The Snowden Ruckus By Richard Sale

A u.s. Senator warned that “NSA’s potential to violate the privacy of American citizens is unmatched by any other U.S. intelligence agency.”

“Tons of electronic surveillance equipment at this moment are interconnected within our domestic and international common carrier telecommunications systems. Much more is under contract for installation. Perhaps this equipment is humming away in a semi quiescent state wherein at present no citizen is targeted but simply scanned…How soon will it be before a punched card will quietly be dropped to the machine, a card having your telephone number, my telephone number or the number of one my friends to whom we will be speaking.”

The sinister statement above was uttered in 1976.

Under the Reagan administration, the NSA could be authorized to lend its full cryptanalytic support – analysts as well as computers – to any department agency. By then, the microwaves and the internet and satellite coverage had transformed human communication. By 1981 there were domestic satellites in orbit with the capacity of carrying thousands of circuits.  Each COMSAT bird had 18,000 thousand circuits that record many thousand phone conversations. Literally tons of billions of words including computer data transfers. Even the mail was being carried by satellite.

The U.S. Postal Service inaugurated the INTELPOST whereby anything from blueprints to letters could be transmitted via satellite and cooperating foreign overseas phone and computer lines. Then came a U.S. domestic system known as Electronic Computer Originated Mail that carried messages by satellite anywhere in the country. By 1982, the system was carrying 12 million messages daily and handing 75 billion of letter mail. IBM, AT&T, Xerox and other major technological giants were joining the program.

The greatest transformation came in U.S. spying and that same worldwide blanket of microwave signals and satellite intelligence, the same circuits that gave you your online banking, telegrams and mail had been diverted to the NSA’s far flung network of dish covered intercept stations, and, one of these was the Air Force Communications intelligence unit that picked up fragments of the Soviet Air Defense System near Alaska near Sakhalin Island. They picked up fragments of on-board chatter from Soviet fighters and beamed to Elmendorf Air Base. At the time the NSA had twenty three “floor units” scattered around the world and listening in. A top Secret clearance was only an entrée into these activities.  (In the 1889 there were 22 secret clearances above Top Secret. That may have changed and probably have but there used to be such things a Top Secret Umbra or Special Activities Office clearance were above Top Secret, for example, who have access to special orbit intelligence, etc. The U.S. Navy Security Group Activity was another group that monitored the Soviet Navy. There was also the U.S.  Army’s Intelligence and Security Command that spied on the Soviet Army in Europe the Soviet Army and Intelligence command that included Afghanistan. The outfits use people with high IQs only. The National SIGINT Operations center was set up in the 1970s by NSA to monitor every crisis event.  It became known at the intelligence command center of the United States.)

The SIGINT got where it is today by being the most accurate way of collecting intelligence, a method that avoids the mental distortions of a HUMINT source as well as the errors of the interpreter of that source.

So I do not quite understand the uproar of Snowden’s revelations except it reveals the mainstream media doesn’t read and doesn’t bother to acquaint itself with the past.

The shock that came with the discovery that the United States had listened into leaders in 2007 summit should not have come as a surprise. Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Operations there is something called the Bureau of Leadership Analysis.  This group used to focus on such things as acquiring sources within Kaddafi’s inner circle and such chores. Their task is to develop intimate information about the meeting participants and then spy o the proceedings.   In Washington in 1987, (I believe) Gorbachev visited President Reagan, and the CIA hired lip readers to watch every conversation, and waiters were armed with listening devices, and all the rooms were bugged. (Lip readers only got about 30 percent of what was said. ) From sources in the FBI I knew every waiter  in the Madison or Jefferson Hotels who was working undercover for the KGB. The Soviets were so good at this electronic eavesdropping that in the mid 1980s, they built a new U.S. Embassy from a detailed model crafted out in the wastes of Siberia. When it was on the brink of being installed, U.S. spies found the whole building was in fact a listening device. By that I mean, that the arch of a doorway was assembled in such a way that it picked up every conversation. The Soviets seeded the buildings with hordes of bugs that could, with work be discovered, but we got wise to it and got ourselves a new building.

