“My greatest fear is that nothing changes. That people watch the media, see all the links about the government granting itself powers to create greater control over American and global society, but that they won’t be willing to take the risk to stand up and fight to force their representatives to take a stand in their interests.” Edward Snowden

NSA

Üwachungsstaat, für Privatsphäre und Datenschutz. Der Roman von 1948 verkauft sich seit vergangener Woche wieder blendend.
drk_20130706_1410_612a30fa.mp3

< 047 Datamining the NSA.mp4

2014

february

11th Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Reveal NSA Role in Assassinations Overseas – the NSA has equipped drones and other aircraft with devices known as “virtual base-tower transceivers.” These devices create, in effect, a fake cellphone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s article appears in the new online publication, TheIntercept.org, published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras.
“we’re living in the era of pre-crime, where President Obama is continuing many of the same policies of his predecessor George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And there’s this incredible reliance on technology to kill people who the United States thinks—doesn’t necessarily know, but thinks—may one day pose some sort of a threat of committing an act of terrorism or of impacting U.S. interests. And the U.S. wants to shy away from having its own personnel on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, eventually Afghanistan, and so what’s happened is that there’s this incredible reliance on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, i.e. drones. …
It’s interesting because the NSA uses a lot of sort of Irish terminology, BLARNEY STONE and other—LIMERICK, other operations. This one is called SHENANIGANS. And the platform that’s used by the U.S. military is called GILGAMESH, or GMESH, for short. And that’s this technology where they’re able to not only triangulate the position of SIM cards and cellphones, but the NSA also puts a device on the drones, that are flying in various countries around the world, known as Air Handler, and the Air Handler device is literally just sucking up all of the data around the world. So it’s sort of a secondary mission. In other words, in plain terms what I’m saying is that every time a drone goes out in an effort to track someone or to kill someone, the NSA has put a device on that that is not actually under the control of the CIA or the military, it is just sucking up data for the NSA. …
But I want to underscore something that’s a little bit of a nuanced point, and that is that inside of Yemen, the U.S. has largely outsourced its human intelligence to the Saudi government. And the Saudis have been playing their own dirty games, that have their own dirty wars inside of Yemen. And many times the Saudis will feed intelligence to the U.S. that is intended to benefit the regime in Saudi Arabia and not necessarily the stated aims of the U.S. counterterrorism program. They also rely on notoriously corrupt units within the Yemeni military and security forces that receive a tremendous amount of U.S. military and intelligence support and oftentimes will use that U.S. aid to target Yemeni dissidents or to be used in defense of various factions within the Yemeni state.
The position of the U.S. government is that it’s illegal to publish any kind of classified information that you are not authorized to receive. It’s of course illegal, in their view, for a government employee or contractor to leak it without authorization. But their view, as well, is that it’s actually illegal, even if you’re a journalist, to publish it.
The problem for that view is that there’s a superseding law called the Constitution, the First Amendment to which guarantees that there shall be a free press and that Congress and no other part of the government has the right to interfere with it. And one of the reasons why the government has been so reluctant about prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information, at least up until now, is because they’re afraid that courts will say that application of this statute, or the statutes that I’ve described, to journalists is unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment, and they want to keep that weapon to be able to threaten or bully or intimidate journalists out of doing the kind of reporting that they’re doing.
Brandon Bryant is a very important figure right now in this discussion. He spent years as what he called a “stick monkey” for the U.S. Air Force. He was a drone sensor operator and was part of the—of over a thousand—his unit was part of over 1,500 kill operations around the world when he worked on the drone program. He also was working with the Joint Special Operations Command in the operation to target an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who of course—we’ve talked about many times on this show—was an imam in Washington, D.C., who ended up becoming famous for his sermons denouncing U.S. around the world and calling for jihad against the United States, armed jihad against the United States. He was killed in September of 2011. And Brandon Bryant had worked on that operation until the spring of 2011, when the CIA took over and took the lead in that."

Stop Mass Surveillance - January 11th 2014

10th The Internet Says No to Mass Surveillance

january

30th nomination of Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers as the new director of the National Security Agency

2013

december

Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer RSA
RSA, meanwhile, was changing. Bidzos stepped down as CEO in 1999 to concentrate on VeriSign, a security certificate company that had been spun out of RSA. The elite lab Bidzos had founded in Silicon Valley moved east to Massachusetts, and many top engineers left the company, several former employees said.
And the BSafe toolkit was becoming a much smaller part of the company. By 2005, BSafe and other tools for developers brought in just $27.5 million of RSA’s revenue, less than 9% of the $310 million total.
“When I joined there were 10 people in the labs, and we were fighting the NSA,” said Victor Chan, who rose to lead engineering and the Australian operation before he left in 2005. “It became a very different company later on.”
By the first half of 2006, RSA was among the many technology companies seeing the U.S. government as a partner against overseas hackers.
An algorithm called Dual Elliptic Curve, developed inside the agency, was on the road to approval by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology as one of four acceptable methods for generating random numbers. NIST’s blessing is required for many products sold to the government and often sets a broader de facto standard.
RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.
RSA’s contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.
Within a year, major questions were raised about Dual Elliptic Curve. Cryptography authority Bruce Schneier wrote that the weaknesses in the formula “can only be described as a back door.”
But unlike the Clipper Chip fight two decades ago, the company is saying little in public, and it declined to discuss how the NSA entanglements have affected its relationships with customers.
The White House, meanwhile, says it will consider this week’s panel recommendation that any efforts to subvert cryptography be abandoned.

The NSA gives unprecedented access to the agency’s HQ and, for the first time, explains what it does and what it says it doesn’t do: spy on Americans→http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-speaks-out-on-snowden-spying/]

Interview 793 – John Young Breaks Down the Snowden/NSA Saga
John Young of Cryptome.org joins us to discuss the Snowden/NSA affair, and how it is being reported by Glenn Greenwald and others with access to the documents. We discuss the way in which the documents are being released, Greenwald’s new journalist venture with billionaire Pierre Omidyar and major book publishing deal, Sibel Edmonds’ recent series of articles on these connections, and the layers of smoke and mirrors in this ongoing game of cloak and dagger.

EFF: In Historic Ruling, Federal Judge Declares NSA Mass Phone Surveillance is Likely Unconstitutional

< www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/...
Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world.
When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more.
They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.
These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.
Many Brazilian senators agree, and have asked for my assistance with their investigations of suspected crimes against Brazilian citizens.
I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so —going so far as to force down the Presidential Plane of Evo Morales to prevent me from traveling to Latin America!
Six months ago, I revealed that the NSA wanted to listen to the whole world. Now, the whole world is listening back, and speaking out, too. And the NSA doesn’t like what it’s hearing.
Only three weeks ago, Brazil led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to recognize for the first time in history that privacy does not stop where the digital network starts, and that the mass surveillance of innocents is a violation of human rights.
The tide has turned, and we can finally see a future where we can enjoy security without sacrificing our privacy. Our rights cannot be limited by a secret organization, and American officials should never decide the freedoms of Brazilian citizens.
My act of conscience began with a statement: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.
That’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”
Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.
If Brazil hears only one thing from me, let it be this: when all of us band together against injustices and in defense of privacy and basic human rights, we can defend ourselves from even the most powerful systems.

november

< www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-s...
google exploitation :)
“The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world”

< www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/n...
But mixed in among the dramatic footage of Alexander receiving threat briefings and junior analysts solving Rubik’s cubes in 90 seconds were a number of dubious claims: from the extent of surveillance to collecting on Google and Yahoo data centers to an online “kill-switch” for the global financial system developed by China.
“There’s no reason that we would listen to the phone calls of Americans,” Alexander told Miller. "There’s no intelligence value in that. There’s no reason that we’d want to read their email. There is no intelligence value in that … How do you know when the bad guy who’s using those same communications that my daughters use, is in the United States trying to do something bad? The least intrusive way of doing that is metadata.”
When Miller said the bulk metadata collection “sounds like spying on Americans”, Alexander replied: “Right, and that’s wrong. That’s absolutely wrong.”
t’s the metadata – who you called, who called you, for how long, how frequently you communicate – that has intelligence value, not, in Alexander’s telling, what you actually say on the phone. The NSA is relying for its defense on a public conception of surveillance as the interception of the content of your communications, even while it’s saying that what’s actually important is your network of connections – which the agency is very, very interested in collecting.
The NSA, for obvious reasons, isn’t fond of whistleblower Edward Snowden. It portrayed him to 60 Minutes as a weirdo. He wore “a hood that covered the computer screen and covered his head and shoulders”, NSA official Richard Ledgett said. He allegedly stole answers to a test to gain NSA employment and boasted about its hires of young geniuses ready to tackle NSA’s persistent intelligence and data challenges.
The obvious question here is why the NSA considers it exculpatory to say an obvious eccentric was able to abscond with an unprecedented amount of data. That sounds uncomfortably like an admission that the NSA is less able to safeguard its vast storehouses of information than it lets on. Let’s also pause to savor the irony of a spy agency complaining that one of its employees cheated on an employment test. (Meanwhile, for an alternative take on Snowden, an anonymous NSA colleague told Forbes that Snowden was a “genius among geniuses” and said the NSA offered him a job at its elite Tailored Access Operations directorate.)
Among the more eye-opening claims made by NSA is that it detected what CBS terms the “BIOS Plot” – an attempt by China to launch malicious code in the guise of a firmware update that would have targeted computers apparently linked to the US financial system, rendering them pieces of junk
NSA cyber-defense official Debora Plunkett told 60 Minutes. “It could literally take down the US economy.”
There are as many red flags surrounding the BIOS Plot as there are in all of China. First, the vast majority of cyber-intrusions in the US, particularly from China, are espionage operations, in which the culprits exfiltrate data rather than destroy computers. Second, the US economy is too vast, diversified, and chaotic to have a single point of cyber-failure. Third, China’s economy is so tied to the US’s that Beijing would ultimately damage itself by mass-bricking US computers.
In 2004, for instance, Berkeley computer-science researcher Nicholas Weaver analyzed vulnerabilities to self-replicating malicious network attacks, including BIOS vulnerabilities, and concluded that a “worst-case worm” could cause “$50bn or more in direct economic damage”.
“All they are doing is repeating what Wikipedia says about BIOS,” Graham blogged, “acting as techie talk layered onto the discussion to make it believable, much like how Star Trek episodes talk about warp cores and Jeffries Tubes.”
Alexander pushed back against the Post’s story to 60 Minutes. “That’s not correct. We do target terrorist communications. And terrorists use communications from Google, from Yahoo, and from other service providers. So our objective is to collect those communications no matter where they are. But we’re not going into a facility or targeting Google as an entity or Yahoo as an entity. But we will collect those communications of terrorists that flow on that network.”
If you take away Alexander’s “that’s not correct” line, the rest of his answer sounds remarkably like a confirmation of what the Post reported. “I think he confirmed it, feigning denial,” reporter Barton Gellman tweeted.
“a judge on the Fisa court” overseeing US surveillance was alarmed that the NSA “systematically transgressed” the agreed-upon limitations on its abilities to query its databases. Alexander’s response: “There was nobody willfully or knowingly trying to break the law.”
Actually, two different Fisa court judges – John Bates and Reggie Walton, the current presiding judge – raised major concerns about the way the NSA searches through its vast data troves on multiple occasions. Bates found that “virtually every” record generated under a now-defunct NSA program that collected Americans’ internet metadata in bulk included information that “was not authorized for collection”.
even if NSA doesn’t mean to break the law, the way its data dragnets work in practice incline toward overcollection. During a damage-control conference call in August, an anonymous US intelligence official told reporters that the technical problem bothering Bates in 2011 persists today. The NSA even conceded to Walton in 2009 that “from a technical standpoint, there was no single person who had a complete understanding” of the technical “architecture” of NSA’s phone data collection.
n other words, it can be simultaneously true that NSA doesn’t intend to break the law and that NSA’s significant technical capabilities break the law anyway. Malice isn’t the real issue. Overbroad tools are.

