[governance] (Tangential) Top NSA Whistleblower Spills the Beans on the Real Scope of the Spying Program
Riaz K Tayob
riaz.tayob at gmail.com
Sat Jun 8 10:25:41 EDT 2013
Exclusive: Top NSA Whistleblower Spills the Beans on the Real Scope of
the Spying Program
Posted on June 8, 2013
<http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/exclusive-top-nsa-whistleblower-spills-the-beans-on-the-real-scope-of-the-spying-program.html>
by WashingtonsBlog <http://www.washingtonsblog.com/author/washingtonsblog>
Top NSA Official: Government Tapping CONTENT, Not Just Metadata
... Using Bogus "Secret Interpretation" of Patriot Act
We reported
<http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2008/10/israel-companies-handle-sensitive-u-s-spying-data.html>
in 2008 that /foreign/ companies have had key roles scooping up
Americans' communications for the NSA:
At least two foreign companies
<http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Factory-Ultra-Secret-Eavesdropping-America/dp/0385521324>
play key roles in processing the information.
Specifically, an Israeli company called Narus processes all of the
information tapped by AT &T (AT & T taps, and gives to the NSA,
copies of all phone calls it processes), and an Israeli company
called Verint processes information tapped by Verizon (Verizon also
taps, and gives to the NSA, all of its calls).
Business Insider notes
<http://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6>
today:
The newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandal
<http://www.businessinsider.com/the-washington-post-backtracks-on-claim-tech-companies-participate-knowingly-in-the-nsas-data-collection-2013-6>
raises an important question: If America's tech giants didn't
'participate knowingly' in the dragnet of electronic communication,
how does the NSA get all of their data
<http://www.businessinsider.com/the-impact-of-nsa-domestic-spying-2013-6>?
One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap
the U.S. telecommunications network.
In April 2012 Wired's James Bamford --- author of the book "The
Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
<http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Factory-NSA-Eavesdropping-America/dp/0307279391>"
--- reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel's
intelligence service provided hardware and software the U.S.
telecommunications network
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1>
for the National Security Agency (NSA).
By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google
don't have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their
servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T
and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to
eavesdrop on all of their data anyway.
From Bamford
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1>
(emphasis ours):
"According to a former Verizon
<http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/verizon> employee
briefed on the program, Verint <http://verint.com/>, owned by
Comverse Technology, *taps the communication lines at Verizon*...
*At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are* powered by software and
hardware from Narus
<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908>,
now owned by Boeing
<http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/boeing>, a discovery
made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/att_whistleblow/> in
2004."
Klein, an engineer, discovered the "secret room" at AT&T central
office in San Francisco
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html>,
through which the NSA actively "*vacuumed up Internet and phone-call
data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T*" through
the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing
<http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-collecting-phone-records-of-americans-2013-6>
that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely
domestic."
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions,
testifying
<https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion>
that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware
<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914> to
"seize and save
<https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion>
all personal electronic communications."
Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s.
***
"*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can
record*," Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus
<http://www.narus.com/>, a Mountain View, California company, said
<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914>. "We
can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see
what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over
internet protocol) calls."
With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft,
Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to
intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The
indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with
plausible deniability.
**And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean
that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing
through the U.S. without *technically* doing it themselves.
This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on
foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding
domestic snooping.
The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private
Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of
the Senate Intelligence Committee -- Senators Wyden and Udall -- have
long said that the government has adopted a /secret interpretation/ of
section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/politics/justice-dept-is-accused-of-misleading-public-on-patriot-act.html>,
because it provides a breathtakingly wide program of spying.
Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney -- a 32-year NSA
veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the
agency's global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York
Times documentary
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html>,
and the source for much of what we know
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1> about
NSA spying) -- said that the government is using a secret interpretation
of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:
*Any* data *in any third party*, like any *commercial data* that's
held about U.S. citizens ....
(relevant quote starts at 4:19).
I called Binney to find out what he meant.
I began by asking Binney if Business Insider's speculation was correct.
Specifically, I asked Binney if the government's secret interpretation
of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company -- like
Narus, for example -- could vacuum up information on Americans, and then
the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on /foreign/
entities ... i.e. an Israeli company.
Binney replied no ... it was /broader/ than that.
Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can
gather and use /any information/ about American citizens living on U.S.
soil if it comes from:
*Any* service provider ... *any* third party ... *any commercial
company -- like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries,
medical companies* -- holding data about anyone, *any U.S. citizen*
or anyone else.
I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking
whether the government's secret interpretation of Section 215 of the
Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as
it came from a private company ... /foreign or domestic/. In other
words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that
it was not using its governmental powers (called "acting under color of
law" by judges), but that it was /private/ companies just doing their
thing (which the government /happened/ to order all of the private
companies to collect and fork over).
Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company
spying program and the Prism
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html>
program -- the government spying on big Internet companies -- is based
upon. Since all digital communications go through private company
networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that
all of the companies
<http://www.theweek.com/article/index/245311/sources-nsa-sucks-in-data-from-50-companies>
turn them over.
Let's use an analogy to understand how bogus this interpretation of the
Patriot Act is. This argument is analogous to a Congressman hiring a hit
man to shoot someone asking too many questions, and loaning him his gun
to carry out the deed ... and then later saying "I didn't do it, it was
that /private citizen/!" That wouldn't pass the laugh test even at an
unaccredited, web-based law school offered through a porn site.
I then asked the NSA veteran if the government's claim that it is only
spying on metadata -- and not content -- was correct. We have
extensively documented that the government is likely recording /content/
<http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/is-the-government-also-monitoring-the-content-of-our-phone-calls.html>
as well. (And the government has previously admitted to "accidentally"
collecting more information on Americans than was legal
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1>, and
then gagged the judges so they couldn't disclose the nature or extent of
the violations
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/politics/justice-dept-is-accused-of-misleading-public-on-patriot-act.html>.)
Binney said that was /not/ true; the government is gathering everything,
*/including content/*.
Binney explained -- as he has many times before
<http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/12/top-nsa-spying-chief-if-you-ever-get-on-their-enemies-list-like-petraeus-did-then-you-can-be-drawn-into-that-surveillance.html>
-- that the government is storing /everything/, and creating a
searchable database ... to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it
wants (even just going after someone it doesn't like).
Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is
correct when he says
<http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html> that /no/
digital data is safe (Clemente says that /all/ digital communications
are being recorded).
Binney gave me an idea of how powerful Narus recording systems are.
There are probably 18 of them around the country, and they can each
record 10 gigabytes of data -- the equivalent of a million and a quarter
emails with 1,000 characters each -- per /second/.
Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act --
Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner -- that the NSA spying programs violate
the Patriot Act
<http://sensenbrenner.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=337001>.
After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on /external/ threats
... not on Americans.
Binney asked rhetorically: "How can an American court [FISA or
otherwise] tell telecoms to cough up all domestic data?!"
Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection:
It's clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus
other text type data on the web.
As for phone calls, I don't think they would record/transcribe the
approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It's more likely
that they are recording and transcribing calls made by the 500,000
to 1,000,000 targets in the US and the world.
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