The Criminal N.S.A.

[seemslikeadream]

TITANPOINTE

The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight

Ryan Gallagher, Henrik Moltke
November 16 2016, 1:40 p.m.
THEY CALLED IT Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.

But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.

The building was designed by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates, whose grand vision was to create a communication nerve center like a “20th century fortress, with spears and arrows replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”


Excerpt from “Project X,” a short film by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, screening at the IFC Center starting Nov. 18. This article is the product of a joint reporting project between The Intercept and Field of Vision.



Construction began in 1969, and by 1974, the skyscraper was completed. Today, it can be found in the heart of lower Manhattan at 33 Thomas Street, a vast gray tower of concrete and granite that soars 550 feet into the New York skyline. The brutalist structure, still used by AT&T and, according to the New York Department of Finance, owned by the company, is like no other in the vicinity. Unlike the many neighboring residential and office buildings, it is impossible to get a glimpse inside 33 Thomas Street. True to the designers’ original plans, there are no windows and the building is not illuminated. At night it becomes a giant shadow, blending into the darkness, its large square vents emitting a distinct, dull hum that is frequently drowned out by the sound of passing traffic and wailing sirens.

For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street — known as the “Long Lines Building” — has been a source of mystery for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s weirdest and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose.

It is not uncommon to keep the public in the dark about a site containing vital telecommunications equipment. But 33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data.
stills-seq-1 Early model of the entrance of 33 Thomas Street as designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates. Still from “Project X”

Documents obtained by The Intercept from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden do not explicitly name 33 Thomas Street as a surveillance facility. However — taken together with architectural plans, public records, and interviews with former AT&T employees conducted for this article — they provide compelling evidence that 33 Thomas Street has served as an NSA surveillance site, code-named TITANPOINTE.
Inside 33 Thomas Street there is a major international “gateway switch,” according to a former AT&T engineer, which routes phone calls between the United States and countries across the world. A series of top-secret NSA memos suggest that the agency has tapped into these calls from a secure facility within the AT&T building. The Manhattan skyscraper appears to be a core location used for a controversial NSA surveillance program that has targeted the communications of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and at least 38 countries, including close U.S. allies such as Germany, Japan, and France.

It has long been known that AT&T has cooperated with the NSA on surveillance, but few details have emerged about the role of specific facilities in carrying out the top-secret programs. The Snowden documents provide new information about how NSA equipment has been integrated as part of AT&T’s network in New York City, revealing in unprecedented detail the methods and technology the agency uses to vacuum up communications from the company’s systems.

“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.”

The NSA declined to comment for this story.

stills-seq-20 The FBI occupies the entire 23rd floor of 26 Federal Plaza, seen here behind 33 Thomas Street. Still from “Project X”
THE CODE NAME TITANPOINTE features dozens of times in the NSA documents, often in classified reports about surveillance operations. The agency uses code names to conceal information it deems especially sensitive — for instance, the names of companies it cooperates with or specific locations where electronic spying is carried out. Such details are usually considered “exceptionally controlled information,” a category beyond top secret and thus outside the scope of most of the documents that Snowden was able to obtain.

Secret NSA travel guides, dated April 2011 and February 2013, however, reveal information about TITANPOINTE that helps establish its connection to 33 Thomas Street. The 2011 guide, written to assist NSA employees visiting various facilities, discloses that TITANPOINTE is in New York City. The 2013 guide states that a “partner” called LITHIUM, which is NSA’s code name for AT&T, supervises visits to the site.

The 33 Thomas Street building is located almost next door to the FBI’s New York field office — about a block away — at Federal Plaza. The 2011 NSA travel guide instructs employees traveling to TITANTPOINTE to head to the FBI’s New York field office. It adds that trips to the site should be coordinated with AT&T (referenced as “LITHIUM”) and the FBI, including an FBI “site watch officer.”

stills-seq-12 Intercom at 33 Thomas Street. Still from “Project X”
When traveling to TITANPOINTE, NSA employees are told to hire a “cover vehicle” through the FBI, especially if they are transporting equipment to the site. In order to keep their true identities secret while visiting, agency employees are instructed not to wear any clothing displaying NSA badges or insignia.
Upon arrival at TITANPOINTE, the 2011 travel guide says, agency employees should ring the buzzer, sign in, and wait for a person to come and meet them. The Intercept visited 33 Thomas Street and found a buzzer outside its entrance and a sign-in sheet on a desk in the building’s lobby, which is manned by a guard 24 hours a day. There are also parking bays in front of the skyscraper designated “AWM,” a traffic code for federal agencies.

A 1994 New York Times article reported that 33 Thomas Street was part of AT&T’s “giant Worldwide Intelligent Network, which is responsible for directing an average of 175 million phone calls a day.” Thomas Saunders, a former AT&T engineer, told The Intercept that inside the building there were at least three “4ESS switches” used to route calls across phone networks. “Of the first two, one handled domestic long-distance traffic and the other was an international gateway,” said Saunders, who retired from his role at the company in 2004. The NSA’s documents describe TITANPOINTE as containing “foreign gateway switches” and they state that it has a “RIMROCK access.” RIMROCK is an NSA code name for 4ESS switches.

The NSA’s documents also reveal that one of TITANPOINTE’s functions is to conduct surveillance as part of a program called SKIDROWE, which focuses on intercepting satellite communications. That is a particularly striking detail, because on the roof of 33 Thomas Street there are a number of satellite dishes. Federal Communications Commission records confirm that 33 Thomas Street is the only location in New York City where AT&T has an FCC license for satellite earth stations.

026V9767-high-res-edit Design plan for the tower mechanical equipment floor at 33 Thomas Street.
THE MAN BEHIND the design of 33 Thomas Street, John Carl Warnecke, was one of the most prominent architects in the U.S. between the 1960s and 1980s.

Warnecke’s high-profile projects included producing designs for the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the Hawaii State Capitol. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s administration commissioned Warnecke to preserve and restructure buildings at Lafayette Square, across from the White House. And following Kennedy’s assassination, Warnecke was asked to design the president’s eternal flame and gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. He also helped construct a new embassy complex in Washington for the Soviet Union, in which the Soviets claimed they found eavesdropping equipment embedded in the walls.

