Replies to post #205601 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) .. a little more here ..

By James Bamford
03.15.12
7:24 PM


Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasatch_Range .. to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oquirrh_Mountains .. to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.



Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy , the Apostolic United Brethren .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_United_Brethren , with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

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The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and
potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
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Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing , the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing , and finally the devastation of 9/11 .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks — some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_253 .. and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010 .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt — there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

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UTAH DATA CENTER .. [shucks, inside this looks all one image]

When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.



Utah Data Center
1 Visitor control center

A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.
2 Administration

Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.
3 Data halls

Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.
4 Backup generators and fuel tanks

Can power the center for at least three days.
5 Water storage and pumping

Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.
6 Chiller plant

About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.
7 Power substation

An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.
8 Security

Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan
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A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Inglis , the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.

Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte .. (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

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The NSA’S SPY NETWORK .. another one ..

Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.



1 Geostationary satellites

Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.

2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado

Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.

3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia

Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.

4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio

Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.

5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu

Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.

6 Domestic listening posts

The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.

7 Overseas listening posts

According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.

8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah

At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.
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Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court , which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_wind_%28code_name%29 , in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the 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. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The 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. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

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The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian .. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism .. state.”
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Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

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In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software
examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.
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But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”

When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.

The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Systems , its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.

In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5 .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_XT5 . Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.

The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”

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The NSA believes it’s on the verge of breaking a
key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.
-----------------------

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel ,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

James Bamford ([e-mail]) is the author of The Shadow
Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 View All

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Show More

James Bamford is the author of the The Shadow Factory:
the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

Read more by James Bamford .. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/james-bamford/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

ok .. just in case anyone felt to know more .. have had those two on tab for a few days .. ah .. a permalink ..
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

[SPARK]

Thanks for posting this~

[fuagf]

Amash Amendment to Defund NSA Phone Program Fails in House

—By Kevin Drum
| Wed Jul. 24, 2013 6:22 PM PDT 25

Rep. Justin Amash's amendment to defund the NSA's bulk collection of domestic telephone records failed in the House this afternoon. That's probably not too surprising given the full court press coming from the president, the leadership of both parties, and the intelligence community. But take a look at the vote count. When was the last time we saw something so genuinely bipartisan? In the end, 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted in favor, and the leaders of both parties—John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer—all joined with President Obama to oppose the amendment and keep the NSA program in place. Despite disagreements at the margin, support for the fundamental structure of the modern national security state truly spans both parties.

On a side note, I'm not sure how to interpret the closeness of the vote. It's possible that House leaders whipped a bare opposition majority in the short time they had and didn't bother putting any pressure on the remaining Yes votes. If they had, maybe the vote would have been more lopsided. On the other hand, maybe they got all the votes they could and this was genuinely a close run thing. With a little more work, maybe the Yes side could have won.

And on the bright side, I note that our nation's major newspapers all deigned to report this on their front pages today. That's something, at least.



http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/07/amash-amendment-defund-nsa-phone-program-fails-house

[fuagf]

Q&A: What Obama’s Surveillance Changes Mean

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries August 9, 2013, 6:01 PM Comments (4)


Associated Press
President Barack Obama .. http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/barack,-obama/4328 .. gestures
during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 9, 2013.

President Barack Obama announced plans Friday .. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324522504579002653564348842.html? .. to overhaul a secret national security court and pledged to take other steps to provide more information on secret programs. Here’s a Q&A on the changes:

What are the main changes President Obama is proposing after disclosures
about surveillance programs by the National Security Agency?

Obama offered four main proposals:

- Revamping the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, which approves the NSA’s surveillance efforts;

- Revamping the section of the Patriot Act that allows for the bulk collection of telephone “metadata,” for example numbers dialed and the duration of calls;

- Disclosing more information about NSA programs;

- Naming a task force to review surveillance efforts.

Which of these is most significant?

The proposal to reform the FISC, also called the FISA court, is the most ambitious. This secret court, which is made up of 11 federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, hears requests to order surveillance in national security cases. Because these cases are so sensitive, proceedings are secret and the court’s opinions are almost never released.

In particular, Obama is suggesting the court system have a privacy advocate to counter government requests for surveillance. In the current court, the federal government makes an application to the judges and they decide whether to approve it. This is unlike the typical criminal legal system, in which defendants eventually have the opportunity to challenge government procedures.

