The Criminal N.S.A.

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:35 pm

The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping
The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing "the Internet's backbone." How does that work?
OLGA KHAZANJUL 16 2013, 1:55 PM ET

Image
Barta IV/Flickr
In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.

Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures.

The project ended in 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold information about the program to the KGB for $35,000. He's still serving his life prison term.

The operation might have ended, but for the NSA, this underwater strategy clearly stuck around.

In addition to gaining access to web companies' servers and asking for phone metadata, we've now learned that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies are tapping directly into the Internet's backbone -- the undersea fiber optic cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers. For some privacy activists, this process is even more worrisome than monitoring call metadata because it allows governments to make copies of everything that transverses these cables, if they wanted to.

The British surveillance programs have fittingly sinister titles: "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," according to The Guardian.

A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far.

The scale of the resulting data harvest is tremendous. From The Guardian:

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites -- all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

In an interview with online security analyst Jacob Appelbaum, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the British spy agency GCHQ "worse than" the NSA, saying it represents the first "full take" system, in which surveillance networks catch all Internet traffic regardless of its content. Appelbaum asked Snowden if "anyone could escape" Tempora:

"Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers," Snowden said. "Even the Queen's selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed."

The U.S.'s own cable-tapping program, known by the names OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW, as revealed in an NSA PowerPoint slide, apparently functions similarly to Tempora, accessing "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," according to The Washington Post. The slide indicates that Prism and these so-called "upstream" programs work together somehow, with an arrow saying "You Should Use Both" pointing to the two operations.

So how does one tap into an underwater cable?

The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line -- the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.

Image

A map of undersea cables. (TeleGeography)
More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world's emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.

In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points -- spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. "At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually," Deutsche Welle reported.

But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it's easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the "Five Eyes" -- the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians -- that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.

The tapping process apparently involves using so-called "intercept probes." According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries or operating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic.

"We believe our 3D MEMS technology -- as used by governments and various agencies -- is involved in the collection of intelligence from ... undersea fibers," said a director of business development at Glimmerglass, a government contractor that appeared, at least according to a 2010 Aviation Week article, to conduct similar types of interceptions, though it's unclear whether they took part in the British Tempora or the U.S. upstream programs. In a PowerPoint presentation, Glimmerglass once boasted that it provided "optical cyber solutions" to the intelligence community, offering the ability to monitor everything from Gmail to Facebook. "We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception. They've passed laws, publicly known, that they will monitor all international traffic for interdiction of any kind of terrorist activity."

Image

Slide from a Glimmerglass presentation
The British publication PC Pro presented another theory: that slightly bending the cables could allow a receiver to capture their contents.

One method is to bend the cable and extract enough light to sniff out the data. "You can get these little cylindrical devices off eBay for about $1,000. You run the cable around the cylinder, causing a slight bend in cable. It will emit a certain amount of light, one or two decibels. That goes into the receiver and all that data is stolen in one or two decibels of light. Without interrupting transfer flow, you can read everything going on on an optical network," said Everett.

The loss is so small, said Everett, that anyone who notices it might attribute it to a loose connection somewhere along the line. "They wouldn't even register someone's tapping into their network," he added.

Once it's gathered, the data gets sifted. Most of it is discarded, but the filters pull out material that touches on one of the 40,000 search terms chosen by the NSA and GCHQ -- that's the content the two agencies inspect more closely.

The British anti-surveillance group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the U.K. government, arguing that such practices amount to "blanked surveillance" and saying that British courts do "not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorization for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications." Their argument is that the existing surveillance laws are from the phone-tapping days and can't be applied to modern, large-scale electronic data collection.

"If their motivation is to catch terrorists, then are there less intrusive methods than spying on everyone whose traffic happens to transverse the U.K.?" said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.

Meanwhile, the British agency, the GCHQ, has defending their practices by saying that they are merely looking for a few suspicious "needles" in a giant haystack of data, and that the techniques have allowed them to uncover terrorist plots.

If groups like Privacy International are successful, it may put an end to the capture of domestic Internet data within the U.K., but as NSA expert Matthew Aid recently told me, since 80 percent of the fiber optic data flows through the U.S., it wouldn't stop the massive surveillance operations here or in other countries -- even if the person on the sending end was British.

It's also worth noting that this type of tapping has been going on for years -- it's just that we're now newly getting worked up about it. In 2007, the New York Times thus described President Bush's expansion of electronic surveillance: "the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants -- latching on to those giant switches -- as long as the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas."

Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny.

The only platform for which there is no encrypted alternative is Apple's iOS, a proprietary software, for which the site had this warning:

"You should not entrust neither your communications nor your data to a closed source device."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Another part of infrastructure?

