Does The NSA Have A File On You?

People who don’t like the idea of Google photographing their homes — and sniffing their wifi– will really hate this: The National Security Agency has been compiling huge information profiles on U.S. citizens, collecting and parsing their email and cell phone conversations, according to three former NSA officials.

Instead of government investigators figuring out which potential terrorists to investigate, the NSA technology will enable the automatic collection, search, and analysis of cell phone conversations and email of everyone. The tools then flag which people to watch, according to the former NSA hands.

William Binney, Thomas Drake, and Kirk Wiebe appeared Monday night on Current TV’s Viewpoint to discuss the NSA program with host Eliot Spitzer, the former New York State Attorney General. What was new to me — news of the eavesdropping program started breaking in 2005 — was their contention that the effort, which started after 9/11, will use tools developed under the Obama Administration’s Big Data initiative to increase the scope of government’s view into our lives. The technology will automate the process of sorting through all that data to determine — without human intervention — who is a threat.

They allege that the government is building a dossier on every citizen from that data — which will be stored in the secret Bluffdale, Utah data center. Software can then be run against that data to construct timelines about an individual’s personal life and a map of their social and business connections. Bluffdale, Binney said, will be able to store 100 years worth of the worlds’ electronic communication. “They’re accumulating [data] against everyone,” he told Spitzer. The website Technically Personal ran a good report on the show.

For the record, Binney, Drake, and Wiebe were investigated as possible leaks when the New York Times started breaking the news of massive government snooping on citizens back in 2005, and are now providing evidence for an Electronic Freedom Foundation lawsuit against the NSA.

There’s more unsettling news on this government spying front in Adam Liptak’s New York Times story about court-approved electronic surveillance. Liptak cites the concerns of Houston Judge Stephen W. Smith about the secretive nature of this information-gathering effort. Update: (Late last week, an NSA official acknowledged in a letter to a U.S. congressman, that the U.S. intelligence agencies had violated citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights at least once.)

“Courts do things in public,” Smith told Liptak. “That’s the way we maintain our legitimacy. As citizens, we need to know how law enforcement is using this power.”

But in an article Smith wrote for The Harvard Law & Policy Review, he said that court orders relating to surveillance might as well be “written in invisible ink.”

But at least in those situations, there is a court order. It looks like when it comes to the government collecting data on us, no court order is necessary at all.

Via: "GigaOm"

How NSA’s Surveillance Algorithms See Into Your Life

On the ViewPoint talkshow with Eliot Spitzer, three whistle blowers from the National Security Agency (NSA), Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe and William Binney have expressed their allegations surrounding NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance measures. The whistle blowers specifically refer to 9/11 as the date after which electronic surveillance has taken new heights.

This means that enormous amounts of email, cell phone conversations have been stored and surveilled, as Eliot Spitzer puts it. When asked whether they knew about the electronic surveillance used by NSA, Kirk Wiebe said that they didn’t even believe the U.S. government could go that far.

Google Seems A Joke When Compared To NSA’s Data

William Binney confirms Spitzer’s assumptions by agreeing that there is, indeed, a dossier for almost every American, filled up with data aggregated by the National Security Agency. Looking at how much data the NSA could possibly have piled up, compared to that, Eliot says that Google “seems like a joke”.  William goes on to say something really spooky:

The data is resident in programs that can pull it together in timelines and things like that and let them (the Government)see into your life, to see what you’re doing in your life.

By using satellites and the huge amount of data the NSA currently holds, they can even create some sort of algorithms to realize who’s talking to whom, thus being able to dissect our private lives. Eliot also says that it is being done without any regard to the Fourth Amendment in the United States Constitution. To get a better understanding, here’s what the 4th amendment presumes:

When police conduct a search, the amendment requires that the warrant establishes probable cause to believe that the search will uncover criminal activity or contraband. They must havelegally sufficient reasons to believe a search is necessary.

also, it is important to know this aspect of the U.S Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, butupon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Government Has An Electronic Spying Program

The algorithms that the NSA has created, according to whistle blower William Binney, are actually a part of the Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which has the official purpose to improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data. William goes on by saying that the algorithms will go through the data base looking at everybody.