A privacy advocate could assuage concerns of civil liberties advocates, but the court would still be subject to stringent secrecy requirements because of the subject of the cases it handles. Advocates of further change in the court might also want reforms to include more releases of court orders, as well as possible adjustments to the way judges are nominated.

How might the Patriot Act be changed?

Obama did not specify how the Patriot Act might be overhauled, other than to explain that he was seeking to increase oversight and put more “constraints” on the provision in question.

The law being discussed is called the “business records” section and allows the government to obtain records as long as it’s reasonable to believe they are “relevant” to an authorized national security investigation.

The disclosure of documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed how this provision was being used to justify the ongoing bulk collection of phone record metadata from millions of Americans. The court approved of this collection only after requiring limits on when the database could be accessed, but those limits have not been officially put into law.

Some legislators have said that they did not consider this large amount of data to meet the “relevant” standard. Several have said they do not believe that the Patriot Act in fact allowed such collection, even with the court’s limitations. Still other lawmakers have opposed any changes to the program, saying it is key to protecting Americans from national security threats.

The Obama administration has defended the data-collection program while also calling for more transparency. So any changes could aim to keep the program in place, while providing a more official system of limitations on access to the data.

What would the task force do?

This group, which has yet to be named, will produce a report that aims to balance “security, privacy and foreign policy concerns” as they relate to U.S. surveillance efforts, a U.S. official said.

Other than that, the group’s role appears limited. Another group, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, already has a role as a watchdog agency for federal surveillance. That board, which was created by Congress in 2004, has had a difficult history and had its first meeting as an independent agency only this June.

What kind of information would be disclosed about the NSA?

Earlier today, the administration released a paper outlining the legal reasoning behind its collection of large amounts of telephone metadata. Officials said they would give more information about the NSA’s legal authority and about the controls that limit what the agency can do with the data it collects. In addition, the NSA has proposed creating a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer and is launching a website to give people more information about its programs. Although this is more information than the secretive agency usually provides, it remains unclear how many additional details about programs will be disclosed.

What did the disclosure of the government’s legal reasoning in the Patriot Act case show?

The government outlined several reasons behind the surveillance court’s approval of bulk phone data under the Patriot Act. Most of the information had been discussed recently in congressional hearings and elsewhere, but the document handed out today is the first complete report on the legal reasoning.

Most important is the assertion that for broad investigations into terrorism this data is indeed “relevant,” as the law calls for. Specifically, the government said there is reason to believe conducting searches on this database will produce information for terrorism investigations, and that the NSA can only perform the necessary analysis if it collects such a large volume of data.

The government also points out that preventive terrorism investigations are much broader than investigations into crimes that already have been committed. This means they require more information and access to data in order to succeed. Also important to the government’s argument is that the FISA court put restrictions on the handling of data collected by the program. For example, there must be “reasonable, articulable suspicion” in order to query the database using an “identifier,” such as a telephone number.

Last year, 300 identifiers met this standard and were used to query the database. The information gathered expands rapidly from there, however, because analysts can gather the numbers from three “hops” of contacts. In other words, the numbers called by the original phone, all the numbers those second set of phones called, and all the numbers the third set of phones called as well. Still, the report says, this represents a “tiny fraction of the total volume” of records.

Finally, the administration points out that it gave information to Congress about the program, and legislators repeatedly reauthorized the part of the Patriot Act that allows it. In fact, Congress declined to make limit the law in a way that would have stopped the program.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/09/qa-what-obamas-surveillance-changes-mean/

======

5 Things To Know About The Legal Reasoning For Surveillance

Eyder Peralta andScott Neuman August 09, 2013 5:57 PM


The National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.
Saul Loeb/Getty Images

After Obama proposed reforms .. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/09/210539942/live-blog-president-obamas-press-conference .. to some surveillance programs run by the NSA, the Justice Department issued a long-awaited white paper .. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750210/administration-white-paper-section-215.pdf .. (pdf) on the legal reasoning for the bulk collection of telephone records.

Much of it centers around Section 215 of the Patriot Act .. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 , which authorizes the warrantless collection of metadata on all the calls that come in and out of the United States.

The white paper is 23 pages long and full of legalese, but it's important. We've gone through the document and found five highlights you should know about.