Postby Allegro » Wed Jul 17, 2013 2:33 am

Mind you, take me out of the field of music, I’m about as technically oriented as a doorknob :). That aside, part of research to attempt finding how things work, I thought of power lines, you know, things that could be, might be (possibly are?) part of the routes that pass data within the infrastructure.

_________________
    WIKI excerpt | Optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made of high quality extruded glass (silica) or plastic, slightly thicker than a human hair. It can function as a waveguide, or “light pipe”, to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of optical fibers is known as fiber optics. Optical fibers are widely used in fiber-optic communications, which permits transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communication. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss and are also immune to electromagnetic interference. Fibers are also used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so that they may be used to carry images, thus allowing viewing in confined spaces. Specially designed fibers are used for a variety of other applications, including sensors and fiber lasers.

_________________
    WIKI excerpt | Submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean. The first submarine communications cables, laid in the 1850s, carried telegraphy traffic. Subsequent generations of cables carried telephone traffic, then data communications traffic. Modern cables use optical fiber technology to carry digital data, which includes telephone, Internet and private data traffic.

    Modern cables are typically 69 millimetres (2.7 in) in diameter and weigh around 10 kilograms per metre (7 lb/ft), although thinner and lighter cables are used for deep-water sections. As of 2010, submarine cables link all the world’s continents except Antarctica.

_________________
    WIKI excerpt | Power line communication (PLC) carries data on a conductor that is also used simultaneously for AC electric power transmission or electric power distribution to consumers. It is also known as power line carrier, power line digital subscriber line (PDSL), mains communication, power line telecom (PLT), power line networking (PLN), and broadband over power lines (BPL).

    A wide range of power line communication technologies are needed for different applications, ranging from home automation to Internet access. Most PLC technologies limit themselves to one type of wires (such as premises wiring within a single building), but some can cross between two levels (for example, both the distribution network and premises wiring). Typically transformers prevent propagating the signal, which requires multiple technologies to form very large networks. Various data rates and frequencies are used in different situations.

    A number of difficult technical problems are common between wireless and power line communication, notably those of spread spectrum radio signals operating in a crowded environment. Radio interference, for example, has long been a concern of amateur radio groups.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby slimmouse » Wed Jul 17, 2013 4:04 am

slimmouse
 
Posts: 6129
Joined: Fri May 20, 2005 7:41 am
Location: Just outside of you.
Blog: View Blog (3)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby justdrew » Wed Jul 17, 2013 5:50 am

July 16, 2013
Unitarian Church, Gun Groups Join EFF to Sue NSA Over Illegal Surveillance
Broad Coalition of Organizations Team Up for Freedom of Association Lawsuit


San Francisco - Nineteen organizations including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) today for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group with years of experience fighting illegal government surveillance in the courts.

"The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA's mass, untargeted collection of Americans' phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation. Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years."

At the heart of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA is the bulk telephone records collection program that was confirmed by last month's publication of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) further confirmed that this formerly secret document was legitimate, and part of a broader program to collect all major telecommunications customers' call histories. The order demands wholesale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other "identifying information" for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months. Government officials further confirmed that this was just one of series of orders issued on a rolling basis since at least 2006.

"People who hold controversial views – whether it's about gun ownership policies, drug legalization, or immigration – often must express views as a group in order to act and advocate effectively," said Cohn. "But fear of individual exposure when participating in political debates over high-stakes issues can dissuade people from taking part. That's why the Supreme Court ruled in 1958 that membership lists of groups have strong First Amendment protection. Telephone records, especially complete records collected over many years, are even more invasive than membership lists, since they show casual or repeated inquiries as well as full membership."

"The First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has a proud history of working for justice and protecting people in jeopardy for expressing their political views," said Rev. Rick Hoyt. "In the 1950s, we resisted the McCarthy hysteria and supported blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, and we fought California's 'loyalty oaths' all the way to the Supreme Court. And in the 1980s, we gave sanctuary to refugees from civil wars in Central America. The principles of our faith often require our church to take bold stands on controversial issues. We joined this lawsuit to stop the illegal surveillance of our members and the people we serve. Our church members and our neighbors who come to us for help should not fear that their participation in the church might have consequences for themselves or their families. This spying makes people afraid to belong to our church community."

In addition to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the full list of plaintiffs in this case includes the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Calguns Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, People for the American Way, and TechFreedom.

EFF also represents the plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA, a class action case filed on behalf of individuals in 2008 aimed at ending the NSA's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. Last week, a federal court judge rejected the U.S. government's latest attempt to dismiss the case, allowing the allegations at the heart of the suit to move forward under the supervision of a public federal court.