So I am quite puzzled at the new uproar about what seems to me old news.  Perhaps I am not grasping the story correctly. I would enjoy people setting me straight.

It seems to me that the real menaces of the privacy of U.S. citizens are marketers who plot every visit to a web site, every purchase in a store or on line, to make a pattern out of our habits to relieve them of our money. That is the real and enduring threat.  Richard Sale

Comments

[shepherd]

Thanks for this explanation. I'm not a big data guy, and I don't know how these systems work, but I'd guess you could do a little more than just track known peoples' contacts. I'd imagine a keyword search could be a blunt, but useful tool in identifying subjects for further analysis. Or is it too broad?

[Medicine Man]

I said damning, not damaging; And by damning, I mean it makes me doubt Snowden's sense of priorities and perspective. I'm sympathetic to the desire to inform the US populace about how and to what extent their government is spying on them. I draw the line at extending foreign governments the same courtesy and start to wonder what he's thinking.

[Fred]

The NSA isn’t the only one snooping:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/06/20/191603369/The-Business-Of-Surveillance-Cameras

Who was at Occupy Wall Street/ Right to Life/Abortion, Free the Whales, you name it, somebody can find it. Hope your boss approves as in “ Your company wants a contract with the city, look what your employees are doing”…. Or “so you think your employees doing a good job, look what they are doing in their free time…..” Nothing like facial recognition software to find out which citizens were exercising their God given rights and where. Not that anyone would intimidate a company or its employees or just solicit a bribe via the threat to do so. (not that any of that would ever happen in America).

Imagine what PM Erdogan could do with a few camers and some software.
http://rt.com/news/minister-turkish-protesters-terrorists-771/

Of course all those cameras, servers and softerware – supposedly prevented a park from getting burned down and ‘prevented’ lots of crimes. Right.

Then there is the simpler matter of traffic cameras, no problems there, except for the problem with actually seeing your accuser – the computer, and the burden of proof on the defendant after being accused.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/03/22/florida-judge-ruling-finds-red-light-cameras-unconstitutional/

But not to worry, we’ll just shorten the time the light stays yellow, that’s sure to help, um, drive revenue:
http://www.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=316418

[Fred]

You mean checking to see if any applicant was at Occuppy Wall Street or any other public event/rally/polical protest that doesn't fit the hiring managers requested profile?

[no one]

Just to add a little to my last, I have worked with data mining fairly large databases in the healthcare insurance industry; large databases though orders of magnitude smaller than what, apparently, we are talking about re; the NSA.

Our databases (in an Oracle environment) contained hundreds of millions of medical claims associated with millions of members. Some higher-up got sold on the idea that one could simply purchase data mining software (in this case SAS), slap it on top of the data and, voila!, obtain statistically meaningful patterns of medical service use as related to demographics, medical conditions, etc.

Even after having SAS send its own dataminer experts out to work with us, it was mission impossible. There was so much pre-mining data scrubbing and normalization that had to occur for the application to work. Even then our data would have to be segmented into much smaller subsets and far more targeted analysis. The tool wasn't going to just find answers from raw data. You need to start with a hypothesis and then feed in preselected data based on that hypothesis.

Processing power aside (because it is practically fatal to the concept in and of itself) I can't even begin to imagine how you would normalize immense data sets from cell phones, internet, credit cards, etc so these different sources could be joined together at the level of a unique individual.

OTOH, you could start from a known individual's phone number and see what other numbers have been called. Ditto an IP address. Ditto credit card info. Again, you need to know who your target is.

That's why IMO this is a red herring re; identifying terrorists. You'd have to already know who is a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer before you began looking to all the data to flesh out a network. So, we are back to good old fashioned HUMINT and police work. You wouldn't need everyone's phone records as a starting point.

As an aside, the downplaying of Snowden as grandiose because a little fish like him wouldn't have access to all that data is ridiculous. As a lower level manager in insurance I had access to *all* of the company's data and all of the medical records of every member; as did the non-managerial analysts that reported to me. It is always the little fish that have the access. That's what they are there for. To run the queries. The higher ups are the talkers and deal makers. They don't know the first thing about extracting data.