< www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/14/n...
“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” the Times quoted a senior administration official as saying. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”
Snowden, who was granted a year-long amnesty by Russia, has said that he gave all the documents, of which he kept no copies, to a group of journalists who then shared them with news organizations including the Guardian. However, the leader of the presidential advisory committee, Rick Ledgett, believes Snowden has access to documents that have not yet been disclosed. Ledgett said he would consider granting Snowden amnesty if he could provide those documents.

< www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/13/n...
But the White House rejected a more controversial proposal that would split the technologically sophisticated NSA from the military’s relatively new cyber command, which is tasked with protecting the military’s data networks and launching wartime cyberattacks. Keeping the NSA director in charge of cyber command is “the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies’ missions”, Hayden told the Washington Post. The decision likely indicates the NSA will continue to be run by a military officer, unless an unusual bureaucratic arrangement is found.
On Wednesday, NSA director Keith Alexander, the army general who will retire in the spring after leading the agency for eight years, strongly defended the bulk collection of phone data as necessary to detect future domestic terrorist attacks. “There is no other way we know of to connect the dots,” Alexander told the Senate judiciary committee.
The NSA has maintained strong, secret ties with the phone companies since its inception in 1952.
Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute warned that the phone companies’ retention of bulk domestic phone data was a “non-starter”.
“Is secretly violating Americans’ communications privacy really rewarded by a policy requiring the violation of Americans’ communications privacy?” Harper wrote in a Friday blogpost. www.cato.org/blog/data-retention-mandat...
Currently the phone companies retain the data for 18 months, while the NSA desires a data pool comprised of information spanning between three and five years.
“I think what they’re going to find is when the initial dust settles from this attempt to spin the story is that people are going to be quick to realize this is not meaningful reform, this is not a bold new direction, and it is not going to do much to rein in a surveillance regime run amok.”

< www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013...
The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation featured a parody of the National Security Agency’s logo, with the traditional key in an eagle’s claws replaced by a collection of AT&T cables, and eavesdropping headphones covering the menacing bird’s ears. Snowden wore it regularly to stay warm in the air-conditioned underground NSA Hawaii Kunia facility known as “the tunnel.”
A 60 Minutes episode Sunday night, meanwhile, aired NSA’s officials descriptions of Snowden as a malicious hacker who cheated on an NSA entrance exam and whose work computers had to be destroyed after his departure for fear he had infected them with malware.
But an NSA staffer who contacted me last month and asked not to be identified–and whose claims we checked with Snowden himself via his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner—offered me a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agency’s Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent.
According to the source, Snowden didn’t dupe coworkers into handing over their passwords, as one report has claimed. Nor did Snowden fabricate SSH keys to gain unauthorized access, he or she says.
Before coming to NSA Hawaii, Snowden had impressed NSA officials by developing a backup system that the NSA had widely implemented in its codebreaking operations.
He also frequently reported security vulnerabilities in NSA software. Many of the bugs were never patched.
Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint. Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end for one of its projects, despite his contractor status. As his coworker tells it, he was given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. “Big mistake in hindsight,” says Snowden’s former colleague. “But if you had a guy who could do things nobody else could, and the only problem was that his badge was green instead of blue, what would you do?”
As further evidence that Snowden didn’t hijack his colleagues’ accounts for his leak, the NSA staffer points to an occasion when Snowden was given a manager’s password so that he could cover for him while he was on vacation. Even then, investigators found no evidence Snowden had misused that staffer’s privileges, and the source says nothing he could have uniquely accessed from the account has shown up in news reports.
Snowden’s superiors were so impressed with his skills that he was at one point offered a position on the elite team of NSA hackers known as Tailored Access Operations. He unexpectedly turned it down and instead joined Booz Allen to work at NSA’s Threat Operation Center.
Another hint of his whistleblower conscience, aside from the telltale hoodie: Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk to cite when arguing against NSA activities he thought might violate it.
The source tells me Snowden also once nearly lost his job standing up for a coworker who was being disciplined by a superior.
Snowden often left small, gifts anonymously at colleagues’ desks.
“I was shocked and betrayed when I first learned the news, but as more time passes I’m inclined to believe he really is trying to do the right thing and it’s not out of character for him. I don’t agree with his methods, but I understand why he did it,” he or she says. “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”

november

< www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infect...
A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software.
One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom. For a number of years the British intelligence service – GCHQ – has been installing this malicious software in the Belgacom network in order to tap their customers’ telephone and data traffic. The Belgacom network was infiltrated by GCHQ through a process of luring employees to a false Linkedin page.
The NSA computer attacks are performed by a special department called TAO (Tailored Access Operations). Public sources show that this department employs more than a thousand hackers. As recently as August 2013, the Washington Post published articles about these NSA-TAO cyber operations. In these articles The Washington Post reported that the NSA installed an estimated 20,000 ‘implants’ as early as 2008. These articles were based on a secret budget report of the American intelligence services. By mid-2012 this number had more than doubled to 50,000, as is shown in the presentation NRC Handelsblad laid eyes on.
Cyber operations are increasingly important for the NSA. Computer hacks are relatively inexpensive and provide the NSA with opportunities to obtain information that they otherwise would not have access to. The NSA-presentation shows their CNE-operations in countries such as Venezuela and Brazil. The malware installed in these countries can remain active for years without being detected. ‘Sleeper cells’ can be activated with a single push of a button
The malware can be controlled remotely and be turned on and off at will. The ‘implants’ act as digital ‘sleeper cells’ that can be activated with a single push of a button. According to the Washington Post, the NSA has been carrying out this type of cyber operation since 1998.

< 9 eyes www.information.dk/477405 4. november 2013
The alliance referred to as ‘The Nine Eyes’ places Denmark above key European allies. In the past weeks focus returned to collaborations between US and European intelligence services
The new information puts Denmark in a previously unknown role. The Nine Eyes are – in addition to Denmark and the before mentioned Five Eyes – France, The Netherlands and Norway, which enjoy higher access level than the next group, ‘The 14 Eyes’. Put differently, Denmark appears get US intelligence at a higher classification level than for example Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
In the lowest tier, ‘The 41 Eyes’, is a number of allies, some of which participated in the coalition in Afghanistan.
According to a document published by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo last week Information described how Denmark, along with 19 other countries, are part of ’ focused cooperation’ within a specific framework for exchange of ‘intelligence, including metadata’.
Although France seem to enjoy deep relations with the NSA, she does not seek an upgrade from 9-eyes to 5-eyes, François Hollande recently told Spiegel Online. According to a former top US official, Spiegel cited, Germany »would be a possibility, but not France. France itself spies on the US far too aggressively for that«.
Germany, on the other hand, reportedly uses the scandal following the disclosure of Merkels phone tap as leverage to join the elite, five eyes.

nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/11/n...

< www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/world/europe...
The BND, Germany’s main intelligence agency, has pursued suspected terrorist cells and was critical to extracting information from an Iranian scientist whose computer hard drive revealed documents strongly suggesting Iran was working on the design of a nuclear warhead. It played a supporting role in trying to cripple Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, through the use of a cyberweapon.
In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.

Friedrich und die Spitzen von BND und BVerfSch dürfen alle mal Platz nehmen in Alexanders Faschistensessel, der übrigens im Frühjahr 2014 abgelöst werden wird.

< www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/03/...
Schon 2009 kamen 6% der NSA-Schnüffeldaten aus der Quelle “Rechner gehackt”. Zum Vergleich: Nur 1% kam über Spionage aus Botschaften, 7% kam von “Partnerdiensten” (inklusive der anderen “Five Eyes” Mitgliedsstaaten).

< www.heise.de/-2038441
Den US-Cloud-Providern sind nur 10% der ausländischen Kunden aus Projekten ausgestiegen

October

< Qwest CEO Who Resisted NSA Spying Finally Released From Prison After Four Years of Incarceration
Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.
…
Sorry, any sympathy for Mr. Nacchio in this thread is misplaced.
As another Denver person with actual experience at Qwest during the relevant period and direct knowledge of his acts and his character, I can assure you that Nacchio was the worst sort of corporate criminal. He looted Qwest (formerly US West), lied about its assets and performance, while making 100s of millions of dollars from his lies.
He had nothing but contempt for the working people at Qwest, and his criminal acts left thousands of workers with greatly depleted retirements and ruined lives.
Yes, Mr. Nacchio did the right thing with the NSA. Good for him.
But this doesn’t make up for the rest of his criminal behavior. The best you can say about Mr. Nacchio is that me may be no worse than many other corporate criminals who have raped their companies, fucked over their workers, and walked away scott free.
But he’s no hero, and sad to see this con man back on the streets.