The basic and most obvious question that comes in our mind, as well as the mind of the talk show host – hasn’t anybody thought about the direct violation of the Constitution? Normally, for such critically important things for a nation, there needs to be a Court approval. According to Kirk Wiebe, it seems that nobody cares about that.

Secret Spying Room Inside AT&T Facility

As always, this is nothing new, it’s just that thanks to this talk show, some of us have gotten the chance to find about these things and to make our duty about informing others. It is only now that I’ve discovered that the EEF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has a lawsuit against U.S government’s massive spying program. Here’s what the EEF had to say about this:

In a motion filed today (July 2), the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the “secret room” at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

There’ve been numerous reports about the secret room at AT&T, Wired and ArsTechnica have written about this 6 years ago. Another interesting article also shows that the same EEF has filed a suit against AT&T over NSA spying, accusing them of diverting customer traffic to the NSA for years as a means of aiding the NSA’s covert surveillance program. If you still think this is fiction we’re talking, you might want to read this Wikipedia article, which refers to this room as Room 641A.

The same William Binney, guest of the ViewPoint show, said that there could be up to 20 of such “secret rooms” across the entire country. The octopus of secret surveillance is getting even bigger as we find out about the President’s surveillance program, which constitutes a series of secret intelligence activities authorized by then President of the United States George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as part of the War on Terrorism.

Is There Still Hope?

The surveillance program seems to have appeared as a direct effect of the Patriot Act and its surveillance procedures. And here’s where we make the link with the 4th amendment. I’m no legal expert, but even to me, it makes sense and this explains it all:

Removed was the statutory requirement that the government prove a surveillance target under FISA is a non-U.S. citizen and agent of a foreign power, though it did require that any investigations must not be undertaken on citizens who are carrying out activities protected by the First Amendment. The title also expanded the duration of FISA physical search and surveillance orders and gave authorities the ability to share information gathered before a federal grand jury with other agencies.

To put it bluntly, by using the Patriot Act’s official purpose of fighting with terrorism, the freedom of U.S citizens appears to be greatly impaired; by using the Big Data initiative’s offical purpose of enhancing even more the role of technology in our lives, they’re actually creating intrusive algorithms that are spying on our private lives.

But there’s still hope as it seems that, recently, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has admitted that government’s spying efforts have exceeded the legal limits, at least once. Let’s hope that all this will have an end and our freedoms will be preserved. As Benjamin Franklin said:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.“

Via: "TechPP"

The Magna Carta Shredded Before Our Eyes

By Noam Chomsky

Editor’s note: This column is adapted from an address by Noam Chomsky on June 19 at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, as part of its 600th anniversary celebration.

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that anniversary. It is not an attractive prospect – not least because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of the Magna Carta was published in 1759 by the English jurist William Blackstone, whose work was a source for U.S. constitutional law. It was entitled “The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest,” following earlier practice. Both charters are highly significant today.

The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the cornerstone of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples – or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”

In 1679 the Charter was enriched by the Habeas Corpus Act, formally titled “an Act for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonment beyond the seas.” The modern harsher version is called “rendition” – imprisonment for the purpose of torture.

Along with much of English law, the Act was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, which affirms that “the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended” except in case of rebellion or invasion. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were “(c)onsidered by the Founders as the highest safeguard of liberty.”

More specifically, the Constitution provides that no “person (shall) be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law (and) a speedy and public trial” by peers.

The Department of Justice has recently explained that these guarantees are satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch, as Jo Becker and Scott Shane reported in The New York Times on May 29. Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer in the White House, agreed. King John would have nodded with satisfaction.

