An unnamed \u201csenior administration official\u201d confirmed the existence of a Bush-era surveillance program which gobbled-up \u201cvast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans,\u201d but claimed, without evidence, that \u201cit ended in 2001,\u201d according to The Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em> reported that the NSA\u2019s \u201cmonitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions.\u201d The secret state\u2019s spying initiative \u201calso encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information.\u201d<\/p>\n Days later, The Washington Post<\/a><\/em> revealed that the Bush administration\u2019s \u201cwarrantless wiretapping\u201d program known as STELLAR WIND, had been succeeded by four \u201ccollection programs\u201d two of which, MAINWAY and MARINA, \u201cprocess trillions of \u2018metadata\u2019 records for storage and analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n Additional programs, the Post<\/em> reported, operating \u201con a much smaller scale, are aimed at content,\u201d one of which \u201cintercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the news outlets principally responsible for bringing these stories to light, principally The Guardian<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, South China Morning Post<\/em>, and now Der Spiegel<\/a><\/em>, have not (as yet) published complete sets of NSA documents, and their reporting has barely scratched the surface of content-siphoning deep packet inspection (DPI) programs for internet and telephone surveillance (indeed, PRISM may be a subset of larger and more pernicious programs that collect, analyze and store everything), what we have<\/em> learned so far is deeply troubling and pose grave threats to civil liberties.<\/p>\n New PRISM Slides, More Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n Filling in some of the blanks, on June 29 The Washington Post<\/a><\/em> published four additional PRISM slides from the 41-slide deck provided to The Guardian<\/em> and Post<\/em> by Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n Confirming what civil libertarians, journalists and political analysts have long maintained, NSA can and probably does \u201cacquire\u201d anything an individual analyst might request as Snowden averred. This includes, according to new information provided by the Post<\/em>: chats, email, file transfers, internet telephone, login\/ID, metadata, photos, social networking, stored data in the cloud, video, video conferencing.<\/p>\n If that<\/em> isn\u2019t a surveillance dragnet, then words fail.<\/p>\n Recall, that previous reporting disclosed that major US internet and high tech firms, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple gave NSA \u201cdirect access\u201d to their systems.<\/p>\n \u201cThe program,\u201d according to The Guardian<\/a><\/em>, \u201cfacilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants,\u201d a near probability in this writer\u2019s opinion.<\/p>\n In a report that appeared the same day, The Washington Post<\/a><\/em> disclosed that NSA and the FBI \u201care tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets,\u201d and that the agency \u201cs accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the firms all denied that they hand over customer data to the government, their self-serving claims are undercut by evidence that NSA-cleared company personnel, including \u201ccollection managers,\u201d send \u201ccontent tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,\u201d rather than directly to company servers.<\/p>\n \u201cUnder Prism,\u201d the Associated Press<\/a><\/em> reported, \u201cthe delivery process varied by company.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGoogle, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWith Prism,\u201d AP reported, \u201cthe government gets a user\u2019s entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOnce the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.\u201d<\/p>\n The slides published June 29 shed some light on how the process works. We learn for example that when an analyst \u201ctasks\u201d PRISM for information on a new \u201ctarget,\u201d it is automatically passed on to a supervisor who \u201cwho reviews the \u2018selectors\u2019 or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst\u2019s \u2018reasonable belief,\u2019 defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection.\u201d<\/p>\n Tasking orders can be sent to multiple sources, \u201cfor example, to a private company and to an NSA access point that taps into the Internet\u2019s main gateway switches.\u201d (for background see: Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine<\/a><\/em>, Klein\u2019s affidavit<\/a> in EFF\u2019s lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T<\/a><\/em> and his groundbreaking 2006 piece for Wired Magazine<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n The FBI \u201cuses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA.\u201d (see Verizon whistleblower Babak Pasdar\u2019s affidavit<\/a> on how FBI \u201ctasking\u201d is accomplished via its Quantico circuit).<\/p>\n \u201cFor stored communications, but not for live surveillance\u201d we\u2019re informed that the Bureau\u2019s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit (ECSU) \u201cconsults its own databases to make sure the selectors do not match known Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n If this is what the Bureau is now claiming, it is disingenuous at best. In fact, as Antifascist Calling<\/a><\/em> reported back in 2009, the FBI\u2019s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), a virtual Library of Babel, is a content management and data mining system with the ability to access and analyze aggregated data from some fifty hitherto separate datasets. That the Bureau would feel compelled to \u201cminimize\u201d domestic information it provides to a \u201csister\u201d agency beggars belief.<\/p>\n In fact, one of the new PRISM slides reveal that from \u201cthe FBI\u2019s interception unit on the premises of private companies, the information is passed to one or more \u2018customers\u2019 at the NSA, CIA or FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDepending on the company,\u201d Barton Gellman and Todd Lindeman report, \u201ca tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and \u2018metadata\u2019 that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target.