NSA Collecting All the Information Needed to Kill You [View all]
From the Washington Post:
On the line with the SEAL was the drone operator and a “collector,” an NSA employee at the agency’s gigantic base at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga. The collector was controlling electronic surveillance equipment in the airspace over the part of Afghanistan where the CIA had zeroed in on one particular person. The SEAL pleaded with the collector to locate the cellphone in Afghanistan that matched the phone number that the SEAL had just given him, according to someone with knowledge of the incident who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The collector had never before done such a thing. Before even intercepting a cellphone conversation, he was accustomed to first confirming that the user was the person he had been directed to spy on. The conversation would then be translated, analyzed, distilled and, weeks later, if deemed to be interesting, sent around the U.S. intelligence community and the White House.
On that day, though, the minutes mattered.
“We just want you to find the phone!” the SEAL urged. No one cared about the conversation it might be transmitting.
The CIA wanted the phone as a targeting beacon to kill its owner.
By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-growth-fueled-by-need-to-target-terrorists/2013/07/21/24c93cf4-f0b1-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_story.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/21/1225525/-Breaking-NSA-Collecting-All-the-Information-Needed-to-Kill-You
Why Snowden Asked Visitors in Hong Kong to Refrigerate Their Phones
By HEATHER MURPHY
New York Times’ Lede Blog
June 25, 2013, 9:41 am
Before a dinner of pizza and fried chicken late Sunday in Hong Kong, Edward J. Snowden insisted that a group of lawyers advising him in the Chinese territory “hide their cellphones in the refrigerator of the home where he was staying, to block any eavesdropping,” as my colleague Keith Bradsher reported.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/why-snowdens-visitors-put-their-phones-in-the-fridge/
Why a refrigerator? The answer does not, as some might assume, have anything to do with temperature. In fact, it does not matter particularly if the refrigerator was plugged in. It is the materials that make up refrigerator walls that could potentially turn them into anti-eavesdropping devices…http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/world/asia/snowden-departure-from-hong-kong.html?_r=2&
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