But it was not only governments that trusted Warnecke — who died in 2010, aged 91 — with major construction projects. He cultivated a close relationship with telecommunications companies, too, possibly helped by family ties to the industry. Warnecke’s father-in-law had been a director at Pacific Bell, a California-based AT&T subsidiary. In the 1960s, Warnecke was asked to design a telephone exchange building for Pacific Bell in Oakland. He would subsequently receive a series of other major commissions from AT&T: Aside from the 33 Thomas Street building, he also designed a telephone exchange in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and an AT&T facility in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Some of Warnecke’s original architectural drawings for 33 Thomas Street are labeled “Project X.” It was alternatively referred to as the Broadway Building. His plans describe the structure as “a skyscraper to be inhabited by machines” and say that it was “designed to house long lines telephone equipment and to protect it and its operating personnel in the event of atomic attack.” (At the time the building was commissioned and built, amid the Cold War, there were genuine fears in the U.S. about the prospect of a Soviet nuclear assault.)

026V0261-edit Sketch of the plaza at 33 Thomas Street.
It is not clear how many people work at 33 Thomas Street today, but Warnecke’s original plans stated that it would provide food, water, and recreation for 1,500 people. It would also store 250,000 gallons of fuel to power generators, which would enable it to become a “self-contained city” for two weeks in the event of an emergency power failure. The blueprints for the building show that it was to include three subterranean levels, including a cable vault, where telecommunications cables likely entered and exited the building from under Manhattan’s bustling streets.
After it was built, the unusual style of 33 Thomas Street attracted a lot of attention. Its dark, somewhat dystopian appearance contrasted dramatically with other buildings in lower Manhattan. Yet it proved popular, particularly among architecture buffs.

In a 1982 piece in the New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised 33 Thomas Street as “one of the neighborhood’s few pieces of good modern architecture,” adding that it “blends into its surroundings more gracefully than does any other skyscraper in this area.”

“Other telephone company buildings from that era, designed solely for equipment, all look like horrible boxes,” Goldberger told The Intercept. “This one has an allure of its own to it. … There’s something about that shape. You see it and you don’t see it at the same time.”

026V9229-1 Satellite dishes on top of 33 Thomas Street. At TITANPOINTE, a program called SKIDROWE intercepts satellite communications. Photo: Henrik Moltke
IN 1975, JUST a year after Warnecke’s 33 Thomas Street building was completed, the NSA became embroiled in one of the biggest scandals in the U.S. intelligence community’s history. Following revelations about domestic surveillance operations targeting anti-Vietnam War activists, a congressional select committee began investigating the alleged abuses.

The inquiry, led by Democratic Sen. Frank Church, published its findings in April 1976. It concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies had “invaded individual privacy and violated the rights of lawful assembly and political expression.” Surveillance programs operated by the NSA through this period, it was later revealed, had targeted “domestic terrorist and foreign radical” suspects, including a host of eminent Americans, such as the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, the boxer Muhammad Ali, Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald, and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker.

The Church Committee recommended that new and tighter controls be placed on intelligence gathering. And in 1978, Congress approved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, requiring the executive branch to request warrants for spying operations from a newly formed court.


Screen-Shot-2016-11-11-at-16.59.11 Diagrams showing NSA-controlled equipment inside TITANPOINTE. Document: NSA
Through this tumultuous time for American spies, the NSA established a new surveillance program under the code name BLARNEY, which was first exposed in a Snowden-leaked slide published in 2013. According to a previously unpublished document provided to The Intercept by Snowden, BLARNEY was established in the early 1970s and, in mid-2013, remained one of the agency’s most significant initiatives.
BLARNEY leverages “commercial partnerships” in order to “gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks,” the document states. It carries out “full take” surveillance — a term that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata — under six different categories: counterproliferation, counterterrorism, diplomatic, economic, military, and political.

As of July 2010, the NSA had obtained at least 40 court orders for spying under the BLARNEY program, allowing the agency to monitor communications related to multiple countries, companies, and international organizations. Among the approved targets were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of Japan, the European Union, the United Nations, and at least 38 different countries, including U.S. allies such as Italy, Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, and Cyprus.

The program was the NSA’s leading source of data collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an April 2013 document disclosed, and information gleaned from the communications it intercepted was a top contributor to the president’s daily briefing.

Notably, TITANPOINTE has played a central role in BLARNEY’s operations. NSA documents dated between 2012 and 2013 list the TITANPOINTE surveillance facility among three of BLARNEY’s “core sites” and describe it as “BLARNEY’S site in NYC.” Equipment hosted at TITANPOINTE has been used to monitor international long-distance phone calls, faxes, voice calls routed over the internet (known as Voice-Over-IP), video conferencing, and other internet traffic.

In one case that may have involved 33 Thomas Street, NSA engineers with the BLARNEY program worked to eavesdrop on data from a connection serving the United Nations mission in New York. This spying resulted in “collection against the email address of the U.N. General leading the monitoring mission in Syria,” an April 2012 memo said.

Mogens Lykketoft, former president of the U.N.’s general assembly, criticized the surveillance. “Such spying activities are totally unacceptable breaches of trust in international cooperation,” he told The Intercept.

skidrowe-keyscore Logo for the NSA’s satellite communications exploitation program SKIDROWE. NSA
At the TITANPOINTE site, the NSA equipment is stored inside a secure room, known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.” Top-secret diagrams dated April 2012 show that within the secure space there is “NSA controlled” equipment linked to the routers of its “access partner,” referring to AT&T. Intercepted internet data was collected from the “backbone,” then processed at TITANPOINTE, before being passed to NSA for storage. Phone calls that were intercepted were collected from TITANPOINTE’s “foreign gateway switches” before being routed through the partner’s “call processor.” They were then forwarded to NSA’s headquarters in Maryland through an interface shared with the partner.

Much of the surveillance carried out at TITANPOINTE seems to involve monitoring calls and other communications as they are being sent across AT&T’s international phone and data cables. But the site has other capabilities at its disposal. The NSA’s documents indicate that it is also equipped with powerful satellite antenna — likely the ones located on the roof of 33 Thomas Street — which monitor information transmitted through the air.

The SKIDROWE spying program focuses on covertly vacuuming up internet data — known as “digital network intelligence” — as it is passing between foreign satellites. The harvested data is then made accessible through XKEYSCORE, a Google-like mass surveillance system that the NSA’s employees use to search through huge quantities of information about people’s emails, chats, Skype calls, passwords, and internet browsing histories.

Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesperson, told The Intercept that the company does not “allow any government agency to connect directly to or otherwise control our network to obtain our customers’ information. Rather, we simply respond to government requests for information pursuant to court orders or other mandatory process and, in rare cases, on a legal and voluntary basis when a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence, like in a kidnapping situation.”

