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FWIW The NSA IS READING/SAVING ur emails/calls/texts etc (1 Viewer)

That sound you hear is the constitution being wiped by the #######s at the NSA. I wouldn't doubt that this thread gets flagged. not :tinfoilhat: anymore. So to whoever reads this EAT a #### and read the constitution. Our forefathers would be ashamed of you and you know it.

teaser Did you know the NSA is building a 40 billion dollar mega data center in Utah that is designed to contain a million times more data that has been created in recorded history? Do you know what a Yottabyte is?



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. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection," examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.



The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. "I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process." But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren't interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—"transactions," in NSA's lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at "between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years."



When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. "They said, oh, OK, we can't comment," Binney says.



Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," he says.
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

By James BamfordEmail Author March 15, 2012 | 7:24 pm | Categories: Crypto, Cybersecurity, Miscellaneous, NSA, Paranoia, privacy, Surveillance

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah's Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It's the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as "the principle," marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation's largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren's complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers' own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town's boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world's telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter." It is, in some measure, the realization of the "total information awareness" program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy.

But "this is more than just a data center," says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: "Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target."

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency's very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and 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 has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it's all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

UTAH DATA CENTER

When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.

1 Visitor control center

A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.

2 Administration

Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.

3 Data halls

Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.

4 Backup generators and fuel tanks

Can power the center for at least three days.

5 Water storage and pumping

Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.

6 Chiller plant

About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.

7 Power substation

An electrical substation to meet the center's estimated 65-megawatt demand.

8 Security

Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan

A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. "What I smell and taste is like coal smoke," complained one local blogger that day. At the city's international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency's highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency's associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed "the spy center." Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? "Absolutely not," he said with a self-conscious half laugh. "Nor do I want them spying on me."

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: "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—it's easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as "a great tribute to Utah," then added, "I can't tell you a lot about what they're going to be doing, because it's highly classified."

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation's largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who'd originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country's human and electronic spies.

Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. "We've been asked not to talk about the project," Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility's scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man's pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this "expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks," as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA's need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. "The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community," according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. "Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable." With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, "a potential adversary."

The NSA'S SPY NETWORK

Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency's eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA's code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here's how the data center appears to fit into the NSA's global puzzle.—J.B.

1 Geostationary satellites

Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.

2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado

Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.

3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia

Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.

4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio

Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.

5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu

Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.

6 Domestic listening posts

The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom "switches," gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.

7 Overseas listening posts

According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.

8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah

At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA's cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world's fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA's new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. 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. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, 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 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. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney says. "That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast."

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn't stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T's powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek's three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country's communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company's Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

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. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection," examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders. "Anybody you want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows you to take it all." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T's vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency's domestic eavesdropping. "That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five," he says. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a day." (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

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 whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?" he says. "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.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. "You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining," Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or anything," he says. Thus, 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. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal conversations." Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. "It's almost like going through and finding somebody's diary," she says.

In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.

But 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.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. "I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process." But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren't interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—"transactions," in NSA's lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at "between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years."

When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. "They said, oh, OK, we can't comment," Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," he says.

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it's incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You've got to build this thing because we just don't have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.

The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the "secret city" where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it's engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.

In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. "For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility," says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab's East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA's now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you'd know it. "There's no sign on the door," says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOE's unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. "They made a big breakthrough," says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA's machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.

The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. "Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it," he says. The reason? "They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption."

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans' personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. "Remember," says the former intelligence official, "a lot of foreign government stuff we've never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you'll find out a lot more of what you didn't know—stuff we've already stored—so there's an enormous amount of information still in there."

The NSA believes it's on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can't be broken today may be broken tomorrow. "Then you can see what they were saying in the past," he says. "By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now." The danger, the former official says, is that it's not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it's also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans' email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy's exascale computing initiative (the NSA's budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. "The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities," the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an "unassuming facility with limited view from roads," in keeping with the NSA's desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story "The Library of Babel," Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world's knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it's only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

James Bamford (washwriter@gmail.com) is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

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Well duh. This isn't exactly new news. Each time it comes up it is clear people in the the FFA and in general don't really mind their civil liberties going down the toilet in exchange for "security". Big Brother is here to stay and has been for quite a long time.

 
Well duh. This isn't exactly new news. Each time it comes up it is clear people in the the FFA and in general don't really mind their civil liberties going down the toilet in exchange for "security". Big Brother is here to stay and has been for quite a long time.
I know. But even I didn't think the rabitt-hole went so deep. I feel like I almost wish I had taken the Blue Pill...
 
