Echelon: US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Post Constitutional
America
Cryptome archives
on NSA activities
Charter of the National Security Agency
"The king hath note of all that they intend. By interception which they
dream not of."
-- Henry V (Shakespeare)
"that [surveillance] capability at any time could
be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy
left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations,
telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this
government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever
took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence
community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,
and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to
combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it
was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the
capability of this technology ...
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I
know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must
see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology
operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never
cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." [emphases added]
-- Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), 1975, quoted in James Bamford, "The
Puzzle Palace"
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck
of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
-- George W. Bush, December 18, 2000
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question
about it." -- George W. Bush, July 26, 2001
Thursday, February 02, 2006
LYING AND SPYING FOR THE MILITARY MACHINE by Bruce Gagnon
My experience reveals that this problem of seeing the citizens as an enemy
goes beyond Bush. The military industrial complex, the folks who really run
our government, have for many years seen fit to label anyone who speaks out
against their plan for global domination as a domestic
enemy. Until we deal with the fact that we have lost our democracy to these
big corporations, nothing much will change.
PRESIDENT BUSH is trying to put the best spin he can on this eavesdropping
scandal, like he said today: "This proves we have a government that listens
to the people."
-- Jay Leno
How to explain
intrusive spying to a five year old ...
December 28, 2005 - The New York Times
Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and JAMES RISEN
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford,
Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency
had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader
data-mining operations in the search for terrorists.
But Mr. Duffy said: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring
phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to
a potluck dinner. These are designed
to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who
have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."
He added: "The president believes that he has the authority - and he
does - under the Constitution to do this limited program. The Congress has
been briefed. It is fully in line with the Constitution and also protecting
American civil liberties."
The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal 12/20/2005
.... The domestic electronic surveillance ball really got rolling under the
Clinton administration, with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement
Act (CALEA). CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping by installing remote
wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that the switch traffic would be
available for snooping by law enforcement. After CALEA passed, the FBI no longer
had to go on-site with wiretapping equipment in order to tap a line--they could
monitor and digitally process voice communications from the comfort of the home
office. (The FCC has recently ruled that CALEA covers VOIP services, which means
that providers like Vonage will have to find a way to comply.)
CALEA opened up a huge can of worms, and PGP creator Phil Zimmermann sounded
the alarm back in 1999 about where the program was headed:
A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone
companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously
wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities. This would
represent more than a thousandfold increase over previous levels in the number
of phones that could be wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about
a thousand court-ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal,
state, and local levels combined. It's hard to see how the government could
even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent
of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen
to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing
that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice
recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords
or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the government doesn't find
the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps can be shifted over
to a different 1 percent until the target is found, or until everyone's phone
line has been checked for subversive traffic. The FBI said they need
this capacity to plan for the future. This plan sparked such outrage that
it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for
these broad powers is revealing of their agenda.
Read the quote above carefully, and see if it doesn't ring any bells for you.
The salient points that Zimmermann makes are these:
In 1995, back when the Pentium Pro was hot stuff, the FBI requested the
legal authorization to do very high-volume monitoring of digital calls.
There's no way for the judicial system to approve warrants for the number
of calls that the FBI wanted to monitor.
The agency could never hire enough humans to be able to monitor that many
calls simultaneously, which means that they'd have to use voice recognition
technology to look for "hits" that they could then follow up on
with human wiretaps.
It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some
kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching system. Now, I don't at all believe that all international calls are or could be monitored
with such a system, or anything like that. Rather, the NSA could very easily
narrow down the amount of phone traffic that they'd have to a relatively small
fraction of international calls with some smart filtering. First, they'd only
monitor calls where one end of the connection is in a country of interest. Then,
they'd only need the ability to do a roving random sample of a few seconds from
each call in that already greatly narrowed pool of calls. As Zimmermann describes
above, you monitor a few seconds of some fraction of the calls looking for "hits,"
and then you move on to another fraction. If a particular call generates a hit,
then you zero in on it for further real-time analysis and possible human interception.
All the calls can be recorded, cached, and further examined later for items
that may have been overlooked in the real-time analysis. [emphases added]
NSA wiretap followup: Why computer-automated mass surveillance is a bad idea
12/20/2005
In the end, brute force security techniques are not only corrosive to democratic
values but they're also bad for national security. They waste massive resources
that could be spent more effectively elsewhere, and they give governments
and countries a false sense of security that a savvy enemy can exploit to
devastating effect.
