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Warrantless Surveillance of American Journalists, authorized by Bush ... FIRSTFRUITS

Electronic Frontier Foundation   "As part of its case, the EFF said it obtained documents from a former AT&T technician showing that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T's network ..."  more

What is Amdocs / Narus connection to Hayden / Bush / NSA phone records database?

UPDATED

Trapwire

FBI Facial Recognition and Identification Initiative

 
Types of Surveillance
Related topics:   Internet            'War on Terrorism'                Communications             Fear             Boycotts    page 1     2    3

  

 
 
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ACLU  safe and free
  • Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii).  Choicepoint and Acxiom companies are data aggregators.  Nuala O'Connor Kelly is head of privacy for Dept of Homeland Security. 
  • Alternet, Patriot II, details, search, government surveillance, spying
  • ArsTechnica Big Brother on a budget: How Internet surveillance got so cheap ... Many governments have invested heavily in packet inspection and related technologies, which allow them to build a picture of what passes through their networks and what comes in from beyond their borders.
  • Center for Democracy and Technology, domestic spying watch 
  • Center for a Legitimate Government    
  • Commercial Alert, protecting children from corporate predation
  • Cryptorights.org human rights for security workers. SF
  • Disinfo  New Surveillance Camera Can Search 36 Million Faces For Matches Per Second
  • Dissenter / FireDogLake Federal Judge’s Injunction Finds NDAA Is Worse Than Material Support Law
  • Echelon Watch discuss civil liberty threats
  • Electronic Privacy Information Center lawsuits, FBI, FOI  
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation working to protect civil and free speech
  • EndoftheAmericanDream 14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Be Using To Spy On You
  • EFF Is Your Printer Spying on YOu
  • EFF  List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots, search terms: yellow tracking dots, printer models, output, Machine Identification Code Technology Project, forensic watermarking, dithering technique, blue light, microscope, Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Fuji, Xerox, IBM, Konica / Minolta, Kyocera, Lanier, Lexmark, Okidata, Panasonic, Ricoh, Savin, Samsung, Tektronix, Toshiba, color laser printers.
  • Buy Wayne Madsen's book Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day.
  • Epic  Electronic Privacy Information Center
  • F-Secure, info on CD rootkits 
  • Eyeballing TIA
  • Freedom Scorecard, ACLU
  • Future of Freedom First Amendment Rights 
  • Global Issues.org
  • Google-Watch Google search engine is spyware
  • High Tech Billboards  domestic surveillance
  • Human Rights Watch briefing paper on MCIS
  • Internet Democracy Project enhance open participation, public accountability and hr of internet
  • KeepAmericaFree  Yes, Pres. Obama, The NDAA DOES Authorize Warrantless, No Due Process, Indefinite Military Detention by the Military of American Civilians
  • MediaFilter covert action quarterly
  • MediaRoots the Clark County Republican Party Central Committee of Nevada unanimously called for its appeal while legislators in Michigan are currently considering a bill that could virtually revoke the federal law in that state.
  • NoNAIS.com Protect Traditional Rights to Farm, stop RFID privicacy intrusion by Bush corporate America.
  • OpManning Free Bradley Manning
  • Privacy International Human rights group, watchdog on surveillance by govt/biz
  • Privacy  
  • PrivacyToday  news
  • Refuse & Resist the device formerly known as Carnivore,
  • Salon  Israeli art students, DEA, Amdocs searchable file
  • Smirking Chimp Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities by DEA
  • Southwest Research and Information Center  Energy, Environment research analysis. 
  • Total Information Awareness Resource Center
  • VeritasVirtualVengeance Righteous Negative Publicity and Black PR: Exposing the terrible truths to take down corrupt corporations.  Surveillance
  • White Dot find out how to free yourself from television.  PTZ point tilt, zoom
  • notes: Wayne Madsen Report ... cell phone  "The "echoing" is not limited to particular cell phone service providers or cell phone types. Customers of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are reporting the same problem with phones from Nokia, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson.  ...  Technicians report that echos occur when there is not a complete connection or if there is a third party connection on the call. While echoing has been a minor problem in the past, the frequency of complaints is increasing and affecting journalists and political activists from Washington, DC to New York City and California to Texas.  ...  Government agencies are already able to remotely activate a cell phone and use the microphone to listen in on conversations. The only way to prevent this surveillance is to agree to "batteries out" conversations, something that is employed more and more among journalists while talking to sources as well as others concerned about high-tech snooping from "roving bugs." Similarly, removing the battery from a cell phone also disables the Global Positioning System and cell tower triangulation capabilities used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track the location of the user, according to U.S. intelligence sources."
  • Random Number Generation Backdoor to Encryption keys, NSA, NIST

 

  • 3-eye  imagery consultants, info
  • BBC George W Bush personally stopped an inquiry into a controversial programme to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of Americans, a top official has said. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said internal investigators wanted to look at the role justice department lawyers had played in drafting the programme

