sosadmin’s blog - 08/23/2012

We don’t know much about what the NSA is doing. What we do know – and what we suspect -  is featured in today’s New York Times. 

Shane Harris, author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, reports that the legacy of John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program “operates with little accountability or restraint” at the NSA, while filmmaker Laura Poitras invites William Binney, a 32-year NSA-veteran-turned-whistleblower, to talk about what that means for all of us. 

Binney contends that the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering has been “turned inward on this country” and that the NSA has the capacity to monitor what everyone is doing and show the “entire life” of an individual over time. 

Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany who gave a TED talk on telecom surveillance was able to map his own life using six months’ worth of data that telecoms had gathered on him. Just imagine what kind of dossier he could have put together on himself if he had access to the range of personal data and computer power possessed by the NSA.

As Shane Harris writes, the NSA’s “global surveillance system continues to grow. It now collects so much digital detritus – e-mails, calls, text messages, cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses – that the NSA is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it. What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom.”

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HSNW - 5 June 2012

Unit 8200 is Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) or GCHQ in Britain; what sets the unit apart from its SIGINT counterparts in the United States and Europe is that it does almost all its research and development in-house; this means that, aside from interpreters and analysts, the unit is home to a huge cadre of engineers, technicians, and programmers; one result is that veterans of Unit 8200 have founded many of Israel’s successful high-tech start-ups

The waves of cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and critical infrastructure – the attacks we know of: Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame – have drawn attention to the secretive Unit 8200, the cyberwarfare unit within the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Military Intelligence (MI) branch (these cyberattacks have also drawn attention to the U.S. efforts in this regard: see David Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” New York Times, 1 June 2012). The Financial Times notes that Unit 8200 is Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) or GCHQ in Britain. These three organizations belong to a branch of the military called signals intelligence, or SIGINT. Unit 8200’s task is to intercept, monitor, and analyze enemy communications and data traffic — from mobile phone chatter and e-mails to flight paths and electronic signals. The unit’s goal is to “fish out from an ocean of data the piece of information that will help the Israeli security forces identify and thwart a potential attack,” the FT writes.

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• The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
• NSA Chief Denies Domestic Spying But Whistleblowers Say Otherwise
• Scott Horton Interviews James Bamford
• Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA
• Surveillance State evils

National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney On Growing Orwellian State Surveillance (via infiniteunknown)

Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the State?

Jane Mayer - May 23, 2011

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.

The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

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Whistleblower Mark Klein tells in his new book of how he was ignored. He spoke with IDG News.

Robert McMillan - July 17, 2009

p>The cliché doesn’t seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein’s new book, “Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It.” It’s an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans.

Klein, 64, was a retired AT&T communications technician in December 2005, when he read the New York Times story that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Secretly authorized in 2002, the program lets the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) monitor telephone conversations and e-mail messages of people inside the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists. Klein knew right away that he had proof — documents from his time at AT&T — that could provide a snapshot of how the program was siphoning data off of the AT&T network in San Francisco.

Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006, meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for.

With the EFF on board, Klein was briefly a media celebrity — the man who had the guts to expose the NSA’s secret wiretapping program. In his book he provides the documents and the stories that illustrate how all of this transpired.

Klein has been politically active since the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam war. “I came to view the government with great suspicion like a lot of people back then and I still do,” he said in an interview he granted the IDG News service on Friday. “I guess that sort of laid the groundwork for my later experience, because I didn’t trust the government to begin with.”

Today he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Linda, and his two dogs. He self-published his book last week.

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New budget docs reveal that the NSA is building a large new datacenter in Utah so that it can inhale more of your e-mail traffic. No word yet on how much it will pay for the large lidless eye wreathed in flame that will tower over the new facility.

Jon Stokes - July 6, 2009

A set of congressional budget documents reveals that the NSA plans to spend almost $1.8 billion over the next few years building a massive datacenter at Fort Williams in Utah. The docs describe the first part of a multi-phase construction project, which is slated to start next year. This first phase (PDF) involves developing infrastructure for the one million square foot center, infrastructure that includes 65MW of electrical power distribution, basic plumbing and drainage, and security and access control.

Power is apparently one of the key reasons that the NSA is looking to branch out from its massive Fort Meade facility and set up datacenters in other locations. The Salt Lake Tribune, which appears to have been first to the story, reports that there are two large power corridors that pass through Camp Williams, so the NSA will focus on hooking into those in the first phase of the project.

The Baltimore Sun ran a story in 2006, well before work started on this new facility, about the strain placed by the Fort Meade facility on Baltimore’s power grid. (The Sun link is broken, but this Slashdot link still works.) The NSA was allegedly in danger of overloading the grid, so it was taking various measures to reduce datacenter power consumption.

Design work on the new center apparently started in November 2008, according to one document, and the NSA is targeting June 2010 to actually start work on the new facility.

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David Kravets | December 01, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

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(NPR) Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Agency stepped up its efforts to collect intelligence domestically by filtering millions of phone conversations and e-mail messages. In his new book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 To The Eavesdropping On America, journalist James Bamford reveals that the ultra-secret agency has half a million people on its watch lists.

Bamford has been writing about the inner workings of the NSA since his first book, The Shadow Factory: A Report On America’s Most Secret Agency, was published in 1982. He is also the author of Body Of Secrets: Anatomy Of The Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.

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Christopher Ketcham - September 26, 2008

How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the US Government’s Telecom System and Compromised National Security

Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the US government. Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among US residents. The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime). “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable,” says a high level US intelligence officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. “How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” If the allegations are true, the electronic communications gathered up by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government. Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents for “public intelligence in the public interest,” tells me that “Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”

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