James Bamford talks with Thom Hartmann about the NSA's Bluffdale, Utah, project

Welcome to America's biggest spy center

here's some more from wired's threat level...

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.”

"everybody's a target"... shit... everybody's BEEN a target for many years... bluffdale is just an upgrade...

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An Awareness Test

This was picked up by a Blog of Revelation friend. (sorry for the blog-pimping, Prof)

Pay very close attention.




Gottcha, didn't it?

Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to Chris at the Red Hog Diary.

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Total Information Awareness

the aclu posts a diary on daily kos...

By Barry Steinhardt, director the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project.

Yesterday’s report in The Wall Street Journal about the NSA’s domestic spy dragnets should be major, major news. It is nothing less than the return of TIA: "Total Information Awareness." Yet there has been barely any followup coverage of the story in the mainstream media. I know the media thinks the sexual behavior of the governor of New York is earth-shatteringly important for American life – but this NSA report actually is.

I mean, when we warn about a "surveillance society," this is what we’re talking about. This is it, this is the ballgame. Mass data from a wide variety of sources – including the private sector – is being collected and scanned by a secretive military spy agency. This represents nothing less than a major change in American life – and unless stopped the consequences of this system for everybody will grow in magnitude along with the rivers of data that are collected about each of us – and that’s more and more every day.

The TIA program, you may recall, was a massive Pentagon plan (run by Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame) to tap into as many databases containing personal information about Americans as possible (program materials listed "Financial, Education, Travel, Medical, Veterinary, Country Entry, Place/Event Entry, Transportation, Housing, Critical Resources, Government, Communications"). All that information would then be pulled together and scanned for "suspicious" patterns. Given the density of the "data trails" that we all create in our daily lives today and in the future, it was a recipe for the routine surveillance of Americans and their every move.

TIA was supposed to have been killed off by Congress in 2003 amid widespread objections to its sweeping Orwellian scope. There have been always been hints about a secret annex to the law that permitted some limited aspects of TIA to operate within the Pentagon’s black budget for intelligence and with respect to foreigners only. Now it appears that, like a vampire that can’t be killed except with a stake through its heart, TIA has arisen again from its coffin in full body with its voracious appetite for privacy of Americans and foreigners alike.

The reporter on the Journal piece, Siobhan Gorman, describes stunning new spying capabilities that flow from a distributed collection of new domestic spying capabilities (each of which the ACLU has long warned against):

• TIA and data mining more broadly


• The NSA’s illegal wiretapping program, the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP)


• The Patriot Act’s broadening of FBI power to collect third-party personal information without a subpoena through Section 215 searches and National Security Letters.


• The Treasury Department’s expanded surveillance of financial transactions through Cash Transaction Reporting and Suspicious Activity Reporting.


• The CIA’s illegitimate access to the SWIFT database to monitor international financial transactions.


• DHS’ efforts to increase collection and monitoring of airline passenger data.


• Partnerships between government agencies and private sector entities to collect and monitor customers’ data and transactions.


• The erosion of privacy through the judicial creation of a distinction between content and "transactional" or "addressing" information (such as the recipients of e-mails or phone calls and the times and dates of each communication) through the Patriot Act and prior developments.
  

In the ongoing battle over FISA and the NSA’s warrantless spying program (which appears to be but one part of this larger effort), the government has been saying in effect, "trust us." Why should we trust an agency that has been running this secret program in contravention of the Wyden Amendment, the law passed by Congress shutting down TIA.

It’s time for Congress to find out exactly what is going on here, inform the public, and put a stop to what appears to be the construction of a sweeping infrastructure for the routine mass surveillance of innocent people.

anybody who wants to believe that this shit started with the bush administration is certainly entitled, but, when it all comes rolling out into the cold, hard light of day - as it will, eventually - there are many of us who will not be in the least bit surprised to learn that it's been going on at least since echelon was revealed in the mid-90s and probably for quite a bit longer than that...

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the US Government Totalitarians

It becomes pretty clear that the US Government and its private partnerships with major US corporations have been involved in the wholesale spying on US citizens all along.

