American laws not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A.

[Ichingcarpenter]

WASHINGTON — Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.



In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/nsa-report-outlined-goals-for-more-power.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=1&


"Huey Long once said, 'Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.' I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security." - Jim Garrison [Playboy interview, October 1967.

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. NSA “SIGINT Strategy” paper targeted “anyone, anytime, anywhere”

The NSA just can’t get a break these days. The latest Snowden paper revelation shows the spy agency speaking plainly last year about pursuing unlimited vision of the digital world. The top secret paper, entitled “SIGINT Strategy” (SIGINT being Spy for “signals intelligence”) was distributed internally Feb. 23, 2012.

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The paper expressed a plan to pursue increasingly broader legal authority to intercept and gather all digital traffic information on a bulk basis for the purpose of fighting “adversaries.” It spoke of the benefits of working with private industry–either through their cooperation or secretly–to gather data. It mentioned setting up “front” companies to act as servers, thus dispensing with the need to infiltrate existing companies. The timeline focused on the years 2012-2016.

Notably, the paper was peppered with some oddly commercialized language. To wit:

We will constantly strive to improve our knowledge, our people, our technology, and our products. Through innovation and personalization, we will advance the SIGINT system. Our customers and stakeholders can rely on us to provide timely, high quality products and services, because we never stop innovating and improving, and we never give up!

We must proactively position ourselves to dominate that environment across discovery, access, exploitation, analysis, collaboration and in the products and services we provide.

Presumably, the terms customers and stakeholders refer to agencies within the US government, while products and services implies crime fighting, but it doesn’t help the NSA sound any less creepy.


http://www.slashgear.com/nsa-sigint-strategy-paper-targeted-anyone-anytime-anywhere-23306618/