Cyberwar (2016) s02e04 Episode Script

1 BEN: US intel partners with corporations and police to spy on civilians Is the FBI spying on domestic social justice groups in the United States today? Yeah, absolutely, there is no question.
spending billions of tax dollars on cyber-surveillance technologies.
They're hiding it, which should put a flashing red light on it.
But a handful of activists, hackers and journalists fight back We care about digital security, transparency, and you attack it from a technologies point of view.
risking everything to uncover corruption at the highest levels of power.
When it was decided that something had to be found on me, I mean, that was it.
Edward Snowden blew the lid off of the surveillance powers of the American spy machine.
And part of his unprecedented leak was exposing the cyber-industrial complex for what it was: a network of private security and tech companies collaborating with US intelligence agencies.
Companies were making money hawking wares to spooks to spy on regular people.
But that was 2013.
I wanna know if the government has backed off or stepped up their domestic surveillance programs.
So I m in Dallas to meet a guy who I ve been wanting to meet for a very long time.
His name is Barrett Brown.
He did actual time for exposing the cyber-industrial complex.
Recently released and under house arrest, I caught up with Barrett at his office.
So you gotta make some phone calls? Yes, we have to call the VOA, which is my halfway house, and we have to ask them why it is that I am not allowed to do an interview with you.
(PHONE DIALLING) VOICE: Record your message at the tone.
Press any key or stop talking to end the recording.
Hi, (BLEEP), it's Barrett Brown.
I was calling to see if the BOP had gotten back to you with the wording I had requested.
Just give me a call back when you get a chance, thank you.
I mean, you're not even an inmate right now.
You're not in a prison.
But even then, why can't you talk to the media? There s no stipulation against it whatsoever.
You know, you reported on the cyber-security industrial complex, so to speak.
How much do you think that's changed since since you got out? A very frightening situation, where you had the government allying with companies to go after activists and journalists, and use disinformation, use criminal hacking techniques that you and I would get arrested for.
Even when that gets out and gets covered by major news outlets, and there's calls in Congress for investigation, there are no consequences ultimately.
People have to decide if they want to be effective or if they want to work within a system that's broken.
BEN: Love him or hate him, Barrett is a legend in the hacker world.
He was famously referenced on House of Cards, and is an OG of Anonymous reporting.
He s also obsessed with revealing the covert actions of US intel, and did four years in prison for offences in connection to a hack of the private intelligence company Stratfor a company he was ordered to pay almost $900,000 in damages.
As part of the conditions of his house arrest, Barrett needs to conduct regular drug tests at a nearby halfway house.
How'd it go? Good, I just had to piss in a cup and breathe into a tube.
It turns out I was not drunk, and not under any drugs that they can detect.
And you re off in a month? Yeah, a little over a month.
I ll be on probation.
Probation is easy, it doesn t involve anything at all.
I mean, prison s not a bad deal.
Like people shouldn t be scared of prison.
People should be actively actively putting themselves in positions where they might have to go to prison.
Everyone needs to stop being such a giant pussy in this country.
So do you think your sentence was was too harsh? 'Cause I remember reading about it and thinking they're going really hard on him.
And to me, it seemed a bit of a shot at the bow at all hackers and leakers and anybody who s doing this kind of work, that this could be your fate.
Yeah, there was definitely a movement among the federal government throughout the Bush Obama administration to go after journalists and leakers and people involved in the sort of Anonymous movement.
The US government spying on its citizens is hardly new.
Back in the '70s, anti-war activists stole FBI documents proving the bureau illegally spied and disrupted the Civil Rights and Women s Rights Movements.
That infamous FBI program, COINTELPRO, was supposed to be about stamping out domestic communism.
Barrett says the cyber-industrial complex is basically just COINTELPRO 2.
0.
COINTELPRO was the template for a lot of the things that are still done in different ways.
There s disinformation, there s stirring up of paranoia so as to interfere with operations.