— On Relevance:

Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act .. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 .. allows the government to collect business records if they are "relevant to an authorized investigation"

So you might ask, yourself, how is it that the government can collect metadata about phone calls in bulk? Can records of all calls made by Verizon customers, for example, be relevant to an "authorized investigation."

The Obama administration argues that in the legal world the term "relevant" is more broad than its dictionary definition.

------
"It is well-settled in the context of other forms of legal process for the production of documents that a document is 'relevant' to a particular subject matter not only where it directly bears on that subject matter, but also where it is reasonable to believe that it could lead to other information that directly bears on that subject matter. In civil discovery, for example, the Supreme Court has construed the phrase 'relevant to the subject matter involved in the pending action' 'broadly to encompass any matter that bears on, or that reasonably could lead to other matter that could bear on, any issue that is or may be in the case.' Oppenheimer Fund, Inc. v. Sanders, 437 U.S. 340, 351 (1978)"
-----

The government continues:

-----
"In light of that basic understanding of relevance, courts have held that the relevance standard permits requests for the production of entire repositories of records, even when any particular record is unlikely to directly bear on the matter being investigated, because searching the entire repository is the only feasible means to locate the critical documents."
-----

— It's What Congress Intended:

The government argues that Congress passed the Patriot Act with that broad definition of "relevant" in mind.

That is clear, the government argues, because they have twice reauthorized the section, knowing how it was being implemented.

"When Congress reenacts a statute without change, it is presumed to have adopted the administrative or judicial interpretation of the statute if it is aware of the interpretation," the administration writes in the white paper.

— The Data Is Not Fully Searchable:

As we've explained before .. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/15/191619038/based-on-what-we-know-is-the-nsa-verizon-request-legal , the government is not allowed to look at all the data it collects. It's enacted "minimization procedures," which sometimes force analysts to seek further permission from a secret court to look at certain data.

One of the interesting minimization procedures in the white paper is something called "hops."

The NSA can obtain three levels of contacts, known as "hops", in addition to the targeted telephone number. The first "hop" is the set of telephone numbers in direct contact with the original number, but two more levels can be looked at. The second "hop" is all numbers in direct contact with the first "hop" and the third "hop" consists of all numbers in contact with the second "hop".

Because it's a geometric progression, if the first number and each one thereafter is in contact with three others, a total of 40 numbers could come under scrutiny as part of a single query.

"Following the trail in this fashion allows focused inquiries on numbers of interest, thus potentially revealing a contact at the second or third 'hop' from the seed telephone number," the paper says.

"Even so, under this process, only a tiny fraction of the bulk telephony metadata records stored at NSA are authorized to be seen by an NSA intelligence analyst, and only under carefully controlled circumstances."

— Section 215, Is Not Boundless:

Some records are different, the government says, so the same standards do not apply to other business records.

They explain:

-----
"For example, the Government's ability to analyze telephony metadata, including through the techniques discussed above, to discover connections between individuals fundamentally distinguishes such data from medical records or library records. Although an identified suspect's medical history might be relevant to an investigation of that individual, searching an aggregate database of medical records—which do not interconnect to one another—would not typically enable the Government to identify otherwise unknown relationships among individuals and organizations and therefore to ascertain information about terrorist networks."
-----

— Plus, Metadata Isn't Protected By The Fourth:

One of the last arguments the government makes is the metadata collected — time, phone numbers, duration — isn't protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Citing Smith v. Maryland .. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=442&invol=735 , the government says the "Supreme Court precedent makes clear that participants in telephone calls lack any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the metadata records generated by their telephone calls and held by telecommunications service providers."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/09/210590409/5-things-to-know-about-the-legal-reasoning-for-surveillance

[fuagf]

Newly Declassified Documents Show How the Surveillance State was Born

.. posted as hopefully some interesting history for some ..

BY JEFFREY ROSEN @rosenjeffrey SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

Almost no one noticed when the book was quietly released this summer. It has perhaps the most benumbing title in publishing history. Yet inside this volume of previously confidential legal opinions is the story of how the surveillance state grew into a monster.

