Deep Politics Forum

And so the fascist wet dream of the military-multinational-intelligence complex finally comes to pass.

Every twitch on the keyboard.

Every throwaway line.

Captured and stored forever by Stellar Wind.

To be used against YOU!

Whenever They so desire.

Via Zero Hedge.

Quote: "We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/17/2012 14:56 -0400



George Orwell was right. He was just 30 years early.

In its April cover story, Wired has an exclusive report on the NSA's Utah Data Center, which is a must read for anyone who believes any privacy is still a possibility in the United States: "A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.... 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 trailsparking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter."... The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013." In other words, in just over 1 year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium, or any record of one's existence in the electronic medium, which these days is everything, will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.

The codename of the project: Stellar Wind.

As Wired says, "there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created."

And as former NSA operative William Binney who was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician, and is the basis for the Wired article (which we guess makes him merely the latest whistleblower to step up: is America suddenly experiencing an ethical revulsion?), and quit his job only after he realized that the NSA is now openly trampling the constitution, says as he holds his thumb and forefinger close together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

There was a time when Americans still cared about matters such as personal privacy. Luckily, they now have iGadgets to keep them distracted as they hand over their last pieces of individuality to the Tzar of conformity. And there are those who wonder just what the purpose of the NDAA is.

In the meantime please continue to pretend that America is a democracy...


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Here are some of the highlights from the Wired article:

The Utah Data Center in a nutshell, and the summary of the current status of the NSA's eavesdropping on US citizens.


Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. 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 trailsparking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter." It is, in some measure, the realization of the "total information awareness" program created during the first term of the Bush administrationan effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy.



But "this is more than just a data center," says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handlefinancial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communicationswill be heavily encrypted. 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."



In the processand for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administrationthe NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it's all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.





...Shrouded in secrecy:

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency's associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed "the spy center." Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? "Absolutely not," he said with a self-conscious half laugh. "Nor do I want them spying on me."



Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. "We've been asked not to talk about the project," Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.



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 tagabout $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Presenting the Yottabyte, aka 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text:

Given the facility's scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man's pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this "expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks," as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytesso large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)



It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA's need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Summarizing the NSA's entire spy network:





Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA's new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposedhow the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program's exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn't revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

Luckily, we now know, courtesy of yet another whistleblower, who has exposed the NSA's mindblowing efforts at pervasive Big Brotherness:

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA's bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that's still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.



He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stationsthe more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the countrylarge, windowless buildings known as switchesthus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney says. "That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast."



The eavesdropping on Americans doesn't stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T's powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek's three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country's communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company's Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

In other words, the NSA has absolutely everyone covered.

We now know all of this, courtesy of yet another person finally stepping up and exposing the truth:

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. "They violated the Constitution setting it up," he says bluntly. "But they didn't care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay." 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 Binneywho has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years agothe 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.



The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

Everyone is a target.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders. "Anybody you want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows you to take it all." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.



After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the targetsay you're just an acquaintance of a friend of the targetthe less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. "The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?" he says. "The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don't want." Instead, he adds, "they're storing everything they gather." And the agency is gathering as much as it can.



Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. "You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining," Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or anything," he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone's life.

Can you hear me now? The NSA sure can:

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind programagain, never confirmed until nowwas 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.)

In fact, as you talk now, the NSA's computers are listening, recording it all, and looking for keywords.

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal conversations." Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. "It's almost like going through and finding somebody's diary," she says.

There is a simple matter of encryption... Which won't be an issue for the NSA shortly, once the High Productivity Computing Systems project goes online.

Anyonefrom terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senderscan use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bitsit's incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithmtrying one combination after another to unlock the encryptionwould likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).



Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guysthe crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You've got to build this thing because we just don't have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makersthe tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industrythe code breakers were admitting defeat.



So the agency had one major ingredienta massive data storage facilityunder way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.



The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflopthe computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the "secret city" where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it's engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.



At the DOE's unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.



Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. "They made a big breakthrough," says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA's machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.



The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. "Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it," he says. The reason? "They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption."

So kiss PGP goodbye. In fact kiss every aspect of your privacy goodbye.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillionsthe race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story "The Library of Babel," Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world's knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it's only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

As for the Constitution... What Constitution?

