents on social networking sites in response to EFF's request suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of these websites.

The documents released by the IRS also include excerpts from the Internal Revenue Manual explaining that employees aren't allowed to use government computers to access social networking sites for personal communication, and cautioning them to be careful to avoid any appearance that they're speaking on behalf of the IRS when making personal use of social media.

The Justice Department released a presentation entitled "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites." The slides, which were prepared by two lawyers from the agency's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, detail several social media companies' data retention practices and responses to law enforcement requests. The presentation notes that Facebook was “often cooperative with emergency requests” while complaining about Twitter’s short data retention policies and refusal to preserve data without legal process. The presentation also touches on use of social media for undercover operations.

Over the next few months, EFF will be getting more documents from several law enforcement and intelligence agencies concerning their use of social networking sites for investigative purposes. We'll post those files here as they arrive.

Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant.

The Snitch in Your Pocket

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

How many of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most "don't have a clue," says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey. The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)

The Justice Department doesn't keep statistics on requests for cell-phone data, according to the spokeswoman. So it's hard to gauge just how often these records are retrieved. But Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years. Sprint Nextel has even set up a dedicated Web site so that law-enforcement agents can access the records from their desks—a fact divulged by the company's "manager of electronic surveillance" at a private Washington security conference last October. "The tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," said the Sprint executive, according to a tape made by a privacy activist who sneaked into the event. (A Sprint spokesman acknowledged the company has created the Web "portal" but says that law-enforcement agents must be "authenticated" before they are given passwords to log on, and even then still must provide valid court orders for all nonemergency requests.)

There is little doubt that such records can be a powerful weapon for law enforcement. Jack Killorin, who directs a federal task force in Atlanta combating the drug trade, says cell-phone records have helped his agents crack many cases, such as the brutal slaying of a DeKalb County sheriff: agents got the cell-phone records of key suspects—and then showed that they were all within a one-mile area of the murder at the time it occurred, he said. In the fall of 2008, Killorin says, his agents were able to follow a Mexican drug-cartel truck carrying 2,200 kilograms of cocaine by watching in real time as the driver's cell phone "shook hands" with each cell-phone tower it passed on the highway. "It's a tremendous investigative tool," says Killorin. And not that unusual: "This is pretty workaday stuff for us."

But there is also plenty of reason to worry. Some abuse has already occurred at the local level, according to telecom lawyer Gidari. One of his clients, he says, was aghast a few years ago when an agitated Alabama sheriff called the company's employees. After shouting that his daughter had been kidnapped, the sheriff demanded they ping her cell phone every few minutes to identify her location. In fact, there was no kidnapping: the daughter had been out on the town all night. A potentially more sinister request came from some Michigan cops who, purportedly concerned about a possible "riot," pressed another telecom for information on all the cell phones that were congregating in an area where a labor-union protest was expected. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of abuse on this," says Gidari.

That was precisely what Smith and his fellow magistrates were worried about when they started refusing requests for cell-phone tracking data. (Smith balked only at requests for real-time information, while other magistrates have also objected to requests for historical data on cell-phone locations.) The grounds for such requests, says Smith, were often flimsy: almost all were being submitted as "2703(d)" orders—a reference to an obscure provision of a 1986 law called the Stored Communications Act, in which prosecutors only need to assert that records are "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. That's the lowest possible standard in federal criminal law, and one that, as a practical matter, magistrates can't really verify. But when Smith started turning down government requests, prosecutors went around him (or "judge shopping," in the jargon of lawyers), finding other magistrates in Texas who signed off with no questions asked, he told NEWSWEEK. Still, his stand—and that of another magistrate on Long Island—started getting noticed in the legal community. Facing a request for historical cell-phone tracking records in a drug-smuggling case, U.S. magistrate Lisa Pupo Lenihan in Pittsburgh wrote a 56-page opinion two years ago that turned prosecutors down, noting that the data they were seeking could easily be misused to collect information about sexual liaisons and other matters of an "extremely personal" nature. In an unusual show of solidarity—and to prevent judge shopping—Lenihan's opinion was signed by every other magistrate in western Pennsylvania.

The issue came to a head this month in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia. A Justice Department lawyer, Mark Eckenwiler, asked a panel of appeals-court judges to overturn Lenihan's ruling, arguing that the Feds were only asking for what amounted to "routine business records." But he faced stiff questioning from one of the judges, Dolores Sloviter, who noted that there are some governments, like Iran's, that would like to use such records to identify political protesters. "Now, can the government assure us," she pressed Eckenwiler, that Justice would never use the provisions in the communications law to collect cell-phone data for such a purpose in the United States? Eckenwiler tried to deflect the question, saying he couldn't speak to "future hypotheticals," but finally acknowledged, "Yes, your honor. It can be used constitutionally for that purpose." For those concerned about what the government might do with the data in your pocket, that was not a comforting answer.

Via:Newsweek