Imagine the past five years of the Obama administration as they might have been. In this alternate universe, the national security state expanded by the Bush administration is disciplined by appropriate legal and constitutional constraints. The new president, despite technological advances that create vastly enlarged possibilities for ubiquitous surveillance, implements the basic reforms he had championed as a freshman senator from Illinois, protecting the privacy of innocent Americans without compromising the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track possible terrorists. With his support and leadership, Congress amends the Patriot Act to require that the government produce a warrant, or at least “specific and articulable facts,” establishing someone as a suspected terrorist before his or her data can be searched and seized. Foreign intelligence judges review those applications individually. Edward Snowden has a harder time leaking troves of secret data, because the data are no longer collected and shared in centrally accessible databases. The violations he does reveal involve closed chapters of U.S. history, not stains on the Obama record.

Of course, none of that happened. Although President Obama could have reined in the surveillance state, as we all know, he did not. The snowballing privacy abuses that Snowden exposed, starting with the PRISM program and culminating most recently in the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s encryption-cracking efforts, have threatened U.S. constitutional values and foreign policy interests without making us safer.

In expanding the surveillance state and the White House’s wartime authorities, Obama has continued a grand and unfortunate presidential tradition—fresh details of which have quietly come to light. They are found in a volume of 66 previously confidential legal opinions, issued between 1934 and 1976, that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released .. http://www.justice.gov/olc/olc-foia1.htm .. over the summer. Bearing a title that is wonky even by Washington standards,1 the book nevertheless is riveting reading, amounting to a secret history of the rise of the national security leviathan. But just as the book shows how that apparatus has been built up, it also tells a second story: of how public outrage, loud and sustained, can tear it back down.

The Office of Legal Counsel was founded in 1934 to provide legal and constitutional advice to the White House on what Homer Cummings, the attorney general at the time, called “the more troublesome questions arising in the administration of the executive branch of the Government.” It has since been staffed by some of the most influential constitutional lawyers of the twentieth century, including future Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist. During the inherently subjective conditions of wartime, the OLC has tended to answer the president’s legal questions in a similar way: by finding justifications to expand executive power, often despite legal restrictions to the contrary. With important exceptions, the previously secret OLC memos repeatedly stress the “unique” threats posed by the current conflict, rather than bedrock values and rights.

The opinions that the OLC has released aren’t legally irresponsible; they are legally cautious, in their determination to defend the executive’s position by any means necessary. But their legal caution has led, in the aggregate, to the erosion of constitutional principles. As some OLC advisers themselves have warned, executive branch lawyers have helped to chip away at the First and Fourth Amendments, brick by brick, leading to the eventual collapse of their most basic protections.

One of those bricks fell on the eve of World War II, when the precursor of the OLC weighed in on the constitutionality of “Presidential control of Wireless and Cable Information Leaving the United States.” In his opinion, Assistant Solicitor General Charles Fahy had little hesitation about validating the president’s authority to intercept electronic communications to parties abroad. There was just one problem: The Supreme Court had explicitly held that the Communications Act barred such a move. But Fahy briskly dismissed the restrictions. “Notwithstanding these provisions,” he argued, “I believe that under his emergency powers” the president could authorize the wiretapping that Congress and the Court had forbidden.



In another previously secret opinion, on May 16, 1942, Assistant Solicitor General Oscar Cox advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt (accurately as it turned out) that the Supreme Court would probably uphold his decision to intern Japanese-American citizens on grounds of military necessity. “The existing case law indicates some doubt,” on the government’s power to do so, Cox acknowledged, “but the conditions of modern warfare are different.” Two decades later, during the Kennedy administration, Assistant Attorney General Robert Kramer discovered his own new frontier. Despite the fact that international law traditionally required a state of war to exist between two countries before a naval blockade was permissible, Kramer advised Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that his brother could unilaterally proceed with a blockade against Cuba. Kramer argued that the United States was clearly engaged in a “cold war,” and this created an exception.

The OLC has done more than approve the expansion of the president’s war powers. It has also supplied the legal rationale for cracking down on those who’ve brought state secrets to light. As early as World War II, the OLC justified the prosecution of journalists and whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act of 1917—the same law some now invoke against Snowden and Fox News’s James Rosen. On June 7, 1942, during the Battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune ran a story revealing that the United States had broken Japanese Naval codes and was reading the enemy’s encrypted messages. In a kind of analog preview of the Snowden and Chelsea Manning affairs, the paper got the scoop when one of its reporters, traveling on a U.S. attack transport, claimed he found on an officer’s desk a dispatch listing the Japanese ships taking place in a naval engagement. (In fact, he probably had an inside source.) The reporter kept the dispatch, or copied it, and later, after flying back to San Francisco, wrote an article—Navy Had Word of JAP Plan to Strike at Sea”—based on the classified information.

