NSA’s EMAIL WAREHOUSE

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html
The Program / by Laura Poitras  /  August 22, 2012

It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004. “The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a“watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators havesigned a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

(Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker who has been nominated for an Academy Award and whose work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America. This Op-Doc is adapted from a work in progress to be released in 2013.}

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfS2Op9l3nk]

WARRANTLESS
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/NSA-WhistleBlowers-Highlight-Scope-of-Domestic-Spying-120927
NSA WhistleBlowers Highlight Scope of Domestic Spying
The Largest Domestic Spy System Ever Built
by Karl Bode / 27-Aug-2012

Whistleblowers the last ten years have highlighted repeatedly how the phone companies are helping the government spy on its own citizens by dumping all Internet data directly into the laps of government (pdf), who is busily building a massive supercomputer warehouse in Utah to dig through it all. The general public’s response to this has been slack-jawed apathy, and recently one of the last real chances to challenge our domestic spying programs went up in legal flames. Under current law, the government is not supposed to spy on citizens without a court order, but we’ve seen time and time again that the government and intelligence community have almost total disdain for the laws they’re supposed to follow on this front (citizens of course are supposed to sheepishly obey every dumb copyright or other law corporations demand the government support).

NSA whistleblowers continue to leak new information on the government’s post 9-11 unaccountable surveillance state, discussed in a new video documentary recently posted over at the NY Times. It specifically focuses on whistleblower William Binney, who worked as a mathematician and code breaker at the NSA. Binney is providing even more detail on what the NSA code-named “Stellar Wind” — the creation of the largest and most sophisticated domestic surveillance apparatus ever built. Of course if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have absolutely no reason to fear a government surveillance system that whistleblowers claim has gone completely out of control, right?

MEET WILLIAM BINNEY
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/binney-on-alexander-and-nsa/
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-explains-nsa-surveillance-2012-8
NSA Whistleblower Details How The NSA Has Spied On US Citizens Since 9/11
by Michael Kelley / Aug. 24, 2012

Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department’s foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he “could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.” In a short video called “The Program,” Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen without warrants under the code-name Stellar Wind. Binney details how the top-secret surveillance program, the scope of which has never been made public, can track electronic activities—phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media—and map them to collect “all the attributes that any individual has” in every type of activity and build a profile based on that data. “So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time,” Binney says. The 8-minute video, adapted from an ongoing project by Poitras that is to be released in 2013, has footage of the construction of the NSA’s $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, which Binney says “has the capacity to store 100 years worth of the world’s electronic communications.”

The purpose of the program, according to Binney, is “to be able to monitor what people are doing” and who they are doing it with.  “The danger here is that we fall into a totalitarian state,” Binney says. “This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had.” Poitras, who has been detained and questioned more than 40 times at U.S. airports, has been working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America.

‘STELLAR WIND’
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-details-on-nsas-new-spy-center-and-secrets-from-domestic-eavesdropping-operation-stellar-wind/
by Liz Klimas  /  March 16, 2012

In the heart of Utah’s desert, the National Security Agency is well underway on a project that has been called the nation’s largest, most expensive cyber-security project. Naturally, almost all details about the building’s soon-to-be inner activities are highly classified and no one is talking — officials in Bluffdale where it is being built and the nearby Salt Lake City are kept in the dark. Still, Wired’s Threat Level has gotten some details on the building and provides analysis on some of its expected activity. Wired describes that the building is ironically and “blandly” named the Utah Data Center. When completed in Sept. 2013 it will house four 25,000 square foot halls of servers, among other things. Wired states that the cost for the project is estimated at $2 billion.

Here‘s some of the data center’s purpose:

Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

Wired reports that the data center will store trillions of “words and thoughts and whispers” swirling on the Web. It states that “[to] those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.” In addition to public website data storage, Wired reports that it will seek out and house information on the “deep web:”

“The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.”

Even with data storage as its publicized purpose, Wired reports that an official involved with the program has said “this is more than just a data center.” It hopes to be the ultimate code-cracking facility:

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Wired reports that the facility’s security system — an antiterrorism protection program — alone costs $10 million. The fence surrounding the building will be able to stop a 15,000 pound vehicle driving at 50 miles per hour. What’s inside that requires protections such as this? Wired has some of the specifications:

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

NSA’s data center layout. (Image via Wired)

Wired also includes a former NSA official going on the record for the first time on the secret, domestic spying program Stellar Wind and its role in data communication collection, which when the Bluffdale facility is complete will be stored there. Former senior NSA “crypto-matematician” William Binney, who helped develop NSA’s spying capabilities before leaving in 2001, explains how the NSA deliberately violated the Constitution, which was the reason why he left, in setting up warrentless wiretapping to the extent that they did. Wired reports that much of NSA’s wiretapping practices now were made legal under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008:

Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

 

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

 

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

Wired reports that in order to return to a Constitutional system, Binney suggested an idea for an automated warrant system, instead of “[subverting] the whole process.” When this didn’t happen, Binney told Wired he had hoped reform could be made under the Obama Administration. His idea didn’t take hold again. Where are we at in this country in terms of surveillance and following Constitutional privacy protections? Wired reports Binney saying  “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state” as he held up his thumb and forefinger close together.

