2 December 2010
Last updated at 10:25 ET
Police looked at funding for the cameras in 2007, the report said
More than 200 so-called “spy” cameras put up in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham will be removed.
West Midlands Police Authority said Project Champion will be withdrawn and all cameras and poles removed at an estimated cost of £630,000.
The cameras, some of which were hidden, were paid for with £3m of government money earmarked for tackling terrorism.
The decision was rubber-stamped at a routine authority meeting some weeks after the force said they should go.
‘Lack of consultation’
They were erected in the Washwood Heath and Sparkbrook areas of the city and members of the community said they were angry about a lack of consultation.
A recent independent report into the project was highly critical of the scheme and the police.
The chief constable of West Midlands Police, Chris Sims, said last month at the last authority meeting that he agreed the cameras should be removed.
All the hidden cameras were removed some months ago and the remainder that were clearly in view were covered with bags.
The police have made assurances that none of them have ever been switched on.
It is not known when the poles and remaining cameras will start to be removed following the authority’s approval.
Lawyers from across the government are investigating whether it can prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage, a senior defense official said Tuesday.
The official, not authorized to comment publicly, spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The decision is complicated by the very newness of Assange’s Internet- based outfit: Is it journalism or espionage or something in between?
Other charges also might be possible, including theft of government property or receipt of stolen government property.
By Pete Yost
The government’s decisions about whether or how to bring criminal charges against participants in the WikiLeaks disclosures are complicated by the very newness of Julian Assange’s Internet-based outfit: Is it journalism or espionage or something in between?
Justice, State and Defense Department lawyers are discussing whether it might be possible to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder and others under the Espionage Act, a senior defense official said Tuesday.
They are debating whether the Espionage Act applies, and to whom, according to this official, who spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Other charges also might be possible, including theft of government property or receipt of stolen government property.
Rep. Peter King of New York called for Assange to be charged under the Espionage Act and asked whether WikiLeaks can be designated a terrorist organisation.
But Assange has portrayed himself as a crusading journalist: He told ABC News by e-mail that his latest batch of State Department documents would expose “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.” He told Time magazine he targets only “organisations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior.”
Longtime Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris, who represented CIA official Aldrich Ames and other espionage defendants, said Tuesday that Assange could argue he is protected by the First Amendment, a freedom of the press defense. “That would be one, certainly,” Cacheris said.
Constrained by the First Amendment’s free press guarantees, the Justice Department has steered clear of prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked secrets. Leakers have occasionally been prosecuted, usually government workers charged under easier-to-prove statutes criminalising the mishandling of classified documents.
But two leakers faced Espionage Act charges, with mixed results.
The last leak that approached the size of the WikiLeaks releases was the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration.
The Supreme Court slapped down President Richard Nixon’s effort to stop newspapers from publishing those papers. But the leaker, ex-Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, was charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorised possession and theft of the papers.
A federal judge threw out the charges because of government misconduct including burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s files by the White House “plumbers” unit.
The Reagan administration had more success against Samuel Loring Morison, a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy and grandson of a famous US historian. Morison was convicted under the Espionage Act and of theft of government property for supplying a British publication, Jane’s Defence Weekly, with a US satellite photo of a Russian aircraft carrier under construction in a Black Sea port. Dozens of news organisations filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Morison because he was a $5,000-a-year part-time editor with Jane’s sister publication and thus arguably a journalist.
But WikiLeaks has entered a space where no journalist has gone before. News organisations have often sought information, including government secrets, for specific stories and printed secrets that government workers delivered to them, but none has matched Assange’s open worldwide invitation to send him any secret or confidential information a source can lay hands on.
Is WikiLeaks the leaker or merely the publisher?
“The courts have been somewhat reluctant to draw a line of demarcation between what we call mainstream media and everyone else,” said Washington attorney Stan Brand. “If these people are publishing and exercising First Amendment rights, I don’t know why they’re less entitled to their First Amendment rights to publish.”
