Revealed: TrapWire spy cams' ticket to Australia
Asher Moses and Dylan Welch
A shadowy private security company with deep links to the CIA - and a parent company awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in Australian government transport contracts - is operating a pervasive global surveillance and facial recognition network on behalf of law enforcement.
Over the past few days the internet has been abuzz with revelations regarding TrapWire, an analytical system that integrates with surveillance cameras to capture photographs or video evidence of "suspicious activity".
TrapWire is owned by the multinational conglomerate, Cubic Corporation, which in 2010 signed a $370 million contract with the NSW Government to provide Sydney's electronic ticketing system for public transport, based on the London Oyster card system.
In April this year it was awarded a $65 million contract to provide services to CityRail and also runs the Brisbane "go card" system.
Fairfax is seeking comment from the government about whether there has been any consideration of bringing the TrapWire system here.
The TrapWire story began late last week, when emails from a private intelligence company, Stratfor - originally released as part of WikiLeaks's Global Intelligence Files in February - appeared online.
The emails and other documentation revealed TrapWire is installed in some of the western world's most sensitive locations - including the White House, 10 Downing Street, New Scotland Yard, the London Stock Exchange and five hundred locations in the New York subway system. Trapwire is also installed in many Las Vegas casinos.
An Australian single mother who online is an anti-surveillance state activist known as Asher Wolf is leading a campaign to expose the clandestine operation, which was created in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and has been operating without public scrutiny for years.
Australia is leading the way in development of facial recognition technology and Australian government agencies have reacted enthusiastically to it.
The founder of TrapWire is 30-year Central Intelligence Agency veteran Richard Hollis Helms. Several of TrapWire's top managers are also former CIA officers. It is part of security company Abraxas Corporation, which reportedly holds sensitive and lucrative contracts involving activities such as creating fake identities for CIA officers.
In December 2010 Cubic Corporation bought Abraxas for $US124 million.
The aim of TrapWire is to prevent terrorist attacks by recognising suspicious patterns in activity. It forwards its reports to police departments across the US and law enforcement organisations such as FBI and US Department of Homeland Security.
Helms said in a 2005 interview that TrapWire "can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists."
In 2007 the company said that it analyses each aspect of a security incident and "compares it to all previously-collected reporting across the entire TrapWire network. Any patterns detected - links among individuals, vehicles, or activities - will be reported back to each affected facility."
In addition to analysing surveillance footage TrapWire also operates "see something say something" citizen reporting campaigns in Las Vegas, New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles and all reports received are collated in the TrapWire database, analysed by the company and forwarded to law enforcement.
While it appears that TrapWire does not operate in Australia, its parent company Cubic holds several large Commonwealth, NSW and Queensland government contracts. It operates in Australia as Cubic Transportation with offices in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. In 2008 it also opened a defence subsidiary based in Queensland, Cubic Defence Australia, run by Mark Horn.
Cubic Defence Australia has won about $32 million in contracts with the Australian defence force, mainly providing combat simulation and training systems.
Comment is being sought from Cubic about the links between their work in Australia and TrapWire.
Ms Wolf, 32, whose father survived a Siberian gulag during World War II and grandmother at 15 had her thumb cut off by Soviet Union secret police, said she had personal motivations behind her campaigning for civil liberties.
"All Australians should be concerned about the outsourcing of Australian government (or military operations) to foreign-owned, private contractors with links to spy agencies," she said.
She said there were inherent conflicts of interest with profit-driven private contractors working in national security. Ms Wolf is also concerned about Australian law enforcement demands for telco data retention and a lack of adequate time for public consultations during the inquiry into national security legislation reforms.
"They're drowning in data and I don't believe it's helping national security, I believe it's making us more insecure because we don't know where to look at real threats," she said.
Ms Wolf, who has a three-year-old son, said "it was definitely more interesting to be scrolling through tweets on info-warfare than watching 3am infomercials while breastfeeding".
The online hacking collective Anonymous has also bought into the issue. They are trying to organise an event called "smash a cam Saturday", where they provide the internet addresses of US security cameras attached to the TrapWire network, and then provide instructions to supporters about how to hack them.
According to Cubic's 2011 annual report, its revenues in Australia have ballooned to $115 million in 2011, up from $39.9 million in 2009.
"The primary reasons for the increase in gross margins from services in 2011 were the improvement in margin and increase in service revenue related to our transportation business in the U.K and Australia as well as the gross margin from 2011 Abraxas sales since the acquisition in December 2010," the annual report reads.
A search on Cubic's websites reveals no information about Abraxas or TrapWire. The page on TrapWire's website outlining its executives and their links to the CIA has recently been removed.
On its website TrapWire says it was founded in 2004 to build and deploy counter-terrorism technologies "in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks". It seeks to prevent such attacks from occurring in the future and boasts on its website that its technology can "detect patterns of behavior indicative of pre-operational planning".
US authorities were criticised after the al Qaeda attacks of 2001 over failings in information sharing, and part of TrapWire's appeals appears to be that it is designed to make it easier to share information across a global surveillance network. Despite the pervasiveness of its monitoring, it states one of its advantages is that it does not share "sensitive of personally identifiable information".