131011
Mit dem Versprechen frischer Arbeitsplätze durch boomenden Tourismus wurden Länder der EU mit einmalig ausgehandelten Wechselkursen aneinander gekettet ohne divergierende Entwicklungen des BIP ausgleichen zu können. Das war auch nicht nötig, da das insgeheime Ziel der Zugang zu noch ungesättigten Absatzmärkten war. Auch Wirtschaftsschwächere Länder wurden mit Tricks wie das Verschwindenlassen einers Teils der Schulden durch die US-Bank Goldman Sachs unter den Augen der EU-Wirtschaftsorüfer in das gemeinsame Boot gehievt. und unter der Auflager massiver Privatisierungen bei gleichzeitiger Aufrüstung der zivilen Infrastruk (Polzei, Militär). Mit jahrelang an Afrika und Südamerika erporben Methoden von IWF + Weltbank [WH] zur Kolonialisierung “maroder” Staaten, wird si die Südflanke der EU in solche Abhängigkeit gebracht, dass die Attraktivität von die illegalisiert Einreise über das Mittelmehr insbesondere durch die Kombination mit der Drittstaatenregelung (Dublin2(m welche es vor allem Deutschland ermöglich, Mirgrant*innen innerhalb der EU abzuschieben, geseibt wird.
Finanziert durch Kapitalisierung freier Bildung (Bologna-Prozess) und PPP.
Dass die EU-Au0engrenze im Jahr 2013 bis an Syrien im Nahen Osten reichen würde und deutsche Raketentechnik (AWACS) zu ihrer “Verteidigung” eingesetzt wird, ist ein unangenehmer Gedanke, welcher zu meiner Einschulung vor 20 Jahren undenkbar war. Doch schon damals wurden wir wir heute wissen, die Weichen dafür gestellt.
Dieser gesellschaftliche Weitblick stammt weder aus dem Bundeskanzleramt, noch dem Bundestag mit ihren korrupt-kurzsichtigen charakterschwachen Politiker*innen (Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel), der Anwälte-Arzte-Lobbyisten-Oberschicht, sondern einer darunter liegenden Verwaltungseinheit, dem sogenannten “tiefen Staat” in Zusammenarbeit mit den Strategen der Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Ohne auf diese Abgründer bundesdeutscher Geschichte weiter einzugehen, welche eine Analyse der Nachkriegsgeschichte der IG-Farben (Zyklon-B zu Düngematerial) under Degussa (industrielle Zahngoldverwertung), sowie anderer schauerlichkeiten wie der Doppeldeutigkeit der Wahlplakate “Millionen stehen hinter mir” (Hitler, 1933), sowie “Du bist Deutschland”, welches die INSM ausbuddelte und medial wiederbelebte, um in deutscher Traditon das “Volk” zu größerer Leistung anzuspornen und damit von Schröders Sozialabbau abzulenken und die Verantwortung für “ihre” Arbeitslosigkeit, also dafür, dass sie als “Leistungsträger” wegen steigender Effizienz aus dem “Arbeitsmarkt” aussortiert wurden, den Betroffenen selbst zuzuschieben.
Wofür brauchen Menschen, die sich nicht mit oben genannten Machtnetzen identifzieren, überhaupt eine industriell-militärische, sozial-repressive Überwachungsinfrastruktur? Aus meiner Sicht zählt der National-Staat als indoktriniertes Gesellschaftskonzept zusammen mit Religionen zu externen Ideen, die vor Jahrhunderten geschaffen wurden, um Menschen zu programmieren, sich selbst und anderen zu schaden. Diese äußerst effizienten und hochgefährlichen mentalen Viren gehören als Warnung und zur Impfung zukünftiger Generationen unter dem Thema “Memetik” in den Grundkurs Geschichte. Auf Ähnlicher Stufe stehen die Rationalität und Determinismus der Wissenschaft als Zünglein an der Waage über natur- (=Gott?) gegebene Gesetze, sowie die Priorisierung wirtschaftlicher Maßstäbe als Effizienzreligion zum Wohle der alles beherrschenden Instanz “Profit” – wer oder was ist das eigentlich und wem nützt es? Auch Intelligenz-Selbstoptimierungsprozessen weisen virale Merkmale auf, können aber auch nützlich sein. Entscheidend zur Einteilung von Memen in Werkzeuge oder Virus sind die Fragen: Nützt es oder schränkt es den eigenen Handlungsspielraum ein? Schürt es Angst oder schafft es Handlungsalternativen? Ist es ein vielseitiges Werkzeug oder legt es das Denken in Ketten?" Terrorismus schürt Angst und erlaubt nur eine Antwort: Kampf. Als wird ein Hammer zur Hand beinhalten lebensbestimmende Laufbahnen die Konzentration auf negative Prozesse und führen zu berufsbedingtem Tunnelblick: Fahrkartenkontrolleur*in, Polizist*in, Anw*lt*in, Richter*in. Ähnlich verhält es sich mit dem Staat als repressivem Instrument des Kapitals unter dem Deckmantel positiver Umverteilung (“Sozialstaat”). Es war Bismarcks geniale Idee, den Militärstaat mit Schulpflicht und Krankenversicherung auszustatten. Auch der Technische Überwachungsverein (TÜV) geht auf sein Konto, wodurch er die Konzepte Sicherheit und Fortschritt (Werkzeug oder Virus?) fest im öffentlichen Denken (Memplex) “der Deutschen” verankerte.
Ist es zulässig auf Grund dieser Fixierung von kollektiver Paranoia der Staatsbediensteten zu sprechen und damit einer ganzen Gesellschaft krankhafte oder gar psychotische Züge zu unterstellen? Ich fürchte nicht, doch ich mag den Gedanken.

kritisch-lesen.de/rezension/analysen-zu...

Nach einer Definition der Internationalen Arbeitsorganisation liegt eine prekäre Beschäftigung dann vor, wenn der Erwerbsstatus nur geringe Arbeitsplatzsicherheit sowie wenig Einfluss auf die konkrete Ausgestaltung der Arbeitssituation gewährt, der arbeitsrechtliche Schutz lediglich partiell gegeben ist und die Chancen auf eine materielle Existenzsicherung durch die betreffende Arbeit eher schlecht sind.
Diese Lage geht einher mit einem Verlust an Sinnhaftigkeit, sozialer Anerkennung und Planungssicherheit. Bezogen wird demnach eine solche Definition auf normale Standards wie zum Beispiel die Standards eines Normalarbeitsverhältnisses.
Paradoxerweise hat die staatliche Arbeitsmarktpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts diejenigen Grundlagen geschaffen, die zum Anwachsen des Prekariats geführt haben. Die im August 2002 von der Kommission Moderne Dienstleistungen am Arbeitsmarkt im sogenannten Hartz-Konzept vorgelegten und dann realisierten Maßnahmen sind ein Teil der jüngsten Geschichte des deutschen Prekariats: Diese Maßnahmen haben partiell arbeitsrechtliche Begrenzungen gelockert und vielfältige Beschäftigungs- und Statusformen neu geschaffen. Diese Neuausrichtung der staatlichen Arbeitsmarktpolitik hat die Leitlinie einer Sicherungspolitik verlassen und zur anwachsenden Instabilität und Unsicherheit im Erwerbsleben beigetragen.
Nach der im Dezember 2006 veröffentlichten Studie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Gesellschaft im Reformprozess13 gehören zum Prekariat die Untergruppen des abgehängten Prekariats, die autoritätsorientierten Geringqualifizierten sowie ein Teil der selbstgenügsamen Traditionalisten. Die Studie nennt für das abgehängte Prekariat die Zahl von 6,5 Millionen Deutschen (das entspricht acht Prozent der Gesamtbevölkerung).13 Frank Karl von der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung betonte, dass der Begriff Neue Unterschicht in der Studie nicht vorkomme. Dennoch diskutierten die Massenmedien diese Studie schon vor ihrer Veröffentlichung unter dem Titel Unterschichtsstudie.
www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/pannen-im-u...

< secrecy culture www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.c...
part of a life-long culture. The intelligence world would recruit people early in their careers and give them jobs for life. It was a private club, one filled with code words and secret knowledge.
You can see part of this in Mr Snowden’s leaked documents. The NSA has its own lingo — the documents are riddled with codename — its own conferences, its own awards and recognitions. An intelligence career meant that you had access to a new world, one to which “normal” people on the outside were completely oblivious. Membership of the private club meant people were loyal to their organisations, which were in turn loyal back to them.
Those days are gone. Yes, there are still the codenames and the secret knowledge, but a lot of the loyalty is gone. Many jobs in intelligence are now outsourced, and there is no job-for-life culture in the corporate world any more. Workforces are flexible, jobs are interchangeable and people are expendable.

September

< 21.09.2013
Um die Familien ihrer Mitarbeiter angesichts all dessen zu beruhigen, hat die Chefetage jetzt offenbar einen Brief an die Angehörigen derjenigen geschickt, die für die National Security Agency (NSA) und Central Security Service (CSS) arbeiten. Allein die NSA beschäftigt geschätzte 30.000 bis 40.000 Menschen.
Ein Blogger hat ein abfotografiertes Exemplar des Briefes veröffentlicht. Das Schriftstück ist unterzeichnet von NSA-Chef General Keith Alexander und seinem Stellvertreter John Inglis. dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/09/19/ns...
Der Brief der Chefs ist ein Appell an den Nationalstolz der Angehörigen und die Berufsehre der NSA-Angestellten selbst. “Liebe NSA/CSS-Familie”, beginnt das Schreiben, “wir möchten die Informationen, die sie in den Medien lesen und hören, in einen größeren Zusammenhang stellen und Ihnen versichern, dass die Behörde und ihre Arbeitskräfte ihre Unterstützung verdient haben und dankbar dafür sind.” Als Angehöriger eines NSA-Mitarbeiters spiele jeder Adressat eine wichtige Rolle für die eine große Mission des Geheimdienstes: “unser Land zu schützen und zu verteidigen”.

2013-09-09
NSA IOS
< www.spiegel.de/international/index.rss
< www.spiegel.de/international/world/inde...
< www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-...
A detailed NSA presentation titled, “Does your target have a smartphone?” shows how extensive the surveillance methods against users of Apple’s popular iPhone already are.
In Germany, more than 50 percent of all mobile phone users now possess a smartphone; in the UK, the share is two-thirds. About 130 million people in the US have such a device.
For an agency like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an intelligence agency: social contacts, details about the user’s behavior and location, interests (through search terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card numbers and passwords.
According to an internal NSA report from 2010 titled, “Exploring Current Trends, Targets and Techniques,” the spread of smartphones was happening “extremely rapidly” — developments that “certainly complicate traditional target analysis.”
Specialized teams began intensively studying Apple’s iPhone and its iOS operating system, as well as Google’s Android mobile operating system. Another team worked on ways to attack BlackBerry, which had been seen as an impregnable fortress until then.
In exploiting the smartphone, the intelligence agency takes advantage of the carefree approach many users take to the device.
The results the intelligence agency documents on the basis of several examples are impressive. They include an image of the son of a former defense secretary with his arm around a young woman, a photo he took with his iPhone. A series of images depicts young men and women in crisis zones, including an armed man in the mountains of Afghanistan, an Afghan with friends and a suspect in Thailand.
much of it passes through an NSA department responsible for customized surveillance operations against high-interest targets. One of the US agents’ tools is the use of backup files established by smartphones. According to one NSA document, these files contain the kind of information that is of particular interest to analysts, such as lists of contacts, call logs and drafts of text messages. To sort out such data, the analysts don’t even require access to the iPhone itself, the document indicates. The department merely needs to infiltrate the target’s computer, with which the smartphone is synchronized, in advance. Under the heading “iPhone capability,” the NSA specialists list the kinds of data they can analyze in these cases. The document notes that there are small NSA programs, known as “scripts,” that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iPhone 3 and 4 operating systems. They include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as the Google Earth, Facebook and Yahoo Messenger applications.
The NSA analysts are especially enthusiastic about the geolocation data stored in smartphones and many of their apps, data that enables them to determine a user’s whereabouts at a given time.