  • Thought Crime legislation: hr1955.info

  • CERT Coordination Center net security, info, response
  • Cnet Tech News First, search Carnivore
  • CICenter Counterintelligence, NGO, UK
  • CNN, Technology
  • Earthdata sea
  • Earthdata International satellite images company
  • FAS Project on Government Security 
  • Freedom of Information Act
  • Global Security Foundation  Intelligence Resource 
  • History of the Internet  
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective
  • LawFare 
  • Legal News Search search
  • LexisNexis  online legal, news and business info services
  • LexisOne  The Resource for Small Law Firms.
  • Mountbatten Centre for International Studies
  • National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information NCADI, info on alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs
  • National Cyber Security Alliance se
  • National Security Archive George Washington U. govt security research, FOI
  • Newsbits technews
  • Open Society Institute Internet policy, independent media, human rights
  • OS News Operating system news
  • PrivacyDigest privacy news
  • Privacy Marketing News UK, into privacy and relationship marketing.
  • Privacy & Security Law Report BNA
  • Project on Government Oversight exposing corruption, exploring solutions
  • Salaam.co.uk Big Brother in Britain, national id cards, high cost and hype. 
  • SearchSecurity news, consulting
  • Security Focus News Microsoft
  • Scientific Working Group on Friction Ridge Analysis fingerprinting, forensic id.
  • Slashdot
  • TechLawJournal news, analysis of legislation, litigation, regulation IT
  • Vera Institute of Justice prisoner rights, justice system innovation, links
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • Wired Magazine, search Poindexter, TIA, Total Information Awareness, IAO,
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
  • WMR Army spying on soldiers' blogs according to leaked Army regulation During a time when the morale of US Army personnel is at an all-time low from a protracted war in Iraq and a de facto draft in the guise of a stop-loss program that keeps soldiers on active duty after their commitments expire, the Army is also spying on the personal blogs of its personnel. This surveillance program has been revealed in a leaked Army Regulation on Operations Security (AR-580-1). ... The regulation was issued almost a year ago, on April 19, 2007. It prohibits the publication of "critical or sensitive" information, a wide-open caveat that could include anything not deemed to be "classified" national security information. The regulation also covers information that has already been disclosed, or "compromised" as stated in the regulation.
  • Yahoo, Spyware new
  • ZDNet, UK news

  • Wikipedia The Disruptive Technology Office (DTO) is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. It was until recently known as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA).  ARDA was created in 1998 after the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by theDirector of Central Intelligence and the Department of Defense, and took responsibility for funding some of DARPA's projects. ARDA evaluates proposals and funds speculative research, particularly in the fields of data mining, video processing, and quantum computing.  There has been speculation that the DTO is continuing research efforts started under the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO). Data-mining activities within the US Department of Defense are controversial and have met with public and congressional disapproval.  Although ARDA's budget is presumably classified as part of the intelligence budget, the New York Times quoted an unnamed former government official saying the agency spent about $100 million a year in 2003. The Associated Press reports that ARDA had a staff of only eight in 2004.  Headquartered at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, site of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, ARDA/DTO has kept a low profile, quietly funding research of interest to the intelligence community.  In December 2007, DTO was folded into the newly created IARPA [1]. A move to a research park near the University of Maryland, College Park was announced at about the same time [2].

  • Wikipedia Real ID The REAL ID Act of 2005, Pub.L. 109-13, 119 Stat. 302, enacted May 11, 2005, was an Act of Congress that modified U.S. federal law pertaining to security, authentication, and issuance procedures standards for the state driver's licenses and identification (ID) cards, as well as various immigration issues pertaining to terrorism. The law set forth certain requirements for state driver's licenses and ID cards to be accepted by the federal government for "official purposes", as defined by the Secretary of Homeland Security. The Secretary of Homeland Security has currently defined "official purposes" as presenting state driver's licenses and identification cards for boarding commercially operated airline flights and entering federal buildings and nuclear power plants. The REAL ID Act implements the following: Title II of the act establishes new federal standards for state-issued driver licenses and non-driver identification cards. Changing visa limits for temporary workers, nurses, and Australian citizens. Funding some reports and pilot projects related to border security. Introducing rules covering "delivery bonds" (similar to bail bonds but for aliens who have been released pending hearings). Updating and tightening the laws on application for asylum and deportation of aliens for terrorist activity. Waiving laws that interfere with construction of physical barriers at the borders. As of April 2, 2008, all 50 states have either applied for extensions of the original May 11, 2008 compliance deadline or received unsolicited extensions.[4] As of October 2009, 25 states have approved either resolutions or binding legislation not to participate in the program, and with President Obama's selection of Janet Napolitano (a prominent critic of the program) to head the Department of Homeland Security, the future of the law remains uncertain,[5] and bills have been introduced into Congress to amend or repeal it.[6] The most recent of these, dubbed PASS ID, would eliminate many of the more burdensome technological requirements but still require states to meet federal standards in order to have their ID cards accepted by federal agencies. 