I'll wrap this post up with a story that shows just how old, and just how
ineffective, brute force "search and seizure" tactics are, even
when the field has been narrowed using intelligently selected criteria.
A Greek religious text from antiquity tells of a king who got word that a
potential usurper to his throne had been born somewhere in his kingdom. He
wanted to find this baby and kill it, but the unwitting human assets that
he was using to lead him to the child's location got wind of his intentions
and managed to slip away. So all the king knew was the sex of the child (male),
the city where the child was born, and a rough estimate of the child's birth
date. Targeted human intelligence having failed him, he decided to try the
brute force approach. He had all the male children in that city that were
two years of age or under killed.
After the slaughter of all of those infants, the king sat back in relief.
The child could never have escaped that massacre! His kingdom was safe. But
unbeknownst to the king, his plan hadn't worked. In spite of the fact that
the king had narrowed his search using perfectly sound criteria, the boy and
his parents still managed to escape to Egypt, and all of those other children
died for nothing. And to top it all off, the boy Jesus wasn't even a real
threat to Herod's throne. It was a false alarm! Herod, in his paranoia, had
misinterpreted the original intelligence data as pointing to a threat, but
in reality it signified no such thing... which brings me to my final point:
it's not just enough to have sound intelligence; you also need political leaders
who have the wisdom to use that intelligence appropriately.
(Bamford has joined an ACLU lawsuit against the NSA)
James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace was the first in-depth
report on the US's largest spy agency. It is required reading for
anyone who wants to know what the US government is. Here's a short
review, followed by links to some chapters on-line:
Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. 465 pages.
The National Security Agency is many times larger than the CIA, and since
1952 has spent many billions more per year. That didn't stop journalists from
ignoring it, which suited NSA just fine. The story was too tough (or too career-threatening)
for them; it took a mild-mannered, unassuming 35-year-old lawyer from Natick,
Massachusetts to come along and blow the lid off. His only tools were persistence,
shoe leather, and a tolerance for dusty library shelves in obscure archives.
It was enough to get folks upset. The government reclassified some documents
and warned Bamford "not to publish or communicate the information."
Newsweek -- while grudgingly admitting that the book is "fascinating"
and "revealing" -- spent more space quoting inside sources regarding
the book's errors and insisted that "the threat the NSA poses to the
privacy of Americans is not nearly so dire as Bamford would have it"
(1982-09-06).
NSA is located in Fort Meade, Maryland in twenty buildings with a dozen acres
of underground computers. In 1978 it controlled 68,000 people to listen in
on the world's communications, analyze satellite eavesdropping systems, and
develop and break codes. Numerous listening posts are spread around the globe,
and 40 tons of classified documents are sent to the shredder each day. Your
tax dollars are hard at work.
ISBN 0-395-31286-8
http://jya.com/pp08.htm
Source: The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, James Bamford,
Penguin Books, 1983. ISBN 0 14 00.6748 5. Pages 391-425.
Thanks to James Bamford and Penguin Books
Chapter 8 Partners
Chapter 10 Abyss - On NSA's expanding operations and attempts at legal controls.
NSA and 9/11
The NSA admits to having intercepted messages on September 10 that
were not translated until after the attacks, which serves a "limited hang
out" purpose. This admission suggests that no one in the government had foreknowledge, which is not true. It also sidesteps
the issue of what the NSA was doing during the attacks -- it is likely that
the world's most sophisticated intelligence agency was not merely watching the
events on television. Perhaps their electronic vacuum cleaners managed to collect
communications during the hijackings that would answer questions about the precise
roles of the war games in confusing the air defenses
and the slow responses of NORAD (the failure to intercept the first three planes),
and the role of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (under the White
House) that morning (while Bush read about a pet goat).
James Bamford's book "The Puzzle Palace" revealed that an
NSA department called the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC)
routinely probes the entire world for indicators that a nuclear war has started,
and has the goal to place an urgent message in front of the President within
less than 10 minutes (called a "Critic" communication). Even if one
accepts the official lie that 9/11 was a surprise attack, there is no way to
excuse the complete lack of response of the "President" (who read
to second graders instead of calling for NORAD to intercept the hijacked planes).
While George W. Bush is clearly not the most sophisticated commander-in-chief
that this nation has ever had, this is irrelevant -- Vice President Cheney,
the top leadership of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are extremely
smart and competent. The tremendous communication capabilities of many military
departments were more than adequate to mount an effective defense of the National
Capital Area, especially after the second tower had been hit.
