"Total Information Awareness" now "Stellar Wind"

[Darren Dirt]

...and actually worse than what the privacy advocates complained/warned about.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

Wired story tells all ... but surely this will be missed by MSM and the under-informed masses and thus will have no impact on the project nor its privacy-shredding methods of carrying out its mission.

For the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.

"It's a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation's cybersecurity." While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it's collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover.

Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed -- how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program's exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn't revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network. The 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA's bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that's still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency (NSA) could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stations -- the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country -- large, windowless buildings known as switches -- thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. "They violated the Constitution setting it up," he says bluntly. "But they didn't care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay."

Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency's worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there.

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target -- say you're just an acquaintance of a friend of the target -- the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything.

"The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don't want." Instead, he adds, "they're storing everything they gather." And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

As data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone's life. The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time.

There is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

[Mr. Analog]

Kind of old news, it's out in the open though. People that matter are paying attention to this crap.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=3&ref=opinion&;

[Darren Dirt]

it's out in the open

^ that's what blows me away ... the open-ness of this. Not even "hidden in plain sight", it's just out there now.

And folks barely blink.

Freedom, Security ... giving up the former to gain/maintain the latter = the mantra of the early 2000s, but now looks like the latter is going POOF as well.

"gee I'm glad I'm Canadian and thus completely unaffected by what this means"
- none of us.

[Mr. Analog]

Actually as a Canadian you have been profiled already using these same tools (or similar, by other powers).

At any rate, this is all passive collection of information, information collected from public sources, they only seem to put the information together into a profile if you are already a target. It's unsettling but no more so than putting weapons in the hands of government, how these tools are used are what mark them as "good" or "evil".

[Thorin]

I think it's that people consider this information collected from public sources to be private.  For instance, emails travel could travel through public servers and therefore could be considered as exposed to a public location.  Most people would argue that they believe the contents of the email are private, though.  Same with phone calls - do you really expect someone to be listening in when there's no warrant in place to do so?  Especially on a landline that is serviced by a private firm you have contracted with?

Ultimately it's going to take some kind of revolt in the US to return its government back to the type of government that existed before the second World War and before the military-industrial complex came to be.

[Tom]

Actually as a Canadian you have been profiled already using these same tools (or similar, by other powers).

At any rate, this is all passive collection of information, information collected from public sources, they only seem to put the information together into a profile if you are already a target. It's unsettling but no more so than putting weapons in the hands of government, how these tools are used are what mark them as "good" or "evil".

When you take into account the US Govt's new massive datacenter, which supposedly can store Exabytes, well they seem to have the intention to just store /everything/. With that kind of set up, its easier to just have the entire thing process all of the data it gathers (all major internet links in the US are tapped), rather than just the data its interested in.

[Mr. Analog]

Pretty much yeah, unfortunately knowledge is power in the information age (moreso than any other) having people in power positions let go of that kind of control would require an extremely large public outcry. And even then it would likely still exist just in a more hidden way.

The alternative is to give public access to data collected but that's going too far in the other direction. I mean you already have people who link spurious relationships between facts to create intricate paranoid fantasies or people who go on crusades against individuals and "crowdsource" information to rain down mob justice.

So far as I can tell the only way to manage this problem is to trust those who collect information and keep a watchful eye on how they use it, punish where required.

[Darren Dirt]

Does anyone else feel the strong urge to watch "A Scanner Darkly" again?

And then re-watch the entire 1st season of Person Of Interest?

[Mr. Analog]

Actually more like watch (or better, read) Fahrenheit 451 where the madness wasn't the Firemen, it was the horrifying apathy of the average person.

[Darren Dirt]

the horrifying apathy of the average person.

bingo, there's the key theme of the book. ain't about the books.

[Lazybones]

Yep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

This novel has been the subject of various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship, but a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of factoids, partial information devoid of context.[2]

[Darren Dirt]

HECK, forget all the complicated and expensive technology!

Just give the sheeple time, they'll tell the whole world everything about themselves -- facebook/twitter now, and as time goes on more sites like http://about.me/ -- apparently cyber-anonymity is something far less valued than it was in the late 1990s - early 2000s.

[Thorin]

I hate the word sheeple, every time I see or hear someone use it I immediately think of this XKCD comic:



Really, it's just a term some people use to make themselves feel superior to others.  And most of the time these same people engage in exactly the activities they're saying the "sheeple" should not be.

about.me is great if you want to market your public image to the world.  It's a lot cheaper than hiring an agent to do the same for you.

[Mr. Analog]

I dislike it because it is a propaganda term.

[Darren Dirt]

everyone in that comic is correct.