  • Wired Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry about a new random-number standard that includes an algorithm that is slow, badly designed and just might contain a backdoor for the National Security Agency.
  • Wikipedia NAIS The National Animal Identification System, (NAIS) is a government-run program in the United States intended to extend government animal health surveillance by identifying and tracking specific animals. Administered at the federal level by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture, NAIS will also be overseen by state animal health boards. While the federal program is voluntary, money received by some states,[2] tribes, and non-profit entities from the USDA through cooperative agreements has been used to make parts or all of the program mandatory. Critics claim the system will put small farmers out of business, by requiring that farmers pay the cost of registration devices of between $1 and $20 for each animal. Large, corporate factory farms which are connected to vertically integrated, birth-to-death factory systems ID and pay by the herd (and not the individual animal), while small farmers must pay it for each animal.  Finally, fears persist about plans to make NAIS mandatory on the federal level, which would threaten the religious freedom of those who believe that making a “mark” is sinful, such as the Amish. The Amish also object to the use of electronic devices such as microchips.[24] If microchip implants were required, as has been proposed in a 2004 report by the United States Animal Health Association’s Committee on Livestock Identification, it would also violate the rights of those who believe that this practice is morally wrong.
  • PressTV U.S. companies are involved in providing technology that helps the Egyptian government to crack down on communications and monitor protestors on the Internet and mobile phones. ... A U.S. company appears to have sold Egypt technology to monitor Internet and mobile phone traffic that is possibly being used by the ruling regime to crack down on communications as protests erupt throughout the country. ...
    Boeing-owned, California-based company Narus sold Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider, "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment, more commonly known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. Common Dreams ,,, HIGHLIGHTS
    The company is also known for creating "NarusInsight," a supercomputer system allegedly used by US' National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time. Common Dreams ...
    Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness. .... Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway. ... "Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, Narus' marketing vice president, once boasted to Wired about the service. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on; we can reconstruct their (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls.” ... Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egypt's government "not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media.” Huffington Post .... FACTS & FIGURES Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients. ... In addition to Narus, there are a number of companies, including many others in the United States, that produce and traffic in similar spying and control technology: Zeugma Systems (Canada), Camiant (USA), Procera Networks (USA), Allot (Israel), Ixia (USA), Advanced IO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others. ... When commercial network operators use DPI, the privacy of Internet users is compromised. But in government hands, the use of DPI can crush dissent and lead to human rights violations. ... Virtually all internet access in Egypt is cut off as the government battles to contain the street protests that threaten to topple President Hosni Mubarak. Telegraph HJ/KA/DB... more search terms: Egypt, Elbaradai, Tunisia, Algeria, Tunisia, protest, regime change,
  • WMR  "January 30-February 1, 2009 -- Stellar Wind blows Democratic governors out of office  WMR has previously reported on the malfeasance of the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, in his investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the outing of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson. In the case of the 1993 attack, Fitzgerald sat on critical signals intelligence (SIGINT) evidence that would have tied the bombing to Osama bin Laden in exile in Sudan. Bin Laden remained a U.S. intelligence asset at the time of the World Trade Center bombing so Fitzgerald, following orders from Langley, simply failed to enter into evidence wiretaps communications between the Sudanese Mission to the United Nations in New York and the Sudanese Foreign Ministry in Khartoum that contained references to Bin Laden. In the outing of Plame, Fitzgerald refused to enter as evidence tapped phone calls of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and others that would have proven the severe damage of Libby's actions to the covert counter-proliferation operation involving Plame and her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover firm. Fitzgerald's actions in covering up the World Trade Center link to Sudan and Bin Laden was so significant that Libby's New York Times interlocutor, Judith Miller, once asked this editor for my sources on the Sudanese wiretap story. I told her that one was well known, the late ABC News reporter John McWethy had reported on the Sudan UN mission wiretaps by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1993. The other, a confidential source in Khartoum, remains confidential. McWethy died in a February 2008 skiing accident in Colorado.   full story
  • Wikipedia Stellar Wind Stellar Wind is the open secret code name for certain information collection activities performed by the United States' National Security Agency and revealed by Thomas M. Tamm to New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau.[1] The operation was approved by President George W. Bush shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001.[2] 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] In March 2004, the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that the program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed, where Ashcroft lay semiconscious, to request that he sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. However, Ashcroft was incapable of signing the document. Bush then reauthorized the operation, over formal Justice Department objections. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller, Acting Attorney General James Comey, and many prominent members of the Justice Department were prepared to resign over the matter. Valerie Caproni the FBI general counsel, said, "From my perspective, there was a very real likelihood of a collapse of government." Bush subsequently reversed the authorization.[2] During the Bush Administration, the Stellar Wind cases were referred to by FBI agents as "pizza cases" because many seemingly suspicious cases turned out to be food takeout orders. Approximately 99 percent of the cases led nowhere, but 1 percent bore fruit.[2] One of the known uses of these data were the creation of suspicious activity reports, or "SARS", about people suspected of terrorist activities. It was one of these reports that revealed former New York governor Elliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes, even though he was not suspected of terrorist activities.[1] In March 2012 Wired Magazine published "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" talking about a new NSA facility and says "For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail." Naming the official William Binney a former NSA code breaker. Binney goes on to say that the NSA has highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at AT&T and Verizon both.[4] The article suggests that the otherwise dispatched Stellar Wind is actually an active program.
  • WMR Bush / Clinton complicity in NSA illegal wiretapping.  A problem for Hillary? ...  1999 docs show NSA and Clinton White House hiding information about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) compliance.  Illegal request for NSA wiretapping made in February 27, 2001 meeting ... Nacchio refused, then indicted for insider stock trading... 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, (they're all crooks?).  search terms: AT&T switching center, Folsom Street, San Francisco, 4ESS equipment, Mark Klein (whistleblower), see  HPSCI, Porter Goss, attorney client privilege, Executive Order 12333, all concerning hiding  documents referring to legality of NSA activities, ... and Wilma A. Lewis, Mark Nagle, Marina Utgoff Braswell, Electronic Privacy Information Center, (Civil No. 99-3197 PLF), information withheld from FOIA, domestic wiretapping  full story
  • Economist "Security experts reckon the latest technology can detect hostile intentions before something bad happens. Unless it is perfect, though, that may be bad in itself   ...   MONITORING surveillance cameras is tedious work. Even if you are concentrating, identifying suspicious behaviour is hard. Suppose a nondescript man descends to a subway platform several times over the course of a few days without getting on a train. Is that suspicious? Possibly. Is the average security guard going to notice? Probably not. A good example, then—if a fictional one—of why many people would like to develop intelligent computerised surveillance systems.   ...   The perceived need for such systems is stimulating the development of devices that can both recognise people and objects and also detect suspicious behaviour. Much of this technology remains, for the moment, in laboratories. But Charles Cohen, the boss of Cybernet Systems, a firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is working for America’s Army Research Laboratory, says behaviour-recognition systems are getting good, and are already deployed at some security checkpoints" 
  • According to Associated Press, the director of CIA's Open Source Intelligence, Doug Naquin, admitted the existence of a secret facility and a team of operatives for exclusive monitoring of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. But I've found evidence pointing out that these online communities might actually have been created by CIA for data mining and COINTELPRO operations on the internet.   Hosted  FEMA Concentration Camp, Beech Grove,  Indiana YouTube & Google Map: Emerson Ave, Beech Grove, Indiana and lists Domestic Spying, FBI, AT&T page Prodigal email, im, text scanning Darpa
Domestic Spying News    top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
ARPA, IARPA, Advanced Research and Development Activity Office     top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • CDC Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Dept of Health and Human Services.
  • PrivacyDigest privacy news
  • Softswitch.org  to develop universal communications solutions over packet-based voice, data and video.
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
 
