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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 9, 2005 20:04:26 GMT -5
according to the NSA book I'm reading...every telephone call, email, telegraph form of communication has been intercepted by the NSA since 50s
vaccuum cleaner approach...take it all in and do key word/statistically improbable phrase searches for domestic targets beginning in mid 60s...Malcolm X = lm_X
NSA operates under no charter, no subject to any rules, budgetary reviews etc...at least 10x size/budget of CIA all black budget no rules against domestic surveillance
there is a "secret" court that rubberstamps all electronic surveillance w/o any defense arguments
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Post by UniverseSeven on Dec 24, 2005 23:32:17 GMT -5
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Post by UniverseSeven on Dec 24, 2005 23:48:50 GMT -5
according to the NSA book I'm reading...every telephone call, email, telegraph form of communication has been intercepted by the NSA since 50s
"vaccuum cleaner approach...take it all in and do key word/statistically improbable phrase searches for domestic targets beginning in mid 60s...Malcolm X = lm_X
NSA operates under no charter, no subject to any rules, budgetary reviews etc...at least 10x size/budget of CIA all black budget no rules against domestic surveillance
there is a "secret" court that rubberstamps all electronic surveillance w/o any defense arguments"
Yep
Echelon, Carnivore, galore
AMDOCS etc.
Whats the name and date of the book?
The court their talking about is probably FISA
not many people know about FISA.
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 25, 2005 1:02:22 GMT -5
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra Secret NSA by James Bamford 2001
also
The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford 1982
I was talking about FISA...Bamford was pioneering on NSA info and still is...I'm about to start his newest book:
A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 27, 2005 23:41:35 GMT -5
The New York Times December 28, 2005 Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda. The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out. The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say. The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions. "It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security." While some civil rights advocates, legal experts and members of Congress have said President Bush did not have authority to order eavesdropping by the security agency without warrants, the White House and the Justice Department continued on Tuesday to defend the legality and propriety of the program. Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford, Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader data-mining operations in the search for terrorists. But Mr. Duffy said: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches." He added: "The president believes that he has the authority - and he does - under the Constitution to do this limited program. The Congress has been briefed. It is fully in line with the Constitution and also protecting American civil liberties." Disclosure of the N.S.A. program has already caused ripples in the legal system, with a judge resigning in protest from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last week. The surveillance court, established by Congress in 1978 to grant warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, wants a briefing from the Bush administration on why it bypassed the court and ordered eavesdropping without warrants. At the same time, defense lawyers in terrorism cases around the country say they are preparing letters and legal briefs to challenge the N.S.A. program on behalf of their clients, many of them American citizens, and to find out more about how it might have been used. They acknowledge legal hurdles, including the fact that many defendants waived some rights to appeal as part of their plea deals. Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets. David B. Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Faris, said he planned to file a motion in part to determine whether information about the surveillance program should have been turned over. Lawyers said they were also considering a civil case against the president, saying that Mr. Faris was the target of an illegal wiretap ordered by Mr. Bush. A lawyer for Mr. Babar declined to comment. Government officials with knowledge of the program have not ruled out the possibility that it was used in other criminal cases, and a number of defense lawyers said in interviews that circumstantial evidence had led them to question whether the security agency identified their clients through wiretaps. The first challenge is likely to come in Florida, where lawyers for two men charged with Jose Padilla, who is jailed as an enemy combatant, plan to file a motion as early as next week to determine if the N.S.A. program was used to gain incriminating information on their clients and their suspected ties to Al Qaeda. Kenneth Swartz, one of the lawyers in the case, said, "I think they absolutely have an obligation to tell us" whether the agency was wiretapping the defendants. In a Virginia case, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a lawyer for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar in Alexandria who is serving a life sentence for inciting his young followers to wage war against the United States overseas, said the government's explanation of how it came to suspect Mr. Timimi of terrorism ties never added up in his view. F.B.I. agents were at Mr. Timimi's door days after the Sept. 11 attacks to question him about possible links to terrorism, Mr. MacMahon said, yet the government did not obtain a warrant through the foreign intelligence court to eavesdrop on his conversations until many months later. Mr. MacMahon said he was so skeptical about the timing of the investigation that he questioned the Justice Department about whether some sort of unknown