For the full complaint in First Unitarian v. NSA:
https://www.eff.org/node/75009
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
User avatar
justdrew
 
Posts: 11966
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 7:57 pm
Location: unknown
Blog: View Blog (11)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:28 am

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Can Edward Snowden Be Deterred?
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 8:05am, July 16, 2013.

How to Be a Rogue Superpower
A Manual for the Twenty-First Century
By Tom Engelhardt

It’s hard even to know how to take it in. I mean, what’s really happening? An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong. His goal: to expose a vast surveillance structure built in the shadows in the post-9/11 years and significantly aimed at Americans. He leaks some of the documents to a columnist at the British Guardian and to the Washington Post. The response is unprecedented: an “international manhunt” (or more politely but less accurately, “a diplomatic full court press”) conducted not by Interpol or the United Nations but by the planet’s sole superpower, the very government whose practices the leaker was so intent on exposing.

And that’s just for starters. Let’s add another factor. The leaker, a young man with great techno-savvy, lets the world know that he’s picked and chosen among the NSA files in his possession. He’s releasing only those he thinks the American public needs in order to start a full-scale debate about the unprecedented secret world of surveillance that their taxpayer dollars have created. In other words, this is no “document dump.” He wants to spark change without doing harm.

But here’s the kicker: he couldn’t be more aware of previous whistleblower cases, the punitive reaction of his government to them, and the fate that might be his. As a result, we now know, he has encrypted the full set of files in his possession and left them in one or more safe places for unknown individuals -- that is, we don’t know who they are -- to access, should he be taken by the U.S.

In other words, from the time Edward Snowden’s first leaked documents came out, it was obvious that he was in control of how much of the NSA’s secret world would be seen. It would be hard then not to conclude that capturing him, imprisoning him, trying him, and throwing away the key is likely to increase, not decrease, the flow of those documents. Knowing that, the Obama administration and the representatives of our secret world went after him anyway -- after one man on a global scale and in a way that may not have a precedent. No thought of future embarrassment stopped them, nor, it seems, did they hesitate because of possible resentments engendered by their heavy-handed pressure on numerous foreign governments.

The result has been a global spectacle, as well as a worldwide debate about the spying practices of the U.S. (and its allies). In these weeks, Washington has proven determined, vengeful, implacable. It has strong-armed, threatened, and elbowed powers large and small. It has essentially pledged that the leaker, former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden, will never be safe on this planet in his lifetime. And yet, to mention the obvious, the greatest power on Earth has, as yet, failed to get its man and is losing the public opinion battle globally.

An Asylum-less World

Highlighted in all this has been a curious fact of our twenty-first-century world. In the Cold War years, asylum was always potentially available. If you opposed one of the two superpowers or its allies, the other was usually ready to open its arms to you, as the U.S. famously did for what were once called “Soviet dissidents” in great numbers. The Soviets did the same for Americans, Brits, and others, often secret communists, sometimes actual spies, who opposed the leading capitalist power and its global order.

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had. Even after three Latin American countries, enraged at Washington's actions, extended offers of protection to Snowden, these should be treated as a new category of limited asylum. After all, the greatest power on the planet has, since 9/11, shown itself perfectly willing to do almost anything in pursuit of its definition of “security” or the security of its security system. Torture, abuse, the setting up of secret prisons or “black sites,” the kidnapping of terrorist suspects (including perfectly innocent people) off the streets of global cities and in the backlands of the planet, as well as their “rendition” to the torture chambers of complicit allied regimes, and the secret surveillance of anyone anywhere would only start a far longer list.

Nothing about the “international manhunt” for Snowden indicates that the Obama administration would be unwilling to send in the CIA or special operations types to “render” him from Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua, no matter the cost to hemispheric relations. Snowden himself brought up this possibility in his first interview with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. “I could,” he said bluntly, “be rendered by the CIA.” This assumes that he can even make it to a land of exile from somewhere in the bowels of the international terminal of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport without being intercepted by Washington.

It’s true that there remain some modest limits on the actions even of a rogue superpower. It’s hard to imagine Washington dropping its kidnappers into Russia or China to take Snowden, which is perhaps why it has put such pressure on both countries to turn him in or hustle him along. With smaller, weaker lands, however, non-nuclear allies or enemies or frenemies, don’t doubt the possibility for a second.

If Edward Snowden is proving one thing, it’s this: in 2013, Planet Earth isn’t big enough to protect the American version of “dissidents.” Instead, it looks ever more like a giant prison with a single implacable policeman, judge, jury, and jailer.