Check out the full story for more details on data collection, NSA’s Utah facility and the encryption-cracking capability it hopes to develop here. The article post on Wired’s Threat Level and the cover story for Wired Magazine was written by James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America published in 2009.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaTv5MODnBk]

WHISTLEBLOWER RETALIATION CREEP
http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/42-2012/2179-whistleblower-retaliation-creep 
by Jesselyn Radack  /  August 15, 2001
The Whistleblogger / 2012

Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday about “secrecy creep”  – the retaliation against whistleblowers that has crept down from the White House into Executive branch agencies. Whistleblowers have always been subjected to retaliation, but the retaliation used to be focused on marginalizing the whistleblower, shifting or eliminating the whistleblower’s job duties, firing her, or yanking her security clearance. Now, with the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, whistleblower retaliation includes polygraphs, systematic monitoring of whistleblowers’ electronic activities, and prosecution under the Espionage Act – even at Executive agencies beyond the intelligence community.

Intelligence community whistleblowers like former National Security Agency (NSA) officials Bill Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe were targeted with criminal investigation and subjected to armed FBI raids. Even more severe, whistleblowers like former NSA official Thomas Drake and former CIA officer John Kiriakou were indicted under the Espionage Act. Now Executive branch agencies outside the intelligence community are using the secrecy and surveillance tactics to punish whistleblowers. Greenwald provides concrete examples of the secrecy creep resulting in increased whistleblower retaliation:

[1] . . . McClatchy reported on a criminal investigation launched by the Inspector General (IG) of the National Reconnaissance Office, America’s secretive spy satellite agency, against the agency’s deputy director, Air Force Maj. Gen. Susan Mashiko. After Mashiko learned that four senior NRO officials whose identities she did not know reported to the IG “a series of allegations of malfeasant actions” by another NRO official relating to large contracts, Mashiko allegedly vowed: “I would like to find them and fire them.”

[2] It was not until 2011 that the Interior Department . . .  hired . . . a hydrologist, Dr. Paul Houser, who was previously an associate professor in George Mason University’s Geography and Geoinformation Sciences Department.

But only a few months later, Houser began experiencing serious problems within the agency when he raised substantial questions, on scientific and environmental grounds, about the administration’s proposal to remove dams from a river that flows through Oregon and California. . . . About the Interior whistleblower case, Sheppard notes: “Advocates for transparency and good science within government agencies point out the apparent irony in firing a guy hired to enforce scientific integrity for his attempts to do just that.” In addition to Greenwald’s examples, other cases of secrecy creep indicate that the surveillance tools once reserved for the intelligence community are now being used by other Executive agencies to intimidate whistleblowers and silence dissenters.

• The State Department monitored all of whistleblower Peter Van Buren’s online activities taken on his personal time using his personal computer.
• The Food & Drug Administration targeted and spied on whistleblowers in a widespread surveillance operation that included spying on whistleblowers’ protected communications with Congress and the Office of Special Counsel, congressional staffers and reporters.
• Feeding off the “leak hysteria” in Washington, Congress proposed a series of pro-secrecy “anti-leak” measures which would do more to silence and punish whistleblowers than stop leaks that actually harm national security.

Greenwald articulated the effects of “secrecy creep:”

Worse still, allowing the Executive Branch to leak at will information that glorifies the President and his policies, while aggressively suppressing all information that does the opposite, is the classic recipe for propagandizing without limit. What these lower-level officials are doing in threatening and retaliating against whistleblowers may very well be criminal, but they’re adhering to a mindset clearly decreed from the top.

The Obama administration’s hypocritical position on so-called “leaks” – ignoring if not orchestrating pro-administration “leaks” while prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act – steers Executive Branch agencies in wrong direction by instituting a culture of silencing dissent and condoning whistleblower retaliation.

{Jesselyn Radack is National Security & Human Rights Director for the Governent Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.}

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DS4nFy1NXA]

DEFINE ‘INTERCEPT’
http://blogs.computerworld.com/security/20828/denying-domestic-spying-dossiers-americans-does-nsa-chief-play-word-games
Denying domestic spying & dossiers on Americans: Does NSA Chief play word games?
by Darlene Storm  /  August 13, 2012

Before any more time passes since Def Con 20, let’s look at facts that came to light when the ACLU presented “Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The NSA and the Constitution.” During the panel discussion, William Binney, former technical director at the NSA, claimed that NSA Chief General Keith Alexander was deceptive during the keynote and was playing word games. So let’s look at a few tidbits from Alexander’s keynote first. During the write up about day one of Def Con, I mentioned thousands of attendees were unable to get in to hear Alexander speak about “Shared Values, Shared Responsibility.” The NSA was just one of many federal agencies at Def Con trying to recruit hackers for Uncle Sam. The NSA had set up a recruitment website for Def Con hackers and Gen Alexander, wearing a jeans and a t-shirt that ironically sported the EFF logo on the sleeve, called Def Con the “world’s best cybersecurity community.” Headded, “Sometimes you guys get a bad rep. From my perspective, what you guys are doing to figure out vulnerabilities in systems is absolutely needed.”

