{"id":47942,"date":"2013-07-05T09:15:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T08:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/hints-that-nsa-is-building-massive-pervasive-surveillance-capability\/47942\/"},"modified":"2013-07-05T09:15:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-05T08:15:20","slug":"hints-that-nsa-is-building-massive-pervasive-surveillance-capability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/hints-that-nsa-is-building-massive-pervasive-surveillance-capability\/","title":{"rendered":"Hints That NSA Is Building Massive, Pervasive Surveillance Capability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FromFrom left: Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency; Rand Beers, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Patrick Gallagher, acting deputy secretary of commerce, and Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch, testify at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 12, 2013. (Photo: Christopher Gregory \/ The New York Times)<\/span><\/span>Washington – Despite U.S. intelligence officials\u2019 repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency\u2019s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases.<\/p>\n

A McClatchy review of public records, statements by Obama administration officials and interviews with cyber and telecom security experts lends credence to assertions that the capability for such surveillance exists.<\/p>\n

\u2014 FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee on March 30, 2011, that \u201ctechnological improvements\u201d now enable the bureau \u201cto pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records \u2014 a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it\u2019s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Security experts, including a former AT&T engineer, say that the NSA has tapped into fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data in cities across the country.<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian who reported on the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, said in a speech over the weekend that an upcoming story will describe a classified document that \u201ctalks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its own repositories 1 billion cellphone calls every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,\u201d Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. \u201cIt means they\u2019re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenwald\u2019s assertions and hints on the public record still offer only a cloudy picture, and the NSA has not disclosed that it is building a storehouse for trillions of digital recordings of phone calls and emails.<\/p>\n

The NSA collected bulk data on Americans\u2019 emails for years before that program was shut down in 2011 when intelligence officials could not provide evidence of its effectiveness, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado said in a statement Tuesday. The agency now collects data showing who sent and received emails under a narrower program focused on foreign terrorism suspects.<\/p>\n

But the continuing revelations have poured kerosene onto a fiery, long-running post-9\/11 debate over whether the NSA, in a scramble for tiny clues that might prevent terrorism, is breaching citizens\u2019 Fourth Amendment rights to privacy.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, charged that what\u2019s already known shows that the NSA has violated the Constitution and created \u201cthe greatest threat to privacy in the history of this country. . . . They have created a system that for the first time makes every citizen visible to the government at the simple pressing of a button.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael McConnell, a Stanford University law professor and a former federal appeals court judge, agreed that the program is potentially \u201cdangerous,\u201d but he called the case that it is illegal \u201cextremely weak.\u201d He likened the NSA\u2019s collection of general data, such as who emailed whom, to an airport search of all passengers.<\/p>\n

The controversy has prompted members of Congress to put growing pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to improve their transparency.<\/p>\n

The NSA insists that it only eavesdrops on or collects phone content from Americans\u2019 overseas calls, and then only if it has a documented foreign intelligence purpose, such as counterterrorism, and obtains approval from a secret court. The agency\u2019s director, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, told a House of Representatives hearing last month that the programs and other intelligence have protected Americans from terrorist attacks \u201cin a way that does not compromise the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

National intelligence chief James Clapper, in a recent NBC television interview, called it \u201cludicrous\u201d to suggest that the government wants to listen to the private phone calls of everyday Americans.<\/p>\n

During the House hearing, Gen. Alexander told Congress that the agency\u2019s \u201cpartnerships\u201d with telecom and Internet companies have helped disrupt more than 50 terrorist attacks over the last 12 years.<\/p>\n

Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole testified that the NSA doesn\u2019t know the identities of Americans whose phone numbers are collected and only gets access to call content when investigators have found enough evidence to target a foreign terrorism suspect. So-called \u201cmetadata\u201d about billions of emails is treated similarly, officials said.<\/p>\n

But even as the Justice Department pursued Snowden on espionage charges from Hong Kong to Moscow, The Guardian reported that the British spy agency GCHQ has tapped into more than 200 cables carrying the world\u2019s phone calls and Internet traffic and is sharing the data with the NSA. By May 2012, it said, 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to help comb through the mountain of data.<\/p>\n

Digitized records of calls over Google Voice, Skype and other \u201cvoice over Internet\u201d systems, many of them to points overseas, would be among the records.<\/p>\n

NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel said that the \u201cNSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

NSA\u2019s doubters point, in particular, to the agency\u2019s push to build the massive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whose storage capacity will be measured in the highest metric now used \u2014 \u201cyodabytes,\u201d named for Yoda, the \u201cStar Wars\u201d character.<\/p>\n

Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive who challenged the data collection for several years, said the agency\u2019s intent seems obvious.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne hundred million phone records?\u201d he asked in an interview. \u201cWhy would they want that each and every day? Of course they\u2019re storing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drake, who fears that NSA chief Alexander is building \u201cextraordinary power,\u201d wound up as the fourth American to face charges under the Espionage Act after he blew the whistle on a wasteful NSA data-collection system. His prosecution, which Drake alleges was both retaliatory and an attempt to silence other potential leakers, eventually crumbled.<\/p>\n

Lending credence to his worries, The Guardian\u2019s latest report quoted a document in which Alexander purportedly remarked during a 2008 visit to an NSA intercept station in Britain: \u201cWhy can\u2019t we collect all the signals all the time?\u201d<\/p>\n

A U.S. government official, who lacked authorization to speak for the record, said that Alexander\u2019s comment was merely \u201ca quip taken out of context.\u201d<\/p>\n

NSA officials say the leaks have undermined their attempt to cloak their operations to avoid tipping off terrorists to their sources and methods. But in a debate that touches the vast majority of Americans, the agency hasn\u2019t won many points for candor.<\/p>\n

The NSA kept secret for more than four years that it was conducting warrantless wiretaps on overseas callers as part of its hunt for al Qaida members and other terrorists.<\/p>\n

Last week, the agency removed from its website a fact sheet describing how it interpreted its authority under a post-Sept. 11, 2001, USA PATRIOT Act provision through which it\u2019s collected Internet records \u2014 after members of Congress pointed to an inaccurate statement. Wyden and Udall, who have led congressional scrutiny of the agency, wrote Alexander that the error, which is classified, was \u201csignificant, as it portrays protections for Americans\u2019 privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two senators, members of the Senate intelligence committee, chided Alexander that such inaccuracies \u201ccan decrease public confidence in the NSA\u2019s openness.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a separate letter to spy chief Clapper, Wyden and 25 other senators lamented having learned through an unauthorized disclosure that the Patriot Act had been \u201csecretly reinterpreted to allow the government to collect the private records of large numbers of ordinary Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Clapper dashed off an apology letter to the Senate after acknowledging in a recent NBC television interview that he gave \u201cthe least untruthful\u201d answer he could in denying in sworn testimony in March that the NSA had collected huge caches of data on Americans.<\/p>\n

George Washington\u2019s Turley called Clapper\u2019s statement an admission of a lie. He chastised members of the Senate intelligence committee \u2014 led by Democratic Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California and ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia \u2014 for failing to seek a Justice Department perjury investigation, especially since they knew the extent of the surveillance program.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t give Roger Clemens a choice: Did you speak truthfully or just get as close as you could?\u201d Turley said, referring to the former New York Yankees pitching star who had to win acquittal by a jury to fend off charges that he lied to Congress in denying steroid use.<\/p>\n

Clapper appears to have played a game of semantics over the meaning of the word \u201ccollect.\u201d James Bamford, author of \u201cThe Shadow Factory\u201d and two other books about the NSA, said that under the agency\u2019s formal definition, an intercept only occurs \u201cwhen a communication becomes understandable to a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Patriot Act gave intelligence and law enforcement authorities a huge tool for looking at phone and Internet data to help identify terror networks. It authorized them to obtain orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that directed telecom and Internet giants such as Google, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple to share email and phone data.<\/p>\n

Effectively, the law enabled the intelligence agencies to keep up with technological leaps that have transformed the world of surveillance. Nearly all personal data now moves over fiber-optic cables, each of whose tiny filaments can use pulsating flashes of light to transmit up to 100 billion bits of data per second.<\/p>\n

Major phone carriers currently do not store digital recordings of phone calls, except for those occurring under court-ordered wiretaps, said a former technology chief for a major telecom company, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid harming relationships.<\/p>\n

That means that the NSA only could collect the content of calls by flagging targets going forward or by capturing data and storing some or all of it.<\/p>\n

Jim Hayes, head of the California-based Fiber Optic Association who once wrote a classified paper on how to tap into a cable, said that it would be relatively easy for the agency to copy data from a cable.<\/p>\n

One former U.S. security consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his connections to government agencies, told McClatchy he has seen agency-installed switches across the country that draw data from the cables.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I know they copied it? Yes,\u201d said the consultant. \u201cDo I know if they kept it? No.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spokesmen for phone and Internet providers Verizon and AT&T, both of which have been gagged by the national security statutes from discussing their court-ordered assistance to the NSA, declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Tish Wells of the Washington Bureau contributed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Truth Out<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From left: Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency; Rand Beers, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Patrick Gallagher, acting deputy secretary of commerce, and Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch, testify at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Capitol […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47942","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=47942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}