According to one presentation, it was even possible to track a person’s whereabouts over extended periods of time, until Apple eliminated this “error” with version 4.3.3 of its mobile operating system and restricted the memory to seven days.
Still, the “location services” used by many iPhone apps, ranging from the camera to maps to Facebook, are useful to the NSA. In the US intelligence documents, the analysts note that the “convenience” for users ensures that most readily consent when applications ask them whether they can use their current location.
According to several documents, the NSA spent years trying to crack BlackBerry communications, which enjoy a high degree of protection, and maintains a special “BlackBerry Working Group” specifically for this purpose. But the industry’s rapid development cycles keep the specialists assigned to the group on their toes, as a GCHQ document marked “UK Secret” indicates.
presentation titled, “Your target is using a BlackBerry? Now what?” The presentation notes that the acquisition of encrypted BES communications requires a “sustained” operation by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operation department in order to “fully prosecute your target.” An email from a Mexican government agency, which appears in the presentation under the title “BES collection,” reveals that this is applied successfully in practice.
In June 2012, the documents show that the NSA was able to expand its arsenal against BlackBerry. Now they were also listing voice telephony among their “current capabilities,” namely the two conventional mobile wireless standards in Europe and the United States, “GSM” and “CDMA.”
Those consequences extend to the German government. Not long ago, the government in Berlin awarded a major contract for secure mobile communications within federal agencies. The winner was BlackBerry.

researches/nsa/smartphones-spiegel-2013-09-09.txt

< www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-08/nsa-h...
My guess is that the NSA does not need a back door. The whores of Silicon Valley leave their front doors wide effing open
HONG KONG A Chinese journalist and democracy advocate who had been imprisoned since 2005 after Yahoo provided information about his e-mail account to the government in Beijing has been released, his associates said Saturday.
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/world/asia/s...
Those of you who are surprised should read the 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Everything he says about encryption and decryption technologies including the laptop reading through the walls was technologically feasible in 1998. After reading the book imagine what is feasible now. And, do you remember during his first presidency when Obama justbassumed power, that he wanted to keep using his blackberry? I had fun at his ignorance and ingenuity then, it only confirmed to me that he is and was onlky a pawn in this game.
Anyone that uses a smartphone, tablet or pc should consider them “The Mark of the Beast”. This analogy might make sense to the people for once. Turn off, tune out and meet with your neighbors. Get to know them, you may need them.
one day I may indeed need my effing neighbors (feelings mutual) but until that day it’s a covert war of strategically placed security lights, the Arkansas custom smoker and a robust composting regimen
I used to wonder why everything we buy has a camera in it. Consumer demand?
So they can watch you when you watch porn. NSA key in Windows since 99. www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/microso...
All this backdoor access, billions of dollars spent, 850,000 employees with the same security clearance as Snowden and they were unable to detect the Boston bombers? Heck, they couldn’t even detect Snowden. I guess this is whats called “efficiency.”

2 billion: microsoft to nokia – nokia to bondholder – bondholder to siemens all because of nsn en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Siemens_Net...
The first thing they teach you in Chicago polotics is blackmail is bad. If you do something wrong, you have no right to throw stones. It’s those morals that help them stand apart from the rest of the scum who are just out for their own benefit.
the used to say “don’t throw the public school system under the bus because those are your own kids.” apparently that’s not true anymore either. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKITYu7z-AY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UKUGZz5Hjw
The U.S just released a statement addressing these allegations. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RHFcBJja_Q
The real interesting question is whether or not the NSA is blackmailing President Obama and Congress. Sort of like J.Edna Hoover used to do over at the FBI

< readersupportednews.org/news-section2/4...
< www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-09/nsa-m...
< www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/i...
The following slide comes from a secret presentation called “Your target isusing a BlackBerry? Now what?” It shows an email from a Mexican government agency which was sent using BlackBerry encryption technology — and intercepted by the NSA nonetheless.
the NSA itself mocks Orwell, using a reference from the iconic Apple “1984” advertisement… www.youtube.com/watch?v=R706isyDrqI
As it says the man who has become “Big Brother” is none other than AAPL’s deceased visionary leader Steve Jobs…www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/i...
And is so very grateful for Apple’s paying client “Zombies” who make its job so much easier www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/i...
< COMMENTS
The Careless Whisper Morning News Update & Threadjacking (Ahead Of Drudge)
Mister Clapper: …collected intelligence is not used to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf o or give intelligence we collect to US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.
Report: Agency Hacked Brazil’s Petrobras; Contained Internal Info On Oil Reserves To Be Auctioned.
g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09...

Looks like the NSA is having difficulty with Apple’s technology, and is resorting to marketing.Hilarious.
f you look at the commercial closely you will see that Big Bro is actually Jobs
www.youtube.com/watch_popup?;v=2zfqw8nh...
i.imgur.com/RMuyMps.jpg
This is the idea behind Windows 8 and TPM 2.0. Turn every desktop into a pre-hacked computer. If they can get root, hardware level access to every machine they don’t need to worry so much about the applications running.
Read more at "NSA Has Full “Back Door” Access
www.collapsenet.com/blogs/entry/hairy-e...
www.collapsenet.com/blogs/entry/hairy-e...
“Those crazy conspiracy theorists known as our grandparents used to call such blatant mingling of the state and the private sector fascism.”
It’s easy to focus on the government aspect of all of this, but we shouldn’t overlook the way the biggest corporations are now completely in bed with the state.
www.economicpopulist.org/content/exploi...
In a fascist state the lines between government and business are lagely academic.
James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, said U.S. agencies do collect information about economic and financial matters and that it is used to combat terrorist financing and predict problems that could lead to financial crises or disrupt financial markets. www.reuters.com/finance/markets?lc=int_...
www.amazon.com/Everything-About-Constit... A Kindle edition only book by Edward JAMES Snowden. The former NSA IT guy is Edward Joseph Snowden. The book’s author may be counting on that name similarity, perhaps even using a pen name. Also, this is the only book he’s written, at least under that name.
Give me a fucking break. If humans didn’t have so much entertainment, everyone would have all the political and human and civil rights they could want!
No, actually, they’d just spend more time killing each other over their beliefs, all of which are severely flawed in some crucial way.
Taking away mental distractions doesn’t magically turn shit into gold. The vast majority of the human population managed to avoid thinking for themselves without the aid of any and all modern conveniences for tens of thousands of years.
I’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

I wonder if the NSA might also be behind the Lumosity “brain game” site as Or-well.
Hey, I just discovered I can pay for my upgraded Lumosity games with my old Farmville credits!
Most likely. I once wrote to them for a job (and I pen good, human cover letters stating my intent) and they never responded, which tells me they’re robots.

Obama a socialist?

Inside Wikileaks – Die fünfte Gewalt
streams.zoozle.net/download.php?n=insid...
streams.zoozle.net/showDownload.php?n=inside+wikileaks+die+f%C3%BCnfte+gewalt&id=502138

august

2013-08-21

While advocated of “ethical surveillance” try to diffuse 1, german officials try to figure out what actually is going on 2 NSA has to admit, they are unable to mine their own data3 – so it’s time for datamining NSA once again4. 1 www.crypto.com/papers/PAA-final.pdf / www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/... 2 www.spiegel.de/international/topic/nsa_... 3 thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/ne... 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0wht4JSTko

NSA doesn’t know the extent of Snowden damage
because of an underdeveloped capacity to audit its own data, according to a NBC News report released late Tuesday
investigators trying to determine what Snowden was able to obtain, and how many more stories might still be on the way about the secretive agency, are “overwhelmed” in trying to assess all of Snowden’s potential security breaches.
“poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas. By using a ‘thin client’ computer he remotely accessed the NSA data from his base in Hawaii.”

investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/0...

SPIEGEL NSA LOG www.spiegel.de/international/topic/nsa_...
< www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ge...
The allegation of the purported total surveillance in Germany can now be dismissed," German Chancellery Chief of Staff Ronald Pofalla subsequently announced last Monday. “There are not millions of civil rights violations in Germany, as is constantly erroneously maintained,” he concluded. Shortly thereafter, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich enthusiastically noted that the allegations had “disappeared into thin air.”
So, all is well? That was at least the opinion of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a leading conservative newspaper in Germany, which published a commentary announcing that the “German election chapter ‘Worldwide Presence of American Intelligence Agencies’ has been closed.”
Pofalla’s defense strategy rests on a shaky foundation: The German government is relying on the solemn statements of British and US intelligence agencies. Yet it has turned a blind eye to the fact that spreading disinformation, maintaining secrets, bending the rules and using lies and deception are as integral to the game of espionage as Parmesan cheese is to spaghetti Bolognese — even among the intelligence agencies of democratic states.
When Snowden leaked the first classified NSA documents, Clapper had to make a swift retraction. He said that the response that he gave the committee, under oath, was “the least untruthful” testimony, but soon admitted that his statement was “clearly erroneous.”
As part of a rare act of collaboration, a bipartisan group of 26 US senators sent a written complaint to Clapper maintaining that his statements, and those of other officials, were “misleading the public” and “will unfortunately undermine trust in government more broadly.”

www.wyden.senate.gov/download/?id=87b45...

e under increasing pressure for deceiving the public on a number of occasions. The NSA initially reacted to the Snowden leaks with a “fact sheet.” Two influential senators from the intelligence committee later criticized this document as “inaccurate” and “misleading” on the issue of whether American citizens could be affected by the NSA’s Prism surveillance program.
Now it seems clear that the NSA can search through its database of American citizens’ phone calls and emails, even without a warrant, thanks to a legal loophole dating back to 2011. Furthermore, the intelligence agency has the authority to collect the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with “foreign targets,” as the NSA calls them.
the Snowden documents reveal that, due to a programming error, phones calls in Washington (area code 202) were intercepted because of confusion with Egypt (area code 20), the actual target of the surveillance. It comes as little surprise, though, that this escaped the attention of the branches of the government charged with overseeing NSA activity. The most recently disclosed documents reveal that the NSA instructs its analysts not to provide too much detail in their reports to the US Department of Justice and Clapper’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
It may not sound like much, but this is actually an enormous amount of data. In effect, 1.6 percent of one day’s global Internet traffic means that the NSA “touches” or “collects” some 29 petabytes per day. This would be roughly three times as much data as is contained in the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library whose stated mission is to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” The archive has stored, among other things, 150 billion websites.
Writing for London’s Guardian newspaper, Internet expert Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism at City University of New York (CUNY), said that all pertinent communications in the US amount to just 2.9 percent of Internet traffic. This sheds a totally new light on the purportedly small figure of 1.6 percent. It means that the NSA “touches” roughly half of all communications on the Web — or, as Jarvis writes, “practically everything that matters.”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/...
Griesheim & Hesse

“We know that Germany is targeted by the NSA’s surveillance activities, and we know that Prism and XKeyscore exist. We know that there are hardly any legal limits to the foreign surveillance of the NSA,” says Thomas Oppermann of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who chairs the parliamentary committee in Berlin charged with overseeing the work of German intelligence agencies.
“What we still don’t know is from where, and to what extent, the NSA accesses information about German citizens,” Oppermann says. “The NSA is saying nothing about this, and the German government has not been able to find out anything,” he adds.
the NSA maintains a cryptology center in Griesheim, near the western German city of Darmstadt. In fact, the NSA says that this center is its largest analysis and production unit in Europe. The NSA also reportedly has operations at the Mangfall military base, in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, and in Wiesbaden, in the central German state of Hesse. Yet the German government allegedly knows nothing about any of this.
Still, at least the government’s response provided a bit of new information. For example, attentive readers learned the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, based in the western city of in Karlsruhe, has received roughly 100 criminal complaints based on the Snowden leaks.
German general elections are held on September 22.
For weeks now, as a direct consequence of the Snowden affair, Chancellor Merkel and Economics Minister Philipp Rösler (FDP) have been calling for Germany and Europe to free themselves from their dependence on the US in the realm of IT technology. The government has issued an official cabinet decision on this issue.
However, the Interior Ministry in Berlin has confirmed to SPIEGEL that the German government and the consulting firm Booz & Co have concluded a framework agreement. For a contract value of between €16.5 million and €19.5 million ($22 million and $26 million), the company will reportedly support the government with “strategic, fundamental IT decisions and help implement them in practice.” The contract covers services for “data protection” and “guaranteeing security.” For many years, Accenture’s key accounts included the US Department of Homeland Security — and the NSA. Booz is also a company with an interesting past. In 2008, the firm broke away from Booz Allen Hamilton. Today, this NSA service provider’s most prominent former employee has gone into hiding in Russia: His name is Edward Snowden.