The internal TrapWire emails were obtained by hackers when they broke into Stratfor Global Intelligence, which had a partnership deal with TrapWire which saw Stratfor earning an eight per cent finder's fee for any clients it referred to the Cubic company.
Separately, a Microsoft-powered police surveillance system is being installed in New York City that connects thousands of New York Police Department and private security cameras in the city, recording and archiving up to 30 days worth of footage at a time. Police can backtrack through the footage when investigating crimes. Microsoft plans to offer it up to other cities around the world.
WikiLeaks dumps Stratfor email dirt on TrapWire, a CIA-connected global spying system
The TrapWire Threat Meter (TTM) may possible be at high red alert since WikiLeaks dumped more shocking surveillance emails from the hacked global intelligence company Strafor. Privacy SOS reports on "the revelation of an enormous, shadowy surveillance company with deep ties to the CIA: Trapwire exploded on the surveillance scene like a bat out of hell. And people are justifiably freaked out about it."
TrapWire is run by Abraxas Corp's Abraxas Applications. The 2007 whitepaper [PDF] described TrapWire as "a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance." No wonder photographers continue to be treated as potential terrorists, since TrapWire says terrorist pre-attack surveillance includes "photographing, measuring and signaling." This Private Paste from Justin Ferguson, who helped spread the word of this leak, states, "It's essentially a system setup to detect surveillance, so if you've ever taken a picture of basically anything 'important' you were probably flagged in a 'suspicious activity report' (SAR). It's logged to a central database and then cross-site reports are disseminated."
When DHS launched the SARs database, senior homeland security official John Cohen stressed that "authorized users of the [SARs] system are instructed on how to distinguish between behavior that warrants scrutiny and lawful conduct that doesn’t justify attention from the government." Yet this Stratfor email claims a TrapWire benefit of using the system is to "help 'walk back the cat' after an attack to identify terrorist suspects and modus operandi.” But mission creep infects all technology and databases store everything forever on everyone waiting to be data-mined; with all the ridiculous you-might-be-a-terrorist-if lists identifying much more than real terrorists, we never know what might be considered suspicous tomorrow. This note states, “Surv footage can be walked back and track the suspects from the get go w/facial recognition software (or TrapWire) technology." Didn't the EFF warn us that most Americans are in a facial recognition database even now? This 2006 United States Patent and Trademark Office says TrapWire uses "pan-tilt-zoom cameras" and human reports entered into databases using a "10-characteristic description of individuals" and an "8-characteristic description vehicles."
Public Intelligence says Stratfor emails imply "that TrapWire is in use by the U.S. Secret Service, the British security service MI5, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as counterterrorism divisions in both the Los Angeles and New York Police Department" and the LA fusion center. The emails also suggest that TrapWire is in use at military bases around the country. "A July 2011 email from Burton to others at Stratfor describes how the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Pentagon have all begun using TrapWire and are 'on the system now.' Burton described the Navy as the 'next on the list'."
This 2009 email from Stratfor Chairman Don Kuykendall says that TrapWire's clients included Scotland Yard, #10 Downing, the White House, and many MNC's (multinational corporations). There were also plans to introduce TrapWire to "Wal Mart, Dell and other Fred cronies." I recall a big push by DHS involving TV screens and See Something Say Something videos at Walmart encouraging regular Wally World Joes to turn into citizen spies and report other allegedly suspicious shoppers. In 2010, Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano said, "This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities."
Public Intelligence wrote, that these activities are part of a larger program called iWatch, which also feeds into TrapWire according to a leaked email:
iWatch pulls community member reporting into the TrapWire search engine and compares SARs across the country...with potential matches being fed back to the local LE agency. An amazing amount of good quality reporting is coming in from alert citizens (and police officers) in the DC area in particular.
There are plenty of alarming TrapWire facts released in Antisec hacktivist-acquired Statfor email dumps. In an attempt to separate fact from hysterical fiction spreading through the interwebz, Privacy SOS has nicely outlined TrapWire's early history and the basics of what TrapWire does. The article also points to this "disturbing" leaked email from Burton stating, "Regarding SF landmarks of interest -- they need something like TrapWire more for threats from activists than from terror threats. Both are useful, but the activists are ever present around here."
The Stratfor emails were mirrored since WikiLeaks was under massive DDoS attacks, but even the mirrors were attacked. Russia Today reported, "Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the servers of WikiLeaks supporter sites were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabits of traffic per second. On Friday, WikiLeaks tweeted that their own site was sustaining attacks of 10 Gb/second, adding, 'Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them'."
This is just scratching the TrapWire surface, but it's also interesting to note what Cryptome added. Regarding Microsoft and NYPD's all-seeing Big Brother crime and terrorism prevention system aka the "Domain Awareness System," Cryptome has a plethora of Private Paste information listed under "Renamed TrapWire Spying System - NYPD-Microsoft Domain Spying System."
infinity HiGH
And WikiLeaks are criminals... :rolleyes:
GGM
Warned a full 50+ years ago and it's the truth now more than ever. Things like privatised jails, military forces and even domestic security firms given police like powers are a reality that lets governments overstep bounds and do what they'd like without being held accountable. This surveillance system is no different. But much like anything else in life I'm sure as humans we'll have to get royally fuct over before caring enough to do anything about it.