  • Biowatch, detect biological warfare threats. fear Bush.
  • Dept of Health and Human Services.
  • Dept of Homeland Security domestic spying
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Virage Inc Video analysis and contact extraction. Part of the Autonomy Group
 
Amdocs, Israel, Narus-Boeing  top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ACLU  and NSA lawsuit
  • Cryptome search Narus spy
  • DailyKOS EFF lawsuit, nationwide class action, AT&T Technician stepped forward to disclose installation of NSA equipment (Narus ST-6400)  in San Francisco trunk facility, NarusInsight
  • EFF State Secrets Act invoked on wiretapping lawsuit.  National Security Agency
  • Cryptome search Narus spy
  • DailyKOS EFF lawsuit, nationwide class action, AT&T Technician stepped forward to disclose installation of NSA equipment (Narus ST-6400)  in San Francisco trunk facility, NarusInsight
  • Moon of Alabama search terms: CDR, call detail records, usage behavior, mortgate data, credit card data, addresses, names, NSA took over Total Information Awareness Project, if you're against Bush are you a terrorist? Datamining, small groups, false tips, 
  • NoGW CIA
  • Scoop ISP, black box, NARUS, Model ST-6400, 
  • Notes, search terms: internet protocol Detail Record, analyzes data 'meaning' impeach bush
  • Serendipity: Timeline of CIA atrocities, School of the Americas, 
  • C/Net downloads
  • Findlaw NSA
  • Eric Umansky
  • Findlaw, Dean
  • Hoover's Narus
  • Liquid Matrix China asks Narus for tech to block VOIP calls.  
  • EFF State Secrets Act invoked on wiretapping lawsuit.  National Security Agency
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • Wired search Narus, Amdocs
  • Notes, search terms, EFF lawsuit against AT&T over their secret work with NSA, ST-6400, content triggers, Narus Insight, Ori Cohen, VDONet, JP Morgan Partners, Mayfied, NeoCarta, Presidio Venture Partners, Walden International, Intel, NTT Software, Sumisho Electronics, William P. Crowell, 
  • Schema-Root AIPAC, Weisman, search Rosen Franklin,
  • Schneier search terms: Operation Shamrock, FISA, FISC, and:legal links
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file Dec 16, 2005
  • Wired  stepped forward to disclose installation of NSA equipment (Narus ST-6400)  in San Francisco trunk facility, NarusInsight
  • Notes, search terms: internet protocol Detail Record, analyzes data 'meaning', voice recognition, business cards, social network analysis,
  • Amdocs search Narus
  • American National Union Should Hayden be confirmed or court-martialed
  • Comverse and Information Clearing House Carl Cameron report  and see CALEA
  • Comverse CEO resigns amid options probe, MORE below
  • Center for Strategic and International 
  • Defense Tech Telcos Deny NSA Ties - and Allowed to Lie?
  • FCC, won't investigate warrantless wiretapping because Bush effectively used the State Secrets defense to shut them down.
  • Narus see Pen-Link, Man-tech, Verisign, Datacraft, Giza Systems.
  • Narus Partners see Pen-Link, Man-tech, Verisign, Datacraft, Giza Systems...more
  • Republicans who are against Bush spying are an irrelevant impotent and small group.
  • New York Times  NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file Dec 16, 2005
  • Narus Board of Directors  Notes on Narus: Narus is a private company founded in 1997 by Ori Cohen, was  in charge of tech development for VDONet,  media streaming pioneer. It has venture funding from  investors including JP Morgan Partners, Mayfield, NeoCarta, Presidio Venture Partners, Walden International, Intel, NTT Software and Sumisho Electronics
  • WMR At first blush, the recent adoption by the House of Representatives of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, which gives telecommunications companies that illegally eavesdropped on the telephone conversations, faxes, text messages, and emails of Americans retroactive immunity from lawsuits from privacy-violated and aggrieved customers, would see to have little to do with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  ...  However, the support for the bill by AIPAC's biggest boosters, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, whose sister, Bernice Manocherian, was an executive president of AIPAC, and Jane Harman, who was slated to become chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) but whose nomination was nixed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after a Justice Department investigation of Harman's contacts with AIPAC  ....    To ensure a lock on the no retroactive lawsuit provisions, the man who became HPSCI chair, Sylvestre Reyes, supported the measure. He was joined by other AIPAC sure bets, including Brad Sherman (D-CA), Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), John Yarmuth (KY), Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Jason Altmire (D-PA), and, for added measure Pelosi. full article
Apple, Iphone, Google Android     top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • Mobiledia Court Allows Phone Searches Without Warrants   U.S. federal appeals court ruled certain forms of warrantless cell phone tracking do not violate Fourth Amendment laws, heating up the debate over consumer privacy on mobile devices   ...   The ruling covers an Indiana case where police officers tracked cell numbers of phones found at the scene of a drug bust. The judges in the appeal ruled that law enforcement's looking up the cell phone's number on the devices did not violate search and seizure laws.    ..   This ruling will likely be revisited, as an ongoing debate on how law enforcement treats mobile phone privacy in regards to criminal tracking and the Fourth Amendment heats up. Multiple cases are testing boundaries, and courts are issuing various rulings, drawing differing lines between what kinds of searches violate privacy protections.  more
  • WMR April 22-24, 2011 -- I-Phone, Android back doors are courtesy of the NSA.    ...   News reports that Apple's I-Phone and I-Pads, as well as Google's Android operating system-enabled phones can track a user's location, as well as Internet activities, is nothing new, according to a well-placed intelligence source. In fact, the Apple and Google "spy ware" is courtesy of a deal struck with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which is the ultimate recipient of the location and web data being collected by Apple and Google.    ...   NSA's aggressive insistence that it have "back door" access to state-of-the-art commercial communications products was on display in the 1990s when Britain's Ministry of Defense discovered eight different back doors installed in Windows 98 and subsequent releases of the operating system. Microsoft is a long-time partner of the NSA in ensuring that its products are accessible by the American eavesdropping agency.    ...   Although Britain's Government Communications Headquarters is a signals intelligence (SIGINT) partner of the NSA, a "rainbow team" representing computer security experts, drawn from multiple British government agencies. discovered the NSA back doors while conducting a security evaluation of Britain's latest tank battlefield system. While back engineering the Microsoft source code at their research facility at Farnborough, the team discovered the eight NSA back doors.    ...   Microsoft threatened legal action against the British government for what the firm considered to be the illegal examination of its source code. However, after the British government claimed Crown immunity and threatened to leak the information about the NSA back doors to the media, Microsoft backed down. Britain removed the eight back doors and was able to secure its tank and other battlefield systems from the NSA.    ...   Apple and Google, like Microsoft, have remained quiet about the surveillance capabilities of their products. WMR's intelligence source stresses that the silence from Apple and google is being directed by the actual developer of the surveillance back doors, the NSA.    PakAlertPress
  • CNN  2012 Under Apple's patent, a traveler's phone would automatically send electronic identification to a TSA agent as soon as the traveler gets in line. While each traveler waits in line, TSA agents would examine the electronic ID at an electronic viewing station. Next, at the X-ray stations, a traveler's phone would confirm to security agents that the traveler's ID had already been checked. Throughout the process, the phone photo could be displayed on a screen for comparison with the traveler. Facial recognition software could be included in the process. (See details on Apple's proposal in the photo gallery above.) The patent documents offer a surprising number of details which open doors to key questions about the system, but Apple declined to discuss the patent. The TSA wouldn't comment either on the viability of Apple's plan. But other government officials, aviation authorities and longtime industry experts say Apple faces at least three high hurdles if they want to see this idea to fruition. Verification Several experts say a key question that must be answered is: How would you prove that the phone is yours? In other words, how would you prove that the e-passport is actually you? To get around this problem, future phones or electronic ID may require some form of biometric security function -- like fingerprint matching. In general, passports must be designed to be difficult to copy. Recent security changes to U.S. passports have included a hidden radio frequency identification chip to hinder counterfeiters. The chip includes the same data as the paper passport, a unique chip ID number, a digital version of the passport holder's photo "which will facilitate the use of face recognition technology at ports-of-entry," according to the State Department website.
  • EFF NSA Spying  The U.S. government with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.   ...   News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports plus a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of their telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution.    ...   The evidence also shows that the government did not act alone. EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed “this isn’t a wiretap it’s a country-tap.”
Appliance Surveillance     top
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  • CDC Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