Deterrence Theory the Second Time Around

In the Cold War years, the two nuclear-armed superpowers practiced what was called “deterrence theory,” or more aptly MAD, short for “mutually assured destruction.” Think of it as the particularly grim underside of what might have been but wasn’t called MAA (mutually assured asylum). The knowledge that no nuclear first strike by one superpower could succeed in preventing the other from striking back with overwhelming force, destroying them both (and possibly the planet) seemed, however barely, to hold their enmity and weaponry at bay. It forced them to fight their wars, often by proxy, on the global frontiers of empire.

Now, with but one superpower left, another kind of deterrence theory has come into play. Crucial to our era is the ongoing creation of the first global surveillance state. In the Obama years, the sole superpower has put special effort into deterring anyone in its labyrinthine bureaucracy who shows a desire to let us know what “our” government is doing in our name.

The Obama administration’s efforts to stop whistleblowers are becoming legendary. It has launched an unprecedented program to specially train millions of employees and contractors to profile coworkers for “indicators of insider threat behavior.” They are being encouraged to inform on any “high-risk persons” they suspect might be planning to go public. Administration officials have also put much punitive energy into making examples out of whistleblowers who have tried to reveal anything of the inner workings of the national security complex.

In this way, the Obama administration has more than doubled the total whistleblower prosecutions of all previous administrations combined under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act. It has also gone after Army Private Bradley Manning for releasing secret military and State Department files to WikiLeaks, not only attempting to put him away for life for “aiding the enemy,” but subjecting him to particularly vindictive and abusive treatment while in military prison. In addition, it has threatened journalists who have written on or published leaked material and gone on expeditions into the telephone and email records of major media organizations.

All of this adds up to a new version of deterrence thinking in which a potential whistleblower should know that he or she will experience a lifetime of suffering for leaking anything; in which those, even in the highest reaches of government, who consider speaking to journalists on classified subjects should know that their calls could be monitored and their whispers criminalized; and in which the media should know that reporting on such subjects is not a healthy activity.

This sort of deterrence already seemed increasingly extreme in nature; the response to Snowden's revelations took it to a new level. Though the U.S. government pursued WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange abroad (while reportedly preparing to indict him at home), the other whistleblower cases might all be considered national security ones. The manhunt against Snowden is something new. Through it, Washington is now punitively expanding twenty-first century deterrence theory to the world.

The message is this: nowhere will you be safe from us if you breach U.S. secrecy. Snowden’s will surely be a case study in how far the new global security state is willing to go. And the answer is already in: far indeed. We just don’t yet know exactly how far.

How to Down a Plane to (Not) Catch a Whistleblower

In this light, no incident has been more revealing than the downing of the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the democratically elected head of a sovereign Latin American nation, and not an official enemy of the United States. Angry Bolivian authorities termed it a "kidnapping" or "imperialist hijack." It was, at the least, an act for which it’s hard to imagine a precedent.

Evidently officials in Washington believed that the plane bringing the Bolivian president back from Moscow was also carrying Snowden. As a result, the U.S. seems to have put enough pressure on four European countries (France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy) to force that plane to land for refueling in a fifth country (Austria). There -- again, U.S. pressure seems to have been the crucial factor -- it was searched under disputed circumstances and Snowden not found.

So much is not known about what happened, in part because there has been no serious reporting from Washington on the subject. The U.S. media has largely ignored the American role in the downing of the plane, an incident regularly described here as if the obvious hadn’t happened. This may, at least in part, be the result of the Obama administration’s implacable pursuit of whistleblowers and leakers right into the phone records of reporters. The government has made such a point of its willingness to pursue whistleblowers via journalists that, as Associated Press President Gary Pruitt recently pointed out, national security sources are drying up. Key figures in Washington are scared to talk even off the record (now that “off” turns out to be potentially very “on”). And the Justice Department’s new "tighter" guildelines for accessing reporters’ records are clearly filled with loopholes and undoubtedly little more than window dressing.

Still, it’s reasonable to imagine that when Morales's plane took off from Moscow there were top U.S. officials gathered in a situation room (à la the bin Laden affair), that the president was in the loop, and that the intelligence people said something like: we have an 85% certainty that Snowden is on that plane. Obviously, the decision was made to bring it down and enough pressure was placed on key officials in those five countries to cause them to bow to Washington's will.

One can certainly imagine that, but know it? At the moment, not a chance and, unlike in the raid that killed bin Laden, a triumphant situation-room photo hasn't been released, since there was, of course, no triumph. Many questions arise. Why, to mention just one, did Washington not allow Morales’s plane to land for refueling in Portugal, as originally planned, and simply strong-arm the Portuguese into searching it? As with so much else, we don’t know.

We only know that, to bring five countries into line that way, the pressure from Washington (or its local representatives) must have been intense. Put another way: key officials in those countries must have realized quickly that they stood in the way of a truly powerful urge by the planet's superpower to get one fugitive. It was an urge so strong that it overrode any other tactical considerations, and so opened the way for Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua to offer asylum to Snowden with the support of much of the rest of Latin America.