wiretap operation had been conducted on the scholar or his young followers, who were tied to what prosecutors described as a "Virginia jihad" cell. "They told me there was no other surveillance," Mr. MacMahon said. "But the fact is that the case against a lot of these guys just came out of nowhere because they were really nobodies, and it makes you wonder whether they were being tapped." John Zwerling, a lawyer for one of Mr. Timimi's followers, Seifullah Chapman, who is serving a 65-year sentence in federal prison in the case, said he and lawyers for two of the other defendants in the case planned to send a letter to the Justice Department to find out if N.S.A. wiretaps were used against their clients. If the Justice Department declines to give an answer, Mr. Zwerling said, they plan to file a motion in court demanding access to the information. "We want to know, Did this N.S.A. program make its way into our case, and how was it used?" Mr. Zwerling said. "It may be a difficult trail for us in court, but we're going to go down it as far as we can." Defense lawyers in several other high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including the so-called Portland Seven and Lackawanna Six cases, said they were also planning to file legal challenges or were reviewing their options. "Given what information has come out, with the president admitting that they had avoided the courts, then the question becomes, do you try to learn whether something like that happened in this case?" said Patrick Brown, a Buffalo lawyer in the Lackawanna case. "I would have to talk to my client about whether that's a road we want to go down." Gerry Spence, who is the lead counsel representing Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer who was arrested in error last year in connection with the Madrid bombings and is now suing the government, said of the security agency program: "We are going to look into that. The calmest word I can use to describe how I feel about this is that I am aghast." Because the program was so highly classified, government officials say, prosecutors who handled terrorism cases apparently did not know of the program's existence. Any information they received, the officials say, was probably carefully shielded to protect the true source. But defense lawyers say they are eager to find out whether prosecutors - intentionally or not - misled the courts about the origins of their investigations and whether the government may have held on to N.S.A. wiretaps that could point to their clients' innocence. Stanley Cohen, a New York lawyer who represented Patrice Lumumba Ford in the Portland Seven case, said many defendants would face significant obstacles in mounting legal challenges to force the government to reveal whether material obtained through the security agency's program was used in their cases. "You really could have standing problems" for many of the defendants, Mr. Cohen said. But some Justice Department prosecutors, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, said they were concerned that the agency's wiretaps without warrants could create problems for the department in terrorism prosecutions both past and future. "If I'm a defense attorney," one prosecutor said, "the first thing I'm going to say in court is, 'This was an illegal wiretap.' " nytimes.com/2005/12/28/politics/28legal.html?ei=5094&en=8778e8e441c81c90&hp=&ex=1135746000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print |
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 29, 2005 11:48:34 GMT -5
The New York Times
December 25, 2005
Private Lives
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
Washington
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.
The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands," General Hayden said.
Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and"Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 29, 2005 18:31:46 GMT -5
December 28, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.
Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
In addition, beginning in 2001 but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target anyone in the U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance of U.S. intelligence personnel by other intelligence personnel in the United States and abroad was conducted without any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The targeted U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who made contact with members of the media, including the journalists targeted by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General, and other oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken to journalists and oversight personnel were subjected to sudden clearance revocation and termination as "security risks."
In 2001, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a number of FISA wiretap applications from Michael Resnick, the FBI supervisor in charge of counter-terrorism surveillance. The court said that some 75 warrant requests from the FBI were erroneous and that the FBI, under Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller, had misled the court and misused the FISA law on dozens of occasions. In a May 17, 2002 opinion, the presiding FISA Judge, Royce C. Lamberth (a Texan appointed by Ronald Reagan), barred Resnick from ever appearing before the court again. The ruling, released by Lamberth's successor, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley, stated in extremely strong terms, "In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors . . . How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court."
After the Justice Department appealed the FISC decision, the FISA Review court met for the first time in its history. The three-member review court, composed of Ralph Guy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Edward Leavy of the 9th Circuit, and Laurence Silberman [of the Robb-Silberman Commission on 911 "intelligence failures"] of the D.C. Circuit, overturned the FISC decision on the Bush administration's wiretap requests.
