NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids

again, no surprise for any of us who have been following these things...

james bamford writing in the new york review of books via information clearing house...

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

there's a lot more but i find it odd that any mention of echelon (see my previous posts on echelon here) is omitted...

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A possible CIA "black site" on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean

for some reason, diego garcia has always fascinated me... it's extremely remote, lying some 1000 miles off the southern coast of sri lanka... a friend from a previous life was a u.s. air force navigator who told me tales of flying in and out of diego garcia... what a perfect spot (terrible choice of words, i know) for a cia "black site" prison...

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called "black site" prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation's submission to the committee, the UK government is "potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention"

[...]

Clive Stafford Smith, the charity's legal director, said he was "absolutely and categorically certain" that prisoners have been held on the island. "If the foreign affairs committee approaches this thoroughly, they will get to the bottom of it," he said.

[...]

Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects. In May 2004 he said: "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq." In December last year he repeated the claim: "They're behind bars...we've got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo."

MPs on the committee may inquire into a Gulfstream executive jet which has been linked by its registration number to several CIA prisoner operations - known as extraordinary renditions - and which flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens, on September 11 2002, soon after the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected planner of the September 11 attacks the previous year.

A prison of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia: in 1984, a review by the US government's general accounting office of construction work on the island reported that a "detention facility" had been completed the previous December.

[...]

One possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels.

.
here are some google earth shots of diego garcia...


The above shows the entire Diego Garcia
atoll surrounding the lagoon. Although
you can't see them very well in this shot,
there are 7 ships in the lagoon and 2
in port.


The above is a closer-in shot of the
airbase. The port is in the middle left
and the housing area is on the extreme
upper left.

from wikipedia... i've highlighted particularly interesting facts in bold...

Diego Garcia (-7.317, 72.417) is an atoll located in the heart of the Indian Ocean, some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) south off Colombo, Sri Lanka's southern coast. Diego Garcia is the largest atoll by land area of the Chagos Archipelago. It is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), a British overseas territory.

Since the enforced depopulation of Diego Garcia in the years leading up to 1973, it has been used as a military base by the United States and the United Kingdom. Diego Garcia hosts one of three ground antennas (others are on Kwajalein and Ascension Island) that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigational system. GEODSS that tracks satellites optically along with the other GEODSS sites at White Sands Missle Range and on top of Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii. The Scripps Institute maintains Project IDA/IRIS sesmic montitors used there to correlate worldwide sesmic events for locating and underground nuclear testing for the US Govenment. Project ECHELON is also hosted there to provide worldwide reception of electronic signals. SNOOPY planes out of Offut AFB in Omaha regularly stop there as they skirted foreign countries intercepting SIGNET from their borders. The Anotonov-225 jet flys there providing cargo heavy lift for the island. B-1's from Ellsworth AFB still launch daily from there for OIF and OEF, as well as B-2's, and formerly B-52's were launched from there against Iraq during the Gulf War. To this day Navy P-3 Orion Subhunters operate out of there. The Navy Submarine Warfare Center is located there. The island is outfitted with sonophone microphones capable of detecting ship Screws turning 5000 miles away. The SR-71 Blackbird flew out of BIOT during the Cold War. The island's shape (similar to that of a human footprint) has led the US Navy to refer to Diego Garcia as "The Footprint of Freedom." You must have a US security clearance to even visit the island. Flights are provided by AMC out of Paya Lebar AB in Singapore.

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The U.S.-Mexico domestic spying story: does anybody remember Echelon? how about Porter Goss and Bob Barr?

i posted last night and earlier today on the story the la times broke yesterday about the u.s. helping to fund mexico's domestic spying effort...

Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country's conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with the United States on law enforcement.

the follow-up post today was due to not having read the times article as thoroughly as i should have and, on a re-read, i picked up on a couple of important points i had missed the first time...

information collected in either country can end up in any hands that either government should decide to put it in, whether it's inside or outside the country, governmental or private sector...

two, this is yet another way to bypass fisa and the 4th amendment and gain access to the the enormous volume of communications traffic between the united states and mexico...

but, still, the story has been nagging at me all day, and i suddenly remembered why... does anybody remember echelon (pdf)...? i've followed echelon off and on for some years and, given the current u.s. domestic spying issue, and now, with the u.s. helping fund mexico's newly-elected conservative president, felipe calderón, to get on the domestic spying bandwagon, it may be time to pay another visit to one of the scarier programs i've heard about...

i've posted several times on echelon in the past (here, here, and here)... here's a sampling...

first this from echelon watch, a site created by the aclu but no longer maintained...

Echelon is perhaps the most powerful intelligence gathering organization in the world. Several credible reports suggest that this global electronic communications surveillance system presents an extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the world. According to these reports, ECHELON attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, including communications to and from North America. This vast quantity of voice and data communications are then processed through sophisticated filtering technologies.

This massive surveillance system apparently operates with little oversight. Moreover, the agencies that purportedly run ECHELON have provided few details as to the legal guidelines for the project. Because of this, there is no way of knowing if ECHELON is being used illegally to spy on private citizens.

Menwith Hill, UK

then this from the aclu, may 2001...

Previous inquiries by the European Parliament have resulted in reports detailing the existence of a surveillance system known as ECHELON, which is led by the NSA in conjunction with its counterpart agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to the reports, ECHELON has communications receiving stations all over the world and attempts to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications worldwide, including communications to and from North America. Computers then sort through conversations, faxes and emails searching for keywords and other triggers. Communications that include triggers chosen by the intelligence agencies are transcribed and forwarded for further investigation.

[...]

"It appears that the NSA is engaged in a surveillance system of epic proportions," Steinhardt said. "If these reports are true, ECHELON dwarfs the extensive surveillance of Americans already conducted by the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies."

and look who pops up back in 1999...

Following recent revelations in Australia and Canada on the international signals intelligence network known as ECHELON, Reps. Porter Goss and Bob Barr have requested access to National Security Agency files concerning the legality of the surveillance system. On May 13, Barr succeeded in attaching a requirement to the Intelligence Authorization Act that would require the National Security Agency, the CIA and the Justice Department to prepare a report on ECHELON for the Congress within 60 days of its enactment. The report would describe the legal standards employed by elements of the Intelligence Community in conducting signals intelligence activities, including electronic surveillance. This would include systems like ECHELON that eavesdrop on international telecommunications. As Barr explained, Congress

is concerned about the privacy rights for American citizens and whether or not there are constitutional safeguards being circumvented by the manner in which the intelligence agencies are intercepting and/or receiving international communications back from foreign nations that would otherwise be prohibited by the prohibitions and the limitations on the collection of domestic intelligence.

anyway, my point is this... IF echelon has been in existence for quite some time (and it appears as though it has), AND the uk, canada, australia, new zealand, and the u.s. are all in bed together, AND the 4th amendment does not prevent information gathered outside the country from being used inside the u.s., AND these five countries are all trading information, that confirms my suspicion that virtually every electronic transaction that any of us make on any network outside of our own personal control, is available for sniffing AND recording - if pattern analysis warrants kicking out a specific transaction to be further analyzed - and that this has been going on at least since the mid-90s...

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