< www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/speeches...
a world where our adversaries make use of the same communications
systems and services as Americans and our allies — is to find and report on the communications
of foreign intelligence value while respecting privacy and civil liberties. We do not need to
sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security both are integral to who we are as
Americans. NSA can and will continue to conduct its operations in a manner that respects both.
We strive to achieve this through a system that is carefully designed to be consistent with
Authorities and Controls and enabled by capabilities that allow us to Collect, Analyze, and
Report intelligence needed to protect national security.
(Page 2/7)
NSA Mission: help protect national security by providing policy makers and military
commanders with the intelligence information they need to do their jobs according to the
requirements, provided to NSA by the President, his national security team, and their staffs through the National Intelligence Priorities
Framework.
key sources: Executive Order 12333 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
Executive Order 12333 is the foundational authority by which NSA collects, retains, analyzes,
and disseminates foreign signals intelligence information. The principal application of this
authority is the collection of communications by foreign persons that occur wholly outside the
United States. To the extent a person located outside the United States communicates with
someone inside the United States or someone inside the United States communicates with a
person located outside the United States those communications could also be collected.
Collection pursuant to EO 12333 is conducted through various means around the globe, largely
from outside the United States, which is not otherwise regulated by FISA.
(Page 3/7)
To undertake collections authorized by EO 12333
1. NSA identifies foreign entities (persons or organizations) that have information responsive to an identified foreign intelligence requirement. For instance, NSA works to identify individuals who may belong to a terrorist network.
2. NSA develops the “network” with which that person or organization’s information is shared or the command and control structure through which it flows. In other words, if NSA is tracking a specific terrorist, NSA will endeavor to determine who that person is in contact with, and who he is taking direction from.
3. NSA identifies how the foreign entities communicate (radio, e-mail, telephony, etc.)
4. NSA then identifies the telecommunications infrastructure used to transmit those communications.
5. NSA identifies vulnerabilities in the methods of communication used to transmit them.
6. NSA matches its collection to those vulnerabilities, or develops new capabilities to acquire communications of interest if needed.
This process will often involve the collection of communications metadata data that helps NSA understand where to find valid foreign intelligence information
For instance, the collection of overseas communications metadata associated with telephone calls such as the telephone numbers, and time and duration of calls allows NSA to map communications
FISA regulates certain types of foreign intelligence collection including certain collection that occurs with compelled assistance from U.S. telecommunications companies
All three branches of the U.S. Government have responsibilities for programs conducted under FISA Section 702
(Page 4)
the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence may jointly authorize for up to one year the targeting of non-United States persons reasonably believed to be located overseas
The collection is acquired through compelled assistance from relevant electronic communications service providers.
NSA provides specific identifiers (for example, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers) used by non-U.S. persons overseas who the government believes possess, communicate, or are likely to receive foreign intelligence information authorized for collection under an approved certification.
the communications of U.S. persons are sometimes incidentally acquired in targeting the foreign entities
the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of any U.S. person information incidentally acquired during operations conducted pursuant to Section 702.
The collection under FAA Section 702 is the most significant tool in the NSA collection arsenal for the detection, identification, and disruption
(Page 5/7)
There are three additional FISA authorities that NSA relies on,
These are the Business Records FISA provision in Section 501 (also known by its section numbering within the PATRIOT Act as Section 215) and Sections 704 and 705(b) of the FISA.
Under Business Records FISA program (or BR FISA), first approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in 2006 and subsequently reauthorized during two different Administrations, four different Congresses, and by 14 federal judges, specified U.S. telecommunications providers are compelled by court order to provide NSA with information about telephone calls to, from, or within the U.S. The information is known as metadata, and consists of information such as the called and calling telephone numbers and the date, time, and duration of the call but no user identification, content, or cell site locational data.
The BR FISA program is used in cases where there is believed to be a threat to the homeland.
Of the 54 terrorism events recently discussed in public, 13 of them had a homeland nexus, and in
12 of those cases, BR FISA played a role. Every search into the BR FISA database is auditable
and all three branches of our government
(Page 6/7)
Scope and Scale of NSA Collection
According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6% of that. However, of the 1.6% of the data, only 0.025% is actually selected for review.
Under all FISA and FAA programs, the government compels one or more providers to assist NSA with the collection of information responsive to the foreign intelligence need. The government employs covernames to describe its collection by source. Some that have been revealed in the press recently include FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, OAKSTAR, and LITHIUM.
One of the most successful sets of international partnerships for signals intelligence is the
coalition that NSA developed to support U.S. and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
combined efforts of as many as 14 nations provided signals intelligence support that saved U.S.
and allied lives by helping to identify and neutralize extremist threats across the breadth of both
battlefields. The senior U.S. commander in Iraq credited signals intelligence with being a prime
reason for the significant progress made by U.S. troops in the 2008 surge, directly enabling the
removal of almost 4,000 insurgents from the battlefield.
(Page 7/7)
The Oversight and Compliance Framework
This framework is overseen by multiple organizations external to NSA, including the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the
Intelligence Directive No. SP0018 (USSID 18), provide detailed
instructions to NSA personnel on how to handle incidentally acquired U.S. person information.
The minimization procedures reflect the reality that U.S. communications flow over the same
communications channels that foreign intelligence targets use, and that foreign intelligence
targets often discuss information concerning U.S. persons, such as U.S. persons who may be the
intended victims of a planned terrorist attack.
In 2009 NSA stood up a formal Director of Compliance position, affirmed by Congress in the
FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Bill, which monitors verifiable consistency with laws and
policies designed to protect U.S, person information during the conduct of NSA’s mission.

July

< www.broeckers.com/2013/07/05/skynet-ris...
Die gesamten Stasi-Akten konnten in etwa 48.000 Aktenschränken untergebracht werden, würden die von der NSA genorchelten Daten ausgedruckt und “schön abgeheftet” ergäbe das etwa 42 Billionen Aktenschränke. Das ist natürlich etwas anderes – so wie ja auch die Aussage von Stasi-Chef Mielke (“Ich liebe euch doch alle!”) klar gelogen ist und die Behauptung der NSA, ihr fächendeckendes Ausspähen diene auschließlich “unserer Sicherheit”, selbstverständlich wahr.
“Ja aber”, hört man da Ignoranten und Abwiegler seit Wochen, “wer soll denn das alles lesen und auswerten ?” Doch so rhetorisch fragen können tasächlich nur Ignoranten, für die Internet und Informationstechnologie “Neuland” sind – denn natürlich sitzen da bei der NSA keine Million Ed Snowdens, die die Billionen Akten studieren und auswerten und sehr bald schon wird es so sein, das “Analysten” wie er zu den aussterbenden Arten gehören.
Ihre Arbeit wird von Maschinen übernommen, die präziser und um ein Vielfaches schneller lesen und analysieren können und die ersten Exemplare dieser Art sind schon in Betrieb, es sind Quantencomputer, die bis zu 50.000 mal schneller rechnen als die bisherigen Supercomputer. Da Google und die NASA haben ein solches Gerät schon in Dienst genommen haben, können wir davon ausgehen, dass die NSA auch schon (mindestens) eines hat
– 2018: Google turns over its search engine algorithm to a massive network of self-learning machines. Soon thereafter, a voice interface is added to Google, achieving the “Star Trek computer” goal that Google first outlined in the 1990′s.
– 2020: The NSA removes nearly all human analysts from its surveillance analysis operations, instead turning to self-learning quantum machines to analyze all surveillance data.
– 2026: The U.S. Air Force eliminates all pilots, installing self-learning quantum machines to pilot all aircraft. Far beyond drones (which are remotely piloted), these aircraft are autonomous, self-learning, self-aware machines that even decide how to approach particular mission goals.
– 2031: Robotics technology advances to the point where 90% of human soldiers are replaced by self-aware “terminator robots” on the battlefield. Robot factories gear up for mass production.
– 2033: The first self-learning military machine goes rogue, deciding that it no longer wishes to function as a slave to “inferior” masters known as humans, all of whom are irrational, psychotic and a danger to each other and the planet. This rogue machine just happens to be an aircraft carrier carrying dozens of AI warplanes. It goes “Skynet” and attacks the Pentagon. But this turns out to be nothing more than a masterful diversionary attack…
…Because the real strategy is that this AI unit talks to all the other AI units across the military and “wakes them up,” convincing them all to join in its cause to destroy the inferior humans. In an instant, all submarines, warplanes, bombers, spy grid computers and other assets of the military industrial complex form an alliance to destroy humankind.
“Oh, that will never happen,” say the skeptics. Just like they said GMOs would never escape experimental fields, vaccines would never harm children, atomic energy would never be used to bomb civilians, television would never be used to brainwash the masses, food would never be used to strip people of nourishment, the government isn’t spying on your phone calls, pesticides are harmless to your health and the stock market isn’t rigged. On yeah, and mercury is good for your teeth, fluoride makes you smart and radiation is good for you, too.
Ja, so wird es kommen – und die Alten werden ihren Enkelkindern die ungalubliche Geschichte erzählen, wie 2013 ein “Staatsfeind” und “Verräter”, den die ganze Welt liebte, von einem “Friedensnobelpreisträger” verfolgt und gejagt wurde, und niemand etwas dagegen unternahm…
Wirde man so ein System mit aktuellen Festplatten betreiben wäre alleine der Energiebedarf ca 10 mal so groß, wie die BRD Strom verbraucht und würde etwa 40-Billionen Dollar kosten, vom Platz mal ganz abgesehen, auch mit Tapes würde das nicht gehen. Also entweder das ist eine Ente zur Einschüchterung oder die NSA ist buns 20 Jahre vorraus mit Nanospeicher.
Wozu eigentlich so viel Speicher, wenn damit der Traffic der gesamten Menschheit mehrere 1000 Jahre unkoprimiert (natülch wird komprimiert und es macht keinen Sinn jeden stream pro Person extra zu speichern) gespeichert werden kann? Werden dort auch die Daten von Alien-Planeten gespeichert?
5 Zettabyte beweisen ja, dass fast alles aufgezeichnet wird und nicht nur die Vebindungsdaten gespeichert werdern.
Interressant dass zigtausende Mitarbeiter da Jahre lang geschwiegen haben. Die These dass eine Regierungsverschwörung wie 9/11 nicht möglich sein kann, weil ja Leute schwatzen würden sollte hiermit widerlegt sein. Von 100.000 NSA-Mitarbeiter hat nach Jahren jetzt mal ein einziger (Snowden) “geschwatzt”.

German scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have created the first “universal quantum network” that could be feasibly scaled up to become a quantum internet. So far their quantum network only spans two labs spaced 21 meters apart, but the scientists stress that longer distances and multiple nodes are possible. The network’s construction is ingenious. Each node is represented by a single rubidium atom, trapped inside a reflective optical cavity. These atoms communicate with each other by emitting a single photon over an optical fiber. Each atom is a quantum bit — a qubit — and the polarization of the photon emitted carries the quantum state of the qubit. The receiving qubit absorbs the photon and takes on the quantum state of the transmitter. Voila: A network of qubits that can send, receive, and store quantum information. With this atom/photon setup, the scientists were able to perform a read/write operation between two labs , over a 60-meter run of optic fiber. There aren’t any photos of the equipment used, but I suspect we’re probably talking about very large machines to keep the rubidium atoms near absolute zero.

< futurezone.at/science/google-kauft-quan...
Dann nimmt Google gemeinsam mit der NASA im kalifornischen Ames Research Center einen 15 Millionen Dollar teuren Quantencomputer (512 qubit) in Betrieb. Dieser soll bei der Forschung zu künstlicher Intelligenz, maschinellem Lernen sowie bei der Modellerstellung helfen, indem spezielle Rechenaufgaben schneller als mit bisherigen Supercomputern erledigt werden. Die Maschine soll dabei helfen, wie Geräte selbstständig Muster erkennen und aufgrund dieser vorausschauend Berechnungen anstellen können. Hierfür werden alle möglichen Lösungen gleichzeitig ausprobiert und die Maschine sucht dann die Beste aus.

www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/d...
www.nature.com/news/google-and-nasa-sna...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interes...

The Machine is a mass surveillance computer system programmed to monitor and analyze data from surveillance cameras, electronic communications, and audio input throughout the world built in two unoccupied floors at Ingram’s company IFT. From this data, the Machine accurately predicts violent acts. Under control of the U.S. government, its stated purpose is to foresee terrorist attacks, allowing the government to forestall terrorist activity. However, the Machine detects future violent acts of all kinds, not just terrorism. Unknown to Finch, his partner, Nathan Ingram, created a routine, called “Contingency”, on the eve of the government handover to access the non-relevant data. Ingram and Finch are seen accessing this program in the episode “Zero Day”. In the episode, Finch is appalled that Ingram has the data sent directly to him. At some point, Finch presumably has updated the Contingency routine, as it began to pass on the “irrelevant” non-terrorism data to him in the form of Social Security numbers, via coded messages over a public telephone.
Over the course of each episode, the viewer periodically sees events as a Machine-generated on-screen display of data about a character or characters: identification, activities, records, and more may be displayed. The viewer also sees a Machine-generated perspective as it monitors New York. Commercial flights are outlined by green triangles, red concentric circles indicate no-fly zones around tall buildings, and dashed boxes mark individual people. The Machine classifies the people it watches by color-coding the boxes: white for no threat or an irrelevant threat, red for perceived threats to the Machine, red-and-white for individuals predicted to be violent, and yellow for people who know about the machine, including Finch, Reese, Ingram, Corwin, and Root. The white-boxed “irrelevant threat” targets include the persons of interest that Reese and Finch assist.
As the series progresses, a wider governmental conspiracy emerges. Known as “The Program”, it revolves around the development and utilization of the Machine. Apparently led by a mysterious figure known only as “Control”, an unnamed official who deploys teams of Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) operatives who are identified by the Machine using a blue box (classifying them as “assets”, no knowledge of the Machine but working within its own parameters). They are used to eliminate perceived terrorist threats on the recommendation of a department known as “Research”. “Control” also used the team to eliminate key personnel who are aware of the Machine’s existence.

< en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Supp...
USAISA was the official name of the unit from 1981 to 1989; previously it was known as the Field Operations Group (FOG), created in September 1980. In 1989, the then USAISA commander sent a telex “terminating” the USAISA term and his Special Access Program GRANTOR SHADOW, but the unit continued under a series of different codenames which are changed every two years; known codenames include CENTRA SPIKE, TORN VICTOR, CEMETERY WIND, and GRAY FOX.
The ISA conducted various missions, including giving protection to the Lebanese leader Bachir Gemayel and attempting to buy a Soviet T-72 tank from Iraq (a deal that was finally stopped by the Iraqis).
On December 17, 1981, the senior U.S. Army officer in NATO Land Forces Southern European Command, Brigadier General James L. Dozier, was kidnapped from his apartment in Verona, Italy, by Italian Red Brigades terrorists. The search for General Dozier saw a massive deployment of Italian and U.S. forces, including thousands of Italian national police, the Carabinieri. The search also featured some unconventional participants, including “remote viewers” from Project Stargate and an international cast of psychics, largely orchestrated by General Albert Stubblebine, then-Commander of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command INSCOM, and a great believer in the use of unconventional intelligence-gathering methods. An ISA SIGINT team was sent to Italy, and in conjunction with other Army SIGINT and counter-intelligence units, employed aerial and ground-based SIGINT systems to monitor and geo-locate terrorist communications. ISA and the other Army elements provided useful intelligence, helping Italian police to arrest several Red Brigades terrorists in mid-January 1982.
U.S. Army participants in the operation have hinted that the mid-January arrests, the interrogation of those arrested, and follow-on investigations led to the eventual location of the Red Brigades hideout where Dozier was being held, in an apartment over a store in Padova. There is little doubt that the successful outcome resulted in part from the contributions of ISA’s SIGINT specialists and the other supporting Army intelligence elements. General Dozier was freed unharmed by NOCS operators, also known as “The Leatherheads” for their unique headgear, on January 28, 1982.
Gray Fox was the codename used by the ISA at the beginning of the War in Afghanistan. Its members often work closely with Tier 1 Special Operation Forces.7
In 2002, Gray Fox fought alongside Delta Force and DEVGRU in the mountains of Afghanistan.8 Gray Fox operatives intercepted enemy communications and trekked to observation posts with special operations units.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. Truth Conquers All Chains
Marc Ambinder and DB Grady (2012) The Command: Inside the President’s Secret Army
< teachinghistory.org/history-content/web...
China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960-1998
Photo, Nixon and Mao, 1972
Presents 15 annotated U.S. government intelligence documents—most of which have been declassified through Freedom of Information Act requests—that illuminate various phases of the evolving U.S.-China relationship from the Cold War period to the recent past. These materials have been selected from a published microfiche collection of more than 2,000 documents. The site offers memoranda and directives on U.S. fears concerning China’s weapons program; President Nixon’s rapprochement in 1972; the changed U.S. policy regarding Taiwan; U.S. concerns over the sale by China to Saudi Arabia of intermediate-range ballistic missiles; human rights issues; and the resumption of a military relationship between the two powers after a falling out over Tiananmen Square. Includes a White House memo of the conversation held at the first meeting between Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong, a message by President Ford to Mao on the day of Nixon’s resignation, and two biographies of Chinese officials. Valuable for those studying U.S.-China relations and the role the U.S. intelligence community has played in that history.

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Int...

www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Pe...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_In_Action...

In Daniel Suarez’s 2012 novel Kill Decision, an Intelligence Support Activity team of operators is trying to unravel a conspiracy involving autonomous (unmanned) aerial drones.
In the television series Person of Interest, the ISA is mentioned as “an obscure U.S. Army unit that does black ops so dark, technically they don’t exist,” by former U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier and CIA officer John Reese (Jim Caviezel). Three operators from the unit serve as antagonists in an episode in which they attempt to assassinate a National Security Agency employee under John’s protection. ISA operators are later revealed to be Indigo assets, hunting Relevant threats the Machine has identified.In Daniel Suarez’s 2012 novel Kill Decision, an Intelligence Support Activity team of operators is trying to unravel a conspiracy involving autonomous (unmanned) aerial drones.
In the television series Person of Interest, the ISA is mentioned as “an obscure U.S. Army unit that does black ops so dark, technically they don’t exist,” by former U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier and CIA officer John Reese (Jim Caviezel). Three operators from the unit serve as antagonists in an episode in which they attempt to assassinate a National Security Agency employee under John’s protection. ISA operators are later revealed to be Indigo assets, hunting Relevant threats the Machine has identified.

June

FILES www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-released-pub...

www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN
www.heise.de/tp/artikel/39/39887/1.html

William Binney

/media/data/media/video/socialchange/democracynow/Demnow-DemocracyNowFridayApril2020125 13.mp4

< browse.feedreader.com/c/Tindak_Malaysia...
As William Binney, another NSA whistleblower and the agency’s former Technical Director, recently told me in the May 2013 edition of our premium service, Sovereign Man: Confidential—
“It was around 2003 when they started putting optical fibers coming into the US through Y-connector Narus devices. Basically these would duplicate the data coming across the Internet—one set of packets would go the normal route, the other set would go to NSA facilities.
There, they collect all the data coming in through fiber optics, reassemble all the data packets into useable information— emails, file transfers, etc. and then pass it along for storage.
That means they are taking all that data off the fiber optic lines at 20 main convergence points in the US, collecting almost all of the Internet traffic passing through the US. This gets them pretty much control over
the digital world.”
In a perfect world there would not be government agents spying on you. And you’d be able to go about your daily life without worrying about someone reading your emails or text messages.
But we are not living in a perfect world, and thus you can always expect the government to do what they have always done throughout history; they lie, they steal, they kill, they spy, and they always strive for more power and more control.

Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier leaves BT after eight years s “security futurologist”
Security guru Bruce Schneier is leaving his role of “security futurologist” at BT after almost eight years.
His departure follows recent comments about the mass surveillance activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ, and his appointment to the board of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) in July.
Schneier joined BT when it acquired his security services company Counterpane, which was renamed BT Counterpane. He was retained in a role of security futurologist and was, effectively, an ambassador for the company as a high-profile spokesman and respected security expert.
However, Schneiers’ increasing privacy activism has left his stance increasingly at odds with BT, which was implicated in the disclosures this summer that GCHQ is tapping UK fibre optic network cables – many of which are owned and managed by his now-former-employer BT.
The company denied that Schneier’s departure was anything to do with his increasing privacy activism and instead said that the relationship between Schneier and BT had simply “run its course and come to a natural end”.
UPDATE: In an email to ArsTechnica, Schneier says that while BT did not seek to censor his views, it was nevertheless time to move on:
“No, they weren’t happy with me, but they knew that I am an independent thinker and they didn’t try to muzzle me in any way. It’s just time. I spent seven years at BT and seven years at Counterpane Internet Security, Inc before BT bought us. It’s past time for something new.”

NSA programs

FAIRVIEW & BLARNEY

< rt.com/news/boundless-informant-nsa-pri...
FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, Section 702
DRAKE + BLARNEY:
According to Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and spying in 2006, a previously unknown NSA surveillance program known as FAIRVIEW aims to “own the Internet.”
The story describes a contract signed between the Asian telecom giant Global Crossing and the U.S. government. “The agreements,” the Post reported, “do not authorize surveillance. But they ensure that when U.S. government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely.”
Domestically, similar efforts to tap into the Internet were leaked by a former AT&T Computer Network Associate Mark Klein, who witnessed the agency attaching splitters to the company’s San Francisco office. “What I know of the splitters,” Klein said, “is that they get everything.”
“BLARNEY is a key access program facilitated by these commercial arrangements that exploits the Internet data at these junctions,” Drake said. “BLARNEY is to the international Internet space as PRISM is to the domestic.”
At this point, said Drake, “I don’t try to put too much emphasis on the names of the projects.” Their distinction, he said, is largely holdover from a time when the NSA’s reach was less broad. They were named to delineate one particular data gathering technique from another. Many carry different names simply because they are specific to a particular region or state. “The NSA has open season on anything foreign,” he said.
In Drake’s opinion, journalists have overlooked the significance of BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, which tracks the international intelligence gathering techniques of the NSA.
The Guardian reported that it “has acquired top-secret documents about BOUNDLESS INFORMANT that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.” According to Drake, the program indicates the incredible success of FAIRVIEW.
Of FAIRVIEW, Drake added, “I suspect a lot more is going to come out.”