Cook added that NSA representatives “do not have access to any secure room or space within our owned portion of the 33 Thomas Street building.” When pressed on whether any room within 33 Thomas Street contains equipment used for the purposes of NSA surveillance, an AT&T spokesperson pointed to a 1983 deed and declaration filed with New York City indicating that Verizon’s predecessor company maintained ownership of three floors and a basement floor in the building. The New York City Department of Finance said the predecessor company has an easement for the space and pays utility taxes, but insisted that AT&T owns the whole building. The AT&T spokesperson declined to comment further.

The NSA’s documents do not state that it can “connect directly to” or “otherwise control” AT&T’s networks, but they do make clear that the agency has placed its own equipment inside TITANPOINTE to tap into phone calls and internet data. It may be the case that the secure room where the equipment is installed is overseen by AT&T’s own engineers or technicians who have a security clearance. One NSA document dated from March 2013 suggests such a relationship, noting that the “corporate sites” the agency collects data from “are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA.”

As in 1983, AT&T may not be completely alone at 33 Thomas Street. Earlier this year, a technician working at the building — who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media — told The Intercept that a handful of Verizon employees were still based inside. However, the NSA’s documents do not suggest that Verizon is implicated in the surveillance at the TITANPOINTE facility, and instead only point to AT&T’s involvement. Verizon declined to comment for this story.

000004 The entrance to 33 Thomas Street. Still from “Project X”
AT&T IS FAR from the only company that has a relationship with the NSA. The agency has established what it calls “strategic partnerships” with more than 80 corporations. But some companies are more cooperative than others.

Historically, AT&T has always maintained close ties with the government. A good example of this came in June 1976, when a congressional subcommittee served AT&T with a subpoena demanding that it hand over information about its alleged role in unlawful FBI wiretapping of phone calls. President Gerald Ford personally intervened to block the subpoena, stating that AT&T “was and is an agent of the United States acting under contract with the Executive Branch.” Ford said the company was in a “unique position” with respect to telephone and other communication lines in the U.S., and therefore it had been “necessary for the Executive Branch to rely on its services to assist in acquiring certain information necessary to the national defense and foreign policy.” The details sought by the committee could not be shared, Ford asserted, because they could expose “extremely sensitive foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information.”

In more recent decades, as the New York Times and ProPublica reported last year, AT&T has allowed the NSA to access billions of emails, exhibiting what the agency called its “extreme willingness to help.” These revelations were foreshadowed in 2006 by allegations made by Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician. Klein stated that the company had maintained a “secure room” in one of its San Francisco offices, which was fitted with communications monitoring equipment apparently used by the NSA to tap into phone and internet traffic. Klein’s claims formed the basis of a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of AT&T customers (Jewel v. NSA), which remains ongoing today.

Mark-NYC-ATT-1988_2 Mark Klein at 33 Thomas Street in 1988. Klein worked as an AT&T employee at that location for 10 years. Photo courtesy of Mark Klein
Coincidentally, between 1981 and 1990, Klein also worked for AT&T at 33 Thomas Street. “I wasn’t aware of any NSA presence when I was there, but I had a creepy feeling about the building, because I knew about AT&T’s close collaboration with the Pentagon, going way back,” he told The Intercept. When presented with the details linking 33 Thomas Street to NSA’s TITANPOINTE, Klein added: “I’m not surprised. It’s obviously a major installation. … If you’re interested in doing surveillance, it’s a good place to do it.”
According to the Snowden documents, AT&T has installed surveillance equipment in at least 59 U.S. sites. And on any given day, NSA employees may be working at the company’s facilities. Classified memos dated from April 2013 describe one- to four-day deployments of NSA technical staff to TITANPOINTE and other buildings. Most AT&T personnel at these locations, however, are unlikely to have knowledge of the agency’s presence. NSA staff are encouraged to wear clothes that make them “blend in to the environment.” Even the car hire company the agency uses for its trips to AT&T facilities is kept in the dark. “Some personnel are aware of the FBI link,” states the agency’s travel guidance, “but [they] have no knowledge of NSA’s involvement.”

This article is the product of a joint reporting project between The Intercept and Field of Vision. “Project X,” a Field of Vision documentary directed by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, will screen at IFC Center starting November 18.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the ... ain-sight/

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[seemslikeadream]

Pentagon and intelligence community chiefs have urged Obama to remove the head of the NSA

Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, speaks at the third annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington in September. (Gary Cameron/Reuters)
By Ellen Nakashima November 19 at 2:15 PM
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.

The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Action has been delayed, some administration officials said, because relieving Rogers of his duties is tied to another controversial recommendation: to create separate chains of command at the NSA and the military’s cyberwarfare unit, a recommendation by Clapper and Carter that has been stalled because of other issues.

The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for director of national intelligence to replace Clapper as the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower. That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters.

The White House, Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment. Carter has concerns with Rogers’s performance, officials said. The driving force for Clapper, meanwhile, was the separation of leadership roles at the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and his stance that the NSA should be headed by a civilian.

NSA director says agency plays increasing role in cyber threats Play Video0:34
In a speech before the National Press Club on July 16, the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers said that the agency is increasingly involved in responding to cyber threats. (C-SPAN)
[Trump’s security picks signals intent to keep hard-line promises]

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on Saturday sent Clapper and Carter a letter defending Rogers. “I have been consistently impressed with his leadership and accomplishments,” said Nunes, who is also a member of Trump’s transition team. “His professionalism, expertise and deckplate leadership have been remarkable during an extremely challenging period for NSA. I know other members of Congress hold him in similarly high esteem.”

Nunes said he will call a hearing on the matter.

Rogers, 57, took the helm of the NSA and Cyber Command in April 2014 in the wake of revelations by a former intelligence contractor of broad surveillance activities that shook public confidence in the agency. The contractor, Edward Snowden, had secretly downloaded vast amounts of digital documents that he shared with a handful of journalists. His disclosures prompted debate over the proper scale of surveillance and led to some reforms.

But they also were a black eye for an agency that prides itself on having the most skilled hackers and cybersecurity professionals in government. Rogers was charged with making sure another insider breach never happened again.

Instead, in the past year and a half, officials have discovered two major compromises of sensitive hacking tools by personnel working at the NSA’s premier hacking unit: the Tailored Access Operations. One involved a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor, Harold T. Martin III, who is accused of carrying out the largest theft of classified government material. Although some of his activity took place before Rogers arrived and at other agencies, some of it — including the breach of some of the most sensitive tools — continued on Rogers’s watch, the officials said.