NSA works closely with the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency
that runs America's spy satellites. The NRO ran a "plane into building" exercise at its Virginia headquarters (near Dulles)
during the attacks -- essentially a "fire drill" that evacuated staff
during an extremely crucial moment in world history, the precise moments when
the planes went off-course.
A real investigation of 9/11 would declassify these materials:
all communication intelligence surrounding 9/11: NORAD air defenses,
FAA controllers, the satellite surveillance systems, military and political
leadership,
communications from defense contractors,
radio signals in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, Pentagon
and Shanksville, Pennsylvania,
radar tapes over the northeast United States
details of all exercises underway that day (NORAD, NRO, STRATCOM,
and any other agencies or commands),
evidence collected from the black boxes (at WTC and Pentagon) which
would show what happened on the planes and how they were steered into the
tops of the towers and nearly empty part of the Pentagon.
what foreign governments and militaries were discussing around the
time of the attacks might reveal further foreign involvements, including all
warnings sent to the United States or Bush administration by foreign governments
and assets.
A serious effort to determine the full truth would have access to all
of this evidence. This website has no knowledge of any of this evidence
(it is purely an "open source" effort), but it is not a secret that
the NSA vacuums up these types of information. It would be surprising if this
evidence was still intact in a form that would permit a post-Bush administration
to perform a serious examination of the facts.
Journalist and former NSA employee Wayne Madsen coverage of NSA scandals:
911 disaster ...has all the hallmarks of yet another Bush family
treasonous action against the United States of America, an action the U.S.
intelligence community was PREVENTED from stopping.
December 28, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. NSA spied on its own employees, other
U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts.
WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of
the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail
of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including
the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight
agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was
part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained
at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits
was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception"
program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception
Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI
has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John
Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.
Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts
of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists
known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those
involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included
author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's
Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz,
UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about
NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy
Information Center (EPIC).
In addition, beginning in 2001 but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target
anyone in the U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled
employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was a violation
of United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18 and the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance of U.S. intelligence
personnel by other intelligence personnel in the United States and abroad
was conducted without any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court. The targeted U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who
made contact with members of the media, including the journalists targeted
by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General, and other
oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken to journalists and oversight
personnel were subjected to sudden clearance revocation and termination as
"security risks."
In 2001, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a number of
FISA wiretap applications from Michael Resnick, the FBI supervisor in charge
of counter-terrorism surveillance. The court said that some 75 warrant requests
from the FBI were erroneous and that the FBI, under Louis Freeh and Robert
Mueller, had misled the court and misused the FISA law on dozens of occasions.
In a May 17, 2002 opinion, the presiding FISA Judge, Royce C. Lamberth (a
Texan appointed by Ronald Reagan), barred Resnick from ever appearing before
the court again. The ruling, released by Lamberth's successor, Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelley, stated in extremely strong terms, "In virtually every
instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications
and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized
disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors . . . How these misrepresentations
occurred remains unexplained to the court."
After the Justice Department appealed the FISC decision, the FISA Review court
met for the first time in its history. The three-member review court, composed
of Ralph Guy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Edward Leavy of the
9th Circuit, and Laurence Silberman [of the Robb-Silberman Commission on 911
"intelligence failures"] of the D.C. Circuit, overturned the FISC
decision on the Bush administration's wiretap requests.
Based on recent disclosures that the Bush administration has been using the
NSA to conduct illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, it is now becoming apparent
what vexed the FISC to the point that it rejected, in an unprecedented manner,
numerous wiretap requests and sanctioned Resnick.
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/weekinreview/25bamford.html?pagewanted=2
Published: December 25, 2005
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like
mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio
quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently
sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts
all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another
N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of
the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has
suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over
whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to
bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens
has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central
Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the
program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence
network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created
in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the
largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far
more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which
its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all
over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated
technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of
limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass
civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation.
Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed
to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat
who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated
the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people,"
he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is
the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams,
it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable
it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said
over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access
to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts
in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet,
and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability
to get inside a person's mind.
The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped
the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime
an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from
22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas
eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering
and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals
who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they
do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly
traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born
Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet
studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities
to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security
clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents',
former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the
N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become
a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001,
for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The
match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour."