  • Biowatch, detect biological warfare threats. fear Bush.
  • Dept of Health and Human Services.
  • Dept of Homeland Security domestic spying
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Virage Inc Video analysis and contact extraction. Part of the Autonomy Group
  • YouTube  CIA Director Promotes Surveillance, Endorses Bugging Home
  • Wired More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them. Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”  “Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”
 
Auto Black Box     top
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  • CDC Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • ComputerWorld When you are car shopping, how many times has a salesman pitched the 15 to 30 specific data elements constantly being collected by the car's black box as you drive?
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • Biowatch, detect biological warfare threats. fear Bush.
  • Dept of Health and Human Services.
  • Dept of Homeland Security domestic spying
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Virage Inc Video analysis and contact extraction. Part of the Autonomy Group
  • ComputerWorld When you are car shopping, how many times has a salesman pitched the 15 to 30 specific data elements constantly being collected by the car's black box as you drive? Probably never, but there's electronic data everywhere and that includes your car collecting digital evidence which might turn into the star witness to testify against you. You may not think about or be aware of your vehicle's event data recorder (EDR), yet it is constantly recording evidence like a plane's "black box" and is being used after a crash to explain why it happened.   Way back in 2006, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) mandated that all new vehicles be equipped with EDR "black boxes" by the 2013 model year [PDF]. 85% of U.S. vehicles now have EDR devices that "must capture and preserve at least 15 types of crash data, including pre-crash speed, engine throttle, changes in forward velocity and airbag deployment times." Some capture 30 types of data.   What cars are equipped to narc on you? According to Crash Forensics, "As of 2011, GM vehicles as old as 1994 have accessible data, Ford vehicles as old as 2001 have accessible data, Chrysler vehicles as old as 2005 have accessible data, Toyota and Lexis vehicles as old as 2006 have accessible data, as well as some Isuzu, Fiat, Mitsubishi, Scion, Sterling, and Suzuki vehicles." You can also check this list [PDF] or this list [PDF] for vehicles with accessible EDRs.  Does that data about your driving belong to you or to insurance companies? It really depends where you have an accident since some courts have ruled the info belongs to the insurance companies and others have ruled the data belongs to drivers. As IEEE pointed out, "In the 37 states without EDR laws, there are no ground rules preventing insurance companies from obtaining the data-sometimes without the vehicle owner ever knowing that the data existed." John Tomaszewski, general counsel at TRUSTe, said "People should not relinquish their Fourth Amendment rights merely because of the location of their information." What about your right to plead the Fifth Amendment and not witness against yourself?
 