Martin’s alleged theft was discovered when some of the tools he is accused of stealing were mysteriously released online in August. They included computer code based on obscure software flaws that could be used to take control of firewalls and networks — what one former TAO operator called “the keys to the kingdom.”

This NSA leaker has a few things in common with Edward Snowden Play Video1:39
A federal contractor suspected in the leak of powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and U.S. officials familiar with the case. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Martin, who moved from the NSA to a job in a Defense Department acquisitions agency last year, was arrested in August. The news broke last month.

[Government alleges NSA contractor stole ‘astonishing quantity’ of classified material]

But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not believed to have shared the material with another country, the official said.

Rogers was put on notice by his two bosses — Clapper and Carter — that he had to get control of internal security and improve his leadership style. There have been persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input. The NSA is an intelligence agency but part of the Defense Department, hence the two overseers.

FBI agents investigating the Martin breach were appalled at how lax security was at the TAO, officials said. “[Rogers] is a guy who has been at the helm of the NSA at the time of some of the most egregious security breaches, most recently Hal Martin,” a senior administration official said. “Clearly it’s a sprawling bureaucracy . . . but I think there’s a compelling case that can be made that some of the safeguards that should have been put in place were either not fully put in place or not implemented properly.”

At the same time, Rogers has not impressed Carter with his handling of U.S. Cyber Command’s cyberoffensive against the Islamic State. Over the past year or so, the command’s operations against the terrorist group’s networks in Syria and Iraq have not borne much fruit, officials said. In the past month, military hackers have been successful at disrupting some Islamic State networks, but it was the first time they had done that, the officials said.

The expectation had been that Rogers would be replaced before the Nov. 8 election, but as part of an announcement about the change in leadership structure at the NSA and Cyber Command, a second administration official said.

“It was going to be part of a full package,” the official said. “The idea was not for any kind of public firing.” In any case, Rogers’s term at the NSA and Cyber Command is due to end in the spring, officials said.

The president would then appoint an acting NSA director, enabling his successor to nominate their own person. But a key lawmaker, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, threatened to block any such nominee if the White House proceeded with the plan to split the leadership at the NSA and Cyber Command.

The rationale for splitting what is called the “dual-hat” arrangement is that the agencies’ missions are fundamentally different, that the nation’s cyberspies and military hackers should not be competing to use the same networks, and that the job of leading both organizations is too big for one person.

But McCain is concerned that placing Cyber Command under its own leadership will hinder its effectiveness, as it is highly dependent on the NSA for capabilities.

Meanwhile, in February, Rogers announced a major reorganization, which he called NSA21, at the NSA to better adapt to the digital age. He has merged the agency’s spying and hacking arms with its computer-security division into one Directorate of Operations. That reorganization has only intensified the discontent that has marked Rogers’s tenure at the agency, current and former officials said.

“The morale is horrible,” one former senior official said. Especially during a period of change, a leader needs to be present, the official said. “Any leader knows that when you institute change, you have to be there. You have to help heal the wounds, be very active. He was not.”

But Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia who served on the Select Committee on Intelligence, said that he thinks highly of Rogers. “When it comes to the world of cyber, there’s nobody more capable than Mike Rogers in the military world today,” he said.

Nonetheless, Rogers has seen other embarrassing network breaches on his watch. In 2013, Iranian hackers managed to penetrate the Navy’s unclassified network when Rogers was head of the 10th Fleet/Navy Cyber Command, the unit responsible for protecting the Navy’s networks. It took months to expel the attackers.

Rogers is a Navy cryptologist whose military career spans 35 years. He began his career as a surface-warfare officer in 1981. A Chicago native, he also has served as head of the Chairman’s Action Group, an in-house Pentagon think tank to advise on policy and long-term issues, under then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, and as director of intelligence at Pacific Command and then on the Joint Staff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... story.html

[seemslikeadream]

FBI and NSA Poised to Gain New Surveillance Powers Under Trump
Chris Strohm
November 29, 2016 — 5:00 AM EST
Attorney general, CIA picks oppose Apple, Google on spying

New rule in effect Dec. 1 gives FBI greater hacking authority
The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.

Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and intelligence agencies -- Republican Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo for director of the Central Intelligence Agency -- are leading advocates for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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The fights expected to play out in the coming months -- in Senate confirmation hearings and through executive action, legislation and litigation -- also will set up an early test of Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley giants including Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Trump signaled as much during his presidential campaign, when he urged a consumer boycott of Apple for refusing to help the FBI hack into a terrorist’s encrypted iPhone.
An “already over-powerful surveillance state” is about to “be let loose on the American people,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, an internet and privacy advocacy organization.

New Hacking Rule

In a reversal of curbs imposed after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about mass data-gathering by the NSA, Trump and Congress may move to reinstate the collection of bulk telephone records, renew powers to collect the content of e-mails and other internet activity, ease restrictions on hacking into computers and let the FBI keep preliminary investigations open longer.

Read more: Apple, the FBI and encryption -- a QuickTake

A first challenge for privacy advocates comes this week: A new rule is set to go into effect on Dec. 1 letting the FBI get permission from a judge in a single jurisdiction to hack into multiple computers whose locations aren’t known.

“Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

Wyden is one of seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul, who have introduced a bill, S. 3475, to delay the new policy until July to give Congress time to debate its merits and consider amendments.

Orlando, San Bernardino

Sessions, Pompeo and officials with national security and law enforcement agencies have argued that expanded surveillance powers are needed, especially because of the threat of small, deadly terrorist plots that are hard to detect, like the killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June and 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last year.

The FBI had at one point opened a preliminary investigation into the Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, but didn’t have the authority to keep it going for lack of evidence of wrongdoing.

“What’s needed is a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities,” Pompeo and a co-author wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary in January. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”

Pompeo and Sessions want to repeal a 2015 law that prohibits the FBI and NSA from collecting bulk phone records -- “metadata” such as numbers called and dates and times -- on Americans who aren’t suspected of wrongdoing.

"Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database," Pompeo wrote.

Press aides for Sessions and Pompeo declined to comment.

Warrantless Interceptions

Sessions has opposed restraints on NSA surveillance and said in June that he supported legislation to expand the types of internet data the FBI can intercept without warrants.

Congress is also expected to consider legislation early next year that would renew the government’s ability to collect the content of e-mail and other internet activity from companies such as Google and Facebook Inc.

