The NSA Search Engine is a Keyhole to You
And it's largely owned and operated by the corporate cronies of War Inc, the BFEE.
Obese Intelligence
The NSA Search Engine
by BINOY KAMPMARK
CounterPunch, Aug. 27, 2014
The Intercept was already getting the intelligence community excited with its revelations that the National Security Agency had decided to mimic inspector Google. Through creating a search engine in the manner of those pro-transparency pioneers, the intelligence community was turning the tables on the very idea of searchable information. Why keep it the operating preserve of the public? The search engine has, as it stands, over 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats.
The revelations have a few implications, the most obvious one confirming the seamless transition between intelligence work on the one hand, and the policing function on the other. The distinction between intelligence communities whose interests are targeting matters foreign to the polity; and those who maintain order within the boundaries of a state in a protective capacity, prove meaningless in this form. The use of ICREACH makes it clear that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are regular clients and users of the system.
A 2010 memorandum from the Chief of Liaison Support Group at the CIA titled “CIA colleagues enthusiastically welcome NSA training” speaks with praise about those “NSA-ers embedded in CIA’s workspaces”. Indeed, it speaks very highly of the “information sharing” ethos of the NSA within the Intelligence Community, channelling Google’s operating rationale within more secret spaces. Furthermore, in 2010, the relevant data base provided the NSA “and second Party telephony metadata events to over 1000 analysts across 23 US Intelligence Community agencies.”
Those keen on squirreling information into such a data base are no doubt thrilled by the prospects that it can be made available to the “appropriate” sources. ICREACH has become one of the largest, if not largest system for the internal processing and sharing of surveillance records within the United States. It is not, according to The Intercept, connected with the NSA database that stores data on Americans’ phone calls pursuant to s. 215 of the Patriot Act.
The difference between the two accumulated pools of data is one of scope: ICREACH is mammoth in reach, and positively defiant in its push against the law; the database gathered under s. 215 guidelines is minute in comparison, confined to the dangerously pertinent idea of combating terrorism and like threats. ICREACH exists outside the system of court orders, being a creature of Executive Order 12333. The document, instituted by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was intended to add robustness to the intelligence gathering capabilities of the US intelligence community.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/27/the-nsa-search-engine/
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Those "in the know" have something the rest of us -- the "Little People" -- don't have access to: Inside Information. Judging by the historical record and the revolving door between the secret government and private industry, it doesn't get shared in a way that's best for democracy. No wonder the rich get richer and the rest of the country becomes poorer. And the wars for personal profit and concentrated secret power continue without end.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Joseph Trento chronicled the case of one Igor Orlov. Supposedly a loyal NAZI Gehlen Org superspy brought to America, really Orlov was loyal to the Kremlin. Dulles and Co. loved what he had to say, despite knowing him as a "man with the soul of a sociopath." The woman with him in the photo below is his wife, in whom he never totally confided.
Orlov’s birth name was Aleksandr Grigoryevich Kopatzky. He was a loyal Stalinist. He volunteered to serve the Kremlin as a double-agent against the NAZIs. He was ordered to fly over NAZI occupied land, shoot the pilot and crew in cold blood, and bail out. He did and was wounded by troops on the ground. He told the story that he wanted to defect from the Soviets. He even gave up the names of several lower Soviet agents who had previously penetrated the Nazis. These men were executed, but helped get Orlov accepted within the Gehlen spy network.
(William) Harvey told (Paul) Garbler that he would be running the Orlov operation, and he explained that he had “major plans” for it. “Nothing,” Harvey said, “is more important than trying to get our own agents recruited in Karlshorst.” He briefed Garbler on Orlov’s use of women to compromise Soviet officers. “To be told you are to be running an operation involving 11 whores and a one-armed piano player was pretty interesting …,” said Garbler. “They wanted me to expand the operation…. They figured that with more girls, we had a better chance of recruiting more officers.” At the outset of a CIA career that was full of hope and promise, Garbler had no way of knowing that he was walking into a nightmare that would dominate the rest of his life.
Garbler’s first meeting at a safe house with Orlov, like his first meeting with Harvey, was unforgettable: “He was a tiny little man. He was perfectly proportioned with those piercing blue eyes and dressed to the nines. He was extremely formal. He was very businesslike. He had this way of capturing your attention…. We never developed a personal relationship. He seemed so very serious.” It was the first of over one hundred safe house sessions between the two men.
From the start, Garbler found the Orlov operation strange. He did not understand why he had to deal with Orlov in German when he and Orlov both spoke Russian fluently. It was one of many things he neve understood about running the little man.
SOURCE: Joseph Trento, "The Secret History of the CIA," pp 130-131.
So, when the NAZIs in CIA wanted to do NAZI things, like experiment and torture, they may have been doing so for their former masters, in addition to their (then-) current USG employer.
CIA-Nazi Link Grows Clearer as More Documents Come to Light
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Apparently, the CIA knew of his whereabouts as early as 1958.
Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON
A former Nazi rose to the highest ranks of a Western intelligence agency - and was a Soviet mole. A lead to Adolf Eichmann was ignored. A spy whose pathological lies made him useless, but who still escaped prosecution for war crimes.
These are among the revelations found among some 8 million pages of documents released here Tuesday that deal with German and Japanese war crimes, including 27,000 pages that detail the relationship after World War II between U.S. government agencies and suspected Nazis war criminals.
The message threading the documents was clear: The price one pays for consorting with evil men far outweighs the return.
"Using very bad people can have very bad consequences," Elizabeth Holtzman, a former U.S. congresswoman and a member of the Interagency Working Group that released the documents, said at a news conference last Tuesday at the National Archives. The group was established in 1999 to declassify rooms full of documents related to Nazi war crimes.
The mandate was later extended to Japanese war crimes.
CONTINUED…
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/29521/declassified-archive-shows-cia-protected-nazis-after-wwii/
That's why I don't go for secret government. It lets people with the secrets, no matter how noble or well-informed, decide what's best for the rest of us. As shown by the history of the last 51 years, it hasn't worked out, except for the super-wealthy served by the Karl Roves, Ralph Reeds and Grover Norquists among us.
From back when ECHELON was new...
Frank Church (D-Idaho) explained why, speaking of the awesome power to eavesdrop on every American the NSA possessed in 1976:
[font color="blue"]“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” [/font color]
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. Evidently targeted for removal by the conservative spy class, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later in the "Reagan Landslide." A brave man, the NSA was turned on him, a coincidence, certainly.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Octafish/277
PS: Sorry to be so darn pedantic, gordianot. Thank you for knowing the why.
In Detroit, at the 1980 GOP nominating convention:
After the election, the relationship really changed:
George Bush Takes Charge
The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
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More details from the good professor:
EXCERPT...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
[font color="red"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
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CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
This all used to be online, easily found via the GOOGLE. It's gone now, for some strange reason.
Kennebunkport, Maine, July 30, 1983.
Wallace and his third wife, the former Lisa Taylor, meet with Vice President George Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton at a lobster bake at Bush's residence at Kennebunkport, Maine, July 30, 1983. The third Mrs. Wallace, whom the governor married in 1981, was 30 years his junior and half of a country-western singing duo, Mona and Lisa, who had performed during his campaign in 1968.
CREDIT: AP/Birmingham Post
SOURCE: http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/george-wallace/13/
George Wallace did all he could to oppose President Kennedy and his administration's policy to integrate public schools, including the University of Alabama.
Something else important to know: Wallace’s running mate in 1968 was Gen. Curtis LeMay, who exhibited insubordination to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The company and its Hollerith machines enabled the fascists to tabulate census data and find out "who was who?" and "who did what?"and "who lives where?"
The IBM Hollerith machines and the punch cards they used helped the NAZI government process information, including religious information. Also tabulated were "how many" of each race and at "what address" they resided also were recorded.
IBM & "Death's Calculator"
by Edwin Black
EXCERPT...
When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.
However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.
SNIP...
I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.
The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just to count the Jews — but to identify them.
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http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gypibm.html
I wonder what they're capable of today, knowing what we've learned via Snowden and other whistleblowers about the vast US government spy network pointing at the American people.
As Director of National Intelligence, Reagan's man on El Salvador and its Death Squads had access to the kind of information on American's private communications, connections, and interests that would have amazed KGB boss Lavrentiy Beria.
The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google
By Ryan Gallagher
The Intercept, 25 Aug 2014
The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.
SNIP...
One-Stop Shopping
The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.
The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.
To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period. The documents suggest these results can be used reveal the “social network” of the person of interest—in other words, those that they communicate with, such as friends, family, and other associates.
The purpose of ICREACH, projected initially to cost between $2.5 million and $4.5 million per year, was to allow government agents to comb through the NSA’s metadata troves to identify new leads for investigations, to predict potential future threats against the U.S., and to keep tabs on what the NSA calls “worldwide intelligence targets.”
However, the documents make clear that it is not only data about foreigners’ communications that are available on the system. Alexander’s memo states that “many millions of…minimized communications metadata records” would be available through ICREACH, a reference to the process of “minimization,” whereby identifying information—such as part of a phone number or email address—is removed so it is not visible to the analyst. NSA documents define minimization as “specific procedures to minimize the acquisition and retention [of] information concerning unconsenting U.S. persons”—making it a near certainty that ICREACH gives analysts access to millions of records about Americans. The “minimized” information can still be retained under NSA rules for up to five years and “unmasked” at any point during that period if it is ever deemed necessary for an investigation.
The Brennan Center’s Goitein said it appeared that with ICREACH, the government “drove a truck” through loopholes that allowed it to circumvent restrictions on retaining data about Americans. This raises a variety of legal and constitutional issues, according to Goitein, particularly if the data can be easily searched on a large scale by agencies like the FBI and DEA for their domestic investigations.
CONTINUED...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/08/25/icreach-nsa-cia-secret-google-crisscross-proton/
