NSA shifts to e-mail, Web, data-mining dragnet
The National Security Agency was once known for its skill in eavesdropping on the world's telephone calls through radio dishes in out-of-the-way places like England's Menwith Hill, Australia's Pine Gap, and Washington state's Yakima Training Center.
Today those massive installations, which listened in on phone conversations beamed over microwave links, are becoming something akin to relics of the Cold War. As more communications traffic travels through fiber links, and as e-mail and text messaging supplant phone calls, the spy agency that once intercepted telegrams is adapting yet again.
Recent evidence suggests that the NSA has been focusing on widespread monitoring of e-mail messages and text messages, recording of Web browsing, and other forms of electronic data-mining, all done without court supervision. Taken together, those activities raise unique privacy and oversight concerns greater than those posed by large-scale monitoring of voice communications.
Documents released last week by a security consultant (PDF) indicate that an unnamed major wireless provider has opened its network to the U.S. government, allowing customers' e-mail, text messaging, and Web use to be monitored. And Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein said last week that surveillance of e-mail was the real concern raised by the debate over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That led some high-ranking House Democrats, including Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell, to circulate a letter (PDF) advising their colleagues to look skeptically at a Republican proposal that would grant retroactive immunity to companies that illegally let the Feds plug into their networks. The Republicans' blanket of retroactive immunity would likely cover e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers, and instant-messaging services too.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an article saying that the NSA can, "without a judicial warrant," obtain the Subject line and other header information from e-mail messages, plus information about Web sites visited and queries to search engines. Phone records, credit card usage information, and airline passenger data are also reportedly vacuumed up by the NSA.
"According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called 'transactional' data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns," the article said.
For its part, the NSA says that it abides by U.S. law. Last week, Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, blamed critical reports on the NSA's culture of "stand-offishness" and said "we've lost something we never knew we needed until we didn't have it--the support of a grateful nation. The question we have to ask now, and this is something everyone here should help think about, is how do we get it back?"
If the reports are correct, what this transactional-data-dragnet amounts to is a rebuilding of the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program, which promised to do extensive warrantless data-mining to identify "information signatures" that could identify criminals. After a public outcry, the department renamed it Terrorism Information Awareness; Congress zeroed funding for it in September 2003.
But that law referred only to "the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program"--leaving the door open, given sufficiently clever lawyering, to a similar program that wasn't quite close enough to be called a "successor" to TIA.
Elements of this data dragnet have been disclosed before. USA Today reported two years ago on how the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth; the latter two have narrowly denied it. Qwest reportedly was approached but rejected the request.
A survey CNET News.com published in February 2006 asked the major telecommunications and Internet companies this question: "Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?" AT&T, Adelphia, Google, Level 3, Verizon, and Yahoo would not answer the question; the rest said they had not.
A subsequent article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker said the NSA had returned to "intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans"--the same kind of legally dubious tactic that led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act being enacted in 1978.
FISA reinforced the notion that the NSA could conduct widespread surveillance of foreigners, but specified that a court order (or authorization from the attorney general) was needed to spy on American citizens. That means the world's largest intelligence agency is, legally speaking, on very shaky ground when operating its e-mail/text-messaging/Web-site-visiting/search-term dragnet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl posted a stinging critique of the data-dragnet's legality. Here are some excerpts from what Opsahl wrote, referring to the Journal article:
The infobox incorrectly asserts that the subject lines of email are not "content," and can be obtained without a warrant... But this is contradicted by the Department of Justice's own 2002 Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations manual, which states that "the subject headers of e-mails are also contents."
The infobox incorrectly asserts that the NSA can review "[s]ites visited and searches conducted" without a warrant. "According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of ... Internet searches." "The [NSA's] haul can include ... records of Internet browsing." To the contrary, courts have held that search terms are "content" within the meaning of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
The infobox asserts that the NSA can get cellphone location data without a warrant. "The information [obtained by the NSA] can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location..." The issue of obtaining cell phone location information has been contentious for some time, but the vast weight of judicial interpretation is that a probable cause warrant is required.
If you get the feeling that a lot of this depends on a set of legal definitions that the NSA would like to keep as fuzzy and ambiguous as possible, you're probably right.
One thing the recent disclosures are likely to do is put the Bush administration on the defensive, which will happen just as Congress is preparing to vote on extending retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. It has looked likely to pass if the House Democratic leadership had held an up-or-down vote; the Senate already approved its version by a 68-29 margin.