Those are generally the same objectives that these companies were trying to achieve against activists today.
Essentially they were just doing a lot of the things that we ve seen done by the KGB and the CIA and FBI over their long and sordid history.
Using the data from hacktivists, Barrett reported on how for-profit security companies were targeting activists.
He exposed their strategies for gathering personal data on family members, threatening journalists and leaking false documents to discredit WikiLeaks.
The FBI will provide documents on one group of people to Stratfor.
Now, if you and I went to the FBI and said, "Hey, we want everything you know on our enemies," we probably wouldn t get that.
That s That s the framework for fascism, that kind of relationship.
Are there things a private cyber-industrial complex company can do for an intelligence agency that an intelligence agency can t do? Remember, there was a lot of companies that were working with the FBI to come after me, and there was discussions about how to get me thrown in prison.
If that was their goal, then they were successful because you went you went to jail for a few years.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they have, you know When it was decided that something had to be found on me, I mean, that was it.
Barrett s claim of the establishment trying to silence him might seem paranoid but when I returned to Vice a few days later, I got some disturbing news.
So I just found out that Barrett Brown was taken back into custody for speaking with me.
That's a direct violation of his First Amendment rights, and underlines the risks of taking on the cyber-industrial complex.
BEN: Journalist Barrett Brown is back in custody after speaking with us about his role fighting the cyber-industrial complex, a web of partnerships between US intelligence and for-profit corporations - and is a reminder of the risks of taking on the spy community.
But Barrett's not the only one dedicated to exposing their secrets.
I ll say it again: The records of government are the property of the people.
Reclaim them, hack the FBI.
Thank you.
This is Ryan Shapiro, an animal rights activist turned transparency researcher whose work the FBI has literally labelled "a threat to national security.
" He stopped protesting animal abuse when his fellow activists started getting convicted as terrorists.
Now, Ryan uses the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, to show the cyber-industrial complex is illegally targeting activists.
So you told an entire room full of hackers to hack the FBI.
Why d you do that? Transparency, very much including the Freedom of Information Act, is an absolutely essential part of a viable democracy.
And yet the FBI and other intelligence agencies view the Freedom of Information Act as a threat to national security.
This leads to the outrageous state of affairs in which the leading federal law enforcement agency is in routine and flagrant violation of federal law.
What do we know about FBI surveillance from the FOIA requests that people have made about activist groups within America? The FBI explicitly has understood and understands largely any genuine threat to the status quo, especially coming from the left, as a direct threat to national security, usually - the FBI believes - with some sort of foreign influence.
What do you think the current state of surveillance of activist groups is? Is the FBI spying on domestic social justice groups in the United States today? Yeah, absolutely, there is no question.
They are.
I mean, we know it from documents that I and other folks have been able to get from the government through FOIA after years of the FBI saying, "No, we don t have anything on Occupy.
No, literally nothing.
We literally have nothing on Occupy.
" - Suddenly they do.
- Suddenly they do! And Ryan Shapiro is not the only one using the Freedom of Information Act to prove US authorities are spying on activists.
I m in Chicago to meet Freddy Martinez, a technologist and transparency activist who used the same FOIA system to uncover that his own city s police department was secretly using a device called an IMSI-catcher, which collects all nearby cell phone communications without warrants or any public oversight.
'Sup, Freddy? Hey, Ben, how are you doing? - Nice to meet you.
- Good to meet you too.
- So you're from Chicago? - Yeah.
- Born and raised? - Yeah, completely.
What's your organization about? So Lucy Parsons Labs, we care about digital security, transparency, and you attack it from a technologies point of view.
You're obviously concerned about surveillance, right? What kind of surveillance? So the FCC requires people to get licenses for turning on IMSI-catchers, but they also have very strict rules about regulating use, and it seems that the police don't really follow them.
(RADIO CHATTERING) Freddy captured this audio from a police scanner.
