Daily Archives: May 20, 2014

The Senate report is called National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans, and describes the results of its investigation into NSAs electronic surveillance practices and capabilities, especially involving American citizens, groups, and organizations.

Among its findings are:

Project MINARET, in which the NSA intercepted and disseminated international communications of U.S. citizens and groups whose names were supplied by other agencies and put on a watch list. Those listed were supposed to be linked to concerns about narcotics, domestic violence and antiwar activities.

It was part of an attempt to discover if there was a foreign influence on them, according to the Senate report. NSA personnel were instructed to keep the agencys name off any distributed reports in order to restrict the knowledge that NSA was collecting such information, the report said.

Operation SHAMROCK involved the collection of millions of international telegrams sent to, from or transiting the United States provided to NSA by the three major international telegraph companies. In some years NSA analysts reviewed 150,000 telegrams a month, according to the committee. What began at the end of World War II as an Army Signals Security Agency project to get access to foreign government messaging morphed into collecting calls from a watch list of Americans whose names were supplied by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

The CIA, the FBI and others joined in. Over one four-year period when the list had 1,200 names the committee said NSA distributed approximately 2,000 reports [the texts or summaries of intercepted messages] to the various requesting agencies as the result of inclusion of American names on the watch lists.

Any of this sound familiar?

This was the 1976 report, one of 14 from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho). One direct result of the Church committees activities, which began as a probe into domestic CIA activities in the 1960s and 1970s, was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). President Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law in 1978.

That law, amended several times, has provided a legal foundation for NSAs operations. It also added judicial and congressional oversight of NSA with the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the House and Senate intelligence committees. At the same time, it continued secrecy for operations necessary to carry out electronic surveillance to protect national security. It allowed intercepts abroad of foreign entities and individuals without a warrant when collecting foreign intelligence. When the target became a U.S. citizen or someone known to be in the United States, a warrant was required within 72 hours.

History does at times seem to repeat itself.

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This NSA history has a familiar ring to it

The U.S. National Security Agency has been recording and archiving virtually every cellphone call in the Bahamas without knowledge and permission from the island nations government, according to a report from The Intercept.

The surveillance is part of an NSA secret system called SOMALGET that tapped into access legally granted to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and opened a backdoor into the countrys cell telephone network, the article states.

The NSA is able to intercept and record cellphone calls made to, from and within the Bahamas, and access the recordings for 30 days, according to the article, whose revelations are based on documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

The article, authored by Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, describes SOMALGET as a cutting edge tool that gives the NSA access to the content of the calls, not just to their metadata.

SOMALGET is part of a broader program called MYSTIC in which the NSA secretly monitors the telecom systems not only of the Bahamas but of several other countries as well, including Mexico, the Philippines and Kenya, according to the report.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere, reads the article.

The Bahamas surveillance is focused on locating international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers, according to the story.

The Intercept is published by Pierre Omidyars First Look Media and was co-created by Greenwald, whose groundbreaking coverage last year in The Guardian about NSA surveillance programs helped that newspaper win a Pulitzer Prize this year. The Intercept was founded primarily to report on documents provided by Snowden.

Mondays article states that the Bahamas SOMALGET surveillance raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad because it isnt driven by anti-terrorism motivations and because the Bahamas is considered a stable democracy that presents no terrorism threat to the U.S.

By targeting the Bahamas entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity, reads the article, noting that almost 5 million Americans visit the Bahamas every year, and that many prominent U.S. citizens have homes there.

Read more from the original source:

Report: The NSA records all cellphone calls in the Bahamas

Reuters

NOT A CROOK: NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers answers a question at a Reuters CyberSecurity Summit in Washington.

As US National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers seeks to repair the damage to the agency caused by leaks about its electronic spying programs, the abuses of government revealed in the wake of the Watergate scandal are very much on his mind.

As a teenager growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, Rogers recalls watching news broadcasts with his family and being horrified by how the CIA, FBI and NSA had illegally spied on hundreds of thousands of Americans.

"I can remember being very impassioned with my father, and telling him: 'Dad, what kind of nation would we ever want to be that would allow something like this to happen?'" Rogers recalled.

Four decades later, and six weeks into his new job as director of the NSA, the agency is facing similar accusations: that it has used its vast and intrusive surveillance powers to trample on privacy.

Unlike 1975's congressional investigation into intelligence gathering by the CIA, FBI and NSA, today's allegations of rampant US surveillance have unfolded on a global scale, damaging American relations from Brazil to Germany and Indonesia.

While Rogers dismissed direct comparisons - noting that the NSA programs exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden last year had all been deemed lawful - he said he understood the concerns that have been raised about balancing individual privacy rights against security needs.

"We have been down that road in our history, and it has not always turned out well. I have no desire to be part of that," Rogers, 54, told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit in Washington.

Still, Rogers' declaration that he wants to continue the NSA's controversial search of phone records, known as metadata, has prompted critics to question if the new director really favours change at all.

See more here:

NSA's future rests on Admiral Rogers

Summary: The world is changing. Fortunately, the tech industry does one thing very, very well: innovate in a changing world.

Ever since Edward Snowden dumped his load on collaborating journalists more concerned with stickin' it to The Man than with the needs of mankind, the IT industry has been taking it on the chin.

You have to admit, we've had a rough year.

This is an arms race. Willing or not, the tech industry is now a front-line combatant.

It's not just the never-ending blizzard of Snowden flakes flowing over the NSA, it's everything else, too. It's the ginormous breach of credit cards at Target. It's the allegations of spying by the Chinese, culminating in a Justice Department indictment of Beijing officers. It's breach after breach after breach.

And then comes the big revelation. The one that goes beyond "this far and no farther," the straw that broke the camel's back and opened up a can of worms. Yep, Cisco.

Glenn Greenwald, the Snowden flak who made his career this last year on the back of America's security, has a book to hawk. In it, he releases yet another revelation from the Snowden archive. For those of you keeping track, Greenwald's first revelation came on June 6, 2013, which means he's been flogging this horse for 347 days now.

The book contains pictures of so-called "upgrade stations," where the NSA supposedly intercepts Cisco's supply chain and "upgrades" the company's gear so the NSA can gain back-door access.

Even though, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, "links to the actual source information are hard to come by," the damage is done. True or not, Cisco, one of America's greatest technology firms, is under the gun. And, as Cisco boss John Chambers said in a letter to President Obama, "Trust with our customers is paramount, and we do everything we can to earn that trust every day."

Even before Chambers sent his letter to the White House, Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler wrote a similar comment in a blog post, saying, "...We have built and maintained our customers trust. We expect our government to value and respect this trust."

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It's time to stop whining about the NSA and start building solutions