Imagine for a moment that an American president’s plane had been brought down in a similar fashion. Imagine that a consortium of nations pressured by, say, China or Russia, did it and that, with the president aboard, it was then searched for a Chinese or Soviet “dissident.” Imagine the reaction here. Imagine the shock. Imagine the accusations of “illegality,” of "skyjacking," of “international terrorism.” Imagine the 24/7 media coverage. Imagine the information pouring out of Washington about what would no doubt have been termed "an act of war."

Of course, such a scenario is inconceivable on this one-way planet. So instead, just think about the silence here over the Morales incident, the lack of coverage, the lack of reporting, the lack of outrage, the lack of shock, the lack of... well, just about anything at all.

Instead, the twenty-first-century version of deterrence theory ruled the day, even though Snowden is the proof that deterrence via manhunts, prosecution, imprisonment, and the like has proven ineffective when it comes to leaks. It’s worth pointing out that what may be the two largest leaks of official documents in history -- Bradley Manning’s and Snowden’s -- happened in a country increasingly under the sway of deterrence theory.

Slouching Toward Washington to Be Born

And yet don’t think that no one has been affected, no one intimidated. Consider, for instance, a superior piece of recent reporting by Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times. His front-page story, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of NSA,” might once have sent shock waves through Washington and perhaps the country as well. It did, after all, reveal how, in “more than a dozen classified rulings,” a secret FISA court, which oversees the American surveillance state, “has created a secret body of law” giving the NSA sweeping new powers.

Here’s the paragraph that should have had Americans jumping out of their skins (my italics added): “The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.”

At most moments in American history, the revelation that such a secret court, which never turns down government requests, is making law “almost” at the level of the Supreme Court would surely have caused an outcry in Congress and elsewhere. However, there was none, a sign either of how powerful and intimidating the secret world has become or of how much Congress and the rest of Washington have already been absorbed into it.

No less strikingly -- and again, we know so little that it’s necessary to read between the lines -- Lichtblau indicates that more than six “current and former national security officials,” perhaps disturbed by the expanding powers of the FISA court, discussed its classified rulings "on the condition of anonymity.” Assumedly, at least one of them (or someone else) leaked the classified information about that court to him.

Fittingly enough, Lichtblau wrote a remarkably anonymous piece. Given that sources no longer have any assurance that phone and email records aren’t being or won't be monitored, we have no idea how these shadowy figures got in touch with him or vice versa. All we know is that, even when shining a powerful light into the darkness of the surveillance universe, American journalism now finds itself plunging into the shadows as well.

What both the Morales incident and the Lichtblau article tell us, and what we’ve barely taken in, is how our American world is changing. In the Cold War years, faced with a MAD world, both superpowers ventured “into the shadows” to duke it out in their global struggle. As in so many wars, sooner or later the methods used in distant lands came home to haunt us. In the twenty-first century, without another major power in sight, the remaining superpower has made those “shadows” its own in a big way. Just beyond the view of the rest of us, it began recreating its famed tripartite, checks-and-balances government, now more than two centuries old, in a new form. There, in those shadows, the executive, judicial, and legislative branches began to meld into a unicameral shadow government, part of a new architecture of control that has nothing to do with “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Such a shadow government placing its trust in secret courts and the large-scale surveillance of populations, its own included, while pursuing its secret desires globally was just the sort of thing that the country’s founding fathers feared. In the end, it hardly matters under what label -- including American “safety” and “security” -- such a governing power is built; sooner or later, the architecture will determine the acts, and it will become more tyrannical at home and more extreme abroad. Welcome to the world of the single rogue superpower, and thank your lucky stars that Edward Snowden made the choices he did.

It’s eerie that some aspects of the totalitarian governments that went down for the count in the twentieth century are now being recreated in those shadows. There, an increasingly “totalistic” if not yet totalitarian beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward Washington to be born, while those who cared to shine a little light on the birth process are in jail or being hounded across this planet.

We have now experienced deterrence theory in two centuries. Once it was brought to bear to stop the wholesale destruction of the planet; once -- and they do say that if the first time is tragedy, the second is farce -- to deter a small number of whistleblowers from revealing the innards of our new global security state. We came close enough to total tragedy once. If only we could be assured that the second time around it would indeed be total farce, but at the moment, as far as I can tell, no one’s laughing.



Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:14 am

Published on Wednesday, July 17, 2013 by Common Dreams
Court Rules to Declassify NSA Justification for Spying
Secret court sides with Yahoo over challenge to release 'key documents' in relation to PRISM program

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program.
The United States' secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, has ruled to declassify a series of key documents intended to disclose the government's legal justification for their widespread, covert data collection program, PRISM.