Nine days later, on June 16, 1942, Oscar Cox, the author of the Japanese internment memo, advised the White House that the reporter (as well as his editor and publisher) might be criminally prosecutable. Cox acknowledged that it was doubtful that the reporter specifically intended to injure the United States. Nevertheless, he concluded, the reporter should have known he was revealing to the Japanese details of our spying capabilities, and this was enough to bring charges. Cox concluded with a moralistic flourish: “The reporter’s conduct in taking and copying a dispatch of immense importance—as this one seems obviously to have been—is characterized by real turpitude and disregard of his obligations as a citizen. ... He thoroughly deserves punishment.”

In several significant cases, OLC advisers showed a greater devotion to the rule of law. The volume of previously secret opinions includes several impressive instances where the office advised the president that the law forbids him from doing whatever he wants in times of war. In 1937, for example, when the Roosevelt administration sought to limit Americans’ access to the rhetoric of a certain influential exiled Marxist, then–OLC head Golden Bell declined to sanction the plan. “The Federal Communications Commission does not have statutory authority,” wrote Bell, “to censor the telephone transmission from Mexico into the United States of a speech by Leon Trotsky.”

At times, the OLC’s defenses of civil liberties have defied ideological expectations. In 1974, Antonin Scalia, OLC head under President Ford, recommended that the Department of Justice grant a Freedom of Information Act request filed by an attorney seeking the files that the FBI had compiled on his client, a faculty member at Arizona State University. The bureau had received a letter, signed by “a concerned alumnus,” comparing professor Morris Starsky, an active member of the Socialist Workers Party, to Heinrich Himmler or Lavrentiy Beria. The accusations had temporarily cost Starsky his job. “In the last analysis,” Scalia concluded stirringly, “the only policy reason for withholding most of the requested documents is to prevent a citizen from discovering the existence of possible misconduct and abuse of government power directed against him. In my view, this is not only no reason for asserting the exemption; it is a positive reason for declining to use it, even where other reasons for asserting it exist.”

But even when the OLC has argued for restraint, the presidents on the receiving end of its memos have sometimes ignored that advice. Consider a case from the spring of 1940, when Attorney General Robert Jackson objected to a program authorized by J. Edgar Hoover and FDR allowing the warrantless wiretapping of suspected spies. The program had drawn public criticism, and the attorney general warned Roosevelt that Congress and the Supreme Court had big problems with it. The following June, Jackson pressed his argument again, transmitting to Roosevelt a previously secret memo written by an OLC attorney-adviser named Thomas Emerson. In the memo, Emerson rejected the rationalethat the Naval Intelligence Service, the precursor to the National Security Agency (NSA), was employing to tap, intercept, and record private telephone calls to and from government buildings— namely, that anyone who used a phone line assumed the risk that the government might be listening in. (This dubious logic reappeared recently in the “assumption of risk” doctrine cited in the Verizon and PRISM cases, in which the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that anyone who turns over data to a third-party database tacitly accepts the possibility that telephone or Internet companies may divulge the data to the government.)

Emerson would go on to become one of the greatest civil libertarians of his generation. As a professor at Yale Law School, he wrote the leading First Amendment treatise of his era and he successfully argued before the Supreme Court the landmark 1965 right-to-privacy case, Griswold v. Connecticut, that eventually led to Roe v. Wade. In his memo to Jackson, he recognized the Navy’s legal ruse for what it was: “My own feeling is that this proposal is a subterfuge” that “might well lead to a total breakdown” of the legal prohibitions on wiretapping, he wrote. “It is hard to see how an invasion of the right to privacy can be authorized by an individual who does not have actual knowledge of the invasion.”

Roosevelt was unmoved. Despite Emerson and Jackson’s eloquent warnings, he proceeded with the wiretapping program as he saw fit.