But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan,
the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and
not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was
that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan
pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know
how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands,"
General Hayden said.
Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring
to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically
on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to
go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing
of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain
a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978,
the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And
even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard
one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the
government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme
Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number
of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the
F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most
of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established
a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin
eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been
based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the
administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging
deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what
might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months
at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly
eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days
or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while
those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely
the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference,
President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is
for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between
detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand
the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information
Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral
who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped
devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to
rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through
vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an
order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times,
the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials
to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit
card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally,
to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down,
and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration
and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our
survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining,"
the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to
use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts,
of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the
report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number
of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism.
But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator
Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he
wrote, "John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating
my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard
to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator
Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total
in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess
this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that
we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and "Body
of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
MINORITY OPINION by Patricia McKenna and Ilka Schröder
This report makes an important point in emphasising that Echelon does exist, but it stops short of drawing political conclusions. It is hypocritical for the European Parliament to criticise the Echelon interception practice while taking part in plans to establish a European Secret Service.
No effective public control mechanism of secret services and their undemocratic practices exists globally. It is in the nature of secret services that they cannot be controlled. They must therefore be abolished. This report serves to legitimise a European Secret Service which will infringe fundamental rights - just as Echelon does.
For the majority in Parliament, the focus is industry, where profit interests are supposedly threatened by industrial espionage. However, the vital issue is that no one can communicate in confidence over distances any more. Political espionage is a much greater threat than economic espionage.
This report constantly plays down these dangers of Echelon, while it remains silent about plans to introduce the ENFOPOL interception system in the EU. Every society must take a fundamental decision whether or not to live under permanent control. By adopting this report, the European Parliament shows that it is not concerned about protecting human rights and citizens’ liberties.
ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically
search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords
or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies
and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors
in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries. ECHELON connects all
these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed
elements an integrated system. An ECHELON station's Dictionary contains not
only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also lists for each of the other
four agencies in the UKUSA system [NSA, GCHQ, DSD, GCSB and CSE]
Echelon is a partnership of five countries: US, Britain, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand
New Navy-supported machine recognizes spoken words better than
humans NAVY WIRE SERVICE (NWS) - November 1, 1999 -- In benchmark testing,
USC's speech recognition system bested all existing computer systems and outperformed
the keenest human ears.
Machine Demonstrates Superhuman Speech Recognition Abilities
University of Southern California News Service Release date: 9/30/99 -- The
system can distinguished words in vast amounts of random "white"
noise — noise with amplitude 1,000 times the strength of the target
auditory signal. Human listeners can deal with only a fraction as much. And
the system can pluck words from the background clutter of other voices —
the hubbub heard in bus stations, theater lobbies and cocktail parties, for
example. With just a minor adjustment, the system can identify different speakers
of the same word with superhuman acuity.
www.fas.org/irp/nsa/
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
Resources from the Federation of American Scientists
These pages outline the National Security Agency/Central Security
Service's strategic plan for the 21st century, and how we intend to achieve
our goal: information superiority for America.
Echelon didn't have to target people since it was based in part on intercepting
messages and selected those with key words in them like "bomb."
Further, the reason Echelon didn't - and didn't have to - comply with FISA
was subtly revealed by Tenet in his testimony: "We do not target their
conversations for collection in the United States. . ." Right, and that's
because Echelon did much of its work outside the United States. And
that's why its stations weren't in the U.S. just as today, many U.S. concentration
camps are not in this country.
Some day, liberals are going to have to accept the fact that this country
has moved further to the right under every president beginning with Reagan
and including Clinton.
The U.S. Intelligence Community
Jeffrey T. Richelson
New York, Ballinger, 1989
This excerpt from Second Edition (soft), pp. 167-197167
Chapter 8
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
29 April 1998
Thanks to William Burrows and Berkley Books
Deep Black:
Space Espionage and National Security
William Burrows
New York, Random House, 1986
This excerpt from Berkley Books (soft), 1988, pp. 167-191, 358-361Chapter 8
FOREIGN BASES:
A NET SPREAD WIDE
DOUG THOMPSON, CAPITOL HILL BLUE - Spying on Americans by the super-secret
National Security Agency is not only more widespread than President George W.
