{"id":262627,"date":"2016-08-19T12:43:53","date_gmt":"2016-08-19T12:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/10-orwellian-moments\/"},"modified":"2016-08-19T17:04:28","modified_gmt":"2016-08-19T17:04:28","slug":"10-orwellian-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/10-orwellian-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Orwellian Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Intercept<\/i> recently began releasing batches of top secret internal newsletters from the most important division of the NSA, the Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SIGINT. This is basically the spy division. The internal newsletter, SIDtoday<\/i><\/a>, was never meant to be read by anyone outside of the agency, but it trickled out with the Snowden leak and has been waiting for proper publication. The Intercept<\/i> will release nine years worth of articles in batches. So far there have been two, and they contain hundreds of articles. They start in the very early stages of the Iraq war, with the first one dated March 31st, 2003.<\/p>\n

The articles range in content from a veteran NSA agent nostalgically remembering when there was a beer machine in the cafeteria to the SIGINT director telling everyone the emotions he felt after a top Iraqi leader was killed.<\/p>\n

There are light-hearted entries \u2014 an article about the origin of April Fool\u2019s Day, a review of Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon<\/i>, instructions for changing the font size in Netscape and Internet Explorer \u2014 and arcane articles that are difficult to understand because of the agency\u2019s strange internal lexicon. Quite frankly, most of it is boring. But it\u2019s an inside look at the human clockwork of one of the most mysterious agencies in the U.S. government. And every so often there is a gem, an illuminating missive straight from the heart of the NSA\u2019s secret files.<\/p>\n

After reading hundreds of them, here is my list of the most Orwellian\u00a0SIDtoday<\/i> NSA newsletters:<\/p>\n

1.<\/strong> An interesting revelation that becomes clear early on is that employees of the Signals Intelligence Directorate speak in corporate lingo. As noted by\u00a0Peter Maas<\/a> in his article for the Intercept<\/em>, intelligence reports are considered \u201cproducts\u201d and the government agencies requesting intelligence (CIA, DoD, etc.) are considered the \u201ccustomers.\u201d There is an entire division called \u201cCustomer Relationship Directorate.\u201d And, perhaps most eerily, they have a category of \u201cproducts\u201d referred to as the \u201cCounterterrorism Product Line<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another unnerving line in a different SIDtoday<\/i> article<\/a> that says,\u00a0\u201cContinue to be selfless in your efforts and think only of the payoff for the customer.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> In an article entitled \u201cGenerally Speaking: Iraq \u2014 Worth All the Effort<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0Richard Quirk, the SIGINT Director, laments the problem of news coverage regarding the war. \u201cWe are bombarded with negative news coverage that paints a \u2018can\u2019t win\u2019 story, and I imagine that at some point many of us had a moment where we asked \u2014 \u2018Is this really worth it?\u2019<\/i>\u201d He answers his own question with a story about watching the Iraqi election coverage in 2005 and witnessing the birth of democracy there. He says it was a very emotional day for him:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [the Iraqis] proved that exercising democratic freedom and being an active participant in the direction of government is part of human nature\u2026it clearly demonstrates that what we are doing in Iraq is very important, and absolutely necessary<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hell, I was almost crying at the end.<\/p>\n

3.<\/strong> In the newsletter \u201cGenerally Speaking: Driving History<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0Quirk again gets a little emotional. He says:<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you ever made a decision or performed an action and then stepped back and wondered\u00a0<\/i>about the historical significance of that decision or action? In the work we do, with our unique\u00a0<\/i>perspective on global events, it is often easy to feel like an observer of history, rather than a\u00a0<\/i>participant or an actor. So, we are often oblivious to the major roles we play in history. We may think we are all passengers on the \u201cMagic History Bus\u201d, but in reality we all have a\u00a0<\/i>steering wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake, and the actions and decisions we make every day\u00a0<\/i>drive and steer history.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s reassuring to know that the agency that was covertly spying on us for a decade thinks of itself as a controlling force of history.<\/p>\n

4.<\/strong> An interesting article from Christmas Eve 2003 is called \u201cMedia Leaks \u2013 Part II (repost)<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0and it discusses protocol in the event of a media leak, or as the NSA calls it, \u201ccryptologic insecurities<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0In the post, the author states:<\/p>\n