The most insightful memo in the OLC volume comes from the poetically named Golden Bell. In 1937, the office was asked to opine on the same question that Obama has faced with Syria: Can the president intervene in foreign conflicts—in Roosevelt’s case, the Spanish Civil War and the China-Japan conflict— without congressional authorization? In arriving at his opinion, Bell consulted the competing views of the American Founders. “Like Hamilton and Madison, average man is never consistently either a strict or a liberal constructionist,” Bell wrote. “He views the Constitution and the government merely as instruments through which he may on the one hand secure the performance of those acts of which he approves and on the other prevent the performance of those acts of which he does not approve.” Therefore, Bell concluded, if the president wanted to do something of which the general public approved, the public would accept any legal argument that allowed the act to go forward. But if the proposed executive action proved unpopular, the typical American would accept any legal argument that stayed the president’s hand.

Bell concluded by coining a phrase that would later be borrowed by Robert Jackson after his appointment to the Supreme Court: “In the field of foreign relations, the Chief Executive moves in a zone of twilightwhere he may proceed with assurance of his powers under the Constitution only when the people follow and approve.”

When President Obama changed course and decided not to press forward unilaterally on planned strikes against Bashar Al Assad’s regime, he was effectively heeding that constitutional catechism. Congress and the public had signaled their opposition to military action, and Obama responded by acknowledging the need for congressional support. After decades of presidents ordering foreign interventions without consulting the House and Senate, his move represented a dramatic and welcome reversal.

On the NSA, Obama has made the opposite calculation. Footage of missile attacks leaves lasting impressions, but surveillance by its nature is covert, and so the public reaction to it has been diffuse. Although some congressmen have objected to the programs, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has cavalierly blessed them, and citizens have tended to protest only when they feel their personal rights are threatened.

There may not be many more NSA bombshells left. But if the OLC’s secret history teaches us anything, it’s that people who care about privacy need to keep the pressure on President Obama to rein in the surveillance state. More than 70 years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt, we now know, continued his warrantless surveillance based on the prediction that the public would let him get away with it. It seems that Obama has operated under the same assumption as he continues to let NSA computers pry into American lives. That’s why it’s so important that the public finally prove him wrong.

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114795/declassified-legal-opinions-show-how-surveillance-state-was-born

See also:

Data-driven analysis debunks claims that NSA is out of control (Special Report)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91260950

Terrorism and the NSA - Let's All Just Calm Down, and Gain Some Perspective
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91231671

Read this one too - No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Get Your Digital Data
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=89734471

NSA Whistleblowers William (Bill) Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=89337496

[fuagf]

The TRUTH about mystery Trojan found in SPAAACE

Mystery ISS malware fingered

By John Leyden, 13th November 2013

The mystery malware inadvertently brought into space by scientists which then infected the International Space Station has been identified as a gaming Trojan.

The historical infection actually happened five years ago in 2008 but was propelled back into the news again last week as the result of a recent speech by Eugene Kaspersky, boss of Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab.

Speaking the members of the Australian media during a presentation at the Canberra Press Club, Kaspersky said that malware was everywhere and that even Windows machines used by scientists on the International Space Station had been affected with malware.

Virus and Trojans on computers on the orbital platform have continued to prove an occasional problem, according to Kaspersky, who explained that malware pathogens hitched a ride on removable media carried up onto the space station by astronauts.

Kaspersky said: "Scientists, from time to time, they are coming to space with USBs which are infected. I'm not kidding. I was talking to a Russian space guys and they said from time to time there are virus epidemics in the space station."

The remarks are recorded (shortly after the 18-minute mark) in a video of the presentation put together by SC Magazine (below).

Kaspersky didn't identify the malware at the time, and the listening press pack didn't ask, but he has since identified the malware as Gammima-AG, a Trojan designed to steal online gaming passwords. The Russian antivirus boss referred to earlier reports .. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7583805.stm .. of the incident - which caused no damage or disruption but illustrates the point that Windows systems everywhere are wide open to infection. It also highlights how USB sticks can easily spread digital nasties.

During the same speech in Australia, Kaspersky separately revealed that Stuxnet had infected the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant after causing chaos in Iran's nuclear enrichment programme, something that unlike the ISS infection does represent new information.

Kaspersky said he heard about the infection from a "friend of mine" at the unnamed nuclear plant. "[The staff] sent a message their nuclear plant network which was disconnected from the internet... was badly infected by Stuxnet," Kaspersky said.

The malware apparently reached the air-gapped network of the nuke plant via, stop us if you've guessed this already, an infected USB stick. Neither independent experts ..

r/t Stuxnet ‘badly infected’ Russian nuclear plant, claims Kaspersky http://t.co/YbB8prjAHh (but maybe not badly *affected*)

— Graham Cluley (@gcluley) November 11, 2013

.. nor Kaspersky suggest the malware did any particular harm but the spread of such a notorious pathogen is none the less noteworthy.