Automatic License Plate Recognition     top    MORE
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  • DeathandTaxes
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • Wikipedia Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR;
  • Wikipedia Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR; see also other names below) is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read vehicle registration plates. They can use existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task. They are used by various police forces and as a method of electronic toll collection on pay-per-use roads and cataloging the movements of traffic or individuals. ANPR can be used to store the images captured by the cameras as well as the text from the license plate, with some configurable to store a photograph of the driver. Systems commonly use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of the day.[1][2] ANPR technology tends to be region-specific, owing to plate variation from place to place. Concerns about these systems have centered on privacy fears of government tracking citizens' movements, misidentification, high error rates, and increased government spending.
  • DeathandTaxes  NEWS License plate readers enhance Big Brother’s intrusive gaze By DJ Pangburn 51 days ago This month the ACLU has launched a nationwide effort to demand information from police departments and other authorities about automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), arguing that they violate privacy. Are ALPRs yet another eye of Big Brother or is the ACLU’s freedom of information request much ado about nothing? “ALPRs are cameras mounted on stationary objects (telephone poles, the underside of bridges, etc.) or on patrol cars,” writes the ACLU. “The cameras snap a photograph of every license plate that passes them by – capturing information on up to thousands of cars per minute. The devices convert each license plate number into machine-readable text and check them against agency-selected databases or manually-entered license plate numbers, providing an alert to a patrol officer whenever a match or ‘hit’ appears.” As with drone technology, no longer do the watchmen have to try to be everywhere at once—they are everywhere at once. According to the ACLU, “When the ALPR system captures an image of a car, it also meta-tags each file with the GPS location and the time and date showing where and when the photograph was snapped.” The ACLU notes that often And often, the photograph of the license plate is also stored in a database. “The system gathers this information on every car it comes in contact with, not simply those to which some flag or ‘hit’ was attached.”
 
Biosurveillance, Biowatch     top
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  • CDC Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Dept of Health and Human Services.
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CALEA Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act    top
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  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • ZD Net  search: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
  • VOIP wiretapping
  • Wired  Fed step up push to tap internet phone calls
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
 
 
CAPPS, CAPPS II, Secure Flight   airline no-fly list    top
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  • Cnet Tech News First, search Carnivore
  • PrivacyDigest privacy news
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • ACLU  The proposed airline profiling program CAPPS II (for Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System) was terminated in August 2004 and replaced by a similar program called Secure Flight. CAPPS II was a proposal to give the government a new role unprecedented in American life: running background checks on Americans who fly, and giving them a ""risk score."" Secretive, lacking due process protections for people who are unfairly tagged, and yet easy for terrorists to circumvent, this program once put in place will grow into a most un-American system of internal border controls.
  • Wikipedia CAPPS (Computer Aided Passenger Pre-screening System) systems rely on what is known as a Passenger Name Record, often abbreviated PNR. When a person books a plane ticket, certain identifying information is collected by the airline: full name, address, etc. This information is used to check against some data store (e.g., a TSA No-Fly list, the FBI ten most wanted fugitive list, etc.) and assign a terrorism "risk score" to that person. High risk scores require the airline to subject the person to extended baggage and/or personal screening, and to contact law enforcement if necessary.
Carnivore, DCS 1000, EtherPeek       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First, search Carnivore
  • PrivacyDigest privacy news
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
 