The underlying principle of “presumption of innocence” has also been given an original interpretation. In the calculus of the president’s “kill list” of terrorists, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are in effect counted as combatants “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,” Becker and Shane summarized. Thus post-assassination determination of innocence now suffices to maintain the sacred principle.

This is the merest sample of the dismantling of “the charter of every self-respecting man.”

The companion Charter of the Forest is perhaps even more pertinent today. It demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population – their fuel, their food, their construction materials. The Forest was no wilderness. It was carefully nurtured, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations.

By the 17th century, the Charter of the Forest had fallen victim to the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality. No longer protected for cooperative care and use, the commons were restricted to what could not be privatized – a category that continues to shrink before our eyes.

Last month the World Bank ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with its case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental protection would deprive the company of future profits, a crime under the rules of the investor rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.”

This is only one example of struggles under way over much of the world, some with extreme violence, as in resource-rich eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cellphones and other uses, and of course ample profits.

The dismantling of the Charter of the Forest brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are conceived, captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential thesis in 1968 that “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: What is not privately owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.

The doctrine is not without challenge. Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed commons.

But the doctrine has force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans are blindly driven by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, called “the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self” – a doctrine they bitterly condemned as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very nature of free people.

Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are dedicated to what political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants” – directing people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption,” in the words of Columbia University marketing professor Paul Nystrom.

That way people can be atomized, seeking personal gain alone and diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves, act in concert and challenge authority.

It’s unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the destruction of the commons: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster. Details may be debated, but there is little serious doubt that the problems are all too real and that the longer we delay in addressing them, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. The recent Rio+20 Conference is the latest effort. Its aspirations were meager, its outcome derisory.

In the lead in confronting the crisis, throughout the world, are indigenous communities. The strongest stand has been taken by the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim of Western destruction of its rich resources.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries. The summit called for very sharp reduction in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. That is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world.

The demand is ridiculed by sophisticated Westerners, but unless we can acquire some of the sensibility of the indigenous communities, they are likely to have the last laugh – a laugh of grim despair.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.

Government Assembling Information On Every U.S. Citizen

NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

Via: "Raw Story"

Hidden Government Scanners Will Instantly Know Everything About You

Above: The Genia Photonics' Picosecond Programmable Laser scanner is capable of detecting every tiny trace of any substance on your body, from specks of gunpowder to your adrenaline levels to a sugar-sized grain of cannabis to what you had for breakfast.

Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 50 meters away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you.

And without you knowing it.

The technology is so incredibly effective that, in November 2011, its inventors weresubcontracted by In-Q-Tel to work with the US Department of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel is a company founded "in February 1999 by a group of private citizens at the request of the Director of the CIA and with the support of the U.S. Congress." According to In-Q-Tel, they are the bridge between the Agency and new technology companies.

Their plan is to install this molecular-level scanning in airports and border crossings all across the United States. The official, stated goal of this arrangement is to be able to quickly identify explosives, dangerous chemicals, or bioweapons at a distance.

The machine is ten million times faster—and one million times more sensitive—than any currently available system. That means that it can be used systematically on everyone passing through airport security, not just suspect or randomly sampled people.

Analyzing Everything In Real Time

But the machine can sniff out a lot more than just explosives, chemicals and bioweapons. The company that invented it, Genia Photonics, says that its laser scanner technology is able to "penetrate clothing and many other organic materials and offers spectroscopic information, especially for materials that impact safety such as explosives and pharmacological substances." [PDF]

Formed in Montreal in 2009 by PhDs with specialties in lasers and fiber optics, Genia Photonics has 30 patents on this technology, claiming incredible biomedical and industrial applications—from identifying individual cancer cells in a real-time scan of a patient, to detecting trace amounts of harmful chemicals in sensitive manufacturing processes.