The Government/Corporate eavesdroppers have long ago concluded that they will have immunity for their crimes no matter what. Normally, the standard meme which has been pushed, (and which has been readily generally accepted with little thought or circumspection), was that, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from surveillance and/or searches."

Of course the Information Haves enjoy a complete advantage over everyone else by maintaining and growing a total (insider) knowledge of the Global Information Grid.

Now comes an example of how things really work:

"House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites"

The Senate version is S.519.

It is likely that they expect the operation of the law to go down like this: "Someone has reported an illegal image. Someone is therefore offended, they have personally found that image obscene and have accordingly reported it and you. Therefore we have no choice but to act on the offended party's complaint."

And most likely, even that won't be enough. Parties will be obliged to comb through every bit and byte, through every virtual nook and cranny looking for anything in everything at all, to possibly get offended about. We will have wholesale packet-sniffing enough to satisfy even the most delicate of all sensibilities.

Gee, it seems like it wasn't all that long ago when we all took umbrage at merely this.

How many times have we heard that lawmakers have simply signed onto or voted for a bill because they never read it? That is like saying that they fired a gun in a crowded direction without looking and that explanation should somehow absolve them. Yet what is worse is that they more often do know, and the excuse that they didn't is a lie.

The so-called "SAFE Act" that was rushed through the House yesterday by a vote of 409 to 2, obliges vast numbers of parties to now become "snitches". No longer are court orders obliged, but rather many parties (the list will grow, it always does) are obliged by the bill to snitch and turn over records and data; but now compliance is mandated to snitch on Internet users, based upon broad undefined subjective interpretations of such nebulous concepts as art and drawings.

Explanations exist for why censorship was ever started in this country to begin with: that it was "to protect the children from starting to masturbate". The Irony is, that for that same reason, (and there is little doubt in this writer's mind), that coupled with the fact of the State having its own sexual appetites, totalitarians will eventually one day work government cameras into the bedrooms of both parents and children alike.

A quick check of the decoy sites last night showed that some of the sites had abruptly switched over to foisting hard core fare over their usual mere soft imagery, to unsuspecting down-loaders. Another deception they have also suddenly begun, is mislabeling downloads as uploads, presumably to misinform grand juries.

This totalitarian scheme will surely scale up to and be applied to music and video and file-sharing very soon as well, as the clearly (to us anyway) unconstitutional expedited "SAFE Act" serves as proof-of-concept for wholesale application to vast other areas of liberal arts and humanities as well.

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Big Brother is eavesdropping

from Slate: "State Your Secrets":

"We agree with the administration that state secrets should be protected at all costs."

Huh? Are they nuts? At all costs? Armageddon? Total lockdown? Absolute fealty to all that is anathema, loathsome, repugnant and vile, masquerading as government?

The state secrets are otherwise known as CRIMES!

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the rogue government

In taking original FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's own words, that the FBI's mission includes to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" specific groups and individuals, we can probably now better substitute the word "out", for the word "expose", given contemporary usage and for a clearer understanding.

In Senator Rockefeller's (now where have we heard that family name before?) apologetics for the telecoms, he paints a picture that companies like AT&T are some kind of witless, hapless and unwitting dupes of the government's overreach.

They are anything but. Evidence abounds that AT&T is an instigator, that they are actually often out front, pitching Big Brother technological possibilities to government, (much like SAIC is known to do, as with their plans for Total Information Awareness, and also with their bleeding-edge work in the field of psyops). It is all about the data mining.

In a truly revealing microcosmic example of what government is doing, consider how regular folks currently utilize Usenet and BitTorrent. All manner of downloads are available to those in the know on these two layers of the Internet: binaries of music, movies, software, child porn, etc, despite copyright or taboos. Unfettered political commentary and analysis often even leads ahead of the blogs there. It is still like the Wild, Wild West, or like pre-copyright conscious China, where the brightest minds were sampling everything and discerning in real time, all that is best.

Now scale that up a gazillion times and you have a picture of how government grabs virtually everything and crunches it to see how it might serve government as a means for political control. And realize why government knows it must stop individuals from doing what it does, on their much contrasting scale. Usenet and BitTorrent are the closest things to genuine equalizers that the People have going, at the moment.