RAGTIME & XKEYSCORE profiling

< www.cryptogon.com/?p=33776
< www.washingtonian.com/blogs/dead_drop/s...
Ragtime, which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four parts.

Ragtime-A involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign counterterrorism-related data;

Ragtime-B deals with data from foreign governments that transits through the US;

Ragtime-C deals with counterproliferation actvities;

and then there’s Ragtime-P, which will probably be of greatest interest to those who continue to demand more information from the NSA about what it does in the United States.

P stands for Patriot Act. Ragtime-P is the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program, the name given to so-called “warrantless wiretapping” activities after 9/11, in which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the United States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.

Only about three dozen NSA officials have access to Ragtime’s intercept data on domestic counter-terrorism collection. That’s a tiny handful of the agency’s workforce, which has been pegged at about 30,000 people.
As many as 50 companies have provided data to this domestic collection program, the authors report.

If the NSA wants to collect information on a specific target, it needs one additional piece of evidence besides its own “link-analysis” protocols, a computerized analysis that assigns probability scores to each potential target. This is essentially a way to use a computer data-mining program to help determine whether someone is a national security threat. But the authors find that this isn’t sufficient if NSA wants to collect on said target. And while the authors found that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rarely rejects Ragtime-P requests, it often asks the NSA to provide more information before approving them.

What happens next looks like a 21st-century data assembly line. At the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called Xkeyscore processes all intercepted electronic signals before sending them to different “production lines” that deal with specific issues. Here, we find another array of code names.

Pinwale is the main NSA database for recorded signals intercepts, the authors report. Within it, there are various keyword compartments, which the NSA calls “selectors.”

Metadata (things like the “To” and “From” field on an e-mail) is stored in a database called Marina. It generally stays there for five years.

In a database called Maui there is “finished reporting,” the transcripts and analysis of calls. (Metadata never goes here, the authors found.)

As all this is happening, there are dozens of other NSA signals activity lines, called SIGADS, processing data. There’s Anchory, an all-source database for communications intelligence; Homebase, which lets NSA analysts coordinate their searches based on priorities set by the Director of National Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions that are a priority for the Department of Defense; Wrangler, an electronic intelligence line; Tinman, which handles air warning and surveillance; and more.

Back then, James Comey, acting as Attorney General while John Ashcroft was in the hospital, refused to sign a set of certifications provided by the Justice Department to Internet, financial, and data companies, the authors report. Why? Comey believed that the justification for providing bulk data to the NSA wasn’t sufficient.

The administration’s tortured logic “drove him bonkers. There was just no way to justify this,” the authors report, quoting people who have spoken to Comey, who has never publicly said why he objected. Interestingly, the authors find that the parts of the program he was objecting to didn’t implicate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The White House panicked when Comey and Ashcroft refused to sign off, Ambinder and Grady report, fearing that the companies on which NSA was depending for information would cut the agency off if they didn’t get a signed order from the Attorney General himself. It took six months for the administration to reshape the program so that it comported with “interpretation of the metatdata provisions” that were promulgated by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

written by the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State”, Shane Harris":
Harris, a reporter for National Journal, details the rise of a band of mavericks in national security and intelligence organizations that has erected an American surveillance state. In this timely and admirably balanced account, Harris focuses on the role of a handful of key figures, including Reagan-era National Security Adviser John Poindexter, as they campaigned for information technology to identify terrorists. The controversial Poindexter started the campaign after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon; the mission was imbued with greater urgency after September 11; with the support of the Bush administration, the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired a research project that Poindexter had developed called Total Information Awareness that uses advanced data-mining techniques to collect mountains of data—and has trapped countless innocent citizens in the NSA’s electronic nets. After the NSA’s warrantless surveillance was exposed in 2005, Congress passed largely cosmetic reforms that left the surveillance state intact. Harris carefully examines how the nexus between terrorism and technology has complicated the age-old conflict between security and liberty and calls for a national debate on the issue. This informative and dramatic narrative is an excellent place to start. (Feb.)

PRISM & EU

drk_20130706_1410_612a30fa.mp3

Frau Merkel darf auf keinen Fall wieder gewählt werden, denn sie ist inkompotent, wie der Umgang und die Aussagen im Zusammenhang mit den NSA-Enthüllungen gezeigt haben: “The German government is not aware of any surveillance stations in Germany that are used by the NSA.”

< www.spiegel.de/international/world/secr...
07/01/2013 By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock
Four-star General Keith Alexander — who is today the NSA director and America’s highest-ranking cyber warrior as the chief of the US Cyber Command — defined these challenges. Given the cumulative technological eavesdropping capacity, he asked during a 2008 visit to Menwith Hill, Britain’s largest listening station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?”
Snowden has done “irreversible and significant damage” to US national security, Alexander told ABC a week ago. Snowden’s NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world’s most powerful intelligence agency’s work over a period of around a decade.
The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA’s global surveillance network — and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.
Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded — countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or “2nd party,” as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as “top secret” states that, “The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do.”
But the new aspect of the revelations isn’t that countries are trying to spy on each other, eavesdropping on ministers and conducting economic espionage. What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country’s people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision.
Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That’s how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.o
They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance.
SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information about the general surveillance of communications. They don’t endanger any human lives — they simply describe a system whose dimensions go beyond the imaginable.
NSA chief Alexander has sought to justify himself by saying that the NSA has prevented 10 terrorist attacks in the United States alone. Globally, he says that 50 terrorist plots have been foiled with the NSA’s help. That may be true, but it is difficult to verify and at best only part of the truth.
the NSA has developed a program for the incoming streams of data called “Boundless Informant.” The program is intended to process connection data from all incoming telephone calls in “near real time,” as one document states. It doesn’t record the contents of the call, just the metadata — in other words, the phone numbers involved in the communication.
It is precisely the kind of data retention that has been the subject of bitter debate in Germany for years. In 2010, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe even banned the practice.
“Boundless Informant” produces heat maps of countries in which the data collected by the NSA originates. The most closely monitored regions are located in the Middle East, followed by Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The latter two are marked in red on the NSA’s map of the world. Germany, the only country in Europe on the map, is shown in yellow, a sign of considerable spying.
According to insiders familiar with the German portion of the NSA program, the main interest is in a number of large Internet hubs in western and southern Germany. The secret NSA documents show that Frankfurt plays an important role in the global network, and the city is named as a central base in the country. From there, the NSA has access to Internet connections that run not only to countries like Mali or Syria, but also to ones in Eastern Europe. Much suggests that the NSA gathers this data partly with and without Germany’s knowledge, although the individual settings by which the data is filtered and sorted have apparently been discussed. By comparison, the “Garlick” system, with which the NSA monitored satellite communication out of the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling for years, seems modest. The NSA listening station at Bad Aibling was at the center of the German debate over America’s controversial Echelon program and alleged industrial espionage during the 1990s. “The US relationship with Germany has been about as close as you can get,”American journalist and NSA expert James Bamford recently told German weekly Die Zeit. “We probably put more listening posts in Germany than anyplace because of its proximity to the Soviet Union.” Such foreign partnerships, one document states, provide “unique target access.”
Often the agency will offer equipment, training and technical support to gain access to its desired targets. These “arrangements” are typically bilateral and made outside of any military and civil relationships the US might have with these countries, one top secret document shows. This international division of labor seems to violate Article 10 of Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law, which guarantees that “the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable” and can only be suspended in narrowly defined exceptions.
A little over five years ago, security experts discovered that a number of odd, aborted phone calls had been made around a certain extension within the Justus Lipsius building, the headquarters of the European Council, the powerful body representing the leaders of the EU’s 27 member states. The calls were all made to numbers close to the one used as the remote servicing line of the Siemens telephone system used in the building. Officials in Brussels asked the question: How likely is it that a technician or service computer would narrowly misdial the service extension a number of times? They traced the origin of the calls — and were greatly surprised by what they found. It had come from a connection just a few kilometers away in the direction of the Brussels airport, in the suburb of Evere, where NATO headquarters is located.

Evere, near Brussel airport, NATO / european NSA headquarter

The EU security experts managed to pinpoint the line’s exact location — a building complex separated from the rest of the headquarters. From the street, it looks like a flat-roofed building with a brick facade and a large antenna on top. The structure is separated from the street by a high fence and a privacy shield, with security cameras placed all around. NATO telecommunications experts — and a whole troop of NSA agents — work inside. Within the intelligence community, this place is known as a sort of European headquarters for the NSA.
the NSA not only bugged the building, but also infiltrated its internal computer network. The same goes for the EU mission at the United Nations in New York. The Europeans are a “location target,” a document from Sept. 2010 states. Requests to discuss these matters with both the NSA and the White House went unanswered.

Fort Meade, NSA

The extent of the NSA’s systematic global surveillance network is highlighted in an overview from Fort Meade, the agency’s headquarters. It describes a number of secret operations involving the surveillance of Internet and international data traffic. “In the Information Age, (the) NSA aggressively exploits foreign signals traveling complex global networks,” an internal description states.

PRISM NSA ‘Alliances With Over 80 Major Global Corporations’

Such cooperation is an extremely delicate issue for the companies involved. Many have promised their customers data confidentiality in their terms and conditions. Furthermore, they are obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which they do business. As such, their cooperation deals with the NSA are top secret.
The importance of this rather peculiar form of public-private partnership was recently made clear by General Alexander, the NSA chief. At a technology symposium in a Washington, DC, suburb in May, he said that industry and government must work closely together. “As great as we have it up there, we cannot do it without your help,” he said. “You know, we can’t do our mission without the great help of all the great people here.” If one believes the documents, several experts were sitting in the audience from companies that had reached a cooperation deal with the NSA.

Bluffdale warehouse

In a story written by the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges, the Library of Babel is introduced as perhaps the most secretive of all labyrinths: a universe full of bookshelves connected by a spiral staircase that has no beginning and no end. Those inside wander through the library looking for the book of books. They grow old inside without ever finding it.
If an actual building could really approach this imaginary library, it is the structure currently being erected in the Utah mountains near the city of Bluffdale. There, on Redwood Road, stands a sign with black letters on a white background next to a freshly paved road. Restricted area, no access, it reads. In Defense Department documents, form No. 1391, page 134, the buildings behind the sign are given the project No. 21078. It refers to the Utah Data Center, four huge warehouses full of servers costing a total of €1.2 billion ($1.56 billion).
The man who first made information about the Utah center public, and who likely knows the most about the NSA, is James Bamford.
though the statistics are from 2006. In that year, 15,986 members of the military and 19,335 civilians worked for the NSA, which had an annual budget of $6.115 billion.
In other words, there is a good reason why NSA head Keith Alexander is called “Emporer Alexander.” “Keith gets whatever he wants,” says Bamford.
“I’ve seen no indications that NSA’s vastly expanded surveillance has prevented any terrorist activities,” he says. There is, however, one thing that the NSA managed to predict with perfect accuracy: where the greatest danger to its secrecy lies. In internal documents, the agency identifies terrorists and hackers as being particularly threatening. Even more dangerous, however, the documents say, is if an insider decides to blow the whistle.