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. "I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process." But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren't interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications"transactions," in NSA's lingothe agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at "between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years."



When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. "They said, oh, OK, we can't comment," Binney says.

In conclusion, the NSA's own whistleblower summarizes it best.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," he says.

... And nobody cares.

Bluffdale is Salt Lake City section = Mormons = people who believe the 'promised land of ''god'' is the USA. About 20+X the population average of Mormons are CIA personnel because of this dual 'loyalty to nation and their 'god's promised land'. Mitt Romney. Beware!

Mae Brussell on Mormons and the CIA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI--BnrwcHQ
Beware of what is coming [or apparently already here!]......

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

Losers who turned against their own people and Constitution.


Let's give them something to intercept. Like the message the people are coming for them and won't tolerate a fascist Stasi military government.

Sunday, April 1, 2012
[URL="http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/"]Final Curtain Call? Deep State Surveillance and the Death of Democratic Alternatives
[/URL]
Over the decades, the maintenance of power and class privileges by corporate, financial and political elites have relied on covert and overt forms of violence, oftentimes in unspoken arrangements with transnational criminal networks (the global drug trade) or intelligence-connected far-right terrorists: the minions who staffed and profited from Operations Condor and Gladio come to mind.

Once viewed as the proverbial "tip" of the imperial spear that advanced elitist dreams of "full-spectrum dominance," the "plausibly deniable" puppeteering which formerly characterized such projects now take place in full-daylight with nary a peep from bought-off guardians of our ersatz democratic order, or a public narcotized by tawdry spectacles: Kony 2012 or American Idol, take your pick!

Mixing intellectual and moral squalor in equal measure with the latest high-tech gizmos on offer from Silicon Valley or Chengdu, the general societal drift towards data totalitarianism, once a hallmark of police states everywhere, is the backdrop where "too big to fail" is code for "too important to jail"!

With the current global economic crisis, brought on in no small part by private and public actors resorting to various frauds and market manipulations which reward privileged insiders, we have reached a social endpoint that analyst Michel Chossudovsky has accurately described as the "criminalization of the state," that is, the historical juncture where "war criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide 'who are the criminals', when in fact they are the criminals."

It should hardly surprise us then that American "hero," Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 innocent Afghan civilians, including 9 children and then burning their bodies, joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks not out of a sense of patriotic "duty," but because he was a thief and swindler who went on the lam to avoid accounting for his crimes.

Indeed, ABC News reported that Bales "enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio couple of their life savings in a stock fraud."

Meanwhile Bales' attorney John Henry Browne told CBS News that his client has "no memory" of the massacre and that it was "too early" to determine "what factors" may have led to the "incident."

Some hero.

Keeping Us 'Safe'

However, there are powerful institutional forces at work today which have extremely long--and exceedingly deep--memories, able to catalog and store everything we do electronically, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," or, more in keeping with the preferences of our Hope and Changeâ„¢ administration, a one-way ticket to indefinite military detention for dissident Americans in the event of a "national security emergency" as a recent White House Executive Order threatened.

"In an Electronic Police State," Cryptohippie averred, "every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it--the evidence is already in their database."

In stark contrast to feckless promises to undo the egregious constitutional violations of the Bush regime, The New York Times reported that the "Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats."

On March 22, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed-off on new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) that "will lengthen to five years--from 180 days--the center's ability to retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism," investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote.

"The guidelines," the Times disclosed, "are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and 'data-mining them'--using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat--than it currently does."

We're told that the relaxation of existing guidelines "grew out of reviews launched after the failure to connect the dots about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber, before his Dec. 25, 2009, attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner."

"'There is a genuine operational need to try to get us into a position where we can make the maximum use of the information the government already has to protect people,' said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the National Counterterrorism Center," the Times reported.

However, as Antifascist Calling disclosed in previous reports on the Abdulmutallab affair (see here, here, here and here) former NCTC Director Michael E. Leiter made a startling admission during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee shortly after the incident.

During those hearings intelligence officials acknowledged that the secret state knowingly allows "watch-listed" individuals, including terrorists, to enter the country in order "to track their movements and activities."

Leiter told congressional grifters: "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

As I wrote at the time: "An alternative explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now, Christmas Day's aborted airline bombing, offers clear evidence that a ruthless 'choice' which facilitates the murder of American citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism's geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home."