Add in FBI Director Robert Mueller's acknowledgment last week of additional surveillance abuses, and his admission that retroactive immunity may not be all that necessary, and retroactive immunity looks a lot less compelling a prospect than it did a week ago. Then again, the NSA didn't need it to create an electronic dragnet in the first place.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
Even during those days while preaching to the USSR about the ethics of spying on their own citizens without due cause the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was abusing the ability to monitor any U.S. citizen as long as Hoover wanted to do so. He kept a tight reign on U.S. politicians so that they could not ever threaaten to "de-thrown" him as head of the FBI or expose his wrong doings.
This is now just "peanuts" compared to the monitoring and sophistication of monitoring going on today in the U.S. thanks to the FBI's Echelon project and President Bush's (King George and his merry men) so called "Executive Privilege" to allow any and all monitoring without FISA warrants and unfettered control.
It doesn't bother me so much that the U.S. is monitoring my emails (an these comments) along with whatever else they decide to capture and examine since it'll be pretty boring but the Idea that we have rights guaranteed by the Constitution against such activity, yet they "forget" about those rights does bother me.
The U.S. is so hypocritical in it's assessment of other countries and their governments when the whole world knows that ours is totally out of control.
Just call it what it is, a State Run non-democratic government almost like the USSR used to be.
At best we are no different from the present Russian government's way of running their police and intelligence organizations.
Should you chose to do so, I caution you to wag your tongue sparingly, or you will lose it.
Google it and educate yourselves and you will learn why people such as Declan and Hannity and Colmes and there ilk are the problem in this country. You are also the problem if you don't start doing for yourself and your family. The government is not supposed to be in the welfare and social security business. Health care is your responsibility not the governments or big business. THATS RIGHT IM LOOKING AT YOU KAISER PERMANENTE!!!!! Hilary and Obama as well as McCain have their idea of health care reform, Care to know what it is? I'll Tell You. They intend to FORCE us ALL to buy it from the people who donated to them. Thats right and if you don't buy it you will \GO TO JAIL. Don't believe me? I watched them say it live on the debates. That's Right !! Right ourt of their festering gobbs. Google that too you'll find it. Then tell everyone and then aquaint yourselves with the Ron Paul movement and do your jobs as Americans. No one is going to save you you must save your selves. If not for your own sakes then for your childrens sake. This is our Last chance people. Don't waste it. If you do there will be no one to save you when the U.N. sends it's troops here for Bush after he declares martial law and sends us all to the CIA camps in the midwest. Don't believe that either? Look it all up! I DARE YOU TO EDUCATE YOURSELF!!!
Ron Paul 08
If you want to keep any conversation totally private (Routed through Gmail or not) encrypt it with PGP and a mondo big key.
Generations of Americans have lost their lives protecting these freedoms and it only takes a few to take them away. Amazing.
The ironic thing about it is that these few have never been in harm's way for their country.
Problem, of course, is how do have the best spy capabilities while protecting our civil liberties?
I agree that during times of great world tensions that "things" need to be ratched it up a bit.
But I disagree with the wholesale deprivitization unless they know something they are not telling us.
2. I love it when they start talking technology, "The IP stack is too badly fragmented. I'll try to extract the information by decompressing the datastream in the warp converter." It is almost as bad as Startrek.
Would it cost the writers too much to find someone who knows how to play solatare and put them on the writing staff?
Here's a TIP to perusing data for key words, and hidden messages.
"Watch your file sharing websites, specifically, names of tunes, you know, songs." How do I know? I've got close to 20,000 songs in my legal, lawful and licensed library. Try creating a message by first searcing for the specific word or words in a "tune title." Then, put together a playlist, and send it to a dirt-bag. Tunes can also be "renamed" with the identifying ID tag obscured. Many ways using tune titles to send a message. The answer to this problem.....A HIGHER AUTHORITY!
Thanks for this opportunity to TALK BACK.
TTFN!
(From WW2, Ta Ta For Now)!
Those who would put privacy above survival can only be categorized as suicidal. Should their opinions be heeded the only privacy any of us can expect is the privacy of the grave.
One wonders what the Wall Street Journal is thinking in publishing such sensitive information--I would expect it of the NY Times, but I expect far more from the Journal.