Under the Prism program, investigators pursuing suspected terrorists can intercept the content of electronic communications believed to come from outside the U.S. without specific warrants even if one end of the communications is inside the country or involves an American.

Patriot Act

Prism came under criticism when it was exposed by Snowden, the former NSA contractor who stole hundreds of thousands of documents on agency surveillance programs. Section 702 of the USA Patriot Act, under which Prism and other spy programs are conducted, is set to expire at the end of 2017 if it isn’t reauthorized by Congress.

James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has said he also wants to renew a debate early next year about whether Apple and other companies can resist court warrants seeking to unlock encrypted communications. The agency went to court trying to force Apple to create new software to crack password protection on a phone used by the shooter in San Bernardino.

“Boycott Apple until they give up the information,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February. He said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, “is looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is. Apple should give up.”

While the FBI dropped that case against Apple after buying a tool to hack into the phone, the increasing use of encryption on mobile devices and messaging services remains a challenge to national security and law enforcement agencies.

Browsing History

Republicans led by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina are expected to re-introduce legislation requiring companies to give investigators access to encrypted communications.

The FBI is also seeking legislation that would allow it to obtain “non-content electronic communication transactional records,” such as browsing histories and computer Internet Protocol addresses, without court oversight or a warrant.

Sessions and Burr supported the legislation earlier this year, while it was opposed by major technology groups as well as Google and Facebook.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... nder-trump

[seemslikeadream]

The NSA has been listening to in-flight cell phone calls for years
Watch what you say if you use your phone in the sky.

Nathan Ingraham , @nateingraham


By now, we're all well aware of how good the NSA is at spying on people's communications. But it's still a little surprising to learn that the NSA and the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) were able to listen in on people's in-flight phone calls as far back as 2005. Le Monde and The Intercept, which has previously broke many stories from Edward Snowden's info on the NSA, say that a secret program called "Southwinds" could gather all cellular communication from commercial air flights, including "voice communication, data, metadata and content of calls."

While cell phone conversations are generally prohibited on many commercial flights, an NSA document says that it recorded data from about 100,000 people who used their phones while flying in February 2009. But the agencies were targeting in-flight calls on Air France as early as 2005. When the program was up and running, it could collect data in "near real-time" and airplanes could be tracked every two minutes using the cell connections. The only real requirement was that a plane be cruising at over 10,000 feet.

Once cruising altitude was reached, ground-based stations could intercept the call as it was passed through a satellite. From there, the agencies could cross-reference the call with the list of passengers on board and find who was making the call. And judging by this report, this practice continues through today -- the report shows calls tracked as recently as 2012, and with in-flight calling expected to be far more common in the coming years, the NSA and GCHQ will have many more opportunities to listen in to calls.

The forthcoming boom in in-flight mobile phone usage will "further extend the scope of espionage by providing a pool of potential targets comprising several hundreds of thousands of people, a level of popularity anticipated by the NSA seven years ago," writes Jacques Follorou of Le Monde. "This implies a population that goes far beyond terrorist targets. The political or economic surveillance of passengers in business or in first class on long-haul flights could be put to many other uses."

Naturally, both the GCHQ and NSA told Le Monde and The Intercept that their actions comply with European Convention on Human Rights and US law and policy, respectively.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/08/the ... s-for-yea/

[seemslikeadream]

NSA Inspector General Facing Termination For Whistleblower Retaliation
“This is a man, who runs an office that is supposed to protect whistleblowers, yet he described them as manic thieves and other such terminology and was quite hostile and intimidating."
By Kevin Gosztola | Shadowproof | December 16, 2016


Published in partnership with Shadowproof.

The inspector general for the National Security Agency, George Ellard, received a termination notice for retaliating against a whistleblower. The outcome was the result of a process enabled by an executive order containing whistleblower protections issued in 2012 by President Barack Obama, according to a report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

“The Ellard case is groundbreaking not only because it represents the most extensive use of PPD-19 procedures to date, but also because of Ellard’s high-ranking position in a national security environment where few, if any top officials are known to have been held accountable. A variety of reprisal accusations have been made against senior officials over the years. Rightly or wrongly, very few have ever been substantiated,” POGO journalist Adam Zagorin wrote. (PPD-19 is the “presidential policy directive” or executive order that Obama signed.)

Though unnamed, government officials confirmed Ellard was issued a “notice of proposed termination” in May from Admiral Mike Rogers, who is the NSA director. The notice came after “eight months of inquiry and deliberation” by an external review panel made up of the inspector generals from the Justice Department, Treasury Department, and Central Intelligence Agency. They overturned a finding from the Pentagon inspector general, which determined it could not confirm the retaliation claim against Ellard.

Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who has represented multiple NSA whistleblowers, including Snowden and Thomas Drake, told Shadowproof, “Ellard’s proposed termination for whistleblower retaliation confirms what the whistleblowing community has long known: there were no safe and effective internal channels for NSA whistleblowers like Snowden to use. The case for pardoning Snowden is made stronger given Ellard’s now proven record of retaliation.”

Ellard became the NSA’s inspector general in 2007, and until Snowden’s disclosures, he did not make public appearances.

On February 25, 2014, Ellard participated in a panel discussion at the Georgetown University Law Center. It was the first time that he spoke about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures, and in his remarks, he insisted if Snowden came to his office he would have investigated his allegations.

But Ellard also suggested his office would have told Snowden he misunderstood the constitutionality of the NSA phone records collection program. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees would be made available to help him address his concerns about the program.

This is fantasy. The inspector general’s office would never roll out some carpet, welcome concerned NSA personnel, and even go so far as to schedule meetings with senators and representatives.

Ellard was the chief of staff on a presidential commission, which examined United States counterintelligence programs in the wake of espionage leaks committed by Robert Hanssen, an FBI Supervisory Special Agent. He compared Snowden to Hanssen, who was a spy.

“Hanssen’s motives were venal. For cash, perhaps, or perhaps, they were psychological, a desire to play a very, very dangerous game that is therefore very, very exciting. At the end of his career, Hanssen had almost 30 years in intelligence and counterintelligence,” Ellard said. “He knew exactly what was of value to his spy handlers and he was very specific in choosing documents to steal. He knew how to control his handlers better than they knew how to control him.”

“Snowden, in contrast, was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s. Hanssen’s theft was, in a sense, finite whereas Snowden is open-ended, as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole.”