Do you know what a Yottabyte is?
Vader
that's funny.This is scary, especially since one of the principal failures of 9/11 was that the NSA/CIA etc had too much data to handle and missed memos & huge red flags in the intelligence they had actually gathered. And that was when they mostly just monitored the bad guys. GB KING George Bush!

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility's scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man's pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this "expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks," as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA's need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
 
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This may be our era's version of prohibition. In the beginning, you had one vocal group in support of it, a second group opposed that was not as vocal, a compliant media, and everyone else cared little.

Until it was actually implemented.

Then everyone saw what a disaster it was. And then people got REALLY vocal and belligerent. Eventually prohibition was repealed and the system put in place was dismantled.

 
This may be our era's version of prohibition. In the beginning, you had one vocal group in support of it, a second group opposed that was not as vocal, a compliant media, and everyone else cared little.Until it was actually implemented.Then everyone saw what a disaster it was. And then people got REALLY vocal and belligerent. Eventually prohibition was repealed and the system put in place was dismantled.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this Beej.
 
This may be our era's version of prohibition. In the beginning, you had one vocal group in support of it, a second group opposed that was not as vocal, a compliant media, and everyone else cared little.Until it was actually implemented.Then everyone saw what a disaster it was. And then people got REALLY vocal and belligerent. Eventually prohibition was repealed and the system put in place was dismantled.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this Beej.
It only has taken 60 years to under the war on drugs. I am sure we'll have a word for the next exponential after the yottabyte by the time this is gone...
 
in before "if you have nothing to hide why should it matter?"

the sad part is obama has been as bad as bush with this kind of crap.

 
Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
I dn't know that the executive branch can do that without review by the judicial branch...
 
Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
I dn't know that the executive branch can do that without review by the judicial branch...
IIRC, it passed through Congress too.
 
Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
I dn't know that the executive branch can do that without review by the judicial branch...
IIRC, it passed through Congress too.
Again judicila review is needed. If this has been happening since 2006, I'd be curious to see if the courts have weighed in on this
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.

 
Ellway earlyclay eway eednay otay artstay ommunicatingcay inway odecay. Eway ancay ingbray ethay ANSAY otay itsway eesknay ifway eway allway artstay ypingtay inway igpay atinlay.

 
I started getting suspicious when I sent a particularly steamy email to a girlfriend and got back: "Have a great season. -NSA"

 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?

 
Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
Thus far the case has been allowed to crawl forward.NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Over Government's Massive Spying Program

EFF Asks Court to Reject Stale State Secret Arguments So Case Can Proceed

San Francisco - Three whistleblowers – all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) – have come forward to give evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) lawsuit against the government's illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA.

In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

"For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program."

The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF's brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All were targets of a federal investigation into leaks to the New York Times that sparked the initial news coverage about the warrantless wiretapping program. Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of charges and Drake had those charges against him dropped.

Jewel v. NSA is back in district court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in late 2011. In the motion for partial summary judgment filed today, EFF asked the court to reject the stale state secrets arguments that the government has been using in its attempts to sidetrack this important litigation and instead apply the processes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that require the court to determine whether electronic surveillance was conducted legally.

"The NSA warrantless surveillance programs have been the subject of widespread reporting and debate for more than six years now. They are just not a secret," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Yet the government keeps making the same 'state secrets' claims again and again. It's time for Americans to have their day in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive surveillance."

For the full motion for partial summary judgment: https://www.eff.org/...ummary-judgment

For more on this case:https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
 
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Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
They tried to assert "state secrets immunity" and the claim was denied by the 9th circuit.I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
I dn't know that the executive branch can do that without review by the judicial branch...
 
Justice department sues ISP for challenging its authority to warrantlessly monitor your every move