Stuxnet

Stuxnet famously hobbled high-speed centrifuges at Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in 2009 and 2010 after infecting computers connected to SCADA industrial control systems at the plant. Stuxnet was reportedly developed as part of a wider US-Israeli information warfare effort, codenamed Operation Olympic Games, that began under the presidency of George W Bush.

The worm was detected after it escaped onto the internet, and was first described by Belarussian firm VirusBlokAda in June 2010. Subsequent analysis .. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002040.html .. revealed that although Stuxnet spread indiscriminately across Windows systems, its malware payload only came into play in screwing up the operation of industrial control systems from Siemens. Additionally, it only activated when the kit was being used to control high-speed equipment such as Iran's nuke purifying centrifuges. Nothing would happen to the same type of kit within a milk-bottling factory or an escalator control mechanism that became infected.

Kaspersky never said that Stuxnet infected the ISS, a point he has since been obliged to re-emphasise (here ..

It's funny how the things exaggerate http://t.co/pAlllgvp1W to get the real story FF this video to 18:35 http://t.co/KiGfjkqegA

— Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) November 13, 2013

.. and here ..

No, #Stuxnet did not infect the International Space Station http://t.co/v4N5vr7eKH

— Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) November 13, 2013

) following misleading reports by some media outlets. He said that the space station has a SCADA system but it is controlled and managed by a Linux-based systems.

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tlUvb26DzI ]

Re-bootnote

Back in May we reported .. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/iss_linux_debian_deployment .. how the ISS crew would soon be trading in their old Windows XP laptops for Debian-powered systems. The ISS has over 140 laptops on board, around 80 of which are working at any one time, many of which are connected to the space station's Operations Local Area Network (Ops LAN).

United Space Alliance (USA), the Earth-based contractor which maintains Ops LAN, is migrating .. http://training.linuxfoundation.org/why-our-linux-training/training-reviews/linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration .. the systems away from Windows XP (which is due to go into retirement next May) to one that gave it greater control and offered greater stability.

The move to Linux vastly reduces the possibility of future malware infection even thought it might cause headaches in finding open-source builds of current Windows-based scientific applications, among other issues.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/space_station_malware_not_stuxnet/

See also:

A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83696920

Sunita Williams of NASA provides a tour of the ISS orbital laboratory.
25 min. video.
http://www.wimp.com/orbitaltour/
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84414551

Thruster Problem Forces SpaceX to Reschedule ISS Docking
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85198773

ASKAP telescope time-lapse
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=93670671

[fuagf]

A Good American review: fascinating revelations about the NSA's role in 9/11

4 / 5 stars

"The Secret War"

The NSA could have easily prevented the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. So claims
a convincing, if evidence-light, documentary about whistleblower William Binney


“Gifted, visionary, focused and determined” … NSA whistleblower William Binney,
the subject of A Good American. Photograph: PR

Demetrios Matheou

Monday 9 November 2015 22.46 AEDT
Last modified on Thursday 15 December 2016 23.49 AEDT

Despite the controversy over Edward Snowden’s revelations of US surveillance of its citizens, it’s easy to imagine the country’s security services privately not being that embarrassed: there might be professional pride in overzealous snooping.

But such bodies’ role in 9/11 is another matter entirely. What if it could be shown that the NSA .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/nsa .. could have – should have – prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center; that its failure to do so wasn’t due to bad luck, but a lethal cocktail of incompetence, arrogance and greed; and that they then sought to cover up their mistakes?

This possibility is the driver of a fascinating, conspiracy theorising documentary: Friedrich Moser’s A Good American, which premieres on Tuesday at the CPH:DOX film festival in Copenhagen .. http://cphdox.dk/en/ . It may not have the contemporaneous frisson of Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour .. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/16/citizen-four-review-edward-snowden-documentary , but it certainly packs a punch.

The American of the title is William Binney .. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/11/the-ultimate-goal-of-the-nsa-is-total-population-control , Bill to his friends, a crypto-mathematician and former NSA analyst, who devised a surveillance and analysis system that was cut-price, had built-in privacy protections, was up-and-running in 2000, and so dazzlingly effective that he claims it “absolutely would have prevented 9/11”, if only the agency hadn’t wilfully ignored it. The documentary doesn’t categorically prove the case – ironically for a film about data, we need to see some, or have more collaborations than are offered. Yet it does make us believe.