Glenn Greenwald, whose work on documents from Snowden garnered a Pulitzer Prize, reacted, “This seems to be yet another Obama official, who has no understanding of the newsgathering process except to invent concepts designed to demonize it. Journalists are not ‘agents’ of their sources, unless Ellard thinks that the New York Times and Washington Post are Snowden’s ‘agents,’ in which case he should have the courage to say this.”

When Ellard was asked at the event whether NSA oversight was effective, he answered, “I don’t think there have been any real questions raised about the efficacy of the oversight. Nobody is asserting, for instance, that the NSA intentionally violated the law. Some people are saying that the law violates the constitution. But we abided precisely by the contours of the law. The crisis is, however, that I suspect a broad swath of people in this room don’t believe that.”

At this point, reports on Snowden documents had been published for over a half of a year and highlighted illegality, abuses of authority, and threats mass surveillance programs pose to civil liberties.

Radack viewed Ellard as “completely hostile to whistleblowers” after hearing him speak at the Georgetown University Law Center event.

“This is a man, who runs an office that is supposed to protect whistleblowers, yet he described them as manic thieves and other such terminology and was quite hostile and intimidating,” Radack declared.

Radack has represented whistleblowers, who not only were retaliated against for making whistleblower disclosures but also who faced retaliation because they went to the NSA inspector general’s office to lodge complaints.

According to the POGO report, Ellard was placed on administrative leave. He has apparently filed an appeal with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/nsa-inspe ... on/223225/

[seemslikeadream]

Trump Wants NSA Program Reauthorized But Won’t Tell Congress How Many Americans It Spies On

Alex Emmons
March 4 2017, 8:15 a.m.
THE WHITE HOUSE wants Congress to reauthorize two of the NSA’s largest surveillance programs before they expire at the end of the year.

One of them scans the traffic that passes through the massive internet cables going in and out of the U.S. and ends up catching a vast number of American communications in its dragnet.

But how many? Lawmakers have been asking for years, and the intelligence community has consistently refused provide even a ballpark figure.

At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, several members expressed frustration that intelligence chiefs — first under Obama, and now under Trump — have failed to provide any kind of estimate, even in classified briefings.

“The members of this committee and the public at large require that estimate to engage in a meaningful debate,” said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the leading Democrat on the committee. “We will not simply take the government’s word on the size of the so-called ‘incidental collection.’”

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lapses at the end of the year, allows the NSA to collect vast amounts of domestic internet traffic as long as it maintains it is only “targeting” foreigners. Documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden described two huge surveillance programs that operate under that authority. One program, PRISM, allows the NSA to collect data in bulk from tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple. The other program — Upstream — allows the NSA to tap the massive internet cables that carry information in and out of the U.S. and search for communications involving certain foreign “targets” or “selectors”.

As the NSA scans the cables for information on its targets, it also collects information on the Americans those targets are communicating with, as well as entirely unrelated information, such as communications from people who happened to be in the same chat room as a target. Furthermore, the targets can be selected for any “foreign intelligence purpose” — not just counterterrorism.

As a result, the NSA ends up collecting information on a huge number of U.S. persons without getting a warrant – collection they describe as “incidental,” but which is really inevitable. And using what critics call the backdoor loophole, law enforcement officials then search through that material for information on Americans.

That collection on Americans is part of how the law was designed, according to Elizabeth Goitein, a lawyer for the Brennan Center for Justice. “Incidentally,’ is the terminology used by the government,” Goitein testified at Wednesday’s hearing. “But it is part of the design of the program to acquire communications of foreign targets with Americans.”

The issue of “incidental collection” has come into the spotlight in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration. Last month, anonymous members of the intelligence community leaked information about phone calls between the Russian ambassador — who was understandably targeted for surveillance – and Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Flynn’s resignation spooked some Republicans who worried about that ability being used improperly. “Whatever your political persuasion is, for me it had a chilling effect,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho. “My political opponents could use my personal information, that they maybe gathered in some private information, against me in the future. That should be quite terrifying to anybody, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat.”

Conyers, along with a bipartisan group of 14 Democrats and Republicans, sent a letter to the director of national intelligence in April last year, asking “simply for a rough estimate” of how many Americans had their communications collected.

Conyers sent a follow-up letter in December. “The intelligence community has not so much as responded to our December letter,” Conyers said Wednesday. “I had hoped for better.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., first requested an estimate in 2011 — even before the Snowden disclosures demonstrated the reach of the surveillance programs. The federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board recommended in 2014 that the NSA start keeping track of the number. In 2015, more than 30 civil liberties organizations wrote a letter to the Intelligence Community’s Civil Liberties Protection Office, demanding the same thing, and got an unresponsive reply.

The intelligence community insists that it doesn’t keep track, in part because doing so would require it to identify which phone numbers and computer IP addresses belong to American citizens. April Doss, a former NSA lawyer, told the committee that it would require the NSA to de-anonymize everyone in their communications. “In my view, the collection and maintenance of that reference information would itself pose significant impacts to privacy,” she said.

But Goitein noted that the NSA already uses computer IP addresses to approximate who is a U.S. citizen for other purposes, so it would be easy for them to estimate how many Americans’ communications they collect.

“The NSA has determined that the IP address is an accurate enough indicator of a persons status … to use it to filter out the wholly domestic communications that the NSA is prohibited from acquiring,” she testified. “If it’s accurate enough to enable the NSA to comply with that constitutional obligation, then it’s certainly accurate enough for the estimate.”
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/04/tru ... -spies-on/

[stillrobertpaulsen]

NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” From Core Values
Jean Marc Manach

January 24 2018, 4:29 a.m.

The National Security Agency maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement. But earlier this month, the agency made a discreet change: It removed “honesty” as its top priority.

Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”

On January 12, however, the NSA removed the mission statement page – which can still be viewed through the Internet Archive – and replaced it with a new version. Now, the parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted. The agency’s new top value is “commitment to service,” which it says means “excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.”

Those are not the only striking alterations. In its old core values, the NSA explained that it would strive to be deserving of the “great trust” placed in it by national leaders and American citizens. It said that it would “honor the public’s need for openness.” But those phrases are now gone; all references to “trust,” “honor,” and “openness” have disappeared.

The agency previously stated on its website that it embraced transparency and claimed that all of its activities were aimed at “ensuring the safety, security, and liberty of our fellow citizens.” That has also been discarded. The agency still says it is committed to transparency on the updated website, but the transparency is now described as being for the benefit of “those who authorize and oversee NSA’s work on behalf of the American people.” The definition of “integrity” has been edited, too. The agency formerly said its commitment to integrity meant it would “behave honorably and apply good judgment.” The phrase “behave honorably” has now been dropped in favor of “communicating honestly and directly, acting ethically and fairly and carrying out our mission efficiently and effectively.”

