Swiss neutrality ‘shattered’ as leading cryptologic firm revealed to be CIA front

Switzerland is reeling from the shock caused by revelations last week that Crypto AG, the world’s leading manufacturer or cryptologic equipment during the Cold War, whose clients included over 120 governments around the world, was a front company owned by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

The revelation, published last Tuesday by The Washington Post and the German public broadcaster ZDF, confirmed rumors that had been circulating since the early 1980s, that Crypto AG had made a secret deal with the US government. It was believed that the Swiss-based company had allowed the US National Security Agency to read the classified messages of dozens of nations that purchased Crypto AG’s encoding equipment. These rumors were further-substantiated in 2015, when a BBC investigation unearthed evidence of a “gentleman’s agreement”, dating to 1955, between a leading NSA official and Boris Hagelin, the Norwegian-born founder and owner of Crypto AG.

But the reality of this alleged secret pact appears to have been even more controversial. According to last week’s revelations, the CIA and West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) secretly purchased the Swiss company and paid off most of its senior executives in order to buy their silence. The secret deal allegedly allowed the US and West Germany to spy on the classified government communications of several of their adversaries —and even allies, including Italy, Spain and Greece, as well as Austria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

What is more, the secret CIA/BND partnership with Crypto AG was known to senior British and Israeli officials, and information derived from it was routinely shared with them. Government officials in Switzerland and even Sweden were aware that Crypto AG had been compromised, but remained silent.  (more...)

Swiss neutrality ‘shattered’ as leading cryptologic firm revealed to be CIA front

Related:

State-Sponsored Commercial Espionage. The Global Theft of Ideas

BND Involved in Intelligence Operations Creating the EU

Bomb threat made against Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga Mohawks as far right escalates talk of violence

A bomb threat made against the Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga Mohawks comes during escalating discussions of violence among Canada’s far right, whose latest obsession is the non-violent Indigenous sovereignty movement that has dominated headlines for weeks.

The Tyendinaga Mohawks blockaded a rail line in Ontario following this month’s RCMP incursion on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in northwestern B.C., part of a project to clear the way for the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline.

“You and your punk friends, the Mohawk warriors, need to call off the blockades,” reads an email sent on Feb. 26 to addresses associated with the Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga township.

“If you don’t, you will find a bomb in your mailbox, and your parents will be in danger.

“This is a threat, you are on notice.”

The email address used to send the threat is linked to a recently suspended Twitter account, according to Anti-Racist Canada, a collective that tracks hate and extremism.

That Twitter account has lately been used to make a variety of threats, including burning reserves and physically attacking an Indigenous woman and her unborn child.

The email address was registered with ProtonMail, which said it “passed it along to our abuse team and they will investigate and take proper measures if needed.” Later ProtonMail said that the address had been deleted by the user.  (more...)

Bomb threat made against Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga Mohawks as far right escalates talk of violence

Related:

Indigenous Rail Blockades Could Become Flashpoint For Far-Right Activity

U.S. neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen targeted Canadian police forces for 'swatting' hoaxes, FBI says

A conspiracy involving a former leader and founding member of violent white supremacist group Atomwaffen targeted police forces in Canada in a large “swatting” campaign, U.S. prosecutors allege.

The group used the harassment technique of reporting fake emergencies to trick heavily armed police teams, often called SWAT units, in masked calls to 11 police agencies across Canada: the RCMP in Alberta, B.C. and New Brunswick; the Ontario Provincial Police; and municipal police forces in Edmonton, Lethbridge, Bancroft, Sudbury, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, according to documents filed in court.

U.S. federal authorities charged several alleged members of the neo-Nazi group on Wednesday for running intimidation campaigns against journalists and members of the Anti-Defamation League in retaliation for reporting on the group’s members and activities.

Among those arrested was John Cameron Denton, 26, of Montgomery, Texas, for an alleged “swatting” conspiracy. He is charged with making interstate threats to injure.

His criminal charge specifically relates to hoax calls sending police scrambling to intervene in faked incidents in Virginia involving a U.S. Cabinet official, a university, a Baptist church and — at the request of Denton — ProPublica, a New York-based newsroom, and one of its journalists who revealed Denton’s identity and role in Atomwaffen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleges.  (more...)

U.S. neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen targeted Canadian police forces for 'swatting' hoaxes, FBI says

The FBI Just Arrested a Bunch of Neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Members

Five “racially motivated violent extremists” with ties to the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen, including its current leader, have been arrested by the FBI, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Of those, four were charged in the U.S. District Court in Seattle for allegedly sending racist and anti-Semitic threats to journalists and activists around the country and the fifth was charged in Virginia for his alleged participation in a swatting campaign.

Wednesday’s news marks the biggest bust of the notorious group since it was founded five years ago, by a group of young, white men who met on the neo-Nazi site Iron March. Since then, the group has been linked to at least five murders in the U.S.

The defendants charged in Seattle are Cameron Brandon Shea, 24, from Redmond, Washington; Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe, 20, from Spring Hill, Florida; Johnny Roman Garza, 20, of Queens Creek, Arizona; and Kaleb Cole, 24, of Montgomery, Texas.

Cole, the current leader of the racist group, was also wanted by local authorities who issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of possessing firearms in violation of an extreme risk protection order.  (more...)