Based on recent disclosures that the Bush administration has been using the NSA to conduct illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, it is now becoming apparent what vexed the FISC to the point that it rejected, in an unprecedented manner, numerous wiretap requests and sanctioned Resnick.
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 29, 2005 18:32:19 GMT -5
Pentagon Shakes Up Emergency Hierarchy
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON -- Heading a military service isn't quite the position of power it used to be. In a Bush administration revision of plans for Pentagon succession in a doomsday scenario, three of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most loyal advisers moved ahead of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth.
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The changes, announced last week, are the second in six months and reflect the administration's new emphasis on intelligence gathering versus combat in 21st century war fighting.
Technically, the line of succession is assigned to specific positions, rather than the current individuals holding those jobs.
But in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary.
The changes were recommended, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, because the three undersecretaries have "a broad knowledge and perspective of overall Defense Department operations." The service leaders are more focused on training, equipping and leading a particular military service, said Whitman.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said the changes make it easier for the administration to assert political control and could lead to more narrow-minded decisions.
"It continues to devalue the services as institutions," said Donnelly, saying it will centralize power and shift it away from the services, where there is generally more military expertise.
Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.
The first to succeed Rumsfeld remains the deputy secretary, a position currently vacant because the Senate has not confirmed Bush's nominee -- current Navy Secretary Gordon England.
Senators have already approved Donald Winter to be England's replacement as Navy chief, and it is expected that Bush will eventually move England into the No. 2 Pentagon job without congressional approval through a recess appointment.
The new succession order bumps the Navy secretary to near the bottom of the line of succession -- eighth behind the deputy, the three Pentagon undersecretaries and the Army and Air Force secretaries.
The Army secretary historically has been third in line, right behind the deputy secretary.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence gathering has taken center stage. Earlier this year, Bush named former ambassador John Negroponte as the country's first director of national intelligence, charged with overseeing the government's 15 highly competitive spy agencies.
In spring 2003, Rumsfeld installed Cambone -- one of his closest aides -- in the new job of intelligence undersecretary.
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Post by jonnygemini on Dec 29, 2005 18:34:36 GMT -5
"9/11 + Anything we say = Shut the fuck up!"
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Post by jonnygemini on Jan 1, 2006 14:29:31 GMT -5
NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information From Surveillance
Fruit of Eavesdropping Was Processed and Cross-Checked With Databases
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 1, 2006; A08
Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said.
The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials, although it could not be determined which agencies received what types of information. Information from intercepts -- which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications -- would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.
At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.
Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.
Today's NSA intercepts yield two broad categories of information, said a former administration official familiar with the program: "content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or e-mail, and "non-content," which would be records showing, for example, who in the United States was called by, or was calling, a number in another country thought to have a connection to a terrorist group. At the same time, NSA tries to limit identifying the names of Americans involved.
"NSA can make either type of information available to other [intelligence] agencies where relevant, but with appropriate masking of its origin," meaning that the source of the information and method of getting it would be concealed, the former official said.
Agencies that get the information can use it to conduct "data mining," or looking for patterns or matches with other databases that they maintain, which may or may not be specifically geared toward detecting terrorism threats, he said. "They are seeking to separate the known from the unknown, relationships or associations," he added.
The NSA would sometimes monitor telephones, e-mails or fax communications in cases where individuals in the United States -- and sometimes people they contacted -- were linked to an alleged foreign terrorist group, officials have said. The NSA, officials said, limited its decisions to follow-up with more electronic surveillance on an individual to those cases where there was some apparent link to terrorist sources.
But other agencies, one former official said, have used phone numbers or other records obtained from NSA in combination with wide-ranging databases to look for links and associations. "What data sets are included is a policy decision [made by individual agencies] when they involve other than terrorist links," he said.
DIA personnel stationed inside the United States went further on occasion, conducting physical surveillance of people or vehicles identified as a result of NSA intercepts, said two sources familiar with the operations, although the DIA said it does not conduct such activities.
The military personnel -- some of whose findings were reported to the Northern Command in Colorado -- were employed as part of the Pentagon's growing post-Sept. 11, 2001, domestic intelligence activity based on the need to protect Defense Department facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks, the sources said.