Cell Site Tracking      top
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  • Cnet Tech News First, search Carnivore
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  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • Wired Court OKs Warrantless Cell-Site Tracking BY DAVID KRAVETS EMAIL AUTHOR 09.07.10 6:33 PM A federal appeals court said Tuesday the government may obtain cell-site information that mobile phone carriers retain on their customers without a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment.  ...
  • Wired Court OKs Warrantless Cell-Site Tracking BY DAVID KRAVETS EMAIL AUTHOR 09.07.10 6:33 PM A federal appeals court said Tuesday the government may obtain cell-site information that mobile phone carriers retain on their customers without a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment.  ...   The decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (.pdf) was not, however, an outright Obama administration victory. Lower courts, the three-judge panel wrote, could demand the government show probable cause — the warrant standard — before requiring carriers to release such data to the feds.    ...   The opinion does leaves the privacy issue in a legal limbo of sorts. The standard by which the government can access such records — which can be used in criminal prosecutions — is left to the whims of district court judges. Historical cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months, identifies the cell tower to which the customer was connected at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call.    ...   Lower courts across the country have issued conflicting rulings on the topic and will continue to do so without appellate guidance or congressional action. The Philadelphia-based court was the first appeals court to address the issue.    ...   The Obama administration argued a judge could force a carrier to produce cell-site data on a showing that the information was “relevant and material” to an investigation.   ...   But the appeals court, ruling in a narcotics case, said the Stored Communications Act, the law in question, was vague as to what standard was required.    ...   The court left open the possibility that it would revisit the case again and decide whether the constitution requires a warrant for the cell site data. The court said the statute itself could be interpreted as not requiring one.   ...   The judges did not directly address the constitutionality of the statute, said Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which weighed in on the case with a friend-of-the-court brief.
Census Bureau      top
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  • WMR By Wayne Madsen According to US Census Bureau documents, the U.S. Census Bureau shared confidential census data files with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Of particular interest to DHS were census files on U.S. citizens of Arab ancestry sorted by individual ZIP code tabulation areas. In a U.S. Census Bureau memo dated April 23, 2004, a senior systems analyst with the Population Division writes to DHS that "my superiors are now asking questions about the usage of the data, given the sensitivity of different data requests we have received about the Arab population." The Branch Officer of the DHS Customs and Border Protection Bureau's Container Security Division Operational Support and Oversight Branch responds to the Census Bureau concern by stating that the information on Americans of Arab ancestry is required for "U.S. Outbound operations; which include both cargo and passenger operations." The Branch Chief continues by stating, "at U.S. International airports, U.S. Customs posts signage informing various nationalities of the U.S. Customs regulations to report currency brought into the US upon entry. Current regulations require passengers bringing more than $10,000 into the U.S. to claim it on a currency entry declaration . . . My reason for asking for U.S. demographic data is to aid the Outbound Passenger Program Officer in identifying which language of signage, based on U.S. ethnic nationality population, would be best to post at the major International airports. Some cases this would identify multiple copies needed of a specific language sign versus other cities only one copy." more
CODIS Collect DNA from every arrest     top
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  • Wikipedia CODIS The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is a DNA database funded by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It is a computer system that stores DNA profiles created by federal, state, and local crime laboratories in the United States, with the ability to search the database to assist in the identification of suspects in crimes
  • Wikipedia CODIS The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is a DNA database funded by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It is a computer system that stores DNA profiles created by federal, state, and local crime laboratories in the United States, with the ability to search the database to assist in the identification of suspects in crimes. CODIS was an outgrowth of the Technical Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (TWGDAM, now SWGDAM) which developed guidelines for standards of practice in the United States and Canadian crime laboratories as they began DNA testing in the late 1980s. TWGDAM was sponsored by the FBI Laboratory which hosted several scientific meetings a year at Quantico, Virginia, to accelerate development of laboratory guidelines and peer-reviewed papers to support forensic DNA testing which was, to some, an unproven forensic tool. TWGDAM completed a white paper in October 1989 which provided conceptual and operational concepts for a Combined DNA Index System to share DNA profiles among crime laboratories similarly to automated fingerprint identification which had become commonplace in law enforcement during the 1980s. The FBI Laboratory began a pilot project with six state and local crime laboratories to develop software to support each laboratory's DNA testing and allow sharing of DNA profiles with other crime laboratories. The DNA Identification Act of 1994 formally authorized the FBI to operate CODIS and set national standards for forensic DNA testing. The TWGDAM guidelines served as interim standards until recommendations were provided by a DNA Advisory Board required under the Act. Although the Act was passed in 1994, CODIS did not become fully operational until 1998.  The CODIS database originally was primarily used to collect DNA of convicted sex offenders. Over time, this has expanded. Currently all fifty states have mandatory DNA collection from certain felony offenses such as sexual assault and homicide, and 47 states collect DNA from all convicted felons. Other states have gone further in collecting DNA samples from juveniles and all suspects arrested. In California, as a result of Proposition 69 in 2004, all suspects arrested for a felony, as well as some individuals convicted of misdemeanors, will have their DNA collected starting in 2009. In addition to this, all members of the US Armed Services who are convicted at a Special court martial and above are ordered to provide DNA samples, even if their crime has no civilian equivalent (for example adultery). Currently, the ACLU is concerned with the increased use of collecting DNA from arrested suspects rather than DNA testing for convicted felons. Along with the ACLU, civil libertarians oppose the use of a DNA database for privacy concerns as well as possible institutionalized discrimination policies in collection.
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
COFEE Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor      top
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  • Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.  The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive  Seattle Times  The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer. 
Controlled Drug Users       top
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  • WMR The Drug Enforcement Agency says it does track prescriptions of so-called controlled substances — including some mood-altering medications — but not all prescriptions made in the United States." The issue is to what extent does the DEA track prescription drug users and what prompted the government to check on records pertaining to Cho Seung-hui, who was reported to have been treated for mental problems in the past? The Psychotropic Substances Act of 1978 added mind-altering drugs to the list of official Controlled Substances. Prescriptions for these controlled substances have a "DEA Number" used for tracking controlled substances. The Cho incident and the comments and quick retractions by "senior federal officials" indicate that there is a secret federal government capability to track controlled drug users.
DARPA, ARPA, IARPA, IPTO       top
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  • ExtremeTech In 2008, DARPA, the US military’s elite group of pocket protector warriors, began soliciting the tech industry to develop technologies that would allow computers to sort through and index surveillance footage from the military’s fleet of drones, satellites, and miscellaneous other super secret spy cameras. This was all part of the Agency’s proposed Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) that would be able to describe specific human activities in real-time. This automated index would allow for searchable queries (i.e. “how often did an adult male taller than six-foot get in a car in the early morning between November 1st and December 22nd in this compound in Abbottabad?”) or flag behavior such as when someone carries a large package towards a car on the side of a road in Basra, but walked away empty handed. And it appears that DARPA has had some success to this end. Earlier this week, the military released a mandated contract announcement describing how the VIRAT system will be deployed into various military-intelligence video archives and systems. The contract will be fulfilled by Lockheed Martin for an unspecified amount. We haven’t been given any detailed information on how this new technology works or how accurate it is, only that a belt-tightening defense industry is willing to invest in it.
  • Wikipedia IARPA Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from IARPA) The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a United States research agency under the Director of National Intelligence's responsibility. In January 2008, Lisa Porter, an administrator at NASA with experience at DARPA, was appointed director[1] of the activity formed in 2006 from the National Security Agency's Disruptive Technology Office (DTO), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology Alliance and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Intelligence Technology Innovation Center.[2] Contents [hide] 1 Goals 2 Program offices 3 The Metaphor Program 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links [edit]Goals   ...   "IARPA's mission [is] to invest in high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide the United States with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries." – FBI National Press Release, 2009[3] The Director of National Intelligence in a September 2006 speech stated that the goal of the agency[4] is to conduct research that Cuts across multiple IC agencies; Targets new opportunities that lie in the white spaces between agencies; Provides innovations that agencies avoid because of current business models; and Generates revolutionary capabilities that will surprise our adversaries and help us avoid being surprised. Program offices    ...   IARPA is divided into three program offices, Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe & Secure Operations. The goal of the Office of Smart Collection is to "dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources." The Office of Incisive Analysis exists to "maximize insight from the information we collect, in a timely fashion." IARPA's third division, the Office of Safe & Secure Operations, exists to "counter new capabilities implemented by our adversaries that would threaten our ability to operate freely and effectively in a networked world." [edit]The Metaphor Program    ...  The Metaphor Program is a two-phase project designed to first develop automated techniques for recognizing, defining and categorizing linguistic metaphors and then use that information to characterize differing cultural perspectives. The Program is headed by Heather McCallum-Bayliss. On May 2011, IARPA issued an open solicitation for private sector parties to participate in the Program
  • Wikipedia The Disruptive Technology Office (DTO) is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. It was until recently known as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA). ARDA was created in 1998 after the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by the Director of Central Intelligence and the Department of Defense, and took responsibility for funding some of DARPA's projects. ARDA evaluates proposals and funds speculative research, particularly in the fields of data mining, video processing, and quantum computing. There has been speculation that the DTO is continuing research efforts started under the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO). Data-mining activities within the US Department of Defense are controversial and have met with public and congressional disapproval. Although ARDA's budget is presumably classified as part of the intelligence budget, the New York Times quoted an unnamed former government official saying the agency spent about $100 million a year in 2003. The Associated Press reports that ARDA had a staff of only eight in 2004. Headquartered at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, site of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, ARDA/DTO has kept a low profile, quietly funding research of interest to the intelligence community. In December 2007, DTO was folded into the newly created IARPA  A move to a research park near the University of Maryland, College Park was announced at about the same time [2].
    • BICA: project to create "Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures"
    • Bootstrapped Learning: a project to bring about "instructable computing" by driving the creation of machine learning algorithms that are responsive to models of human-to-human instruction
    • LifeLog, an IPTO project "to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships" by creating "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities."
    • FORESTER: a program to develop a helicopter-borne radar system that can detect soldiers and vehicles moving underneath folliage cover
    • VIRAT: analysis and storage of video surveillance data
    • Deep Green: U.S. Army battlefield decision-making support system
    • Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team: aerial surveillance program designed to monitor cities with self-directed UAVs
    • High Productivity Computing Systems: project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2007 to 2010 timeframe