Last year, when a telecommunications company received an ultra-secret demand letter from the FBI seeking information about a customer or customers, the telecom took an extraordinary step — it challenged the underlying authority of the FBI’s National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it.Both challenges are allowed under a federal law that governs NSLs, a power greatly expanded under the Patriot Act that allows the government to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and been reprimanded for abusing them — though almost none of the requests have been challenged by the recipients.After the telecom challenged its NSL last year, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure: It sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority.That’s a pretty intense charge, according to Matt Zimmerman, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the anonymous telecom.“It’s a huge deal to say you are in violation of federal law having to do with a national security investigation,” says Zimmerman. “That is extraordinarily aggressive from my standpoint. They’re saying you are violating the law by challenging our authority here.”The government’s “Jabberwocky” argument – accusing the company of violating the law when it was actually complying with the law – appears in redacted court documents that were released on Wednesday by EFF with the government’s approval. Prior to their release, the organization provided them to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the case Tuesday night. The case is a significant challenge to the government and its efforts to obtain documents in a manner that the EFF says violates the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.It’s only the second time that such a serious and fundamental challenge to NSLs has arisen. The first occurred in 2004 in the case of a small ISP owner named Nicholas Merrill, who challenged an NSL seeking info on an organization that was using his network. He asserted that customer records were constitutionally protected information.But that issue never got a chance to play out in court before the government dropped its demand for documents.With this new case, civil libertarians are getting a second opportunity to fight NSLs head-on in court.NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more.NSLs are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have even received an NSL. An FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can self-issue an NSL to a credit bureau, ISP or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. The FBI has to merely assert that the information is “relevant” to an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.The lack of court oversight raises the possibility for extensive abuse of NSLs under the cover of secrecy, which the gag order only exacerbates. In 2007 a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI had indeed abused its authority and misused NSLs on many occasions. After 9/11, for example, the FBI paid multimillion-dollar contracts to AT&T and Verizon requiring the companies to station employees inside the FBI and to give these employees access to the telecom databases so they could immediately service FBI requests for telephone records. The IG found that the employees let FBI agents illegally look at customer records without paperwork and even wrote NSLs for the FBI.Before Merrill filed his challenge to NSLs in 2004, ISPs and other companies that wanted to challenge NSLs had to file suit in secret in court – a burden that many were unwilling or unable to assume. But after he challenged the one he received, a court found that the never-ending, hard-to-challenge gag orders were unconstitutional, leading Congress to amend the law to allow recipients to challenge NSLs more easily as well as gag orders.Now companies can simply notify the FBI in writing that they oppose the gag order, leaving the burden on the FBI to prove in court that disclosure of an NSL would harm a national security case. The case also led to changes in Justice Department procedures. Since Feb. 2009, NSLs must include express notification to recipients that they have a right to challenge the built-in gag order that prevents them from disclosing to anyone that the government is seeking customer records.Few recipients, however, have ever used this right to challenge the letters or gag orders.The FBI has sent out nearly 300,000 NSLs since 2000, about 50,000 of which have been sent out since the new policy for challenging NSL gag orders went into effect. Last year alone, the FBI sent out 16,511 NSLs requesting information pertaining to 7,201 U.S. persons, a technical term that includes citizens and legal aliens.But in a 2010 letter (.pdf) from Attorney General Eric Holder to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Holder said that there had “been only four challenges,” and those involved challenges to the gag order, not to the fundamental legality of NSLs. At least one other challenge was filed earlier this year in a secret case revealed by Wired. But the party in that case challenged only the gag order, not the underlying authority of the NSL.When recipients have challenged NSLs, the proceedings have occurred mostly in secret, with court documents either sealed or redacted heavily to cover the name of the recipient and other identifying details about the case.The latest case is remarkable then for a number of reasons, among them the fact that a telecom challenged the NSL in the first place, and that EFF got the government to agree to release some of the documents to the public. The organization provided them to the Wall Street Journal, before releasing them on its web site, with the name of the telecom and other details redacted. The Journal, however, using details left in the court records, narrowed the likely plaintiffs down to one, a small San-Francisco-based telecom named Credo. The company’s CEO, Michael Kieschnick, didn’t confirm or deny that his company is the unidentified recipient of the NSL.The case began sometime in 2011, when Credo or another telecom received an NSL from the FBI.EFF filed a challenge on behalf of the telecom (.pdf) in May that year on First Amendment grounds, asserting first that the gag order amounted to unconstitutional prior restraint and, second, that the NSL statute itself “violates the anonymous speech and associational rights of Americans” by forcing companies to hand over data about their customers.Instead of responding directly to that challenge and filing a motion to compel compliance in the way the Justice Department has responded to past challenges, government attorneys instead filed a lawsuit against the telecom, arguing that by refusing to comply with the NSL and hand over the information it was requesting, the telecom was violating the law, since it was “interfer[ing] with the United States’ vindication of its sovereign interests in law enforcement, counterintelligence, and protecting national security.”They did this, even though courts have allowed recipients who challenge an NSL to withhold government-requested data until the court compels them to hand it over. The Justice Department argued in its lawsuit that recipients cannot use their legal right to challenge an individual NSL to contest the fundamental NSL law itself.“It was eye-opening to us that they followed that approach,” Zimmerman says.After heated negotiations with EFF, the Justice Department agreed to stay the civil suit and let the telecom’s challenge play out in court. The Justice Department subsequently filed a motion to compel in the challenge case, but has never dropped the civil suit.“So there’s still this live complaint that they have refused to drop saying that our client was in violation of the law,” Zimmerman says, “presumably in the event that they lose, or something goes bad with the [challenge case].”Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle declined to comment on the case.The redacted documents don’t indicate the exact information the government was seeking from the telecom, and EFF won’t disclose the details. But by way of general explanation, Zimmerman said that the NSL statute allows the government to compel an ISP or web site to hand over information about someone who posted anonymously to a message board or to compel a phone company to hand over “calling circle” information, that is, information about who has communicated with someone by phone.An FBI agent could give a telecom a name or a phone number, for example, and ask for the numbers and identities of anyone who has communicated with that person. “They’re asking for association information – who do you hang out with, who do you communicate with, [in order] to get information about previously unknown people.“That’s the fatal flaw with this [law],” Zimmerman says. “Once the FBI is able to do this snooping, to find out who Americans are communicating with and associating with, there’s no remedy that makes them whole after the fact. So there needs to be some process in place so the court has the ability ahead of time to step in [on behalf of Americans].”It remains to be seen, however, whether that issue will finally get its day in court.Post Comment | 18 Comments and 364 Reactions | Permalink
 