The FBI Just Arrested a Bunch of Neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Members

Neo-Nazi Patrik Mathews’s arrest highlights Ottawa’s support for Ukrainian far right

The recent arrest of a Canadian neo-Nazi on the run in the United States should embarrass the federal government — and not just for the obvious reasons.

Last week former Canadian Forces engineer Patrik Mathews pled not guilty to gun charges, a month after he was arrested by the FBI. The prosecution says he called for the poisoning of water supplies and derailment of trains in order to provoke conflict leading to the creation of a white ethnostate. Mathews had fled southward in August after he was outed as a recruiter for The Base, a neo-Nazi group that helped him go underground in the U.S.

Mathews’s case, of course, highlights concern about white supremacists in the Canadian Forces. While the issue has received recent attention, it’s as old as the Canadian military. Many commentators point to the 1990s Somalia affair, when Canadian soldiers tortured and murdered a Somali teenager while on a humanitarian mission, but up to the end of World War II, Royal Canadian Navy policy said that “candidates must be of pure European descent.” In other words, the problem of racism in the Canadian Forces is structural and longstanding, never having been properly acknowledged and dealt with.

But there is another angle to Mathews’s arrest that should concern every Canadian worried about the rise of the far right. The Base has ties to the most well-organized neo-Nazis in the world — whom Ottawa has not only failed to condemn, but in fact bolstered.

In 2014 the far right benefited from the right-wing nationalist EuroMaidan movement that ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Ottawa supported the U.S.-backed coup against Yanukovych, who was oscillating between the European Union and Russia. In July 2015 the Canadian Press reported that opposition protesters were camped in the Canadian Embassy for a week during the February 2014 rebellion against Yanukovych. And since the mid-2000s, Canada has provided significant support to right-wing, nationalist opponents of Russia in Ukraine.  (more)...

Neo-Nazi Patrik Mathews’s arrest highlights Ottawa’s support for Ukrainian far right

Related:

Meet Andriy Parubiy, the Neo-Nazi Leader Turned Speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament

Indigenous Rail Blockades Could Become Flashpoint For Far-Right Activity

MONTREAL — Tensions around rail blockades such as the ones in Saint-Lambert and Edmonton show that the situation has “all the ingredients” for far-right groups to further escalate the conflict, according to some experts.

On Wednesday, a group of counter-protesters dismantled a barricade erected in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en on a CN railway just outside of Edmonton.

While it’s not known who organized the event, the men who removed the blockade were quickly congratulated by groups associated with far-right movements, as well as several right-wing commentators.

United We Roll called the dismantlement a “victory for the country.” The group has been described as a “a revisioned white nationalist, white supremacist movement” by McMaster University Prof. Ameil Joseph, who specializes in race theory, immigration and mental health.

Meanwhile, Rebel Media founder and right-wing commentator Ezra Levant promised to “send a case of beer” to one of the counter-protesters who dismantled the barricade “on behalf of a grateful nation.”  (more...)

Indigenous Rail Blockades Could Become Flashpoint For Far-Right Activity

Related:

Far-Right Groups Engaging in Vigilantism

WEXIT Party Leader Downing Shares Violent Fantasies About Indigenous Protesters

KKKanada's dark soul re-animates:

Toronto is the political and corporate wing of global extractive violence

It is well known within the mining sector that if you want to start a mining company, you do so in Canada, thanks to nearly endless layers of governmental support including exploration subsidies, extensive tax breaks, a free-entry tenure system, and international diplomatic assistance. That’s why the city of Toronto is, in many regards, the engine of the global mining sector.

The Toronto Stock Exchange and Venture Exchange host 50 per cent of the world’s mining companies and raised $6.5 billion dollars of capital for the industry in 2018 alone. Bay Street is aflush with legal teams, financiers, and traders working tirelessly to facilitate the next big mining project. Of Canada’s more than 1,300 publicly listed mining companies, 699 held foreign mining assets worth $168.7 billion. Many of these companies are headquartered in Toronto’s financial district.

The city, as a space of finance, capitalization and networking, is vitally important to the function and expansion of the global mining sector. To help maintain its status as a mining juggernaut and to facilitate further project development, Toronto hosts the annual convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC).

Each March, the halls of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre are transformed into a hotbed of extractive business activity. In 2019, the 87th meeting of PDAC hosted over 1,000 trade-show exhibitors and more than 500 investor booths, where junior mining companies put their latest mining frontier narratives on display, hoping to catch the eye of willing investors. With over 25,000 attendees, nearly 30 per cent of whom arrived from outside of Canada, the convention itself has become an indicator of the global mining sector’s health.

But the spectacle that is PDAC conceals the intense destruction wrought by the mining sector. At the convention, there is little talk of the consequences of the extraction and processing of metals and minerals, which accounts for 26 per cent of global carbon emissions and more than 60 percent of the 100 billion tonnes of materials consumed annually by humans.

For their part, Canadian mining companies are implicated in extreme cases of violence around the world. In Latin America alone, conflicts with Canadian companies resulted in more than 400 injuries and 44 deaths reported between 2000 and 2015. Five UN bodies and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have called on Canada to keep its corporate actors accountable.  (more...)

Toronto is the political and corporate wing of global extractive violence