Commenting on the ramp-up of new surveillance powers grabbed by the Obama administration, Michael German, a former FBI investigator now with the ACLU's legislative office warned that "the 'temporary' retention of nonterrorism-related citizen and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny."

Anonymous administration officials who spoke to The Washington Post tried to assure us that "a number different agencies looked at these [guidelines] to try to make sure that everyone was comfortable that we had the correct balance here between the information sharing that was needed to protect the country and protections for people's privacy and civil liberties."

However, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out "oversight" of the secret state's surveillance activities are being handled by the ODNI's Civil Liberties Protection Officer, Alexander Joel, a Bush appointee who was so "concerned" about protecting our privacy that he found no civil liberties violations when he reviewed NSA's illegal warrantless wiretapping programs.

Joel, a former attorney with the CIA's Office of General Counsel, told The Wall Street Journal that public fears about NSA's driftnet spying activities were "overblown."

"Although you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on, those potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see what was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else," Joel said.

Despite Joel's soothing bromides spoon-fed to compliant media, Michael German warned that "such unfettered collection risks reviving the Bush administration's Total Information Awareness program, which Congress killed in 2003."

Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that TIA aimed "to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant."

EPIC learned that "The project called for the development of 'revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories,' which would contain information from multiple sources to create a 'virtual, centralized, grand database.' This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data."

Although Congress allegedly "killed" TIA in 2003 when it closed the Pentagon office, we now know from multiple investigations by journalists and from the government's own internal reports, Total Information Awareness never went away but rather, was hidden behind impenetrable layers of above top secret Special Access Programs and code-name protected projects, most of which are controlled by the National Security Agency.

'A Turnkey Totalitarian State'

The secret state's "virtual, centralized, grand database" will shortly come on line.

As investigative journalist James Bamford recently reported in Wired Magazine, "new pioneers" are taking up residence in the small Utah town of Bluffdale, home to the largest sect of renegade Mormon polygamists: the National Security Agency's Utah Data Center.

"A project of immense secrecy," Bamford wrote, "it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013."

Wired disclosed that all manner of communications will flow into Bluffdale's "near-bottomless databases" 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'."

Additionally, one top NSA official involved with the program told Bamford that the agency "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'."

"For the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration--the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens," Bamford averred. "It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas."

Since the dawn of the Cold War, the National Security Agency operated outside its charter, illegally spying on the communications of dissident Americans. In a companion piece for Wired, Bamford detailed how NSA denied that it was eavesdropping on Americans.

"For example," Bamford wrote, "NSA can intercept millions of domestic communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still be able to say it has not 'intercepted' any domestic communications. This is because of its definition of the word. 'Intercept,' in NSA's lexicon, only takes place when the communications are 'processed' 'into an intelligible form intended for human inspection,' not as they pass through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses."

NSA mendacity aside, "for decades," Bamford informed us, "the agency secretly hid from Congress the fact that it was copying, without a warrant, virtually every telegram traveling through the United States, a program known as Project Shamrock. Then it hid from Congress the fact that it was illegally targeting the phone calls of anti-war protesters during the Vietnam War, known as Project Minaret."

But as we learned when The New York Times disclosed some aspects of the Bush regime's Stellar Wind program, the NSA was caught red-handed illegally spying on tens of thousands of Americans without benefit of a warrant and did so with the full cooperation of America's giant telecom firms and internet service providers who were then immunized by Congress under provisions of 2008's despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

Even as Congress granted retroactive immunity to telecoms and ISPs, and politicians, including President Obama, scrambled to downplay serious violations to individual political and privacy rights, the enormous reach of these programs are still misunderstood by the public.

William Binney, a former NSA official who was a senior "crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network," went on the record with Wired and denounced NSA's giant domestic eavesdropping machine.

Binney explained "that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stations--the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law."

"Instead," Binney told Wired, the agency "chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country--large, windowless buildings known as switches--thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. 'I think there's 10 to 20 of them,' Binney says. 'That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast'."

Readers will recall that back in 2006, former AT&T technician Marc Klein blew the lid off the technical details of Stellar Wind, disclosing internal AT&T documents on how the firm gave NSA free-reign to install ultra-secret Narus machines. Those devices split communications as they flowed into AT&T's "secret rooms" and diverted all internet traffic into NSA's bottomless maw.