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total surveillance

When "critical" black projects are killed, they have this nasty habit of not going away, but rather first being renamed. (According to Wikipedia, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program was renamed to the Terrorism Information Awareness Program in May, 2003.) If renaming doesn't work, programs seem to get shuffled around and relocated elsewhere. If that doesn't work, they appear to be broken into smaller pieces.

In the case of the TIA in relation to the Infosphere, that is really not a big problem as the information is literally part of the "Global Information Grid". So tools that find and stitch together the disparate information can be physically half-a-world apart. Much of intelligence work is already farmed out to private corporations anyway.

In fact, Wikipedia names SAIC executive Brian Hicks together with former United States National Security Advisor John Poindexter, as approaching the DoD with the Total Information Awareness idea.

[W]e will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every tool of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every weapon of war—to the disruption of and to the defeat of the global terror network." -- President Bush Address to a Joint Session of Congress Sept. 20, 2001

As stated stated by Glenn Greenwald...

UPDATE: Here is a snapshot of the United States from 2000-present. The Bush administration whispers something to "journalists." They repeat it uncritically on their front page. Other "journalists" read it. They believe it uncritically and then repeat it. With nothing else required, it becomes "fact"...

OK, let's start with 2000 then, with: "Protecting the Homeland -- Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on DEFENSIVE INFORMATION OPERATIONS", 2000 Summer Study, Volume II.

And then onto: GIG - Information Assurance Architecture.

"GIG" is "Global Information Grid" (the Infosphere)
"IA" is "Information Awareness" --> "Information Assurance"
"Information Awareness Office" --> "Information Assurance Directorate"

It seems that the aerospace industry has a keen interest in surveillance. Boeing bagged a virtual border fence contract and Lockheed Martin has undertaken the the FBI's new Sentinel main contract, after the Virtual Case File and Trilogy fizzled.

Here and here and here are several additional links that go to showing the extent of the programs early on.

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Meanwhile, the government continues to violate our right to privacy

well, gee whiz... it looks like the total information awareness program that was killed by congress back in 2003 wasn't dead after all...

The Department of Homeland Security is testing a data-mining program that would attempt to spot terrorists by combing vast amounts of information about average Americans, such as flight and hotel reservations. Similar to a Pentagon program killed by Congress in 2003 over concerns about civil liberties, the new program could take effect as soon as next year.

ah, but we don't have to wait until next year...

But researchers testing the system are likely to already have violated privacy laws by reviewing real information, instead of fake data, according to a source familiar with a congressional investigation into the $42.5 million program.

and, in point of fact, the tia program never completely shut down...

ADVISE [Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement] has progressed further than the program killed by Congress in 2003, Total Information Awareness, which was being developed at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Yet it was partly ADVISE's resemblance to Total Information Awareness that led lawmakers last year to request that the GAO review the program. Though Total Information Awareness never got beyond an early research phase, unspecified subcomponents of the program were allowed to be funded under the Pentagon's classified budget, which deal largely with foreigners' data.

oh, but wait... there isn't just ONE program, there's TWO...

The Disruptive Technology Office, a research arm of the intelligence community, is working on another program that would sift through massive amounts of data, such as intelligence reports and communications records, to detect hidden patterns. The program focuses on foreigners. Officials declined to elaborate because it is classified.

omg... the "disruptive technology office..." whoever dreamed THAT one up created an instant classic...

The Disruptive Technology Office, or DTO, is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. It was until recently known as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA).

ARDA was created in 1998 after the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by the Director of Central Intelligence and the Department of Defense, and took responsibility for funding some of DARPA's projects. ARDA evaluates proposals and funds speculative research, particularly in the fields of data mining, video processing, and quantum computing.

There has been speculation that the DTO is continuing research efforts started under the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO). [1] Data-mining activities within the U.S. Department of Defense are controversial and have met with public and congressional disapproval.

Although ARDA's budget is presumably classified as part of the intelligence budget, the New York Times quoted an unnamed former government official saying the agency spent about $100 million a year in 2003. The Associated Press reports that ARDA had a staff of only eight in 2004. Neither report can be verified and are only speculation.

i learn something every day...

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