Bush admits but is part of a concentrated, government-wide effort to gather
and catalog information on U.S. citizens, sources close to the administration
say. Besides the NSA, the Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department
of Homeland Security and dozens of private contractors are spying on millions
of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. "It's
a total effort to build dossiers on as many Americans as possible," says
a former NSA agent who quit in disgust over use of the agency to spy on Americans.
"We're no longer in the business of tracking our enemies. We're spying
on everyday Americans."
"It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program,"
says cryptology expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier says he suspects that the NSA
is turning its massive spy satellites inward on the United States and intentionally
gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed to date
- potentially including all e-mails and phone calls within the United States.
But the NSA spying is just the tip of the iceberg.
Although supposedly killed by Congress more than 18 months ago, the Defense
Advance Project Research Agency's Terrorist Information Awareness system, formerly
called the "Total Information Awareness" program, is alive and well
and collecting data in real time on Americans at a computer center located at
3801 Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia. . . "TIA builds a profile of
every American who travels, has a bank account, uses credit cards and has a
credit record," says security expert Allen Banks. "The profile establishes
norms based on the person's spending and travel habits. Then the system looks
for patterns that break from the norms, such of purchases of materials that
are considered likely for terrorist activity, travel to specific areas or a
change in spending habits.". . .
In her book Army Surveillance in America, historian Joan M. Jensen noted,
"What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became
a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but who objected
to wartime policies or to the war itself." "It's a fucking nightmare,"
says a congressional aide who recently obtained information on the program for
his boss but asked not to be identified because he fears retaliation from the
Bush administration. "We're collecting more information on Americans than
on real enemies of our country."
The Hidden State Steps Forward
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation
09 January 2006 Edition
The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses "inherent"
authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim
and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example,
to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be
secretly exceeded by the President? ....
If Congress accepts his usurpation of its legislative power, they will be
no Congress and might as well stop meeting. Either the President must uphold
the laws of the United States, which are Congress's laws, or he must leave
office.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
At the sound of the beep . . . Posted December 31, 2005 - Orlando Sentinel
I've included a sample script below that may be helpful to your readers
when recording an outgoing message on their answering machine in the future
in light of President Bush's determination to continue to use the NSA to spy
on American citizens:
Hello, you've reached 407- -------- . I'm sorry I'm not available to take
your call at this time.
It's really not necessary to leave your name, number, time you called, where
you called from, date of birth, place of employment, mother's maiden name,
Social Security number or shoe size; the government already has that information.
Please just leave a brief message after the beep and the National Security
Agency will record the call and get back to you at its earliest possible convenience.
BEEP. . . .
Doug De Clue
Orlando
Cryptome archives
on NSA activities
cryptome.org, based in New York City, is one of the best "open source"
databases of information related to so-called "intelligence" operations.
Here are a few links to their compilations about the No Such Agency:
www.cryptome.org/nsa-program.htm
State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, James
Risen, published 3 January 2006, pp. 42-60.
1975 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, "The
National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights": http://cryptome.org/nsa-4th.htm
http://cryptome.org/nsa-4th-p2.htm
INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES -- THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY AND FOURTH AMENDMENT
RIGHTS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1975
U.S. SENATE
SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE
ACTIVITIES
http://jya.com/echelon-dc.htm
NEW STATESMAN
12 August 1988
Cover, pages 10-12
Somebody's listening by Duncan Campbell
http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT (STOA)
AN APPRAISAL OF TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL
Working document
(Consultation version)
Luxembourg, 6 January 1998
PE 166 499
Directorate General for Research
http://jya.com/nsa-elint.htm
Ramparts, Vol. 11, No. 2, August, 1972, pp. 35-50
U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir
http://jya.com/nsa-40k.htm
Nation Review (AU) 1973
Uncle Sam and his 40,000 snoopers
The following is an interview with a former US operative, now in Australia,
of America's National Security Agency ...
http://cryptome.org/echelon2-arch.htm
ECHELON'S ARCHITECT
Echelon now has a big brother. Meet Bruce McIndoe, lead architect for Echelon
II, the 'most productive intelligence program' in history
By Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg
Our President has chosen to declare himself above the law, a dangerous precedent
that could do great harm to our country. However, without substantial effort
on the part of you, and I mean you, every person reading this, nothing much
is going to happen. The rule of law will continue to decay in our country.
Future Presidents will claim even greater extralegal authority, and our nation
will fall into despotism. I mean that sincerely. For the sake of yourself,
your children and your children's children, you cannot allow this to stand.