Klein, the author of Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine said that the program "was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg" which is not only targeted at suspected "terrorists" but rather is "an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples' communications every second automatically."

Narus, an Israeli firm founded by retired members of the IDF's secretive Unit 8200, now owned by The Boeing Corporation, and Verint, now Comverse Infosys, another Israeli firm, were close partners alongside NSA in these illegal projects; one more facet of the U.S. and Israel's "special relationship."

The former official turned whistleblower told Wired that "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," Bamford wrote, "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."

"Once a name is entered into the Narus database," Binney said, "all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders."

"'Anybody you want, route to a recorder,' Binney says. 'If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded.' He adds, 'The Narus device allows you to take it all.' And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis."

Chillingly, Binney "held his thumb and forefinger close together" and told Bamford: "'We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state'."

Main Core

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration issued Executive Order 9066 which granted the military carte blanche to circumvent the constitutional rights of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and led to their mass incarceration in remote, far-flung camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

Will history repeat, this time under the rubric of America's endless "War on Terror"?

In 2008, investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum reported in the now-defunct Radar Magazine and Tim Shorrock, writing in Salon, provided details on a frightening "Continuity of Government" database known as Main Core.

According to Ketchum, a senior government official told him that "there exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously."

That official and other sources told Radar that "the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention."

For his part, Shorrock revealed that several government officials with above top secret security clearances told him that "Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies."

"One former intelligence official," Shorrock reported, "described Main Core as 'an emergency internal security database system' designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains 'copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community'."

It now appears that Main Core, or some other code-word protected iteration of the secret state's administrative detention database will in all likelihood soon reside at Bluffdale.

While conservative and liberal supporters of the Bush and Obama administrations have derided these reports as the lunatic ravings of "conspiracy theorists," analysts such as Peter Dale Scott have made clear that a decade after the 9/11 attacks, "some aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also the probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security's Project Endgame--a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone."

"At the same time," Scott wrote, "we have seen the implementation of the plans outlined by [Miami Herald journalist Alfonso] Chardy in 1987: the warrantless detentions that Oliver North had planned for in Rex 1984, the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart, and the militarization of the domestic United States under a new military command, NORTHCOM. Through NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with local enforcement to control America, in the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local enforcement to control Afghanistan and Iraq."

Indeed, as the Associated Press recently disclosed in their multipart investigation into illegal spying by the New York Police Department (NYPD), undercover officers "attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the U.S., according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities."

A 2008 intelligence report obtained by AP revealed "how, in the name of fighting terrorism, law enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that legally oppose government policies."

"The FBI for instance," investigative journalists Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo averred, "has collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Republican Rep. Ron Paul might indicate support for violent militias--an assertion for which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups."

"The April 2008 memo offers an unusually candid view of how political monitoring fit into the NYPD's larger, post-9/11 intelligence mission. As the AP has reported previously, [David] Cohen's unit has transformed the NYPD into one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies in the United States, one that infiltrated Muslim student groups, monitored their websites and used informants as listening posts inside mosques."

Nor should we forget how the Pentagon's own domestic intelligence unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA, routinely monitored antiwar activists and other dissidents.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, multiple news reports beginning in late 2005 revealed that CIFA with 400 full-time DoD workers and 900 "outsourced" contractor employees and a classified budget, had been authorized to track "potential terrorist threats" against DoD through reports known as Threat and Local Observation Notices (TALON).

Although that office was shuttered in 2008, its domestic security functions were transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and the TALON database along with future "threat reports" would now be funneled to an FBI database known as "Guardian."

However, as SourceWatch noted, "in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements," even though CIFA was closed down, DoD "will maintain a record copy of the collected data." In other words TALON reports, including data illegally collected on antiwar activists, will continue to exist somewhere deep in the bowels of the Defense Department, more likely than not in a Bluffdale database administered by NSA.

When President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on December 31, he did more than simply facilitate multibillion dollar Pentagon boondoggles for the current fiscal year; he set the stage for what journalist Christopher Ketchum called "The Last Roundup," and what James Bamford's source denounced as our approaching "turnkey totalitarian state."

We need not speculate as to when an American police state will be fully functional, it already is.