FISA Court Judge Reggie Walton issued the ruling Monday in response to a challenge by internet giant Yahoo, who filed court papers last month in an effort to prove how "vehemently [Yahoo] had objected to government requests to hand over data," BBC reports.

The exposed documents include the transcript from a "key 2008 court case" which, according to BBC, was "widely seen as pivotal in letting the [National Security Administration (NSA)] establish PRISM and start gathering data on web use."

According to a series of slides revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported on by the Guardian, under the data collection program, internet companies are compelled to grant the NSA access to materials including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.

As Guardian reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill wrote at the time of the disclosure,

Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US."
"It remains to be seen how forthcoming (the government) will be," said Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which on Tuesday also filed suit against the NSA on behalf of a broad coalition for violating the plaintiff's First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

"The administration has said they want a debate about the propriety of the surveillance, but they haven't really provided information to inform that debate. So declassifying these opinions is a very important place to start," he added.

"Once those documents are made public, we believe they will contribute constructively to the ongoing public discussion around online privacy," Yahoo said in a statement following the ruling.

The order requires the government to review which portions of the opinion, briefs and arguments can be declassified and report back to the court by July 29, AP reports.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:23 pm

Published on Wednesday, July 17, 2013 by Common Dreams
NSA Comments Disclose Ever-Expanding Surveillance Web
Ackerman: "The NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone they communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with..."

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

NSA officials hint at increasingly expansive web of surveillance before a House judiciary committee Wednesday. (Photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
Not unlike the infamous 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' game, representatives from the National Security Agency revealed before a House panel Wednesday that they are permitted under secret court rule to analyze the phone data and internet records of an individual "three hops" away from a terrorism suspect.

Testifying before the House judiciary committee, NSA deputy director John C. Inglis said that the agency's analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its massive store of telephone and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

"Hops" are a technical term indicating connections between people, the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman explains. "A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with."

According to Inglis, this spying web is permitted under rules set by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. However, those justifications remain unknown due to the Department of Justice's insistence that, because of the classified content of their dealings, the court's interpretation of the law must also be kept secret.

Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and released by the Guardian previously exposed the practice of "contact chaining," or analyzing networks with two degrees of separation from the "target." Wednesday's hearing disclosures go another step further in revealing the true extent of the seemingly endless web of surveillance.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:16 pm

NSA affair: Ex-President Carter condemned U.S. snooping

By Gregor Peter Schmitz in Atlanta


AP
Ex-President Carter: "The invasion of privacy has gone too far"
The Obama administration tried to placate Europe's anger over spying programs. Not as ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharp. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was "useful."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in the wake of the NSA Spähskandals criticized the American political system. "America has no functioning democracy," Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the "Atlantic Bridge" in Atlanta.

Previously, the Democrat had been very critical of the practices of U.S. intelligence. "I think the invasion of privacy has gone too far," Carter told CNN. "And I think that is why the secrecy was excessive." Overlooking the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Carter, whose revelations were long "likely to be useful because they inform the public."
Carter has repeatedly warned that the United States sharply declined due to excessive restriction of civil rights, their moral authority. Last year he wrote in an article in the "New York Times", new U.S. laws "never before seen breach our privacy by the government" allowed the.

Carter was the 39th President of the United States, who ruled from 1977 until 1981. During his tenure, he tried to align U.S. foreign policy that is more about human rights - after his retirement from active politics for his humanitarian work, he received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize .

ANZEIGE

In Atlanta, he also expressed his overall pessimistic about the global situation. There is currently no reason for him to be optimistic, Carter said, referring to the situation in Egypt, which had fallen into a military dictatorship. He also lamented the growing political divide in the United States, the excessive influence of money in U.S. election campaigns and the confusing American election rules. The ex-president whose "Carter Center" operates worldwide including election monitoring, announced skeptical whether the United States, the standard that applies when reviewing the Center of elections might be fulfilled.
As a bright spot, however, Carter called the triumph of modern technology that would have caused some of the countries of the Arab Spring of democratic progress. Exactly these developments but are endangered by the NSA Spähskandal as major U.S. Internet platforms such as Google or Facebook lose credibility worldwide.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby Joao » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:35 pm


"America has no functioning democracy."

Apparently this is only being reported by Der Spiegel, which ran the quote as: "Amerika hat derzeit keine funktionierende Demokratie." My German is quite rusty but that still seems pretty clear. He was in Atlanta and presumably spoke in English, so obviously it would be nice to know precisely what he said.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby Elvis » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:05 pm

Found this at Cryptome, which is having a field day with all the NSA related stuff.