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in before "if you have nothing to hide why should it matter?"the sad part is obama has been as bad as bush with this kind of crap.
Given Ndaa you could make the argument that he is worse. Which is why anyone who gives a #### about this should still write in Ron Paul. He is the only candidate who would put a stop to this, or at least try.
 
This is why all my texts are 256bit skey encrypted with a cross cypher.

Incidentally, IIRC the NSA tried to get an injunction against M/S to have no more than 64 bit encryption on emails some time ago and that was tossed out in court. Idea being they already could crack 64 bit. No word on how close they are to higher levels of encryption.

 
This is why all my texts are 256bit skey encrypted with a cross cypher.

Incidentally, IIRC the NSA tried to get an injunction against M/S to have no more than 64 bit encryption on emails some time ago and that was tossed out in court. Idea being they already could crack 64 bit. No word on how close they are to higher levels of encryption.
Can't tell if this is shtick, but if not please share how you do this.
 
This is why all my texts are 256bit skey encrypted with a cross cypher.

Incidentally, IIRC the NSA tried to get an injunction against M/S to have no more than 64 bit encryption on emails some time ago and that was tossed out in court. Idea being they already could crack 64 bit. No word on how close they are to higher levels of encryption.
Can't tell if this is shtick, but if not please share how you do this.
schtick, sorry.
 
This is why all my texts are 256bit skey encrypted with a cross cypher.

Incidentally, IIRC the NSA tried to get an injunction against M/S to have no more than 64 bit encryption on emails some time ago and that was tossed out in court. Idea being they already could crack 64 bit. No word on how close they are to higher levels of encryption.
Can't tell if this is shtick, but if not please share how you do this.
schtick, sorry.
:lol: Didn't sound real.

 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Yep. I'm voting 3rd party down the line in November. Libertarian (Johnson), Green, Independent, Constitutional, Jedi, whatever is available. I'll write in Ren Hoeck for the rest.
 
Who is granting them access to this data?
Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries.
has the ACLU filed suit against these Telecoms, ISPs, and other intermediaries?Have any law firms started a class action?
I'm sure they have but my understanding is that the Federal Government has granted these parties immunity.
I dn't know that the executive branch can do that without review by the judicial branch...
Why does it require judicial review? The president has proven he can order the assassination of a US citizen without review or disclosure. The government has proven it can take cell phone data without warrants.
 
My sister sent me an email last night and told me I should stop frequenting this site now that its on the watch list as a terrorist site due to people questioning NSA's authority.

Now you guys have gone and done it.

Yes my sister really works for NSA :ph34r:

 
My sister sent me an email last night and told me I should stop frequenting this site now that its on the watch list as a terrorist site due to people questioning NSA's authority.

Now you guys have gone and done it.

Yes my sister really works for NSA :ph34r:
:useless:
 
My sister sent me an email last night and told me I should stop frequenting this site now that its on the watch list as a terrorist site due to people questioning NSA's authority.