Wired, James Bamford
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04...-nsa/all/1

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency's greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and "22 caves," according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA's giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA's headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA's mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency's decade-long building boom, it will be the "cloud" where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation's privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency's biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors not government employees install the taps, run the agency's eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.'s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it's not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn't approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

"One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up," he said.

Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It was located within the SARC's Lab, on the third floor of Operations Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director's office. "I walk in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn," he said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency officials were let in on the secret.

"He was the one who organized it," said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA's worldwide monitoring networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.

Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the NSA, and later become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired's request to interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn't confirm or deny if a person is employed by the agency.

Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a bizarre and troubling history.

"It was Technology Development Corporation," said Binney.

The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him set up a similar network in SARC albeit one that was focused on foreign and international communications the kind of spying the NSA is chartered to undertake.

"They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it up," he said. "And then it was just a matter of feeding in the attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and any of the content you want." Those "attributes" came from secret rooms established in large telecom switches around the country. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney says.

Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall's Clarkesville, Maryland house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the NSA, and the company's phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney's old office.

The company's troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security clearance. "If you ever met this guy, you would know he's a really strange guy," Binney said of Paul. "He did crazy stuff. I think they thought he was unstable." At the time, Paul was working on a contract at the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it, claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as "weird" and that he "acted like a robot," "never wore decent clothes," and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf.

With "von Ronsdorf's" clearance gone and no longer able to work at the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to additional problems.

"What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of the company and he squandered them," according to Binney. "It was so bad, Randy couldn't pay the people who were working for him." According to court records, Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments. But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records. Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.

Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious misgivings about the NSA's program once they discovered its true nature, according to Binney. "They came and said, Do you realize what these people are doing?'" he said. "They're feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in there.' I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away." Binney added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another contractor to run the tapping operation. "They made it pretty well known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the SAIC people to run it after that." Jacobsen was then shifted to other work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.

Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country's intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, "who was a very strong supporter of Israel," said Binney, "gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis."

Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn't.

"In addition to being the technical director," he said, "I was the chair of the TAP, it's the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We're supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they're doing…. They didn't do this that way, it was under the table." After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. "So we gave it to them for switches," he said. "For access."

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. "And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device," he said. "I think there's a connection there, we don't know for sure."

Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel's Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is "known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world." The company says its equipment is capable of "providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world" and that "Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls."

Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company's sales literature, lets "service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …" and was "[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications."

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel's NSA, noted his former organization's influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. "Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology," said Gefen. "Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse's main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit's technology."

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. "Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years," he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha'artez in 2000, "Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street." Referred to only as "Brigadier General B," he added, "This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans."

Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.

When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to "verify the allegations made."

But the NSA did "eagerly offer" that it "ensures deliberate and appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity" and "takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our activities."

The NSA also added that "we are proud of the work we do to protect the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated to serving their country."

However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wired on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. Also not reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to survive the government's use of the "state secrets" privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.

So take the NSA's assurances as you will.

But as NSA director Alexander flies around the country, scissors in hand, opening one top-secret, outsourced eavesdropping center after another, someone might want to ask the question no one in Congress seems willing to ask: Who's listening to the listeners?

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 04, 2012

Over and over again

"Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA" by James Bamford (note the 'dual loyalist' passing technology to his only Homeland):
"Pay TV piracy hits News":

AT 4/04/2012 03:52:00 AM

[TABLE="width: 798"]
[TR]
[TD] April 5-6, 2012 -- The background to the Israeli penetration of NSA (in: GENERAL ARCHIVES April 2012)
Apr 5, 2012More revelations on the Mossad operation at Fort Meade originally reported seven years ago by WMR.

Currently available to subscribers only and embargoed.

**** *****

[TABLE="width: 798"]
[TR]
[TD]

June 5, 2005 -- WASHINGTON, DC -- As the AIPAC/Pentagon Israeli espionage scandal grows, more news about the non-reported Israeli penetration of the NSA and U.S. Navy in the 1980s has been revealed by NSA insiders.