This is just what the Navy is spending -- man, this war's a go-go:

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2013/07/navy-cyber-warfare.html

Navy earmarks hundreds of millions of dollars for cyber warfare project involving 13 companies

July 17, 2013

Posted by John Keller

CHARLESTON, S.C., 17 July 2013. U.S. Navy cyber warfare experts are spending as much as $899.5 million and are involving 13 technology companies for integrated cyber operations -- or ways to defend military computers and computer networks and attack those of the nation's enemies.

Officials of the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center Atlantic in Charleston, S.C. awarded contracts to 13 companies Tuesday for equipment and services for integrated cyber operations. The contracts are worth at least $179.9 million over the next year, and as much as $899.5 million over a possible four-year duration of the contracts.

Companies awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts for the project are:

-- Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. in McLean, Va.;
-- CACI Technologies Inc. in Chantilly, Va.;
-- Computer Sciences Corp. in Falls Church, Va.;
-- General Dynamics One Source LLC in Fairfax, Va.;
-- Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. in Columbia, Md.;
-- Engility Corp. in Mount Laurel, N.J.;
-- Lockheed Martin Services Inc. in Gaithersburg, Md.;
-- Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) in McLean, Va.;
-- Scientific Research Corp. in Atlanta;
-- Secure Mission Solutions in Fairfax, Va.;
-- STG Inc. in Reston, Va.;
-- Systems Research and Applications Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of SRA International Inc. in Fairfax, Va.; and
-- URS Federal Services Inc. in Germantown, Md.

The contracts call for the 13 companies to provide research, development, production, and fielding of command, control, communication, computers, combat systems, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C5ISR), information operations, enterprise information services (EIS), and space capabilities for cyber operations.

Each company will receive a minimum of $25,000, and will receive more money for individual task orders for efforts involving their individual expertise.

For more information contact each company separately, or the SPAWAR Systems Center Atlantic at http://www.navy.mil/spawar/Atlantic.


Related stories

DARPA picks six companies to define enabling technologies for U.S. cyber warfare strategy

DARPA's Plan X program to set standards for U.S. cyber warfare strategy

Industry: get ready for spectrum warfare program to cover EW, optics, GPS, and cyber operations.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7567
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby justdrew » Thu Jul 18, 2013 12:15 am

By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
User avatar
justdrew
 
Posts: 11966
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 7:57 pm
Location: unknown
Blog: View Blog (11)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby semper occultus » Thu Jul 18, 2013 8:02 am

Circumventing Invasive Internet Surveillance with Carrier Pigeons

Rewilding the endangered world wide web of avian migration pathways

embedded links at site : http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/pigeon.php

Introduction
Recognized competence of carrier pigeons
Demonstrated non-military messaging capacity of carrier pigeons
Demonstrated non-messaging capacity of carrier pigeons
Demonstrated military capacity of carrier pigeons
Assessment of viability of data transfer by carrier pigeons
Personal and social implications of use of carrier pigeons
Implications for intelligence agencies and security
Engagement of birds in advanced communication technologies of the future
Greening the world wide web using migratory birds
Carrier pigeons for security and peace vs. Drones for insecurity and war?
References
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 18, 2013 10:02 am

NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope
NSA officials testify to angry House panel that agency can perform 'three-hop queries' through Americans' data and records

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 July 2013 15.19 EDT
Jump to comments (557)

NSA officials James Cole, Robert S Litt and John Inglis appear before House committee. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

"Hops" refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.

Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of "three-hop" analysis.

But Inglis and other intelligence and law enforcement officials testifying before the committee said that the NSA's ability to query the data follows rules set by the secret Fisa court, although about two dozen NSA officials determine for themselves when those criteria are satisified.

A document published last month by the Guardian detailing the history of the NSA's post-9/11 bulk surveillance on telephone and internet data refer to one- or two-hop analysis performed by NSA. The document, provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, does not explicitly mention three-hop analysis, nor does it clearly suggest that such analysis occurs.

Wednesday's hearing was the second major public congressional hearing about the NSA's surveillance activities since the Guardian and the Washington Post disclosed some of them in early June. Unlike the previous hearing on June 18 before the House intelligence committee, members of the House judiciary committee aggressively questioned senior officials from the NSA, FBI, Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

One senior member of the panel, congressman James Sensenbrenner, the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, warned the officials that unless they rein in the scope of their surveillance on Americans' phone records, "There are not the votes in the House of Representatives" to renew the provision after its 2015 expiration.

"You're going to lose it entirely," Sensenbrenner said.

Inglis and deputy attorney general James Cole repeatedly argued that the NSA's surveillance was limited because it only searches through its databases of phone records when it has a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of a connection to terrorism.

