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leveymg's JournalIs Universal Profiling of phone users in America the next revelation?
In a post on The Guardian's website, Glenn Greenwald seemed to suggest that another major revelation about mass telephone surveillance might be imminent.
"I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come," Greenwald wrote. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/whistleblowers-and-leak-investigations
Proof of Universal Profiling of phone users in America is likely among those "future revelations."
In 2008, Congress legalized much of the Bush-era NSA Program with passage of the FISA Amendment Act (FAA). The FAA alludes to some safeguards for data acquired by "drift net" surveillance that was legalized. The personal data safeguards that have been put in place are likely those described in Jane Mayer's bio of NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who developed the "Thin Thread" surveillance program. However, Binney also revealed something else to Mayer - the existence of computerized profiling software at the heart of Thin Thread.
Binney detailed the NSA program to Mayer, who describes it this way in a 2011 article published in The New Yorker.: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. This was a big problem: federal law forbade the monitoring of domestic communications without a court warrant. And a warrant couldn’t be issued without probable cause and a known suspect. In order to comply with the law, Binney installed privacy controls and added an “anonymizing feature,” so that all American communications would be encrypted until a warrant was issued. The system would indicate when a pattern looked suspicious enough to justify a warrant.
< . . .>
Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
After 9/11, Binney revealed, the Bush Administration simply ran Thin Thread without the anonymizing feature, as they wanted to conduct self-targeted investigations and a modified version of Thin Thread offered that capability. After the NSA scandals attendant to the NYT disclosures, in 2006, it appears that feature in Binney's original design was reinstalled, and the system instead operates according to computerized profiling.
Is everyone who makes a telephone call in America now automatically profiled for indicators of terrorist activities? That seems likely to be one of the "future revelations" alluded to by Greenwald.
Your Permanent Record: How NSA (and Others) Have Been Spying on Everyone
Until yesterday, if you had posted with a straight face, "Your phone is tapped," most people would have blinked, laughed, and the DU debunking squad would be all over you. You might have been painted with the dreaded "Conspiracy Theorist" label. That has changed with Glenn Greenwald's article in The Guardian and, most importantly, a copy of an Order issued in April by the FISA Court instructing Verizon to turn over all its records of phone calls made inside the United States, including purely local call records between US Citizens.
The fact is that this is a domestic program being conducted on an “ongoing basis,” (according to The Washington Post, the order has been renewed every 90 days since 2006) – has people asking for information. But, this isn't new, it just confirms the details of what has been known about "The Program" since massive domestic wiretapping was first revealed by The New York Times in 2004.
Now, suddely, people want information, and the topic doesn't seem so 
. Here's a relatively brief summary of what's publicly known about the government's key surveillance programs and how they actually work:
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The United States' National Security Agency (NSA) maintains a database containing hundreds of billions of records of telephone calls made by U.S. citizens from the four largest telephone carriers in the United States: AT&T, SBC, BellSouth (all three now called AT&T), and Verizon.[1]
The existence of this database and the NSA program that compiled it was unknown to the general public until USA Today broke the story on May 10, 2006.[1] It is estimated that the database contains over 1.9 trillion call-detail records.[2] According to Bloomberg News, the effort began approximately seven months before the September 11, 2001 attacks.[3]
The records include detailed call information (caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc.) for use in traffic analysis and social network analysis, but do not include audio information or transcripts of the content of the phone calls.
The database's existence has prompted fierce objections. It is often viewed as an illegal warrantless search and a violation of the pen register provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and (in some cases) the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The George W. Bush administration neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the domestic call record database. This contrasts with a related NSA controversy concerning warrantless surveillance of selected telephone calls; in that case they did confirm the existence of the program of debated legality. The program's code name is Stellar Wind.*[4]
Based on what little we know of the NSA’s programs from public reports, a single “authorization” will routinely cover hundreds or thousands of phone numbers and e-mail addresses. That means that even if there’s only “one occasion” on which the NSA “circumvented the spirit of the law” or flouted the Fourth Amendment, the rights of thousands of Americans could easily have been violated.
”Minimization procedures are the rules designed to limit the retention and dissemination of irrelevant information about innocent Americans that might get picked up during authorized surveillance. In ordinary criminal wiretaps, it makes sense to talk about “collection carried out pursuant to… minimization procedures” because, under the stricter rules governing such spying, someone is supposed to be monitoring the wiretap in realtime, and ensuring that innocent conversations (like a mobster’s spouse or teenage kids chatting on the house line) are not recorded.
But that’s not how FISA surveillance normally works. As a rare public ruling by the FISA Court explains, the standard procedure for FISA surveillance is that “large amounts of information are collected by automatic recording to be minimized after the fact.” The court elaborated: “Virtually all information seized, whether by electronic surveillance or physical search, is minimized hours, days, or weeks after collection.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, minimization is something that normally happens after collection: First you intercept, then you toss out the irrelevant stuff. Intelligence officials have suggested the same in recent testimony before Congress: Communications aren’t “minimized” until they’re reviewed by human analysts—and given the incredible volume of NSA collection, it’s unlikely that more than a small fraction of what’s intercepted ever is seen by human eyes.