Northcom was set up in October 2002 to conduct operations to deter, prevent and defeat terrorist threats in the United States and its territories. The command runs two fusion centers that receive and analyze intelligence gathered by other government agencies.
Those Northcom centers conduct data mining, where information received from the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, state and local police, and the Pentagon's Talon system are cross-checked to see if patterns develop that could indicate terrorist activities.
Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report suspicious activities around military installations. Information from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.
Military officials acknowledged that such information should have been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being reviewed.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director for national intelligence and former head of NSA, told reporters last month that the interception of communications to the United States allegedly connected to terrorists was, in almost every case, of short duration. He also said that when the NSA creates intelligence reports based on information it collects, it minimizes the number of Americans whose identities are disclosed, doing so only when necessary.
"The same minimalizationist standards apply across the board, including for this program," he said of the domestic eavesdropping effort. "To make this very clear -- U.S. identities are minimized in all of NSA's activities, unless, of course, the U.S. identity is essential to understand the inherent intelligence value of the intelligence report." Hayden did not address the question of how long government agencies would archive or handle information from the NSA.
Today's controversy over the domestic NSA intercepts echoes events of more than three decades ago. Beginning in the late 1960s, the NSA was asked initially by the Johnson White House and later by the Army, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to intercept messages to or from the United States. Members of Congress were not informed of the program, code-named Minaret in one phase.
The initial purpose was to "help determine the existence of foreign influence" on "civil disturbances occurring throughout the nation," threats to the president and other issues, Gen. Lew Allen Jr., then director of NSA, told a Select Senate Committee headed by then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) in 1975.
Allen, in comments similar to recent Bush administration statements, said collecting communications involving American citizens was approved legally, by two attorneys general. He also said that the Minaret intercepts discovered "a major foreign terrorist act planned in a large city" and prevented "an assassination attempt on a prominent U.S. figure abroad."
Overall, Allen said that 1,200 Americans citizens' calls were intercepted over six years, and that about 1,900 reports were issued in three areas of terrorism. As the Church hearings later showed, the Army expanded the NSA collection and had units around the country gather names and license plates of those attending antiwar rallies and demonstrations. That, in turn, led to creation of files on these individuals within Army intelligence units. At one point a Senate Judiciary subcommittee showed the Army had amassed about 18,000 names. In response, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, which limited NSA interception of calls from overseas to U.S. citizens or those involving American citizens traveling abroad.
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Post by UniverseSeven on Jan 2, 2006 12:03:38 GMT -5
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Good evening, my fellow Americans: First, I should like to express my gratitude to the radio and television networks for the opportunity they have given me over the years to bring reports and messages to our nation. My special thanks go to them for the opportunity of addressing you this evening. Three days from now, after a half century of service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all. Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on questions of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation. My own relations with Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and finally to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years. In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation well rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. So my official relationship with Congress ends in a feeling on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together. We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. Throughout America's adventure in free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad. Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road. So – in this my last good night to you as your President – I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future. You and I – my fellow citizens – need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nations' great goals. To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love. Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it. Thank you, and good night. VIDEO: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5407.htm |
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Post by jonnygemini on Jan 2, 2006 13:50:39 GMT -5
Thanks for that...I had never had the opp to read the whole thing
I really liked this:
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Post by UniverseSeven on Jan 3, 2006 11:57:00 GMT -5