The new list of values includes the additions “respect for people” and “accountability.” But the section on respecting people is a reference to diversity within the NSA workforce, not a general commitment to members of the public. Accountability is defined as taking “responsibility for our decisions.” The one core value that remains essentially unchanged is “respect for the law,” which the agency says means it is “grounded in our adherence to the U.S. Constitution and compliance with the U.S. laws, regulations and policies that govern our activities.”

In response to questions from The Intercept on Tuesday, the NSA played down the alterations. Thomas Groves, a spokesperson for the agency, said: “It’s nothing more than a website update, that’s all it is.”

Oh well, at least they're finally being honest and open ... about the fact that they are frequently dishonest and always far from open.

[cptmarginal]

Paul Syverson, a 57-year-old mathematician at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, created Tor as a means for people to communicate securely online. "We certainly were aware that bad people could use it," says Syverson, wearing an M.C. Escher T-shirt in his cluttered office in Washington, D.C., "but our goal was to have something for the honest people who need to protect themselves."

Since its inception in 1923, the NRL has been the military's most esteemed research and development lab, inventing everything from radar to GPS. In 1995, Syverson and his colleagues conceived a way to make online communications as secure as possible. The idea was to provide a means for anyone — including government employees and agents — to share intelligence without revealing their identities or locations. With funding from the Department of Defense, Syverson brought on two scruffy graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, to help bring his vision to life. Like Syverson, Dingledine — a ponytailed privacy activist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina — saw the project as a way to empower everyone in the age of online surveillance. "How can we build a system that gives you privacy in the face of the large governments who are surveilling the Internet as much as they can?" Dingledine asks. "That's a really hard research problem."

On Nov. 1, 2007, the National Security Agency hosted a talk by Roger Dingledine, principal designer of one of the world’s leading Internet privacy tools. It was a wary encounter, akin to mutual intelligence gathering, between a spy agency and a man who built tools to ward off electronic surveillance.

According to a top-secret NSA summary of the meeting, Dingledine told the assembled NSA staff that his service, called Tor, offered anonymity to people who needed it badly — to keep business secrets, protect their identities from oppressive political regimes or conduct research without revealing themselves. In the minds of NSA officials, Tor was offering protection to terrorists and other intelligence targets.

As he spoke to the NSA, Dingledine said in an interview Friday, he suspected the agency was attempting to break into Tor, which is used by millions of people around the world to shield their identities.

lulz

The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:

The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize: China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any backdoors into their software. (See below.)

The documents conclusively showed that Tor is not independent at all. The organization did not have free reign to do whatever it wanted, but was kept on a short leash and bound by contracts with strict contractual obligations. It was also required to file detailed monthly status reports, giving the government a clear picture of what Tor employees were developing, where they went and who they saw.

The Tor Files: Transparency for the Dark Web [Full FOIA Cache]

[seemslikeadream]

William Barr, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general

William Barr Helped Build America’s Surveillance State


William Barr, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has a history of getting it wrong. From designing warrantless surveillance programs to justifying the president’s power to disregard acts of Congress, Barr has advanced dubious legal theories that have been rejected by the courts, Congress, and the public.

As Barr begins the confirmation process, senators must question Barr on his record regarding the right to privacy and the Fourth Amendment — which raises serious concerns about his suitability to be attorney general. Barr has violated or supported violations of Americans constitutional rights, leaving a disastrous legacy of warrantless spying and government abuse.

Barr was the godfather of the NSA’s bulk data collection program

While serving in the George H.W. Bush administration, Barr helped develop what became a “blueprint” for the National Security Agency’s mass phone surveillance program. In 1992, he and his then-deputy Robert Mueller authorized the Drug Enforcement Administration to begin amassing phone call data in bulk, ordering telephone companies to secretly hand over the records of all phone calls from the U.S. to countries — which eventually grew to be well over 100 nations — where the government believed drug traffickers were operating.

As USA Today reported when the DEA program came to light, it “was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime.”

The DEA program ultimately became a model for the NSA’s phone records collection program under the Patriot Act of 2001, which the agency used to collect the domestic call records of tens of millions of Americans. The NSA program, exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was found to be illegal by a federal appeals court, and in 2015 Congress voted on a bipartisan basis to partially reform it. Barr, unsurprisingly, was an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act when it was enacted. In fact, he said the law didn’t go far enough.

Congress should question Barr about whether he will be a roadblock to still-needed surveillance reforms and whether he believes the government has the power to resurrect or expand warrantless spying programs.

Barr worked to make it easier for Verizon and other companies to hand over massive amounts of sensitive customer data to the government

In the George W. Bush era, during which Barr served as executive vice president and general counsel at Verizon, the telecom giant participated in a massive, warrantless surveillance program known as Stellar Wind. Under Barr’s watch, Verizon allowed the NSA to intercept the contents of Americans’ phone calls and emails and to vacuum up in bulk the metadata associated with Americans’ phone calls and internet activities.

This surveillance was prohibited by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which Congress passed to regulate government surveillance practices and prevent abuses. The Justice Department eventually concluded in 2004 that portions of the program were illegal. Exact dates of Verizon’s involvement are not known, though documents suggest they participated at least as early as 2007. Other portions proved to be a forerunner of the NSA’s Upstream surveillance program, which the government continues to use today to unlawfully search Americans’ emails and internet communications without a warrant.

As Verizon’s general counsel, Barr later lobbied Congress to give telecom companies retroactive and future immunity from private lawsuits for participating in illegal surveillance programs, which would make sure that companies like Verizon would never be held accountable for helping the government violate Americans’ privacy.

Barr himself has held the legal position that Americans do not have a Fourth Amendment-protected privacy interest in data held by third parties — a view that the Supreme Court declined to adopt in last year’s pro-privacy ruling about cellphone location tracking by police.

Senators should question Barr on whether he still holds the position that individual’s do not have a Fourth Amendment-protected interest in information held by third parties. In addition, they should question whether he will support actions that widen the surveillance dragnet, as his history at Verizon suggests that he will have few qualms about conscripting other private companies — including tech giants like Facebook and Google — into handing over private user information to the government.