*"Stellar Wind" is one codename for The Program. Another that is publicly known is "Thin Thread."
The program's activities involve data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, phone conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity.[1]
There were internal disputes within the Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data are collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants.[3]
For a detailed discussion of Thin Thread, see Jane Mayer's 2011 profile of NSA whistleblower Bill Binney,
Going backwards, related programs included Trailblazer, an NSA program that focused on interception and analysis of data carried on web communications networks, cell phones, VOIP, and e-mail. After receiving adverse publicity Trailblazer was shutdown but reportedly morphed into the NSA Turbulance Program. Thin Thread was a rival NSA program that went operational, resulting in massive domestic surveillance. This is described by Jane Mayer in a 2011 New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed.
Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet, tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.
Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” According to Binney, Drake took his side against the N.S.A.’s management and, as a result, became a political target within the agency.
Binney described Thin Thread to Mayer, who describes The Program this way:
Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S.
< . . .>
Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
In addition to NSA's Thinthread and Trailblazer programs, DIA operated its own domestic-focused pre-9/11 surveillance program. At least one of these monitored AQ cells operating inside the US. The story of the Able Danger has been well documented and fairly widely known. Able Danger was shut down by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone in late 2000-early 2001 after it had mapped out the Al Qaeda support cell inside the US supporting Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attack cell members. That operation built up a social network analysis focusing electronic surveillance on members of the so-called Brooklyn Cell that had remained in place after its establishment by CIA as part of Operation Cyclone, the Agency's operation that recruited and trained Jihadis for war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Much of bin Laden's organization grew out of the US and Saudi organized covert operations against the Russia and its allies in Central Asia and the oil-rich region of the Transcaucasus that flared up again as wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Dagestan, and Chechnya.
As early as 1997, as the US and Saudi paramilitary organized by bin Laden were cooperating in Kosovo, US intelligence officials were bragging that they had "mapped out" bin Laden's financial and donor network by human and technical means. Al Qaeda was already the focus of multiple surveillance operations inside the US, but this was gravely complicated by intelligence agencies from several countries stumbling over each other and the fatal duplicity of their network of interwoven double-agents that created the opportunity for the 9/11 attacks.
NSA and DIA technical collection and analysis, elsewhere referred as "The Program" survived the reorganization of intelligence that followed 9/11, and the closing down some legacy programs that followed a series of disclosures and scandals involving "The Program" in the middle of the decade. Part of this was described by Shane Harris in The National Journal, "TIA LIVES ON":
February 23, 2006, http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm or http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/3509
As early as February 2003, the Pentagon planned to use Genoa II technologies at the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort Belvoir, Va., according to an unclassified Defense budget document. The awareness center was an early tester of various TIA tools, according to former employees. A 2003 Pentagon report to Congress shows that the Army center was part of an expansive network of intelligence agencies, including the NSA, that experimented with the tools. The center was also home to the Army's Able Danger program, which has come under scrutiny after some of its members said they used data-analysis tools to discover the name and photograph of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the attacks.
The other project has been re-designated "TopSail" (formerly Genoa II) and would provide IT tools to help anticipate and preempt terrorist attacks. SAIC has also been contracted to work on Topsail, including a US$3.7 million contract in 2005.
The Matrix Project and Your Terrorism Quotient (TQ)
Finally, we come to what may have been the most tin foilish program of all, Matrix, (yes, there really was one named that before the movie)
Wish I were only kidding. But, according to this 2004 article, The Matrix program was in the works that had the potential to profile every American and assign each of us a Terrorism Quotient (TQ): http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-05-20-terror-database_x.htm?csp=34 ; see, related Cong. Research Service Study: http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32536.pdf?
'Terrorism quotient' records spark suspicions about Matrix
NEW YORK (AP) — Before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix, a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists — sparking some investigations and arrests.
The "high terrorism factor" scoring system also became a key selling point for the involvement of the database company, Seisint Inc., in the Matrix project.
Public records obtained by The Associated Press from several states show that Justice Department officials cited the scoring technology in appointing Seisint sole contractor on the federally funded, $12 million project.
Seisint and the law enforcement officials who oversee Matrix insist that the terrorism scoring system ultimately was kept out of the project, largely because of privacy concerns.
However, new details about Seisint's development of the "terrorism quotient," including the revelation that authorities apparently acted on the list of 120,000, are renewing privacy activists' suspicions about Matrix's potential power.
Now, if that early profiling program was similarly developed, your Terrorism Quotient (TQ), goes with IQ into your permanent record.
Yes, your Permanent Record.