But at a news conference Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder contrasted WikiLeaks with traditional news organisations, which he said acted responsibly in the matter even though several posted some classified material. Some news organisations consulted with the government in advance to avoid printing harmful material; Assange has claimed his efforts to do likewise were rebuffed.
“One can compare the way in which the various news organisations that have been involved in this have acted as opposed to the way in which WikiLeaks has,” said Holder.
Some see openings for the government.
Assange “has gone a long way down the road of talking himself into a possible violation of the Espionage Act,” First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said on National Public Radio, noting that Assange has said leaks could bring down a US administration.
Washington lawyer Bob Bittman expressed surprise the Justice Department has not already charged Assange under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property over his earlier release of classified documents about US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bittman said it was widely believed those disclosures harmed US national security, in particular US intelligence sources and methods, meeting the requirement in several sections of the act that there be either intent or reason to believe disclosure could injure the United States.
“These are not easy questions,” said Washington lawyer Stephen Ryan, a former assistant US attorney and former Senate Government Affairs Committee general counsel. Ryan said it would be legally respectable to argue Assange is a journalist protected by the First Amendment and never had a duty to protect US secrets.
But Ryan added, “The flip side is whether he could be charged with aiding and abetting or conspiracy with an individual who did have a duty to protect those secrets.”
On the question of conspiracy there’s a legal difference between being a passive recipient of leaked material and being a prime mover egging on a prospective leaker, legal experts say.
Much could depend on what the investigation uncovers.
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is being held in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., charged with leaking video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April.
Military investigators say Manning is a person of interest in the leak of nearly 77,000 Afghan war records WikiLeaks published online in July. Though Manning has not been charged in the latest release of internal US government documents, WikiLeaks has hailed him as a hero.
Another obstacle would be getting Assange to the United States. His whereabouts are not publicly known.
In France, Interpol placed Assange on its most-wanted list Tuesday after Sweden issued an arrest warrant against him as part of a drawn-out rape probe – involving allegations he has denied. The Interpol “red notice” is likely to make international travel more difficult for him.
But even if Assange were charged and arrested in a country that has an extradition treaty with the United States, there could be problems getting him here. The Espionage Act carries a maximum penalty of death, and nations with no death penalty often refuse to send defendants here if they face possible execution.
One renowned First Amendment and national security lawyer, Duke law professor emeritus Michael Tigar urged caution.
“The US reaction to all of this is rather overblown,” Tigar said. “One should hesitate a long time before bringing a prosecution in a case like this. The First Amendment means that sometimes public expression makes the government squirm. … That diplomats collect information, and are sometimes brutally candid, comes as no surprise to anybody.”
(This version corrects grammar in 1st paragraph, changing “is” to “are.”)
AP
The criminal case of the alleged Goldman spy is off and running, and it’s shaping up to be a good one. The case seems likely to open a window into the mysterious world of high-frequency trading and to shed some light inside Wall Street’s most notorious powerhouse, Goldman Sachs. But the lawsuit might do something else, too: It could test legal limits related to trade secrets — and cause angst far from the trading world.
The man of the hour is the defendant, Sergey Aleynikov. Aleynikov was a programmer in Goldman’s high-frequency trading group and is accused of taking code in order to help a new employer compete with Goldman. He disputes this and has said he intended to take some code, but not anything secret – just open-source code. The open-source part of that is crucial.
When open-source code is involved, what can be defended as a trade secret? His argument is “going to make it harder for government to prove that what was taken was in fact proprietary to Goldman,” says Brent Cossrow of the Employee Defection and Trade Secrets Practice Group of law firm Fisher Phillips. That could roil the high-frequency trading world, a competitive and controversial business that is transforming the financial markets. Beyond that, any company that has open-source software sitting on its networks, integrated into its digital intellectual property, might have to circle the wagons and figure out what to do.
High-frequency trading relies on algorithms that exploit tiny price differences in the markets. Do that enough, fast enough, and it can lead to big profits. Algorithms that do best have essentially found a niche in the market, and their owners are secretive because they don’t want anyone else muscling in on their niche. The algorithm is the secret sauce.