The Chicago Police Department used a Stingray IMSI-catcher to monitor an activist s cell phone during a protest.
Do you ever feel like you re gonna be or you are being watched by the authorities? I don t really worry about the question.
I just hope that there s enough political support for people that do interesting things, and hopefully that protects us all.
Do you think that there s this relationship where private corporations get to do things on behalf of governments? They will go to law enforcement and say, "Use our technology, but only on our conditions.
" And one of the conditions of Stingray or IMSI-catcher is that you can t tell the public about it.
Private corporations are dictating the policy.
It is also the case that the FBI will tell prosecutors to drop cases rather than reveal their methods.
Freddy is referring to contracts tech companies force police departments to sign to use their equipment.
Federal intelligence agencies will broker these deals and include clauses prohibiting the police from making public any information about the technology, even if that means dropping child porn or mafia cases relying on the tech for evidence.
Where s this going? Forget four years, think 10 years down the road.
Do you think what you re doing is gonna be in the end useless, and we re just hurtling towards this surveillance state? We ve been doing this for about three or four years, and there have been some really fascinating outcomes.
There are states now that are pushing these warrant requirement bills on things like Stingray.
There are people that are pulling the plug on surveillance companies like Geofeedia.
And so, you know, it s easy to get nihilistic about the future and say, "Well, it doesn t really matter," but there are victories along the way.
So it s important to just keep fighting.
BEN: I m in Chicago, where the police department has been using shady cell phone monitoring tech called IMSI-catchers on activists.
They re illegal to turn on without a license, but anti-surveillance activist Freddy Martinez built his own and promised to show me how it works.
Come back with a warrant.
(LAUGHING) Fucking hackers.
- 'Sup, man? - Hey Ben, come in.
Snowden! - Snowden? - Yeah.
I think she might be a little cuter than Edward Snowden, to be honest with you.
So you actually have built the software for an IMSI-catcher, but you can't turn it on? So it's not functional, but you know, just a quick one line command and we could be you know, catching everything.
Just watching people's actions on their cell phones? Yeah, you can get like SMS messages You can catch people s text messages? Yeah, you can even catch their phone calls.
I mean, obviously you're somebody who studied physics, so not the average person can make this, but - Uh - Or can they? Yeah, actually anyone who's maybe a bit familiar with the next command line, sure.
And I mean, what did you make it out of? So we have Raspberry Pie, which is like a $50 computer, LimeSDR, which is a Software Defined Radio, and that's it.
That's crazy.
And then do you wanna show me Yeah, so basically I can decide which subscribers I want to grab.
I can grab all of them.
I can configure sort of the country code, I can configure the name of the cell phone tower, and then I can configure whether or not I actually, you know, wanna tap.
(LAUGHING) Have you ever done it? No, it's illegal.
(LAUGHING) But why is the Chicago Police Department using this technology? Do beat cops really care what activists are up to? So we re really excited right now because a cop has now agreed to speak with us about social media surveillance, and the use of things like Stingrays and IMSI-catchers.
It s a guy from the CPD here in Chicago.
It s a really difficult thing to do, to get a cop to go on the record, because as you can imagine the brotherhood keeps a tight lip.
So have you personally ever used a Stingray or an IMSI-catcher, anything like that? Now, if there were people in CPD using them, would you know about it? So do you think that, you know, CIA, NSA are trying to get local police departments to use these things, and then actually have the information for themselves, the intelligence? So it kinda seems to me like there's almost this this weird big data gathering machine going on at the local policing level.
(LAUGHING) So police are gathering information on activists, at least in Chicago.
But how is that intel making its way to the federal agencies? To find out, I m in San Francisco with Nicole Ozer, an ACLU lawyer who revealed that state and municipal police are covertly spending billions on surveillance tech like IMSI-catchers, then passing the info they collect onto the feds.
Do you see some of this stuff being an extension of COINTELPRO that the FBI used to do? Yes.
A lot of people don't realize, but since 2005 over a billion dollars a year has been sent down from the federal government.