So, if we arm them to overthrow the regime, what do we give that they don't already have? ICBMs?
What do you give the well-armed Sunni freedom fighter who already has everything?
Surplus Minuteman IIIs? B-52s? Aging Trident submarines?
How molecular can the splinters in Syria get?
Does anyone else recognize the global dangers that a complete loss of command, control and coherence among armed factions in the region will cause?
Was DOJ expecting to find Risen's sources through accessing his credit scores and bank records?
Or, did DOJ just want to sell him a used car?
?
Response to article post: "Feds spy on NYT reporter in leak probe" (Politico)
Thnx. The twisting of the narrative by the GOP probably benefits Obama in the long run by obscuring
the real issues at stake - the unanticipated costs of serial blowback and the failure of the "humanitarian" regime change model. That's an irony that the Repugs probably don't grasp.
But, blowback from the Libyan and Syrian regime changes, and the earlier covert operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Bosnia, are actually part of a larger ongoing disaster for the US. The Soviet Union's collapse has resulted not in a peace dividend but the rise of ambitious and wealthy adversaries, and further overextension of the U.S. Each failure to restabilize after a setback illustrates how little real power we still have to effect outcomes in the MENA region and South Asia. Like the Russians before us, our interventions only weaken us and show the rest of the world just how vulnerable and rusted out we have become. The American people are the only ones fooled by all the secrecy and disinformation that goes along with these operations.
We are only beginning to feel the real domino effect - serial blowback from a whole series of misconceptualized covert operations and failed regime changes carried out over several decades. Secret wars never end. They are now cascading into each other -- the terrorists we supported in the Transcaucasus, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq now turn on us -- making the situation ever more chaotic and uncontrollable. In the midst of this we aren't even trying to contain the rise of Saudi Arabia/GCC as the dominant power in the region, and the Saudis and their Sunni proxies really, really don't like us at all, in the same way the Egyptians and Persians hate the British. But, this is far worse than the collapse of the British Empire, because we have been continually at war for well over a decade, and haven't even begun to create an exit strategy for ourselves. We can't even admit that it is our "allies" who have been funding AQ and are reaping the benefits as they fill our vacuum of power.
The bipartisan Cold War establishment in Washington now has to operate largely in secret because of public revulsion to the colossal debacle of Iraq and its costs, the buildup to which which was itself a semi-covert operation backed by the same people who are still largely in charge. They continue to run US foreign policy by the same strategy of propaganda and deception aimed at the American people as they did during Iran-Contra and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. I don't have a lot of confidence that the thing can change course and save itself.
Looks like the "Make the economy scream" people are back in the saddle in DC again.
Yes, you know who you are.
Response to LBN post: "Now Venezuela is running out of toilet paper"
As we know, when white Republicans do that, it isn't an act of terrorism (worth mentioning).
Who granted The Army of God Air Force a C(4)?
AP report contradicted White House claims: no known AQ plot on bin Laden anniversary
Here's the AP report of May 7, 2012 that spurred the DOJ to secretly collect AP phone records. That article draws into question statements previously made by the White House and Homeland Security officials that there was no known AQ plotting of an attack to coincide with the anniversary of bin Laden's death. http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/national_world&id=8650811
The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. This new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger's underwear, but this time al-Qaida developed a more refined detonation system, U.S. officials said. The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.
< . . .>
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said President Barack Obama learned about the plot in April and was assured the device posed no threat to the public. "The president thanks all intelligence and counterterrorism professionals involved for their outstanding work and for serving with the extraordinary skill and commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand," Hayden said.
The operation unfolded even as the White House and Department of Homeland Security assured the American public that they knew of no al-Qaida plots against the U.S. around the anniversary of bin Laden's death. The operation was carried out over the past few weeks, officials said. "We have no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the anniversary of bin Laden's death," White House press secretary Jay Carney said on April 26. On May 1, the Department of Homeland Security said, "We have no indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the U.S. tied to the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death." The White House did not explain those statements Monday.
America, of course, embodies the spirit, legacy and methods of such Cromwellian solutions.
Just ask those who were here before, and what we continue to do around the world.
RESPONSE TO POST:
Thatcher suggested 'Cromwell solution' for Northern Ireland
From The Guardian Saturday 16 June 2001 02.04 BST
A year after Brighton bombing, PM saw mass shift of Catholics from Ulster to Irish Republic as a way to end the Troubles
Special report: Northern Ireland
Margaret Thatcher horrified her advisers when she recommended that the government should revive the memory of Oliver Cromwell - dubbed the butcher of Ireland - and encourage tens of thousands of Catholics to leave Ulster for the south.
A year after she was nearly killed in the IRA's 1984 Brighton bomb, the then prime minister expressed dismay at Catholic opposition to British rule when they could follow the example of ancestors who were evicted from Ulster at the barrel of a Cromwellian gun in the 17th century.
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