Ex-Lobbyist Is Focus of Widening Investigations By Susan Schmidt Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 16, 2004; Page A19 Former powerhouse lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations entrepreneur Michael Scanlon are the focus of widening investigations this summer, one by Congress and the other a criminal probe involving five federal agencies. A criminal task force of investigators from the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department's public integrity section, the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Interior Department inspector general's office is looking into payments Abramoff and Scanlon received from an array of clients, including 11 wealthy Indian tribes that operate gambling casinos, according to officials familiar with the investigation. In Congress, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee has set a deadline of this week for responses to subpoenas it has issued. Congressional staff members from the Indian Affairs Committee and the Commerce Committee have spent five months gathering documents and interviewing tribal members and others in preparation for a public hearing in September, officials said. Government sources and people who have been interviewed said the twin investigations are examining tens of millions of dollars in fees that Abramoff and Scanlon received from clients, including, in Abramoff's case, a number of foreign entities. Investigators also are looking into ties the two have to members of Congress, into campaign donations and into whether criminal or tax codes were violated in the work they contracted to do or by the fees they collected, the sources said. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Abramoff, who is well-connected to conservative Republicans in the White House and Congress, and Scanlon, a former spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), received more than $45 million in lobbying and public affairs work from four newly wealthy tribes in the past three years. Those fees rival what some of the biggest corporate interests in the country pay to influence public policy. The fees and $2.9 million in federal political contributions Abramoff advised the tribes to make, two-thirds of it to Republicans, have led to battles in some tribes. Some tribe members question why their leaders approved such payments. Abramoff also directed tribes to donate to several obscure foundations that appear to have no connection to Indian concerns, including a think tank in Rehoboth Beach, Del., set up by Scanlon. The revelations led to Abramoff's ouster in March from Greenberg Traurig, the law firm where he led one of Washington's most successful lobbying groups. Greenberg Traurig said it acted after Abramoff "disclosed to the firm for the first time personal transactions and related conduct which are unacceptable to the firm." Lawyers for Abramoff and Scanlon declined to comment this week on the investigations. Congressional investigators learned in March that Scanlon or organizations he was associated with paid Abramoff $10 million, an arrangement that was not known to the tribes or to Greenberg Traurig. Abramoff, who must publicly disclose lobbying fees, urged the tribes to hire one of Scanlon's public relations firms, often for much higher amounts than Abramoff's firm was receiving. Those public relations fees did not have to be disclosed under federal lobbying rules. In an interview earlier this year, Abramoff denied having any financial stake in Scanlon's business. Federal law permitting Indian gambling requires that the proceeds be spent to benefit the tribe, but regulators in Washington do not normally become involved in monitoring the money that closely. "Nobody is tasked to see where all the dollars get spent," said Philip N. Hogen, chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission. Hogen declined to comment on the investigations of Abramoff and Scanlon. But he said federal agencies have formed a working group to more closely coordinate criminal investigations that have arisen out of Indian gambling over the past six months. "This is really high on the priority list of tribal concerns," he said. "This is a cash cow in many circumstances, and tribes are concerned about protection of tribal assets." Indian gambling, officials said, has grown from a $100 million-a-year industry in 1988 to a $16 billion industry today. Ernst Weyand, an official in the FBI's Indian Country investigative unit, said his office is working closely with organized-crime investigators. Officials in various agencies said the new working group makes it easier for federal investigators to take on larger and more complex investigations. One person who has been interviewed by the FBI in connection with the investigation of Abramoff and Scanlon said the areas of interest ranged from foreign lobbying clients to billing practices involving the tribes and whether there were efforts to illegally fix tribal elections. He also said the FBI is looking at the relationship Abramoff and Scanlon and their firms had with some members of Congress. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53609-2004Jul15.html |
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Post by jonnygemini on Jan 5, 2006 14:25:12 GMT -5
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Pentagon propaganda program orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave
An excerpt:
Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the United States on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public.
The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed “Operation Homefront,” ordered military personnel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.
And:
But soldiers who are home and don’t have to return to Iraq tell a different story.
“I've just been focused on trying to get the rest of these guys home,” says Sgt. Major Floyd Dubose of Jackson, MS, who returned home after 11 months in Iraq with the Mississippi Army National Guard's 155th Combat Brigade.
And the Army is cracking down on soldiers who go on the record opposing the war.
Specialist Leonard Clark, a National Guardsman, was demoted to private and fined $1,640 for posting anti-war statements on an Internet blog. Clark wrote entries describing the company's commander as a "glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major an "inhuman monster". His last entry before the blog was shut down told how his fellow soldiers were becoming increasingly opposed to the US operation in Iraq.
“The message is clear,” says one reservist who is home for the holidays but has to return and asked not to be identified. “If you want to get out of this man’s Army with an honorable (discharge) and full benefits you better not tell the truth about what is happening in-country.”
But Sgt. Johnathan Wilson, a reservist, got his honorable discharge after he returned home earlier this month and he’s not afraid to talk on the record.