Meanwhile, In-Q-Tel states that "an important benefit of Genia Photonics' implementation as compared to existing solutions is that the entire synchronized laser system is comprised in a single, robust and alignment-free unit that may be easily transported for use in many environments… This compact and robust laser has the ability to rapidly sweep wavelengths in any pattern and sequence." [PDF]

So not only can they scan everyone. They would be able to do it everywhere: the subway, a traffic light, sports events... everywhere.

How Does It Work?

The machine is a mobile, rack-mountable system. It fires a laser to provide molecular-level feedback at distances of up to 50 meters in just picoseconds. For all intents and purposes, that means instantly.

The small, inconspicuous machine is attached to a computer running a program that will show the information in real time, from trace amounts of cocaine on your dollar bills to gunpowder residue on your shoes. Forget trying to sneak a bottle of water past security—they will be able to tell what you had for breakfast in an instant while you're walking down the hallway.

If Genia Photonics' claims pan out, this is will be an incredible leap forward in technology. And one with staggering implications.

Observation Without Limits

There has so far been no discussion about the personal rights and privacy issues involved. Which "molecular tags" will they be scanning for? Who determines them? What are the threshold levels of this scanning? If you unknowingly stepped on the butt of someone's joint and are carrying a sugar-sized grain of cannabis like that unfortunate traveler currently in jail in Dubai, will you be arrested?

And, since it's extremely portable, will this technology extend beyone the airport or border crossings and into police cars, with officers looking for people on the street with increased levels of adrenaline in their system to detain in order to prevent potential violent outbursts? And will your car be scanned at stoplights for any trace amounts of suspicious substances? Would all this information be recorded anywhere?

Above: A page from a Genia Photonics paper describing its ability to even penetrate through clothing.

There are a lot of questions with no answer yet, but it's obvious that the potential level of personal invasion of this technology goes far beyond that of body scans, wiretaps, and GPS tracking.

The End Of Privacy Coming Soon

According to the undersecretary for science and technology of the Department of Homeland Security, this scanning technology will be ready within one to two years, which means you might start seeing them in airports as soon as 2013.

In other words, these portable, incredibly precise molecular-level scanning devices will be cascading lasers across your body as you walk from the bathroom to the soda machine at the airport and instantly reporting and storing a detailed breakdown of your person, in search of certain "molecular tags".

Going well beyond eavesdropping, it seems quite possible that U.S. government plans on recording molecular data on travelers without their consent, or even knowledge that it's possible—a scary thought. While the medical uses could revolutionize the way doctors diagnose illness, and any technology that could replace an aggressive pat-down is tempting, there's a potential dark side to this implementation, and we need to shine some light on it before it's implemented.

The author of this story is currently completing his PhD in renewable energy solutions, focusing on converting waste to energy in the urban environment. Even while most of this information is publicly available, he wanted to remain anonymous.

Image by oleandra/Shutterstock

Via: "Gizmodo"

FBI To Coordinating Domestic Intelligence Activities

By Greg Miller,
Published: June 19, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"


The FBI has been given an expanded role in coordinating the domestic intelligence-gathering activities of the CIA and other agencies under a plan enacted this year by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., officials said.

The bureau’s highest-ranking field agents now also serve as the DNI’s representatives across the country.

The change is intended to improve collaboration, but some officials say it has created new friction between
the FBI and CIA.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, assistant director of national intelligence, said the move is meant to enhance the FBI’s ability to lead efforts by federal, state and local authorities to confront terrorist threats and other domestic security concerns.

“This is a connecting bridge between intelligence and law enforcement,” Flynn said in an interview. He added that the DNI designation does not give regional FBI officials power over other agencies’ operations or personnel.

The program was endorsed by CIA Director David H. Petraeus and officials at other affected agencies. But concerns have surfaced in some regional offices that the FBI is exploiting its new clout at the CIA’s expense.

One former U.S. official said senior FBI agents recently used a meeting with executives from major manufacturing companies on the West Coast to instruct them to cut off contact with the CIA.