Barr has defended the president’s power to disregard laws passed by Congress

Barr is also an advocate of sweeping executive authority, which would have major implications for oversight. In a 1989 memo, Barr, then serving as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, raised doubts about the ability of Congress to limit the executive branch’s powers, and he has even argued that the FISA law is too restrictive and that the president can disregard its limits under the guise of fighting terrorism.

As long as the president invokes national defense, Barr believes an administration could embark on virtually any endeavor. This philosophy helped lend credence to the radical theory that the executive branch has nearly unlimited counterterrorism powers that Congress cannot regulate, which is shared by the likes of John Yoo, who in the George W. Bush administration worked to justify the Stellar Wind program and torture.

This theory could be used as justification to flout laws passed by Congress addressing everything from foreign policy to immigration to domestic law enforcement.

The future of privacy rights

The Trump administration, with help from Congress, has already done grave harm to our right to privacy. While Trump has raised concerns about perceived surveillance abuses, albeit often with false and misleading claims, he signed into law the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act, which arguably codified and expanded certain surveillance powers.

Barr’s nomination is more evidence that the Trump administration will continue to pursue vast surveillance powers at the expense of our Fourth Amendment rights and will have little respect for Congress’ power. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee must seize their opportunity to question Barr thoroughly and determine whether he will protect Americans from government intrusions and expansive executive power if he’s returned to run the Justice Department for a second time.

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https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-secu ... rveillance

[Grizzly]

Regarding the above^^^

I think I''ve posted this before, see below, it's long, but highly informative. And it wouldn't surprise me to see it scrubbed from our tax paid for airways by the "reality makers" ... 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'~Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove
https://www.c-span.org/video/?313279-1/panel-discusses-hacking-information-activism


Hacking, Leaking and Investigative Journalism

[Grizzly]

https://surveillancevalley.com/

Surveillance Valley
The Secret Military History of the Internet
By Yasha Levine

In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine traces the history of the internet back to its beginnings as a Vietnam-era tool for spying on guerrilla fighters and antiwar protesters–a military computer networking project that ultimately envisioned the creation of a global system of surveillance and prediction. Levine shows how the same military objectives that drove the development of early internet technology are still at the heart of Silicon Valley today. Spies, counterinsurgency campaigns, hippie entrepreneurs, privacy apps funded by the CIA. From the 1960s to the 2010s — this revelatory and sweeping story will make you reconsider what you know about the most powerful, ubiquitous tool ever created.



From his blog...
https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/its-a-drag-to-be-right-so-often
It's a drag to be right so often

The New York Times published a great, long investigation into how our smartphone apps spy on us every moment of every day. The paper got its hands on a location surveillance database compiled by various smartphone apps that's available for sale, and it was shocked by what it found. The data gave its journalists God's eye view of millions of people as they lived their lives in New York — watching them as they went the gym, to abortion clinics, to work. It even allowed them to single out government employees and to track a staffer with New York mayor Bill de Blasio as they travelled around the city on official business.

Reading the story...well...I hate to brag, but it really is a drag to be right so often. Surveillance Valley called it — right down to the abortion clinic spying.
No matter what's plugged into it, the Internet is a giant surveillance machine.

The New York Times did great work on this article. But like a lot of reporting that deals with the Internet, the premise is wrong. The fact that these apps are collecting and selling our private data should not come as a surprise. As I show in my book, surveillance is not a bug, but a feature. The internet was designed to be a surveillance machine — that's been its central function from the moment the tech was developed by the Pentagon in the late 1960s. And really, it goes back even earlier: all computer technology, starting with 19th century punch card tabulators, were about watching and tracking people and the world.

—Yasha Levine

Buy the book!

On sale: US • UK

[seemslikeadream]

LAWFARE “BREAKS” NEWS: NSA HASN’T RESTARTED THE SECTION 215 CDR FUNCTION

March 4, 2019/12 Comments/in FISA /by emptywheel

Last week, Lawfare’s podcast had on Luke Murry, National Security Advisor to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Daniel Silverberg, National Security Advisor to Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

At 5:10, in response to a question from Margaret Taylor about what kind of oversight Congress will exercise in this Congress, one of them says,

I think my mind goes to the must-pass things. Let’s use that as lowest common denominator. One which may be must-pass, may actually not be must-pass, is Section 215 of USA Freedom Act, where you have this bulk collection of, basically metadata on telephone conversations — not the actual content of the conversations but we’re talking about length of call, time of call, who’s calling — and that expires at the end of this year. But the Administration actually hasn’t been using it for the past six months because of problems with the way in which that information was collected, and possibly collecting on US citizens, in the way it was transferred from private companies to the Administration after they got FISA court approval. So, if the Administration does ask on that, that’s inherently a very sensitive subject. And we’ve seen that sensitivity be true in other areas of USA Freedom Act so I think that’s going to be a real challenge for Congress. But I’m not actually certain that the Administration will want to start that back up given where they’ve been in the last six months.

The staffer seems a bit confused by what he’s talking about.

By description — the description of this being metadata turned over by providers — this must be the Call Detail Record of USA Freedom Act, not all of Section 215. It appears to be public confirmation that the government never resumed the CDR program after it announced that it had destroyed all its records last June (though that works out to be 8 months, not just 6).

That, in turn, suggests that the problem with the records may not be the volume or the content turned over, but some problem created either by the specific language of the law or (more likely) the House Report on it or by the Carpenter decision. Carpenter came out on June 22, so technically after the NSA claims to have started deleting records on May 23. It also may be that the the NSA realized something was non-compliant with its collection just as it was submitting the 6th set of 180-day applications, and didn’t want to admit to the FISC that it had been breaking the law (which is precisely what happened in 2011 when the government deleted all its PRTT records).

Just as an example, I long worried that the government would ask providers to use location data to match phones. Under the law, so long as the government just got the phone number of a new phone that had been geolocated, it might qualify as a CDR under the law, but would absolutely be a violation of the intent of the law. Such an application — which is something that AT&T has long offered law enforcement — might explain what we’ve seen since.

One other thing, though: The NSA almost never gives up a function they like. Instead, they make sure they don’t have any adverse court rulings telling them they’ve broken the law, and move the function some place else. Given that the government withdrew several applications last year after FISC threatened to appoint an amicus, and given that the government now has broadened 12333 sharing, they may have just moved something legally problematic somewhere else.

In any case, there’s no follow-up on the podcast, which might at least clarify the obvious parts of this revelation, to say nothing of asking for the underlying detail. So it will take some work to figure out what really happened.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/03/04/l ... -function/