Goldman purchased its original code in 1999 from Hull Trading, founded by Chicago trader Blair Hull, for $531 million. After that, Goldman presumably had the right to do what it wanted with the code. It could add to it, take away from it, and tinker with it at will. It brought on programmers to do that, including Aleynikov. Programmers are vital in this space, and they’re demanding high pay. After UBS reportedly came calling for Aleynikov, Goldman paid Aleynikov $400,000 a year.
But when programmers write new code to insert into existing code, that can take hours. So sometimes, instead, they use open-source alternatives available for free on the internet. Open-source software is meant to be shared. It’s used in many industries, but Wall Street’s programmers find it particularly useful. In trading, time is money, so speed is prized.
In this case, proprietary and open-source code come head to head. Around the time Aleynikov planned to take a new job, he uploaded some code. Goldman says he stole proprietary code that it and the government claims is a trade secret. But Aleynikov says that he only meant to take open source code, which by definition isn’t secret.
Cossrow says this argument raises several questions. How much of what Aleynikov downloaded was open source? How much of it was proprietary? Those questions are possible to answer — it requires looking at the code and at the metadata (data about data) underlying it. That could mean laying bare Goldman’s code, which would be something between a headache and nightmare for Goldman. The government wants the courtroom closed if that happens.
But there are more questions: as there are hundreds of open-source licenses, what were the terms of the open-source license or licenses associated with the code Aleynikov is accused of taking? And how did Aleynikov use the code in the broader software?
All that leads to the ultimate question: how much open source code, and of what quality, does it take to dilute a trade secret? As Cossrow explains, “if you bake the world’s best brownie, and the recipe is secret, the mere fact that you used water as an ingredient doesn’t mean the whole recipe is diluted.” However the courts haven’t gotten much more specific than that.
For lawyers like Cossrow, this case is turning into a big deal. There’s no telling where this argument could take Aleynikov, but if it works, it could turn out that Goldman’s alleged trade secrets aren’t really secret at all. That could blow up Goldman’s trading profits. It’s all very interesting stuff — and that was just the first day of trial.
Ottawa, Canada (CNN) — Scrupulously silent in public but colorfully candid in person, the former head of Canada’s spy agency didn’t hold back in a meeting with a senior U.S. State Department official in July 2008. It was a meeting that he had assumed would stay private and the content classified.
According to the cable marked “secret,” but now part of the WikiLeaks document dump, Jim Judd admits his spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, was “increasingly distracted from its mission by legal challenges that could endanger foreign intelligence-sharing with Canadian agencies.”
According to the cable, he complains about Canadians having an “Alice in Wonderland’ world view and goes on to describe Canadian courts “whose judges have tied CSIS ‘in knots,’ making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad.”
“The situation, he commented, left government security agencies on the defensive and losing public support for their effort to protect Canada and its allies,” the U.S. cable says.
A Canadian court had earlier that year agreed to release a videotaped interrogation of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, who recently pleaded guilty to murder in a special military hearing at Guantanamo.
Of the video release, the cable states that Judd told the State Department that “a videotaped recording of a tearful Omar Khadr at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay would trigger “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” and “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.”
Judd is now retired.
The formerly secret WikiLeaks cable has sent Canada into damage control. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said at a press conference Monday that “these leaked documents that pertain to Canada are in my view … not something that will harm our relations. I do find it deplorable, though, that documents are leaked in this fashion”
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton contacted Cannon over the weekend to brief him on the Canadian disclosures in the WikiLeaks documents. WikiLeaks says it has more than 2,000 documents that pertain to Canada, most of which have not yet been released.
Intriguingly, this cable from July 2008 refers to Canada’s spy agency agreeing to open a channel to Iran’s Intelligence service, but added that it was something Judd has not yet “figured out.”
Also in the cable is a reference to Judd saying his spy agency “responded to recent, non-specific intelligence on possible terror operations by ‘vigorously harassing’ known Hezbollah members in Canada.”