Should we protect ourselves, yes, however we should also protect ourselves from the true enemies of the US. Those who want to use this as an excuse to deprive us of our inalienable rights.
(It should be noted that the concept of rights that are so fundamental that no ruler can take them from any human was first found in Islamic law.)
A historically recent example of the our Govs. record of abuse was in the Mc Carthy communist witch hunt era. Had the US government then had the balls to trash the Constitution to the level as which the Bush Administration has, who knows how much worse it would have been? Fortunately, the Mc Carthy problem was not at the Executive Branch level. The difference in the use of fear to manipulate the public then to trample individual rights and the Constitution - is only different now in its much higher levels of deception and its greater scale afforded by better technology.
Coercion of a people by fear is Terrorism, whether its done by foreign criminals - or their own government... criminals. The fatal flaw in your argument is that the gov. is not being limited in their surveillance needs. It can do any required surveillance - if they get a legal warrant from the secret FISA court. You are also wrong regarding the the internet. Its no different than phone surveillance. Such warrants could include blanket surveillance warrants for very specific periods if they were needed - but that hasn't been requested. To avoid getting a legal warrant and avoiding any legal oversight - means they are knowingly breaking the law for their own agendas and this one fact taints any and all objective justification they might try to make. Its like a thief trying to justify his crime by saying how bad he needed the money he stole - its still illegal. We aren't talking about a few emergency incidents where warrants couldn't be granted in a timely fashion, we are talking about the wholesale side stepping of Constitutional Law and the required judicial oversight. Its the first time in our history where we have had such bold and arrogant criminals in our government and political system - that frankly, our political and legal system is totally unprepared experience wise in how to deal with it - there have simply been no precedents of corruption of the Executive Branch at this extraordinary level. Our government and its Constitution have essentially and effectively been seized.
There has been an unopposed coop of the US Constitution, American Law and American ideals by the Executive Branch of our government under the guise of better security - which obviously is no better than it has ever been (ports, airports, borders - totally unsecure). Their control has become so firmly established that they no longer even bother to cover up their illegal activities - such as warrant less surveillance. They have become so bold as to seek Congressional immunity for those that aided and abetted their illegal surveillance acts. They are so confident in their fear coercion of the public with the campaigns of terrorist fear mongering they actually believe their is a significant probability (that and the influence of their Congressional conspirators) immunity will be granted. (Opinions like yours make them even more confident.) They fear no prosecution by the Judicial Branch of the US government because the Executive Branch now controls the Judicial Branch - and because they are the face of the government - its' Executive Branch - the Presidency. Who will call this President's hand? Who will prosecute him, the group behind this coop, and his key Administrators for high treason and seek the maximum penalty? Who? Don't think this problem is going away when Bush is gone. The same group of puppeteers that brought us the Bush performance will undoubtedly be prepared to replace him and his cohorts with a new batch of similar puppets and enablers.
Those that choose not to take heed of history are doomed to repeat it.
9/11 was recent. McCarthy is ancient history.
Learn to recognize when the world changes, or you're doomed to fighting the last war instead of the current one.
2) NATIONAL ID CARD (Constant 24/7 monitoring, which every citizen will be forced to accept if they want to fly, or drive state to state. Nazi papers anyone?)
3) BILL HR 1955 (Thought Crimes Bill, you cannot speak out about the government
4) Everything we do is monitored precisely like 1984 predicted. All of your communications, email, phone calls, postal packages are now opened and examined.
5) No warrant required to barge into you home and conduct a search and whatever they take it becomes their property.
6) Blackwater bases are cropping up all over the United States. BW is a mercenary company (think belligerent thugs) that is the personal army of the government. They have reported that they would kill US citizens if they were ordered to do so.
7) Large detainment prison FEMA camps are documented all over the United States. There is one here in southern Indiana.
8) Bush quote: "The Constitution is just a piece of paper."
9) Drugs being dumped into our drinking water.
10) Chem trails.
11) Confirmed election fraud.
These are the tip of the iceberg....
Hypocrite.
This is the same government that prevented black males from getting treatment for Syphilis for 40 years, just to see how sick they got.
This is the same government that decided to take away the property of a number of Americans who were born in America and toss them in jail, Just because they looked like they were born in Japan.
This is the same government that sold cocaine so they could get guns to sell to Iran.
America was founded on the distrust of government. We should be willing to fight for our government, we should be willing to die for our government. We should never trust our government.