Def Con founder Dark Tangent, aka Jeff Moss now with the Homeland Security Advisory Council, asked Alexander, “So does the NSA really keep a file on everyone, and if so, how can I see mine?” Alexander replied, “No, we don’t. Absolutely not. Anybody who tells you we’re keeping files or dossiers on the American people knows that’s not true.” Let’s stop and rewind for a minute back to March. After NSA expert James Bamford claimed NSA software secretly examines “every email, phone call and tweet as they zip by,” it spurred a congressional hearing to determine if such domestic spying were true. Gen Alexander denied such NSA total information awareness spying on Americans. In fact, he answered “no” fourteen times during the congressional probe.

Fast forward to the Hope 9 conference where NSA whistleblower WilliamBinney said the NSA has dossiers on nearly every U.S. citizen. Binney’s revelations to journalist Geoff Shively and Livestreamer Tim Pool included, “Domestically, they’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you’re doing.” Alexander’s keynote did mention collecting data, but not on Americans. He said “the NSA is authorized ‘to collect foreign targets — think of terrorists — outside the United States’.” The FISA Amendment Act “allows us to use some of our infrastructure to do that. We may, incidentally, in targeting a bad guy, hit on somebody from a good guy.”  Alexander added, “Our job is foreign intelligence. We get oversight by Congress.”

But at “Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains,” Binney said, “All the oversight is totally dependent on what the NSA tells them. They have no way of knowing what [the NSA is] really doing unless they’re told.” Although Alexander was “technically” accurate, Binney said, “This thing about not keeping track of every American is absolutely true. They missed a few. That’s the kind of word game they play. I’ve been in that business for a long time.” Binney resigned from the NSA in 2001 because the spook agency started spying on everyone in America.  He believes that in the new datacenter in Utah, the NSA will go beyond archiving to indexing and “sorting information that they’re collecting, which is email, FTPs [file transfers], those kinds of things, Twitter things, all kinds of data about everybody.” Also at the panel, James Bamford agreed with Binney that it’s “technically legal” so “long as no human listens to or reads any of the harvested communications without a warrant.” Bamford said, “An intercept doesn’t take place until it’s actually listened to, until somebody puts on some earphones or actually reads some text on a screen.” We don’t know the real deal, because there is a problem with the “government’s needless classification of information.” It’s one thing if there is an actual threat to national security, but we’ve become a nation of digital distrust – for years even the cute, popular toy Furby was suspicious. The NSA banned the toy because “it was feared that Furbies would overhear top secret information, which would then be shared with others when the toys began to talk.” It’s up to you what to believe regarding if NSA’s Alexander is playing word games, but I’d like to point out the vendor area at Def Conwhere the NSA had a booth with its core values listed as “honesty, integrity, respect for the law, transparency.”

Regarding NSA transparency, have you ever seen redacted NSA documents released via FOIA requests? I’m not at liberty to say more about these at this time, but here are three such NSA documents. It’s too small to make out other than being almost totally blanked out as in redacted. Does that say transparency to you? Respect for the law? After the NSA claimed it would violate Americans’ privacy to say how many of us it spied upon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence admitted the U.S. has violated the Fourth Amendment at least once when it comes to warrantless wiretaps done under the FISA Amendments Act.

Want the real answer to how often the feds have spied on Americans “since 9/11 through the use of drones, legal search warrants, illegal search warrants, federal agent-written search warrants and just plain government spying?” Sen. Rand Paul attended a secret security hearing and although he cannot legally repeat what he learned, Reason.com reported that Paul’s answer was “Gazillions.” Do you believe General Keith Alexander’s statements about not keeping files or dossiers on the American people? As SecurityNewsDaily reported regarding Alexander’s resassurances, security and cryptography guru Bruce Schneier said at Def Con, “You didn’t buy any of that, did you?”

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnguA0GLYhg]
RSA Conference 2012 – The Meaning of Trust in Today’s Digital World

‘WORD GAMES’
http://www.privacysos.org/node/771
NSA has “20 trillion+” records of US communications, says whistleblower / 07/30/2012

You’ve likely heard by now that National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander spoke at the DefCon hackers convention in Las Vegas over the weekend. Former NSA cryptographer and high level technocrat Bill Binney also spoke at the conference, on a panel with ACLU attorneys Jameel Jaffer and Alexander Abdo, along with author and NSA expert Jim Bamford. The tone and content of the two presentations could not have been more different. The basic disagreement hinges on an explosive controversy that strikes at the heart of the imbalance between our right to know and the government’s: The NSA says it doesn’t wholesale intercept US communications, but Bill Binney and other whistleblowers say it does.

CNET’s Elinor Mills:

Asked during the question-and-answer session whether the NSA keeps a file on every U.S. citizen, Alexander said that notion was “absolute nonsense,” partly because managing 260 million or so individual citizen files would be impossible for the department to handle.

“No we don’t. Absolutely not,” he said. “Our job is foreign intelligence. We get oversight by Congress…everything we do is auditable by them, by the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)…and by the (Obama) Administration.”