June 5, 2005 -- WASHINGTON, DC -- As the AIPAC/Pentagon Israeli espionage scandal grows, more news about the non-reported Israeli penetration of the NSA and U.S. Navy in the 1980s has been revealed by NSA insiders. Veterans of the RCA-NSA-Israeli joint SIGINT program code named DINDI report that Israeli engineer spies used the carve out contract with NSA, through RCA, to gain access to NSA and U.S. Navy secrets. In an RCA facility in Mount Laurel, NJ, the Israeli engineers had their own secured lab, and for three years that DINDI ran, they were walking out with their briefcases loaded with equipment, including scopes. When RCA engineers finally gained acess to their lab, they found the prints laid out for the Trident missile system. RCA had an ongoing contract top develop the Trident communications suite at the time of the security leak. The Israeli engineers on DINDI claimed they were from the Israeli Air Force but months later, an RCA engineer was in New York and he ran into the same Israelis, but they were wearing Israeli Navy uniforms. One ex-RCA engineer commented about the DINDI Israeli spies: "They were all a nice bunch of guys, even when they had their hands in your pockets."


The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 poisoned US-Israeli intelligence relations for decades.

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• September 19-21, 2008 -- NSA believes that spying on journalists is not an urgent matter
  
• October 31-November 1, 2008 -- NSA has mental patients working as security agents
  
• March 2-3, 2012 -- EARLY EDITION. NSA continues to spy on U.S. citizens
  
• August 28, 2008 -- Russia confirms WMR report that it seized US intelligence equipment
  
• November 19, 2007 -- NSA not interested in WMD proliferation by Russian-Israeli-Ukrainian Mafia
  
• January 5, 2006 -- More details emerge on NSA spying on journalists and politicians
  
• December 16, 2005 -- Former NSA analyst and White House Secret Service officer found guilty in politically-motivated trial
  
• Sep. 18, 2005 -- EXCLUSIVE REPORT: THE DEMISE OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY
  
• May 7, 2006 -- WMR reported extensively on Michael Hayden's management, scandal, and morale problems at the National Security Agency (NSA).
  
• October 31, 2007 -- NSA "Went Dark" on Caucasus Region Hours Before Beslan Attack
  
• January 13, 2006 -- The name has been changed to protect the guilty
  
• March 12, 2008 -- Defense Department sources confirm Israeli intelligence connection to hooker ring
  
• February 28, 2008 -- Creative financing at NSA continues to enrich SAIC
  
• April 8, 2008 -- Where have all the Russian linguists gone?
  
• June 4, 2005 -- NSA IN MANAGEMENT UPROAR
  
• September 23, 2008 -- "Higher than top secret" surveillance program may be emerging from shadows
  
• December 4, 2005 -- Saudi money funded 9-11 attacks
  
• December 4, 2005 -- Current Deputy Director for National Intelligence helped lay groundwork for 9-11 intelligence failures
  
• May 27-28, 2008 -- Another confirmation that Calipari was targeted by US forces
  
• September 30, 2008 -- NSA reverses decision on WMR FOIA request
  
• June 18, 2007 -- NSA officials deride U.S. Constitution
  
• April 24, 2008 -- Kadish and Pollard part of larger Israeli spy ring, including sleeper cells
  
• November 30, 2005 -- Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, yesterday postponed a hearing on national security whistleblowers
  
• December 28, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. NSA spied on its own employees
  
• May 25, 2006 -- Hayden's policy: "If not asked, don't tell."
  
• October 11-12, 2008 -- Maryland State Police open up political surveillance files
  
• May 27, 2005 SPY AGENCY DISRUPTION REACHES FORT MEADE
  
• May 8, 2006 -- Bush makes Hayden nomination to be CIA Director official
  
• January 26, 2006 - From a Real Conservative
  
• December 26, 2005 -- Colin Powell says Bush's use of NSA to conduct warrantless wiretaps acceptable
  
• February 28, 2006 -- Tomorrow, former NSA analyst Ken Ford, Jr., is scheduled to be sentenced after his political show trial
  
• Sept. 26, 2007 -- El Pais publishes transcript of Bush-Aznar pre-war meeting
  
• December 30, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. The Alberto Gonzales Justice Department is opening up a criminal investigation of the leak of classified NSA information
  
• February 4/5/6, 2006 -- Former NSA analyst Kenneth Ford was accepted into a fast track internship program at NSA in November 2002
  
• July 22/23, 2006 -- Yesterday, the Washington Post's Dana Priest (about the only reporter there who still does actual investigative journalism) had a story about a CIA contractor for BAE Systems who was fired after posting an entry on the intelligence com
  