O.K.
So when the bill was drafted in the House without retroactive telcom immunity included, GB Jr. said quite clearly that he would veto the bill, even though the current law was set to expire.
The House Democrats offered to pass an extension for a few weeks so the problem of telcom immunity could be worked out, but GB Jr was having no part of it. He demanded retroactive telcom immunity or nothing!
The law expired.
This law, this powerful tool that was doing so much to keep the terrorists at bay and Americans safe, was not as important to GB Jr as protecting a couple of telcoms from the inquiring eye of the US court system.
You can take this one of two ways.
Either GB Jr exposed the American Public to a terrible risk of attack to protect the telcoms, and therefore sided with the terrorists, or he knows there isn't a risk, and figured that saving the telcoms was worth more than keeping the real (low) level of risk a secret.
Get the picture?
Lampie The Clown
Thank the president to put your desires to spy on American citizens with telecoms companies above the safety of Americans people. I sure hope you can take this country and the business of spying on citizens one step closer to the Chinese, Russian, Saudi. Long live King George. Job well done!
Someday, a few days after some major new threat emerges, a future Administration asks a set of corporations for their help with something that may not quite be legal. Perhaps the law to legalize it will be passed "soon", but not yet. Imagine that these corporations are the only ones who can help with this, since they own whatever resources are necessary to address this new threat. This Future Administration (perhaps a Democrat Administration) gives their word to protect these corporations in case of legal problems down the road.
After today's Congress (House, not Senate) fails to approve retroactive immunity for the Telecoms who helped after 9/11, what do you think that these future corporations will say to the Future Administration?
The immunity that the Bush Administration asked for, and that the Senate approved, was _retroactive_. This means that it only applied from the present into the past - not into the future. There was no good reason to reject it - only political reasons. Yet these political reasons may have practical consequences in the future.
These consequences will not be limited to Republican Administrations fighting Islamic Terrorists.
The idea that this is all real seems to escape some people.
"Peace in our time"
Welcome to the Policed States of America!
"A survey CNET News.com published in February 2006 asked the major telecommunications and Internet companies this question: "Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?" AT&T, Adelphia, Google, Level 3, Verizon, and Yahoo would not answer the question; the rest said they had not."
Google Privacy Policy Highlights
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html
Personal information and other data we collect
* Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information. We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you.
* Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.
* Google's servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.
* Read more in the full privacy policy.
Uses
* ...
* When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
* ..."
Information sharing
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
* We have your consent. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
* ...
* We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law. "
Sorry, I didn't realize you were clairvoyant. BTW, are there any psychics that aren't human?
1. You left out "PR" in your previous post. The NSA is not a military intelligence agency. They are a civilian agency with subordinate military intelligence agencies. "Soilders" are members of the Army, not all military services.
2. Definitely off topic again. The leaker was Richard Armitage, an Administration official opposed to the Bush doctrine. He broke no laws.
3. masonx, " Bin Laden apparently knows our communication tracking skills well enough to have avoided our efforts to capture him for more than 6.5 years. What do you conclude from that?"
Bin Laden stopped using electronic communications after it was disclosed we were monitoring his sat phone.
4. "Advertising" successes in thwarting significant terrorist operations would disclose sources and methods and it would be criminal as well as "incompetent" to do so. By asking the question, "If you're right again, how could there be any terrorist left at this point?" as well as your total misconstruance of my meaning (see #5) confirms the depth and breadth of your cluelessness.
5. I wrote, " I apologize for you not being put on the Terrorist Threat e-mail list. I'll see if I can correct that oversight."
How someone could construe that as a "threat" is beyond the realm of reality. I did not threaten you. It was sarcasm! I apoligized for you not being included in the multi-agency threat alert system that informs the appropriate entities of the latest intelligence regarding terrorist threats. I was just trying to get you in the loop.
5. PART DEUX: Crypto, mon ami.
- Good for the NSA
- by rplat March 15, 2008 2:40 PM PDT
- NSA has my support . . . I have nothing to hide and anything they
- Reply to this comment
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- good for the nsa
- by scott2400 March 15, 2008 3:12 PM PDT
- you obviously are not an American -
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(92 Comments)can do to detect and stop the terrorist threat is acceptable to me.
"those who are willing to sacrifice their freedoms for a little safety
are deserving of neither" - Ben Franklin
go live in a dictatorship, where you'll feel much more comfortable