That money, because it's federal money, has largely circumvented sort of traditional local oversight of city councils and board of supervisors.
The one thing that worries me about these types of systems the most is I've heard that these types of systems aren't necessarily the bread and butter of a local police department, or even like a state police department.
This stuff is really useful to spies.
Well, and the information that is collected from surveillance systems doesn't just stay in that one community.
It gets funnelled up to the federal government through fusion centres.
Fusion centres are federal entities collecting as much raw information about us as possible.
Our cell phone activity from police using IMSI-catchers.
Our purchasing patterns via private security companies, and social media surveillance.
Who we spend time with, where we go, and what we believe in.
They are supposed to connect the dots for the federal government, so they are spy centres.
And there are fusion centres in every state in the country, and there are six here in California alone.
In 1999, the CIA founded In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm using US tax dollars to develop cutting-edge surveillance tech.
Local police forces with more tax dollars handed down from the federal government then buy these technologies.
The police use the tech to collect information on their populations, which is then funnelled through fusion centres back to the intelligence agencies.
And federal fusion centres, you know, don't just collect data from government sources.
They also pick up data from data brokers and other private sources.
Once information is collected and you're in that web of surveillance, you never know how it's going to end up being used.
How are our elected officials dealing with the threat of excessive surveillance? To find out, I'm heading to DC to meet with Jason Chaffetz, who was until recently the chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
BEN: I'm in Congress to see how the politicians in DC view this battle between activists and the cyber-industrial complex.
Until recently, Jason Chaffetz was the chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
He s a hardcore Republican and a respected voice against unwarranted surveillance.
Chaffetz worries the intelligence community s current behaviour could lead to the suppression of our First Amendment rights.
This is definitely an issue that goes on both sides of the aisle.
Democrats and Republicans are interested in this.
My partner in arms here has been Senator Wyden, who's about as liberal and different on most issues.
But we're very united on this issue because I think it's the American way.
This personal privacy is something that was in part the foundation of our nation, and we have to be very careful.
I need the FBI in particular to be candid with us.
Thus far they haven't.
They've been very slow in providing Congress the information that we've been seeking and demanding.
They're hiding it, which should put a flashing red light on it.
There's a reason why they're hiding.
Now, one thing that was kind of discovered is that law enforcement is sort of working hand in hand with these corporations that are creating these technologies by signing NDAs and protecting them from ever having any of this technology exposed in open court.
That's right, they'd much rather protect their own methods than they would to prosecute a bad guy.
And what do you think the effect is on activists and political gatherings that are going on right now? I think people should be wary.
I think it's gonna suppress our First Amendment rights to peacefully gather and be able to protest their government.
And under our current president, do you think these issues will be addressed? Well, look, I've dealt with this in the Obama administration.
I thought they were terrible on this issue.
I hope the Trump administration is better, but you have this bureaucracy that stayed the same.
After the interview with Chaffetz, we found out that Barrett, who had been taken back into custody after speaking with me without permission, had been re-released from prison.
I caught up with him on Skype.
Yeah, so sorry about getting you in jail.
I mean, do you think you have a mark on your back so to speak because of the work you've done reporting on this cyber-industrial complex? So today you're on probation.
You switched, right? It's better than pissing in that cup for the halfway house.
Has it stopped you from, you know, ever reporting on this kind of stuff again? As part of his continued fight against the US government, Barrett is now developing Pursuance, a secure online platform where activists can collaborate far from the watchful eye of the spy community.
In 2017, the US will spend 54.
9 billion on national intelligence.
It s easy to say you have nothing to hide, but living as we do inside of the cyber-industrial complex, the data of journalists, activists and regular citizens is mainlined straight to the FBI, NSA and CIA if they want it.
Some say that s the first step toward totalitarianism, or the erosion of our constitutional rights.
But one thing is for sure: if you rebel against the system, you can expect the system to come down on you.