\u201cMedia leaks are rarely prosecuted. Why? Often because they are hard to prove, but in some cases, officials are reluctant to prosecute for fear that the case will attract even more attention than the original disclosure.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

5.<\/strong> There is an article<\/a> from July 16, 2013, that explains the differences between Digital Network Exploitation, Digital Network Intelligence, and Computer Network Exploitation. I normally wouldn\u2019t bore you with this, but there is an interesting statement near the end:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur targets communications are increasingly buried by millions of non-target communications.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Just a reminder of how much civilian snooping went on.<\/p>\n

6.<\/strong> One of the most disturbing articles has to be \u201cSID Around the World: A TDY to Guantanamo Bay<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0The bulk of the article is about the mission of Joint Task Force (JTF)-GITMO in exploiting intelligence for the global war on terrorism and how screening detainees and Iraqi war crimes investigations plays into that. There is, of course, an immediate irony here in discussing war crimes during an invasion that broke the Geneva Convention<\/a>. But the part I want to point out is the following passage offering travel tips to agents working in Guantanamo:<\/p>\n

\u201cOutside work, fun awaits, and opportunities abound. Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA. No\u00a0<\/i>experience, no problem. Learn how to operate a boat in a weekend, become a certified open water scuba diver within weeks. If you\u2019ve already mastered these skills, or once you do, the MWR marina rents boats from pontoon party boats to Carolina skiffs to ski boats to kayaks\u2026and recently they\u2019ve added sailboat rentals, too. The local dive shop has all the gear and tips to ensure a perfect outing. Surround all this water fun with a Tiki Bar and a Jerk House as well\u00a0<\/i>as the Bayview Restaurant \u2026 relaxing is easy.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

The agents were quite literally waterboarding during the week and water skiing on the weekend.<\/p>\n

7.<\/strong> The FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW article<\/a> is interesting from a numbers perspective. The information on these two special source-collecting programs sheds light on the incredible volume of emails and metadata the NSA processes.<\/p>\n

\u201cFAIRVIEW DNI access, for e-mail only, is now forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system at NSAW.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cFAIRVIEW and STORMBREW are also collecting metadata or data about the network and the communications it carries. For September 2003 alone, FAIRVIEW captured several trillion metadata records \u2013 of which more than 400 billion were selected for downstream processing or storage. This metadata will be used to enable the surgical collection of much smaller amounts of target-rich data \u2013 which should extend beyond FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW to many other DNI accesses across NSA.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

8.<\/strong> It\u2019s not really Orwellian, but a fun fact to note is that according to these documents, the NSA was obsessed with preventing leaks. A full decade before Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the agency went to great lengths to ensure protection. The ISI scanned 350 press items daily for \u201ccryptologic insecurities.\u201d They also maintained a database called FIRSTFRUIT with \u201cover 5,000<\/a> insecurity-related records.\u201d<\/p>\n

9.<\/strong> The newsletter article about the \u201cDeep Target Knowledge<\/a>\u201d\u00a0program states:<\/p>\n

\u201cA target\u2019s Information Space, related to the technology the target uses, is what produces SIGINT. But analysts should also understand their targets\u2019 Conceptual Space, to get inside their heads and understand their cultural references.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

This style of thinking was actually very common in the Iraq War, as it was in the Vietnam War. In fact, as I wrote in a previous Anti-Media<\/i> article<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cDARPA\u2019S \u2018culture-centric warfare\u2019 program conscripted social scientists and anthropologists into the Iraq war as mercenaries.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Their Human Terrain System<\/a> sought \u201chonorable warfare\u201d by understanding the enemy\u2019s culture. It\u2019s interesting to know that the NSA operates under a similar neo-colonial ethos.<\/p>\n

10.<\/strong> The Intercept<\/i>\u2019s most recent release of emails was accompanied with an article entitled, \u201cHow the U.S. Spies on Medical Nonprofits and Health Defenses Worldwide<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0and it\u2019s based on a series of SIDtoday<\/i> articles. The articles show that the NSA collaborated with the Defense Intelligence Agency to \u201cextract \u2018medical SIGINT\u2019 from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Intercept recently began releasing batches of top secret internal newsletters from the most important division of the NSA, the Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SIGINT. This is basically the spy division. The internal newsletter, SIDtoday, was never meant to be read by anyone outside of the agency, but it trickled out with the Snowden leak […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-262627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}