But several members of the committee, of both parties, said they were concerned not merely about the analysis of the phone records but about NSA's collection of millions of Americans' phone data in the first place, without an individual suspicion of connections to terrorism.

"The statute says 'collection'," congressman Jerrold Nadler told Cole. "You're trying to confuse us by talking use."

Congressman Ted Poe, a judge, said: "I hope as we move forward as a Congress we rein in the idea that it's OK to bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security."

Inglis, Cole and Robert Litt, the senior legal counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also argued that the surveillance activities were restricted by the oversight of Congress and the Fisa court. Legislators challenged both contentions.

Congressman Spencer Bachus said he "was not aware at all" of the extent of the surveillance, since the NSA programs were primarily briefed to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren revealed that an annual report provided to Congress by the government about the phone-records collection, something cited by intelligence officials as an example of their disclosures to Congress, is "less than a single page and not more than eight sentences".

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, challenged Litt's contention that the Fisa court was "not a rubber stamp" by way of a baseball analogy. Jeffries noted that some of the greatest hitters in baseball history – the Cardinals' Stan Musial, the Red Sox's Ted Williams, the Tigers' Ty Cobb and the Yankees' Babe Ruth – did not hit more than four balls safely per 10 times at bat, for career batting averages ranging from Musial's .331 to Cobb's .366.

He then noted that the Fisa court approves over 99% of government requests for surveillance – which would give the government a lifetime batting average of .999 – saying: "But you've taken the position that the Fisa court is an independent check."

Litt, continuing the analogy, said that when the government submits a surveillance request or "throws a pitch", the Fisa court "says 'throw a little bit higher, a little more inside'" rather than ruling it out of the strike zone.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 18, 2013 12:36 pm

NSA Facebook Post, No Laughing Matter
July 18, 2013
Though her Christian Democratic Union remains favored in upcoming German elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel is on the defensive over the “surveillance state” disclosures of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. One quirky turn came when a young German joked about visiting a U.S. spy base, Frank S. Grevil writes.


By Frank S. Grevil

The Snowden Affair — or Abhörskandal as the German media have dubbed it – is being played on several levels on several continents. In Germany, the scandal seemingly won’t end, in particular because of parliamentary elections seven weeks from now.

A 28-year-old German with a sense of humor was contacted by German federal police after inviting his Facebook friends tongue-in-cheek for a hike into a U.S. base area outside Darmstadt, Hesse, where the NSA’s Dagger Complex, responsible for a much of the disputed information gathering, is located.


German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Photo credit: א (Aleph))
As Spiegel Online reported, Daniel Bangert “described the outing as though it were a nature walk. He wrote on Facebook that its purpose was to undertake ‘joint research into the threatened habitat of NSA spies.’ He added: ‘If we are really lucky, we might actually see a real NSA spy with our own eyes.’ He suggested that those interested in coming should bring along their cameras and ‘flowers of all kinds to improve the appearance of the NSA spies’ habitat.’

“Perhaps not surprisingly, not many of his friends showed much interest in the venture. But the authorities did. Just four days after he posted the invitation, his mobile phone rang at 7:17 a.m. It was the police calling to talk about his Facebook post.

“Bangert’s doorbell rang at almost the exact same time. The police on the telephone told him to talk with the officers outside of his door. Bangert quickly put on a T-shirt — which had a picture of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on it along with the words ‘Team Edward’ — and answered the door. His neighbor was outside too so as not to miss the fun.

“The police wanted to know more about what exactly Bangert had in mind. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I thought: What? They are coming for such nonsense?’ Bangert says he answered all of the questions truthfully, saying that, yes, his intention was that of heading out to watch the spies. ‘The officers did smirk a bit,’ he notes.

“How, though, did the police get wind of Bangert’s planned ‘nature’ walk? A spokeswoman for the police in nearby Darmstadt told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the US Military Police had found the Facebook post and passed it along to German officials. The Military Police are responsible for security within the Dagger Complex, but outside the fence, it is the Germans who are in charge.”

For more on this curious cloak-and-dagger episode, go to: http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 11451.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby slimmouse » Thu Jul 18, 2013 2:24 pm

Just a quick thought on the "three hop" scenario

If the original suspect, has illustrated through facebook and other social media, email and telephone calls that he has 100 people who he knows, then by the third hop, those linked to him would probably be almost half of civilisation as we know it.

Edited to add, that when it comes to "the terrorists", the NSA are almost as intimate with their true leadership as it is possible to be. In fact theyre working for many of them.

Talk about BS.
slimmouse
 
Posts: 6129
Joined: Fri May 20, 2005 7:41 am
Location: Just outside of you.
Blog: View Blog (3)
PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 165 guests