It truly is amazing how 3000 people dying have lead to billions of first world citizens losing so many liberties in the last 11 years that took many decades to build and obtain.
hardcore trancer
quote:
Originally posted by GGM
It truly is amazing how 3000 people dying have lead to billions of first world citizens losing so many liberties in the last 11 years that took many decades to build and obtain.
^^This!! yet barely anyone cares these days about any of these matters..
bucky
This all sounds like the that happens on the tv show Person of Interest.
pkcRAISTLIN
yeah, i'd expect my crazy canuck cousins to be up in arms about all of this. try and learn a little more about the issue before going off half cocked.
trapwire is software that analyses already-obtained CCTV footage. said footage is far more intrusive than the analysis of such imo.
interesting that the original story is now offline. either our friends at the sydney morning herald have been taken down by the global elite spymasters or perhaps they felt a little foolish once digging a little further.
but i'd like to thank the single mother for her righteous fight against The Man. must be nice to have all that time on your hands while no-doubt collecting your dole cheque. don't complain about that facet of government intrusion do you!
culorut
GGM
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
trapwire is software that analyses already-obtained CCTV footage. said footage is far more intrusive than the analysis of such imo.
I'd say both are pretty crappy but I wouldn't discount the software end of this. Funny thing is the fight against CCTV usage was weak and didn't accomplish much, my prediction is the same for the current one against the facial recognition side of this. People just don't care until it affects them directly.
Footage = you in a bunch of recordings in god knows how many databases from who knows how many cities/locations and when. More or less impossible for anyone to go through all the footage manually and compile a close to complete list of footage you are in.
Software = take facial recognition with a video of you using something linked to your identity (ie any ATM camera, a security swipe card, passport in an airport, a transit card if your city happens to have your identity on it etc) and the software can now attach a name to your face. From there you only need to run a search query and voila the random footage from above is now all there with a list and of where you been and when. This tech employed in a city like London where you're on a camera while in public more often that not is pretty intense.
Beyond creating awareness on the issue TrapWire is somewhat irrelevant as the technology to do this has been around for years and they didn't create it. They're using already existing tools to earn profit which is the basis of most corporations' existence. Even if they got shut down tomorrow without something in place to regulate this type of stuff then someone else would just pop up and fill the demand.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
Originally posted by GGM
I'd say both are pretty crappy but I wouldn't discount the software end of this. Funny thing is the fight against CCTV usage was weak and didn't accomplish much, my prediction is the same for the current one against the facial recognition side of this. People just don't care until it affects them directly.
Footage = you in a bunch of recordings in god knows how many databases from who knows how many cities/locations and when. More or less impossible for anyone to go through all the footage manually and compile a close to complete list of footage you are in.
Software = take facial recognition with a video of you using something linked to your identity (ie any ATM camera, a security swipe card, passport in an airport, a transit card if your city happens to have your identity on it etc) and the software can now attach a name to your face. From there you only need to run a search query and voila the random footage from above is now all there with a list and of where you been and when. This tech employed in a city like London where you're on a camera while in public more often that not is pretty intense.
Beyond creating awareness on the issue TrapWire is somewhat irrelevant as the technology to do this has been around for years and they didn't create it. They're using already existing tools to earn profit which is the basis of most corporations' existence. Even if they got shut down tomorrow without something in place to regulate this type of stuff then someone else would just pop up and fill the demand.
dont disagree with anything you've written here. i just think some people are way too paranoid and quick to jump to 1984 conclusions without the corresponding level of evidence to support their fears.
mahalliner
quote:
Originally posted by GGM
Warned a full 50+ years ago and it's the truth now more than ever. Things like privatised jails, military forces and even domestic security firms given police like powers are a reality that lets governments overstep bounds and do what they'd like without being held accountable. This surveillance system is no different. But much like anything else in life I'm sure as humans we'll have to get royally fuct over before caring enough to do anything about it.
It truly is amazing how 3000 people dying have lead to billions of first world citizens losing so many liberties in the last 11 years that took many decades to build and obtain.
Don't forget that Eisenhower also wanted to include the collusion of congress in this speech but elected not to include it in the final draft.
Sadly, immense domestic and foreign signals intelligence networks like this aren't even surprising to hear about anymore and that is what is most shocking. With NSA whistleblowers admitting that the NSA has collected literally trillions of 'transactions' like emails, SMS messages and phone conversations and nobody really bats an eye, I'll be surprised if much happens with this.
Until it gets to the point that we're all going to the local all-candidates debates for our local MP, MPP, MLA, or council elections and asking for their positions on digital privacy and information security (i.e. protecting electronic health records, etc.) and electing candidates who consider that important nothing will change. Also, following up that with making it known that if they fail to make any real progress on those issues they will not be re-elected.
Magnetonium
This technology can and will be used by authoritarian regimes and dictators alike, in controlling their populations. At this stage its obvious that the technology potential in this field is huge and far from being fully realized, technology is its infancy stage.