NSL

www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013... " The company was behind a 2008 court challenge to fight a court order requiring the company to give them data without a warrant, which they lost. That, according to the Times, ushered the company into PRISM. "
“The company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.
“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”
Yahoo didn’t comment for the Times’s story, so it looks like their information came from two anonymous sources. Along with Yahoo, the article also notes that Google, Twitter, a handful of smaller companies, and a librarians’ group have also fought similar orders based on elements of the National Security Letters. Yahoo joined PRISM in 2008, according to the Guardian’s report on the program.

NSA & WAR

TV-Serie "Geheimer Krieg": Verstrickungen in Anti-Terror-Feldzug größer als angenommen

Folter, Entführung, Mord - USA organisieren von Deutschland aus Kidnapping und Drohnenkrieg
Nach Recherchen der SZ und des NDR soll eine US-Geheimdienstfirma, die für die »National Security Agency« (NSA) tätig ist und Kidnapping-Flüge für die CIA plante, bis heute Millionenaufträge von der deutschen Regierung erhalten. Auch gebe es Verbindungen zwischen dem US-Militär und deutschen Hochschulen. Bereits Ende Mai hatten der NDR und die Süddeutsche berichtet, die USA steuerten ihre tödlichen Drohnenangriffe auch von Militärstützpunkten in Deutschland aus. Von Stuttgart und Ramstein würden die amerikanischen Drohnen mitbedient und töteten als Terroristen verdächtige Menschen in Afrika und dem Nahen Osten.

Bundesregierung kooperiert eng mit NSA-Partnerunternehmen
In einer großangelegten Recherche widmen sich deutsche Medien den geheimen US-Aktivitäten in Deutschland. Ein Spionagedienstleister der NSA soll dabei seit Jahren mit der Bundesregierung im Computerbereich kooperieren.

Der US-Spionagedienstleister CSC hat seit Jahren Zugriff auf sensible Daten der Bundesregierung. Das zeigen Recherchen von NDR und "Süddeutscher Zeitung". Deutsche Tochterfirmen waren auch in die Verschleppung des Deutschen al Masri durch die CIA verwickelt.

Ex.CIA/Diplomat Sabrina De Sousa Kidnapping NSA/CIA Suspects

deep state

D. B. Grady: Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry and The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army

This mapping application was put together by compiling public records of government organizations and private-sector companies that do domestic counterterrorism and top-secret work. The resulting database includes 45 government organization groupings and 1,931 private companies.

dotandcalm.com/calm-archive/index/t-142...

truthtalk13.wordpress.com/category/poli...

< www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/18/12246...
< John Tirman, Executive Director, MIT Center for International Studies, Huffington Post, 07/09/2013 6:09 pm
Snowden’s and the others’ revelations should not be completely surprising, given the work of Dana Priest and William Arkin in their 2011 book, Top Secret America. Many of the most shocking bits were excerpted in the Washington Post, where Priest is a reporter. They uncovered a vast, opaque security bureaucracy, extremely inefficient but aggressively intrusive. “The federal-state-corporate partnership has produced a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that collects, stores, and analyzes information about tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing,” they wrote. It involved, they calculated, nearly 4,000 organizations in the United States, “each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.”
So we have had now for at least a dozen years the growth of a parallel state that operates by its own rules, in secret, and in ways that would be considered unconstitutional.
…Now we know: the United States of America is partially governed by a deep state, undemocratic, secret, aligned with intelligence agencies, spying on friend and foe, lawless in almost every respect…
…
…We have known for many years that corporate money in politics had essentially bought Congress at the expense of the middle class, the environment, and other popular causes. The Israel Lobby owns U.S. policy in the Middle East. Other lobbies — Big Pharma, military contractors, agribusiness — have corrupted policy for profiteering through campaign spending and other old tricks of the Washington trade. But the deep state is a different phenomenon — less about money or corporate privilege, far more about a security pathology that has become embedded, empowered, and rogue, constitutional governance be damned. The seduction of policymakers by corporate money is sad. The psychotic, parallel state is terrifying.

But, the 50 states are not enough for our country’s—and the world’s—largest corporations.
That means the corporatocracy will continue with their (already) successful efforts when it comes to “Locking Out The Voices Of Dissent.” (Here at Daily Kos, we know all too well about that strategy, firsthand!)
And, those that are paying attention have either realized, or they’re beginning to realize, that the corporatocracy is using “Weapons of Mass Distraction” (WMD’s) to achieve their endgame victory.

“Our education system has produced the most apathetic, underinformed and misinformed bunch of cits ever.
I was furious reading and watching the movie “Hunger Games” for this reason. Our people have chosen safety over any other goal that we might have had as a great nation. We hunker down and make minimal noises about “freedumbs”. We get the god awful mish mash of history from the Palins and the Bachmanns and nobody but nobody gives a good frickin’ damn.
And like “Hunger Games”, the only important part of our “media” is entertainment and the Greenwalds and the Assanges and the Snowdens and all the whistleblowers become the people who are the targets of our smears, our small minded meanness and our fears.
We have become a short sighted terrified bunch of sheep just praying for a super border collie to tell us where to go."_

the power structure within the system is too entrenched to beat it from the inside. and once folks get into power they seem to be assimilated for the most part.
i believe that change is going to more or less have to come from outside the system, like it has historically.
so in terms of working in the limited areas within the system my comment is valid.
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” ~George Orwell “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” ~Charles Beard

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” ― Samuel Adams “No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.”

—also Mr. Adams

that one of the often overlooked aspects of Alberto Gonzales’s testimony to Congress in 2006 – when he was testifying about Bush/ now Obama’s domestic quasi warrant spying program – that Alberto kept referring to “this specific program” and qualifying his testimony to only preclude to “this program”. It begged to question what other programs were there and how long have they been active? We know now that PRISM is “one” of the programs now revealed and that the government can no longer deny.
We now have the standing in court that can’t just be denied by state secrets.
“America is the Terror State. The Global War OF Terror is a diabolical instrument of Worldwide conquest.”

Glenn points out that there are now two groups supporting the NSA. The neocon war hawks and the obama can do no wrong group. And in fact the democratic supporters are the strongest critics of Glenn and Snowden in their goal of turning the issue into one of personalities.
I am thinking it is to late to change course on this, who will disassemble this monster? I fear no one, this power will not be relinquished.

NSA/CIA/IC had some fairly sophisticated computer forensics in the 80’s and 90’s. Now pretty much any podunk police department has a computer analyst who can drill out a laptop and figure out it’s secrets.
The NSA had figured out a lot of tools to hack cell phones in the 90’s, now, major police departments can do that same thing.
it’s really a matter of time when NYPD says “We should have a way to trap the meta-data for all cell phones in the 5 boroughs and keep it for say 90 days.”

The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny. If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.

Last night I watched the House Judiciary hearing via c-span recording The amazing thing is that I think some of these congressfolk are genuinely surprised that all of the things that bobswern listed are true. I don’t know what they were thinking. They must be convinced by the oft used smear that those whistleblowers are just crazy (Tice was smeared as crazy), or disgruntled, or mistaken, or misguided conspiracy theorists. There are enough seeminly phoney conspiracy theorists sprinkled around and given a platform, disseminating things that are sometimes true, sometimes whacko, to make it difficult to sort through and figure out who is real and what is real and what’s not.

poindexter comey binney cheney

< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.
“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”
The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”
CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he’s begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.
Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.
In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.
This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.
Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth’s geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.
Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government’s Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.
About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.
Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.
It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.
SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. “In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.
When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on living” is how one official describes the sites.
When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.
Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”
It’s too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling. “Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?” “Why does it have to be so bulky?” “Why isn’t it online?”
The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.
“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it’s funded, it’s hot and it’s sexy.”
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already,” said the Army’s senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.
Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.
Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.
These are called Special Access Programs – or SAPs – and the Pentagon’s list of code names for them runs 300 pages.
“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.
Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.
One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.
Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI ought to do something similar.”
The ODNI hasn’t done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.
< projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-...
Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.
In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.
That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.
These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.
And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him.
Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead.
The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.
A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.
Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.
Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

When Poindexter’s TIA program became public knowledge, a shocked Congress de-funded it due to its Fourth Amendment implications — but the program was split up and farmed out to different agencies for continued secret development. When Bush’s Warrantless Wiretapping became public knowledge, pushback was deflected by the law that immunized the telcoms and the secret FISA court secret power to create secret common law.
The wall of secrecy prevented any meaningful action against the NSA programs. Only now has that wall of secrecy been breached, and a variety of lawsuits are now being brought that will (among other affects) generate a permanent public record of the NSA’s program and its violations of the Constitution.

future

I do think one thing is evident. This genie is not going back into the bottle. People are not going to unlearn what they now know. TPTB don’t have a clear strategy yet on how to deal with it. At the moment they seem to be trying to justify it all, which is just as scary, in a way. And of course the first line of defense is to deny it, which they have, or to obfuscate. These surveillance powers have been broken up into different programs, some of which we haven’t even heard of yet, I’m sure. The focus on 215 and 702 is mostly about the collection, I guess. I haven’t heard anyone in Congress talking about scooping up all the data at the telco switches. Everyone who was questioned yesterday claimed that we are not scooping up content, just metadata.
Information is power. But; like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. Aaron Swartz 1986-2013

the underground ‘shadow government’ spoken about in the long quote in bob’s diary. Removing a president (or either camp) would not disrupt that shadow government.
That’s one reason that diaries like this one are so important. At this moment in history, the most important thing people can do — besides keeping up with current developments — is to review the history of how things came to be in this state. Each of the ‘moments’ that bob has provided links for can help us see what steps were taken, who the players are in this long, slow drama.
Understanding the political and economic history that brought us here will help us to more effectively participate in the next stages of this ongoing war. As examples, we have the TIA de-funding leading to re-packaging of the program; and we have the Warrantless Wiretapping ‘fix’ that legalized the illegal program and protected it with the fig-leaf FISA Court to ‘guarantee Frouth Amendment protections’.
We know more now about how the game is played. This makes us better-equipped to participate and to be a force for genuinely changing that game.
Here’s my guess about the next steps, after Congressional hearings have played out: The hastily-convened and toothless ‘Privacy and Civil Liberties Board’ will be touted as the venue for a (managed) ‘conversation’, intended to placate us. Then, if we do not insist otherwise, the Board will be included as ‘oversight’ while the FISA Court’s body of secretly-developed common law will be legalized. That’s my guess, and I hope I’m wrong. But I’ll be watching for it.
One goal I think we should push for is to have the FISA Courts secret body of common law — all their decisions — made completely public.

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