The FBI’s message was that “they were now in charge of relationships with the corporate sector, so the folks there should feel no need to deal with the agency,” said the former U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. The FBI agents apparently were not aware that a former CIA officer was among the executives in attendance. The former official declined to provide more details about the location of the meeting or its participants.

FBI spokesman Michael Kortan said that officials could not confirm the alleged incident and that such a statement to company executives by an FBI agent would be inaccurate.

Although the CIA is best known for its spy work overseas, the agency has stations in most major U.S. cities.

The National Resources Division, as this group is known, routinely debriefs executives, university officials and other Americans who volunteer to share information gathered on their trips out of the country. The CIA is also allowed to approach foreign nationals in the United States and try to recruit them as spies upon their return to their home countries.

The FBI dramatically expanded its domestic intelligence-gathering operations as part of a reorganization after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Flynn said the DNI program is not meant to disrupt CIA efforts in the United States. “This program doesn’t change the authorities of the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security or anybody else in the system,” he said. “But there is more of a responsibility to share and work together.”

It is unclear whether the change will require the CIA to disclose more information about its domestic sources. In his memoir, former senior CIA official Henry A. Crumpton writes that during his tenure as head of the National Resources Division, the FBI “repeatedly demanded the identities of NR sources” and he refused.

The new DNI program began as a pilot operation in four cities — New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago — and was expanded to 12 regions covering the entire country this year.

The program is analogous to an arrangement overseas in which CIA station chiefs serve as the nation’s senior intelligence officers and main points of contact with their foreign counterparts. A 2009 proposal to change that policy and give the DNI power to select officers from other spy services prompted a fierce bureaucratic battle that the CIA won.

A CIA spokeswoman said the agency has not opposed the move to elevate FBI agents in the United States.

“The CIA endorses and supports the DNI’s decision,” said spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. “The decision makes sense, and the program is working well. DCIA Petraeus has already met with several of the domestic DNI representatives and has been impressed with them and with their cooperation.”

40 Years Of Growing Surveillance

By Nat Hentoff
This article appeared on The New York Times (Online) on June 13, 2012.
Courtesy Of "The CATO Institute"

The Watergate legacy of disabling opponents by wiretaps and other suspensions of the Bill of Rights has since been protected by the current administration in federal court. The attorney general, Eric Holder, opposed a history professor's attempt to secure records about the wiretap that cost Nixon his presidency.

But ceaseless advances in government privacy-invading technology have made the Nixon-era suspensions of individual constitutional liberties appear amateurish.

For an example that far exceeds the once-fearsome vision of George Orwell's 1984, the National Security Agency — with the support of President Obama, who was elected in part for pledging the most transparent administration in American history — is erecting a data tracking center in Bluffdale, Utah, that as of September 2013 will be storing and distributing to other intelligence agencies "all forms of communications, including the contents of private emails, cellphone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases." 

(Including, I'm sure, e-books, to be up to date.) In view of the Obama administration's strange definition of its transparency, I give you my source: James Bamford, a historian who, more successfully than any investigative reporter, has become familiar with the inner workings of the N.S.A.

It was Senator Frank Church of Idaho who, investigating the state of our privacy in 1975, warned that as the N.S.A. kept evolving without accountability, for Americans "there would be no place to hide."

Meanwhile, the F.B.I.'s domestic surveillance powers allow it to open a warrantless "threat assessment" against any American or organization without going to court and without any articulable evidence of imminent or actual criminal behavior.

Turning America into a society under surveillance was never remotely conceived by the Founders, however conflicted they sometimes were. Nor does it seem likely that our resemblance to Iran in this context will be an issue of any consequence in the 2012 elections. The incumbent is, of course, immovable in his definition of national security as it frees him from fealty to the Constitution. Mitt Romney has so far not given any indication that he is in the least troubled by the National Security Agency. And most of the rest of us are concerned with our survival in this perilous economy.
Is this still America?