Never mind the non-stop collection of metadata and other sneaky surveillance tools being implemented by the NSA: a new report has revealed that the National Security Agency’s spy powers allow the government to grab location data on just about anyone.
In an article published by the Washington Post over the weekend,
journalist Dana Priest detailed how one of the most secretive
agencies administered by the United States government has
expanded drastically in the decade-plus since the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. An increased demand for
intelligence encouraged the development and implementation of
surveillance tactics previous confined to the pages of science
fiction, she wrote, and those tools today rival even what has
already been unearthed by the NSA’s undercover operations.
“Lacking a strong informant network to provide details about
al-Qaeda, US intelligence and the military turned to the NSA’s
technology to fill the void,” Priest wrote.
According to Priest, policies enacted in a post-9/11 intelligence
community involved a pivotal role played by the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a Department of Defense office
that was created to collect battlefield intelligence using the
most sophisticated of means available. In the wake of 9/11, that
involved being able to pinpoint the location of a suspected
adversary using only a cell phone number, and agents with that
kind of access quickly were on-demand outside of the walls of the
NGIA and NSA.
In one incident reported by Priest, a Navy SEAL working within a
makeshift Central Intelligence Agency operations center in one
part of the US called up an agent in the basement of the NSA’s
base in Augusta, Georgia and insisted a team of geolocation
specialists identify the exact location of an insurgent in
Afghanistan using only the suspect’s telephone number.
Once all parties were properly coordinated, Priest wrote “they
aimed the NSA’s many sensors toward individual targets while
tactical units aimed their weaponry against them.”
Priest went on to call that moment and others like it
revolutionary with regards to what was to come for the NSA. The
intelligence tools once used to track and spy on the leaders of
competing countries and adversaries around the world had been
deployed to target a single suspected terrorists 8,000 miles away
using the resources utilized by an ever-expanding agency still
only in its infancy.
Thanks to a bevy of whistleblowers who exposed the agency’s use
of domestic surveillance years before the name Edward Snowden was
known, today it’s common knowledge that the communications of
American citizens can be inadvertently collected by the NSA.
Leaked documents attributed to Snowden during the last several
weeks have shined further light on how the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, the PATRIOT Act and an array of tactics take
conversations sent over telephone wires, fiber optic cables and
Wi-Fi signals and send them to Uncle Sam. In her article for the
Post, though, Priest wrote that these tools are coupled with
military agencies at times to create a quick and coordinated
action that often ends in the execution of an alleged enemy.
“By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to
find cellphones even when they were turned off,” Priest
wrote. The tactic was called “The Find,” and reportedly it gave
the Joint Special Operations Command the tools to track down
members of al-Qaeda and other extremist group and then order a
hit. Combining it with another new system, the Real Time Regional
Gateway, both intelligence and military officers could access any
type of surveillance in a given region under which a target could
be tracked.
“We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em,” was a motto that the
Augusta, Georgia geolocation agents quickly adopted, Priest
wrote.
But 12 years after the September 11 attack – and more than three
since al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was executed thanks to
tactics employed by the NSA, CIA and others – these operations
have not been scaled back. Instead, rather, the NSA has expanded
around the globe and is currently in the midst of building what
will be one of the largest intelligence facilities in America.
That structure, a million-square-foot data storage facility in
Bluffdale, Utah, when all is said and done will collect domestic
intelligence that one former NSA worker said isn’t necessarily
relevant to anything.
Bill Binney, a former NSA agent that resigned after 9/11 with
more than three decades of experience under his belt, said the
government is collecting data before even figuring out what to do
with it.
“They would have plenty of space with five zettabytes to store
at least something on the order of 100 years’ worth of the
worldwide communications, phones and emails and stuff like
that,” Binney told Wired last year, “and then have plenty
of space left over to do any kind of parallel processing to try
to break codes.”
“It’s everything – phones, emails, twitter, any kind of
digital communications that they’ve had. I think it’s into
banking as well, but I don’t know that for sure. I do believe
they’re doing it,” he added to Libertas Institute in an
interview last month. “My estimate is that there’s a little
over 280 million Americans in the database, several times because
one person can have a work phone, home phone, mobile phone,
online banking, multiple email addresses. Two-hundred-and-eighty
million people are in there at least, and the ones that aren’t
are babies in cribs, people in hospice, others not doing anything
electronic. Each person is in there between several hundred and
several thousand times. It’s aggregated data over a now 12 year
period.”
Meanwhile, the NSA defends the construction of both foreign and
domestic facilities, citing to Priest the need to stay one-step
ahead of the adversary.
“The notion of constant, unchecked, or senseless growth is a
myth,” the NSA said in a statement to the Post.
Republished with permission from: RT