Some Fear Eavesdropping Could Undermine Work of Spy Agency
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Friday 23 December 2005
Web snooping vital, spy agency boss says
Oct. 22, 2005. 10:27 AM
MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER Toronto
Star
OTTAWA—The head of Canada's eavesdropping agency says it needs to own
the Internet to combat terrorism.
DIGITAL FORTRESS, the controversial thriller about the ultra-secret U.S. National
Security Agency, spent 15 weeks as the #1 national bestselling E-book and was
inspired by a true event.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
"I couldn't figure out how the Secret Service knew what these kids were
saying in their E-mail."
Q: A rather startling event inspired you to write Digital Fortress. Can you
elaborate on what happened?
A: A few years ago, I was teaching on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy
in New Hampshire. One Spring day, unannounced, the U.S. Secret Service showed
up and detained one of our students claiming he was a threat to national security.
As it turned out, the kid had sent private E-mail to a friend saying how much
he hated President Clinton and how he thought the president should be shot.
The Secret Service came to campus to make sure the kid wasn't serious. After
some interrogation the agents decided the student was harmless, and not much
came of it. Nonetheless, the incident really stuck with me. I couldn't figure
out how the secret service knew what these kids were saying in their E-mail.
I began doing some research into where organizations like the Secret Service
get their intelligence data, and what I found out absolutely floored me. I discovered
there is an intelligence agency as large as the CIA... that only about 3% of
Americans knows exists.
It is called the National Security Agency (NSA), and it is home to the country's
eavesdroppers. The agency functions like an enormous vacuum cleaner sucking
in intelligence data from around the globe and processing it for subversive
material. The NSA's super-computers scan E-mail and other digital communiqués
looking for dangerous word combinations like "kill" and "Clinton"
in the same sentence.
The more I learned about this ultra-secret agency and the fascinating moral
issues surrounding national security and civilian privacy, the more I realized
it was a great backdrop for a novel. That's when I started writing Digital Fortress.
"The NSA is in charge of waging the information war-- stealing other people's
secrets while protecting our own." ....
Q: Does the government really read our E-mail?
A: Government monitoring of civilian communication is something that has been
going on for decades. Even though the public is widely unaware, government officials
and specialists in privacy-related fields are certainly aware of the practice.
The debate over its ethics is complex because a precedent exists that intercepting
certain E-mail, cellular phone, and FAX communications can help law-enforcement
officials catch dangerous criminals. The question turns into one of civilian
privacy vs. national security. In the 1950's the NSA's then top-secret Project
Shamrock intercepted and scanned all telegrams sent in or out of the country;
ITT and Western Union were under enormous political pressure to cooperate silently...and
they did so.
Project Shamrock stayed in effect until 1975. Nixon's Huston Plan and later
Project Minaret further relaxed regulations on monitoring civilian communications
and even activated enormous watch-lists of U.S. civilians whose communiqués
were regularly tapped. Just recently, of course, the FBI caught the infamous
hacker Jose Ardita by secretly monitoring computer activity at Harvard University.
As you can see, this sort of activity is nothing new.
Original Charter
of the National Security Agency
At 12:01 On the morning of November 4, 1952, a new federal agency was born.
Unlike other such bureaucratic births, however, this one arrived in silence.
No news coverage, no congressional debate, no press announcement, not even the
whisper of a rumor. Nor could any mention of the new organization be found in
the Government Organization Manual of the Federal Register or the Congressional
Record. Equally invisible were the new agency's director, its numerous buildings,
and its ten thousand employees.
Eleven days earlier, on October 24, President Harry S Truman scratched his signature
on the bottom of a seven-page presidential memorandum addressed to secretary
of State Dean G. Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett. Classified
top secret and stamped with a code word that was itself classified, the order
directed the establishment of an agency to be known as the National Security
Agency. It was the birth certificate for America's newest and most secret agency,
so secret in fact that only a handful in the government would be permitted to
know of its existence.
-- James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (1982) at 15.
A 20707 5/4/54/OSO
NSA TS CONTL. NO 73-00405
COPY: D321
Oct 24 1952
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
SUBJECT: Communications Intelligence Activities
The communications intelligence (COMINT) activities of the United States are
a national responsibility. They must be so organized and managed as to exploit
to the maximum the available resources in all participating departments and
agencies and to satisfy the legitimate intelligence requirements of all such
departments and agencies.