Binney is familiar as a high-profile NSA whistleblower who, like Snowden, has spoken out against the agency’s mass surveillance and abuses of privacy, which is what prompted his resignation in October 2001. But it’s no coincidence that he left so soon after 9/11, and the film focuses on his achievements and frustrations in the years up to and immediately after the terrorist attack.

It starts with a devastating hook. Like many people, Binney reflects on the images that most affected him at the time: people jumping out of the World Trade Center. “It was just revolting,” he says, pausing for a long time before adding, “and disgusting that we allowed it to happen.” His language has that slightly indecorous but apt choice of words one might associate with a brilliant scientist who doesn’t beat about the bush; the eyes suggest the weary resignation of a man who’s been through the wars.

What follows is a slow-burn narrative, which moves back and forth between Binney’s early, formative work as an army analyst in the 1960s, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and his development thereafter of the potentially game-changing computer system, ThinThread. Moser mixes straight-to-camera interviews with well-chosen newsreel and archive film, overlaid by a foreboding soundtrack. Marred only by too many screen-filler shots of his protagonists wandering around the countryside, the approach evokes the work of Errol Morris, not least The Fog of War ..

, which also dealt with the misuse of power by those charged with America’s defences.

It was during the cold war, when attempting to gauge Soviet military movements, that Binney discovered the virtue of trying to interpret the patterns between data, even when encrypted, concerned not with content but who was talking to whom, how often and when. Thus he became the metadata analyst par excellence, who came up with his own five “indicators” of aggression and later predicted the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

After 1993, he realised that the new cold war was caught up in the digital age and that terrorists were “burying themselves in that ballooning communications network worldwide”. By that time he was a senior staffer at the NSA; while the rest of the agency was buried in analogue, he set to work on ThinThread.

Moser’s other talking heads are Binney’s ThinThread colleagues J Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis, a sympathetic NSA software engineer Tom Drake, and Diane Roark, who was the senior staffer at the House Intelligence Committee .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Permanent_Select_Committee_on_Intelligence , responsible for overseeing the NSA. Between them, they paint an all too familiar bureaucratic story: the small team of dedicated experts quietly creating something of enormous significance, while brasher, less talented and more self-interested superiors barely notice.

Moreover, as Binney and his team perfected ThinThread, the then NSA director General Michael Hayden commissioned Trailblazer to be the agency’s signature surveillance system, farming billions of dollars of work to the private sector and pushing ThinThread to the sidelines. Trailblazer would later be scrapped as an unmitigated failure, but not before tragedy struck in New York. Drake tells us what could have been discovered and deduced in the NSA’s databases, if only ThinThread had been directed towards it. To rub salt into the wounds, the agency then took Binney’s work, removed the privacy protections, and used it to spy on American citizens.

While some of the film’s content has been aired before, the inside experience has not been voiced in such a collective manner, with Moser joining the dots just as Binney might connect his metadata. The misdemeanours and acts of folly pile up miserably; the villains of the piece – Hayden and his NSA stooges – decline to participate.

As expert witnesses go, there is something of Alan Turing about Binney: gifted, visionary, focused and determined, not good at suffering fools (though on this evidence, personable), confident in his work but without the political nous to see off the vipers around him. “I didn’t understand why a lot of people couldn’t see what I could see,” he says of his early revelations of the use of metadata. By 9/11, such intellectual puzzlement had turned to moral outrage.

Binney is also featured in Citizenfour. One wonders why his own story took this long to get an airing; a telling exchange with his whistleblower attorney early in the film, and a sequence reminiscent of House of Cards, suggest an answer. All these years later, it still feels like a brave undertaking.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/09/a-good-american-review-nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-911-world-trade-centre

.. i haven't seen a legitimately bad word about this William Binney and he and his fellows sure suffered
lotsa dirty business there .. seems no doubt one area at least in which there is room for much reform ..

See also:

...agree, too with Binney that Snowden has crossed the line between
whistle blower and traitor .. Binney says that in this interview with USA Today ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=89102706

Binney said Snowden did the right thing, then later crossed the line.