“Iraq is a classic FUBAR,” he says. “The country is out of control and we can’t stop it. Anybody who tries to sell a good news story about the war is blowing it out his ass. We don’t win and eventually we will leave the country in a worse shape than it was when we invaded.”
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Post by jonnygemini on Jan 5, 2006 15:17:18 GMT -5
via: Wayne Madsen Report
On January 3, 2006, NBC's Andrea Mitchell interviewed James Risen, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the story on NSA eavesdropping of U.S. citizens. WMR reported on May 10, 2005 that NSA had a special system that eavesdropped on journalists:
May 10, 2005 WayneMadsenReport.com
Spying on Unfriendly Journalists
The inquisition side of NSA is the one that Hayden and his advisers do not want the public to see. In fact, NSA maintains a database that tracks unofficial and negative articles written about the agency. Code named "FIRSTFRUITS," the database is operated by the Denial and Deception (D&D) unit within SID. High priority is given to articles written as a result of possible leaks from cleared personnel.
According to those familiar with FIRSTFRUITS, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times features prominently in the database. Before Hayden's reign and during the Clinton administration, Gertz was often leaked classified documents by anti-Clinton intelligence officials in an attempt to demonstrate that collusion between the administration and China was hurting U.S. national security. NSA, perhaps legitimately, was concerned that China could actually benefit from such disclosures.
In order that the database did not violate United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, which specifies that the names of "U.S. persons" are to be deleted through a process known as minimization, the names of subject journalists were blanked out. However, in a violation of USSID 18, certain high level users could unlock the database field through a super-user status and view the "phantom names" of the journalists in question. Some of the "source" information in FIRSTFRUITS was classified—an indication that some of the articles in the database were not obtained through open source means. In fact, NSA insiders report that the communications monitoring tasking system known as ECHELON is being used more frequently for purely political eavesdropping having nothing to do with national security or counter terrorism.
In addition, outside agencies and a "second party," Great Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), are permitted to access the journalist database. FIRST FRUITS was originally developed by the CIA but given to NSA to operate with CIA funding. The database soon grew to capacity, was converted from a Lotus Notes to an Oracle system, and NSA took over complete ownership of the system from the CIA.
Tens of thousands of articles are found in FIRSTFRUITS and part of the upkeep of the system has been outsourced to outside contractors such as Booz Allen, which periodically hosts inter-agency Foreign Denial and Deception meetings within its Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or "SCIF" in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Currently, in addition to NSA and GCHQ, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) routinely access the database, which is, in essence, a classified and more powerful version of the commercial NEXIS news search database.
In addition to Gertz, other journalists who feature prominently in the database include Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker; author and journalist James Bamford, James Risen of The New York Times, Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post, John C. K. Daly of UPI, and this journalist [Wayne Madsen].
NSA abhors negative publicity. Anytime the agency is the subject of unwanted media attention, [NSA Director Michael] Hayden sends out an email known as an "All Agency." The memo reiterates NSA's long standing "neither confirm nor deny" policy regarding certain news reports:
"NSA personnel must refrain from either confirming or denying any information concerning the agency or its activities which may appear in the public media. If you are asked about the activities of NSA, the best response is 'no comment.' You should the notify Q43 {Public Affairs] of the attempted inquiry. For the most part, public references to NSA are based upon educated guesses. The agency does not normally make a practice of issuing public statements about its activities."
The NBC transcript originally read:
"Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that
Mitchell: "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?"
Risen: "No, no I hadn't heard that."
Inexplicably, NBC then deleted the last two paragraphs from its original transcript.
New information provided to WMR expands on our initial reports about the Bush administration using NSA to spy on politicians, including phone conversations between then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson concerning diplomatic back channels to North Korea's UN ambassador. Informed sources also report that Arizona Republican Senator John McCain was also subject to NSA eavesdropping. Of particular interest to the White House was McCain's actual commitment to Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign, evidence his Indian Affairs Committee collected on GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff's tribal casino activities, and details of McCain's medical condition. McCain is recovering from skin cancer. McCain has also been assured by senior GOP officials that in the event Dick Cheney steps down as Vice President, McCain would be rewarded for his past support for Bush with the Vice President's slot.
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