[mbrenner]

Here are 2 pieces on PRISM etc. that I have published in the Huffington Post.

www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/spy-america-and-its-willi_...

www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/prism-no-grownup-a

[confusedponderer]

" There was so much ... data scrubbing and normalization that had to occur for the application to work"

Amen to that.

It is something many folks don't get when they want to apply technology on data. Normalisation is precondition to efficient processing, be it data mining or, for instance, publishing.

To do proper normalisation on a large number of data efficiently (preferably automatically) and correctly is something of a black art. It is always something that requires careful attention, and often, time.

XML, Regex and semantic capturing can do a lot for you, but when people get really creative ... eventually you're happy for everything at least nominally predictable.

[robt willmann]

Mr. Sale inquires about whether there is a problem with the NSA data collection, wondering whether the real menaces to our privacy are marketers "who plot every visit to a web site, every purchase in a store or on line, to make a pattern out of our habits to relieve them of our money. That is the real and enduring threat."

The problem is that the NSA and perhaps other government agencies (including their private contractors) are doing what the corporate marketers are doing plus much more, and a government has a claimed monopoly on force and violence to get you to do what it wants and to prevent you from quickly changing it, whereas the private company has no right to use force against you on its own accord.

Here are two things worth watching (totalling only about 18 minutes), in which former NSA employees who had much higher positions than Edward Snowden discuss the problem. The first is a short documentary on William Binney (over 30 years at NSA), whose duties included developing collection programs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIPHNlAxY4

The second video is an interview by the USA Today newspaper of Mr. Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe (over 30 years at NSA), Thomas Drake, and attorney Jesselyn Radack.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/

An affidavit by Mr. Binney provided in a lawsuit that is still active in California in pdf form is here, and includes his cv/bio as an exhibit--

http://ia700508.us.archive.org/10/items/gov.uscourts.cand.207206/gov.uscourts.cand.207206.88.0.pdf

Mr. Binney also complained of massive waste of money and fraud at the NSA, but to no avail.

No one is asking what other information has been collected and intercepted by the NSA over the years. Are the states' driver license records there? License plate records? Credit card purchases? Credit histories as compiled by the three main credit reporting agencies? Bank records? FinCen records?

The FBI made the request to the FISA court for the order to Verizon to release all call information on every subscriber every day to the NSA. But the NSA is part of the Department of Defense. Perhaps the Posse Comitatus Act -- to prevent military involvement in law enforcement -- has gone the way of all flesh.

This brief discussion by the Guardian newspaper on metadata shows how it was used to link David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell--

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2013/jun/12/what-is-metadata-nsa-surveillance#meta=0000000

[Ingolf]

A useful debate on this whole business between Maciej Ceglowski and David Simon.

They started far apart but in an all too rare example of open-mindedness and intellectual integrity, they closed the gap. As Ceglowski put it on Twitter) "I’m afraid our argument degenerated into a violent agreement at the end.”

Ceglowski's argument first:

"The security state operates as a ratchet. Once you click in a new level of surveillance or intrusiveness, it becomes the new baseline. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes permissible in exceptional cases today, and routine tomorrow. The people who run the American security apparatus are in the overwhelming majority diligent people with a deep concern for civil liberties. But their job is to find creative ways to collect information. And they work within an institution that, because of its secrecy, is fundamentally inimical to democracy and to a free society."

http://blog.pinboard.in/2013/06/persuading_david_simon/

David Simon's response:

"Reform of the systemic is the only practical hope we have of rationalizing the necessary and continual conflict that will accompany the introduction of every single new technological capability, and a system that is capable of measuring the potentials and risks and then writing, keeping and enforcing the rulebook is the fundamental here. And yet the scare-tactics that accompany this NSA leak are enough to turn potential allies into cynics and take eyes off the legitimate and essential prize."

http://davidsimon.com/the-nigger-wake-up-call/

And, finally, their conversation on the comments thread following Simon's post.

http://davidsimon.com/the-nigger-wake-up-call/comment-page-1/#comment-9665

Skip the essays if time’s short but do read this brief conversation. It’s almost enough to give you hope.