• December 4, 2005 -- US intercepted communications of Congolese President Kabila during 1998 Rwandan-Ugandan invasion of Congo
  
• April 14, 2008 -- Contaminating signals intelligence with Fox News
  
• July 7, 2008 -- Colombian hostage "rescue" a staged event
  
• August 5, 2008 -- Incarcerated former NSA Iraq analyst is refused appeal without a hearing
  
• April 20, 2006 -- Today, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte is delivering a speech at the National Press Club in which he will pat himself on the back for the great job his bureaucracy of 1500 is doing to streamline intelligence to those wh
  
• June 2005 WHY NSA IS THE FORT KNOX OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT
  
• October 31, 2007 -- NSA warns against kiosks at Columbia Mall in Maryland
  
• September 22, 2008 -- Was there a closed circuit feed on the WTC on 9/11?
  
• February 28, 2006 -- At yesterday's White House press conference, "Snotty Scotty" McClellan rejected a letter signed by 18 House Democrats that called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens
  
• March 30, 2006 -- Rescheduled politically-motivated sentencing of ex-NSA analyst Ken Ford this morning in Maryland
  
• August 19, 2008 -- Journalists and bloggers under assault by Bush Gestapo
  
• March 28-30, 2008 -- NSA pulling over and detaining drivers
  
• June 27, 2006 -- Republican Rep. Peter King (NY), the chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has called for the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute The New York Times under the Espionage Act
  
• July 28, 2006 -- National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Russell Tice subpoenaed to testify
  
• May 4-6, 2007 -- On Wednesday, US federal Judge Peter Messitte decided not to break with the precedent set by US Judge T. S. Ellis in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Espionage Act case
  
• May 15, 2005 NSA INTERCEPTS FOR BOLTON MASKED AS "TRAINING EXERCISE"
  
• February 7, 2006 -- The Bush Crime family has alienated the very people who have been at the forefront of America's intelligence efforts
  
• May 25, 2006 -- The most privacy-invasive technology that NSA is using to conduct vacuum cleaning of phone calls, e-mail, faxes, and Voice over IP (VOIP) calls is the use of downstream switches that disassemble and reassemble packets
  
• April 7, 2006 -- Class action lawsuit against AT&T in AT&T-NSA cooperation deal "big" according to NSA insiders
  

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Peter Lemkin Wrote:Bluffdale is Salt Lake City section = Mormons = people who believe the 'promised land of ''god'' is the USA. About 20+X the population average of Mormons are CIA personnel because of this dual 'loyalty to nation and their 'god's promised land'. Mitt Romney. Beware!

Mae Brussell on Mormons and the CIA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI--BnrwcHQ
Beware of what is coming [or apparently already here!]......

So come November we have a (false) choice between CIA tool Obama or CIA tool Romney. Mormans have been in positions of high power in banks, ABC mil intel groups etc. for some decades. Little notice has been paid to this. Peter it's been here and people are still asleep.

Dawn

Dawn Meredith Wrote:

Peter Lemkin Wrote:Bluffdale is Salt Lake City section = Mormons = people who believe the 'promised land of ''god'' is the USA. About 20+X the population average of Mormons are CIA personnel because of this dual 'loyalty to nation and their 'god's promised land'. Mitt Romney. Beware!

Mae Brussell on Mormons and the CIA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI--BnrwcHQ
Beware of what is coming [or apparently already here!]......

So come November we have a (false) choice between CIA tool Obama or CIA tool Romney. Mormans have been in positions of high power in banks, ABC mil intel groups etc. for some decades. Little notice has been paid to this. Peter it's been here and people are still asleep.

Dawn

As I see it, all of the intelligence agencies - which we all sometimes mistakenly subsume under the rubric of 'CIA' - are the 'muscle/security/military/death squads' for the Oligarchy that runs the country. It has been their dream and goal all along to offer up a non-choice between two preselected puppets of theirs. [In fact, that is all that is usually served up!] The Oligarchy sends out the 'order' and the intelligence apparat carries it out.

Those who 'step out of line' or cut their strings are 'eliminated', one way or another. One choice with two names and nuances; choose one! Some 'democracy'! Very akin to the voting that goes on in dictatorships. So, we get to choose which puppet we have before us; however, the puppet-masters remain the same!