I therefore designate the Secretaries of State and Defense as a Special Committee
of the National Security Council for COMINT, which Committee shall, with the
assistance of the Director of Central Intelligence, establish policies governing
COMINT activities. and keep me advised of such policies through the Executive
Secretary of the National Security Council.
I further designate the Department of Defense as executive agent of the Government,
for the production of COMINT information.
I direct this Special Committee to prepare and issue directives which shall
include the provisions set forth below and such other provisions as the Special
Committee may determine to be necessary.
A directive to the United States Communication Intelligence Board (USCIB).
This directive will replace the National Security Council Intelligence Directive
No. 9, and shall prescribe USCIB's new composition, responsibilities and procedures
in the COMINT fields. This directive shall include the following provisions.
USCIB shall be reconstituted as a body acting for and under the Special
Committee, and shall operate in accordance with the provisions of the new
directive. Only those departments or agencies represented in USCIB are authorized
to engage in COMINT activities.
The Board shall be composed of the following members:
The Director of Central Intelligence, who shall be the Chairman of
the Board.
A representative of the Secretary of State.
A representative of the Secretary of Defense
A representative of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Director of the National Security Agency.
A representative of the Department of the Army.
A representative of the Department of the Navy.
A representative of the Department of the Air Force.
A representative of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Board shall have a staff headed by an executive secretary who shall
be appointed by the Chairman with the approval of the majority of the Board.
It shall be the duty of the Board to advise and make recommendations
to the Secretary of Defense, in accordance with the following procedure,
with respect to any matter relating to communications intelligence which
falls within the jurisdiction of the Director of the NSA.
The Board shall reach its decision by majority vote. Each member
of the Board shall have one vote except the representatives of the Secretary
of State and of the Central Intelligence Agency who shall each have
two votes. The Director of Central Intelligence, as Chairman, will have
no vote. In the event that the Board votes and reaches a decision, any
dissenting member of the Board may appeal from such decision within
7 days of the Special Committee. In the event that the Board votes but
fails to reach a decision, any member of the Board may appeal within
7 days to the Special Committee. In either event the Special Committee
shall review the matter, and its determination thereon shall be final.
Appeals by the Director of NSA and/or the representatives of the Military
Departments shall only be filed with the approval of the Secretary of
Defense.
If any matter is voted on by the Board but -
no decision is reached and any member files an appeal;
a decision is reached in which the representative of the Secretary
of Defense does not concur and files an appeal; no action shall
be taken with respect to the subject matter until the appeal is
decided, provided that, if the Secretary of Defense determines,
after consultation with the Secretary of State, that the subject
matter presents a problem of an emergency nature and requires immediate
action, his decision shall govern, pending the result of the appeal.
In such an emergency situation the appeal may be taken directly
to the President.
Recommendations of the Board adopted in accordance with the foregoing
procedures shall be binding on the Secretary of Defense. Except
on matter which have been voted on by the Board, the Director of
NSA shall discharge his responsibilities in accordance with his
own judgment, subject to the direction of the Secretary of Defense.
The Director of NSA shall make such reports and furnish such
information from time to time to the Board, either orally or in
writing, as the Board may request, and shall bring to the attention
of the Board either in such reports or otherwise any major policies
or programs in advance of their adoption by him.
It shall also be the duty of the Board as to matters not falling within
the jurisdiction of NSA;
To coordinate the communications intelligence activities among all
departments and agencies authorized by the President to participate
therein;
To initiate, to formulate policies concerning, and subject to the
provision of NSCID No. 5, to supervise all arrangements with foreign
governments in the field of communications intelligence; and
to consider and make recommendations concerning policies relating
to communications intelligence of common interest to the departments
and agencies, including security standards and practices, and, for this
purpose, to investigate and study the standards and practices of such
departments and agencies in utilizing and protecting COMINT information.
Any recommendation of the Board with respect to the matters described
in paragraph e above shall be binding on all departments or agencies of
the Government if it is adopted by the unanimous vote of the members of
the Board. Recommendations approved by the majority, but not all, of the
members of the Board shall be transmitted by it to the Special Committee
for such action as the Special Committee may see fit to take.
The Board will meet monthly, or oftener at the call of the Chairman or
any member, and shall determine its own procedures.
A directive to the Secretary of Defense. This directive shall include the
following provisions:
Subject to the specific provisions of this directive, the Secretary of
Defense may delegate in whole of in part authority over the Director of
NSA within his department as he sees fit.