Now you guys have gone and done it.

Yes my sister really works for NSA :ph34r:
:useless:
if you want pics of a 53 year old fatbottom girl I can oblige, but she's been working there since she graduated high school in 77.
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.

 
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My sister sent me an email last night and told me I should stop frequenting this site now that its on the watch list as a terrorist site due to people questioning NSA's authority. Now you guys have gone and done it.Yes my sister really works for NSA :ph34r:
Just wait until these Orwellian clonws find out about the Iron Shiek being here too.
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.
You could win by explaining to the people what it is you don't like about it. The same general demographic that wants Americans to heavily pursue terrorists are also likely to be a demographic that doesn't like massive government spending or the idea that the government is watching them everywhere they go. I think a legitimate politician could attack this and survive. Just as people are paranoid about terrorists, they are paranoid about Obama dumping entire cell phone tower data into government databases or trashing the Constitution to spy on Americans.
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.
You could win by explaining to the people what it is you don't like about it. The same general demographic that wants Americans to heavily pursue terrorists are also likely to be a demographic that doesn't like massive government spending or the idea that the government is watching them everywhere they go. I think a legitimate politician could attack this and survive. Just as people are paranoid about terrorists, they are paranoid about Obama dumping entire cell phone tower data into government databases or trashing the Constitution to spy on Americans.
Getting branded "soft" doesn't ever win.I know what you are saying is reasonable and makes sense, but the electoral doesn't reflect it.

 
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We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.
You could win by explaining to the people what it is you don't like about it. The same general demographic that wants Americans to heavily pursue terrorists are also likely to be a demographic that doesn't like massive government spending or the idea that the government is watching them everywhere they go. I think a legitimate politician could attack this and survive. Just as people are paranoid about terrorists, they are paranoid about Obama dumping entire cell phone tower data into government databases or trashing the Constitution to spy on Americans.
I don't know about this. These people typically think that sacrificing a little "inconvenience" for security is acceptable. Afterall, only the people doing something wrong have anything to worry about regarding their privacy. They mostly prefer to remain ignorant of what is going on here. Of course that is probably for the best since you are evidently labeled a potential terrorist for discussing these things. :lmao:

 
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We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.
You could win by explaining to the people what it is you don't like about it. The same general demographic that wants Americans to heavily pursue terrorists are also likely to be a demographic that doesn't like massive government spending or the idea that the government is watching them everywhere they go. I think a legitimate politician could attack this and survive. Just as people are paranoid about terrorists, they are paranoid about Obama dumping entire cell phone tower data into government databases or trashing the Constitution to spy on Americans.
Getting branded "soft" doesn't ever win.I know what you are saying is reasonable and makes sense, but the electoral doesn't reflect it.
You have to sell it as not being soft, but being hard on the current administration. I am not saying it is easy, but IMO many of Obama's greatest weaknesses are not being exploited. Obama was elected despite him campaigning on diplomacy, cleaning up the abuse of military prisoners, and a softer stance on marijuana. He was criticized for being soft on those issues, but he won big.
 
We've got to vote this Bush guy out of office.

We should probably replace him with.... Gary Johnson.
Both Obama and Romney support the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act).Gary Johnson favors its repeal.
Continued proof that voting for either the Dems or Reps is just voting for more of the same BS.Haven't had time to read all of this yet, but can someone explain to me how all these massive piles of intelligence get disseminated?
Gary Johnsons (and those types) have nothing to lose. They can say whatever they like, they aren't wining anyway.Meanwhile, amongst those that do have something to lose, there is a side of the aisle that will brand you as unPatriotic, anti-American, and a terrorist sympathizers if try to obstruct these types of measures. And its effective. Enough so that you will soon fall into the "cant win" category if you try.
You could win by explaining to the people what it is you don't like about it. The same general demographic that wants Americans to heavily pursue terrorists are also likely to be a demographic that doesn't like massive government spending or the idea that the government is watching them everywhere they go. I think a legitimate politician could attack this and survive. Just as people are paranoid about terrorists, they are paranoid about Obama dumping entire cell phone tower data into government databases or trashing the Constitution to spy on Americans.
I don't know about this. These people typically think that sacrificing a little "inconvenience" for security is acceptable. Afterall, only the people doing something wrong have anything to worry about regarding their privacy. They mostly prefer to remain ignorant of what is going on here. Of course that is probably for the best since you are evidently labeled a potential terrorist for discussing these things. :lmao:
What if Obama is the one spying on them, reading their emails, etc?
 

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