\u201d<\/p>\n Elapsed times from \u201ctasking to response\u201d from the above-named firms or other \u201cpartners\u201d such as banks, credit card companies, etc. range from \u201cminutes to hours.\u201d An unnamed \u201csenior intelligence official\u201d told the Post<\/em>, \u201cMuch as we might wish otherwise, the latency is not zero.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAfter communications information is acquired,\u201d the data is \u201cprocessed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and \u2018digital network information\u2019 that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets.\u201d<\/p>\n We also learn how some of these code named systems function.<\/p>\n For example, PRINTURA is described as a tool \u201cwhich automates the traffic flow.\u201d The Post<\/em> reports that \u201cthe same FBI-run equipment sends the search results to the NSA.\u201d Once it is received, in bulk, \u201cPRINTURA sorts and dispatches the data stream through a complex sequence of systems that extract and process voice, text, video and metadata.\u201d<\/p>\n Once dispatched from PRINTURA, described as a \u201clibrarian and traffic cop,\u201d SCISSORS and Protocol Exploitation \u201csort data types for analysis in NUCLEON (voice), PINWALE (video), MAINWAY (call records) and MARINA (internet records).\u201d<\/p>\n While the Post<\/em> claims that \u201csystems identified as FALLOUT and CONVEYANCE appear to be the final filtering to reduce the intake of information about Americans,\u201d information provided by NSA whistleblower William Binney dispute such assertions.<\/p>\n In fact, Binney told investigative journalist James Bamford for his Wired Magazine<\/a><\/em> piece on NSA\u2019s giant Utah Data Center, that the agency \u201ccould have installed its tapping gear at the nation\u2019s cable landing stations\u2014the 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInstead,\u201d the former cofounder of the agency\u2019s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC) told Bamford that NSA \u201cchose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country\u2014large, windowless buildings known as switches\u2014thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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. \u2018I think there\u2019s 10 to 20 of them,\u2019 Binney says. \u2018That\u2019s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, NSA\u2019s network of \u201csecret rooms\u201d were installed at key junctures that would facilitate, not \u201cminimize\u201d wholesale domestic surveillance.<\/p>\n Expanding on just how intrusive NSA \u201ccollection\u201d programs are, Binney told The New Yorker<\/a><\/em> in a Jane Mayer piece on the Obama regime\u2019s prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, that a surveillance program he helped design as SARC director, ThinThread, was \u201cbastardized\u201d after 9\/11 and \u201cstripped of privacy controls\u201d that would filter out Americans\u2019 communications.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018It was my brainchild,\u2019 Binney told Mayer. \u201c\u2018But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.\u2019 He said that although he was not \u2018read in\u2019 to the new secret surveillance program, \u2018my people were brought in, and they told me, \u2018Can you believe they\u2019re doing this? They\u2019re getting billing records on US citizens! They\u2019re putting pen registers\u2019\u2014logs of dialed phone numbers\u2014\u2019on everyone in the country!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And they continue to do so today without one iota of oversight from a thoroughly compromised Congress.<\/p>\n New Programs Exposed<\/strong><\/p>\n The programs described above all evolved from the Bush administration\u2019s so-called President\u2019s Surveillance Program, PSP, which has continued under Obama. As Antifascist Calling<\/a><\/em> reported in 2009, citing a declassified 38-page report<\/a> by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, the Departments of Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report failed to disclose what these programs actually do, claiming they are \u201ctoo sensitive\u201d for an \u201cunclassified setting.\u201d<\/p>\n Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state\u2019s war against the American people.<\/p>\n For example, the DOJ\u2019s Office of the Inspector General described FBI participation in the PSP as that of a \u201cpassive recipient of intelligence collected under the program.\u201d Recent revelations by Edward Snowden expose such statements as bald-faced lies. And when the OIG claimed that Bureau efforts \u201cto improve cooperation with the NSA to enhance the usefulness of PSP-derived information to FBI agents,\u201d that too, is a craven misrepresentation given what we now know about the key role the FBI plays in NSA\u2019s PRISM program.<\/p>\n However, the unclassified version of NSA\u2019s Inspector General\u2019s report on the PSP published by The Guardian<\/a><\/em> paints a far-different picture.<\/p>\n A close reading of the document reveals that a federal judge sitting on the FISA would approve a bulk collection order for metadata \u201cevery 90 days,\u201d as long as it \u201cinvolved\u201d the \u201ccommunications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually,\u201d Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman reported, the agency \u201cgained authority to \u2018analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the administration now claims that specific program ended in 2011, online collection of data on Americans continues today.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-3ZIEuWeFXSI\/UdG52mhjrEI\/AAAAAAAAAYg\/kA62rTIVX2Y\/s320\/Big+Brother+is+Watching+you+4.png\")
<\/a>Early last month, the British newspaper began publishing documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including a Top Secret FISA court order<\/a> to Verizon Business Services, which requires the firm \u201con an ongoing, daily basis\u201d to hand over information on all telephone calls within its system.<\/p>\n