The COMINT mission of the National Security Agency (NSA) shall be to
provide an effective, unified organization and control of the communications
intelligence activities of the United States conducted against foreign governments,
to provide for integrated operational policies and procedures pertaining
thereto. As used in this directive, the terms "communications intelligence"
or "COMINT" shall be construed to mean all procedures and methods
used in the interception of communications other than foreign press and
propaganda broadcasts and the obtaining of information from such communications
by other than intended recipients, but shall exclude censorship and the
production and dissemination of finished intelligence.
NSA shall be administered by a Director, designated by the Secretary
of Defense after consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who shall
serve for a minimum term of 4 years and who shall be eligible for reappointment.
The Director shall be a career commissioned officer of the armed services
on active or reactivated status, and shall enjoy at least 3-star rank during
the period of his incumbency.
Under the Secretary of Defense, and in accordance with approved policies
of USCIB, the Director of NSA shall be responsible for accomplishing the
mission of NSA. For this purpose all COMINT collection and production resources
of the United States are placed under his operational and technical control.
When action by the Chiefs of the operating agencies of the Services or civilian
departments or agencies is required, the Director shall normally issue instruction
pertaining to COMINT operations through them. However, due to the unique
technical character of COMINT operations, the Director is authorized to
issue direct to any operating elements under his operational control task
assignments and pertinent instructions which are within the capacity of
such elements to accomplish. He shall also have direct access to, and direct
communication with, any elements of the Service or civilian COMINT agencies
on any other matters of operational and technical control as may be necessary,
and he is authorized to obtain such information and intelligence material
from them as he may require. All instruction issued by the Director under
the authority provided in this paragraph shall be mandatory, subject only
to appeal to the Secretary of Defense by the Chief of Service or head of
civilian department of agency concerned.
Specific responsibilities of the Director of NSA include the following:
Formulating necessary operational plans and policies for the conduct
of the U.S. COMINT activities.
Conducting COMINT activities, including research and development,
as required to meet the needs of the departments and agencies which
are authorized to receive the products of COMINT.
Determining, and submitting to appropriate authorities, requirements
for logistic support for the conduct of COMINT activities, together
with specific recommendations as to what each of the responsible departments
and agencies of the Government should supply.
Within NSA's field of authorized operations prescribing requisite
security regulations covering operating practices, including the transmission,
handling and distribution of COMINT material within and among the COMINT
elements under his operations or technical control; and exercising the
necessary monitoring and supervisory control, including inspections
if necessary, to ensure compliance with the regulations.
Subject to the authorities granted the Director Central Intelligence
under NSCID No. 5, conducting all liaison on COMINT matters with foreign
governmental communications intelligence agencies.
To the extent he deems feasible and in consonance with the aims of maximum
over-all efficiency, economy, and effectiveness, the Director shall centralize
or consolidate the performance of COMINT functions for which he is responsible.
It is recognized that in certain circumstances elements of the Armed Forces
and other agencies being served will require close COMINT support. Where
necessary for this close support, direct operational control of specified
COMINT facilities and resources will be delegated by the Director, during
such periods and for such tasks as are determined by him, to military commanders
or to the Chiefs of other agencies supported.
The Director shall exercise such administrative control over COMINT activities
as he deems necessary to the effective performance of his mission. Otherwise,
administrative control of personnel and facilities will remain with the
departments and agencies providing them.
The Director shall make provision for participation by representatives
of each of the departments and agencies eligible to receive COMINT products
in those offices of NSA where priorities of intercept and processing are
finally planned.
The Director shall have a civilian deputy whose primary responsibility
shall be to ensure the mobilization and effective employment of the best
available human and scientific resources in the field of cryptographic research
and development.
Nothing in this directive shall contravene the responsibilities of the
individual departments and agencies for the final evaluation of COMINT information,
its synthesis with information from other sources, and the dissemination
of finished intelligence to users.
The special nature of COMINT actives requires that they be treated in all
respects as being outside the framework of other or general intelligence activities.
Order, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive
Branch relating to the collection, production, security, handling, dissemination,
or utilization of intelligence, and/or classified material, shall not be applicable
to COMINT actives, unless specifically so stated and issued by competent departmental
of agency authority represented on the Board. Other National Security Council
Intelligence Directive to the Director of Central Intelligence and related implementing
directives issued by the Director of Central Intelligence shall be construed
as non-applicable to COMINT activities, unless the National Security Council
has made its directive specifically applicable to COMINT.