 
Data Mining for profit, Acxiom and Epsilon      top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
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  • TheEconomic Collapse Blog  Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit   When most people think of "Big Brother", they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies.  
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.

 

  • TheEconomic Collapse Blog  Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit   When most people think of "Big Brother", they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies. Yes, they are definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations. In fact, there are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for profit to anyone willing to pay the price. It is called "data mining", and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything that you do. Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but data mining goes far beyond that. When you use a customer rewards card at the supermarket, the data miners know about it. When you pay for a purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about it. Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to someone. Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations is notified. Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than ever before. But that also means that our personal information is no longer "private", and this trend is only going to get worse in the years ahead.   ...   You have probably never even heard of many of these companies that are making millions of dollars selling your personal information. Acxiom and Epsilon are two of the biggest names in the industry, and most of the time they are selling your information to companies that want to sell you stuff.   Almost every single day, very personal information about you is being bought and sold without your permission and it is all perfectly legal. 
DHS       top
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  • WMR EMAIL BLOCKING THROUGH CENSORWARE  By Wayne Madsen  U.S. intelligence agency officials, speaking on background, are reporting that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are intercepting and blocking email from and to selected individuals and organizations within the United States and around the world. Through the use of the same type of web filtering "censorware" employed by state security organizations in China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, DHS and the FBI have entered into agreements with major Internet Service Providers to intercept and block email for "national security" purposes. 
  • Complete list of DHS monitoring keywords:  Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Coast Guard (USCG) Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Border Patrol Secret Service (USSS) National Operations Center (NOC) Homeland Defense Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent Task Force Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Fusion Center Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Secure Border Initiative (SBI) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) National Guard Red Cross United Nations (UN) Assassination Attack Domestic security Drill Exercise Cops Law enforcement Authorities Disaster assistance Disaster management DNDO (Domestic Nuclear Detection Office) National preparedness Mitigation Prevention Response Recovery Dirty bomb Domestic nuclear detection Emergency management Emergency response First responder Homeland security Maritime domain awareness (MDA) National preparedness initiative Militia Shooting Shots fired Evacuation Deaths Hostage Explosion (explosive) Police Disaster medical assistance team (DMAT) Organized crime Gangs National security State of emergency Security Breach Threat Standoff SWAT Screening Lockdown Bomb (squad or threat) Crash Looting Riot Emergency Landing Pipe bomb Incident Facility Hazmat Nuclear Chemical spill Suspicious package/device Toxic National laboratory Nuclear facility Nuclear threat Cloud Plume Radiation Radioactive Leak Biological infection (or event) Chemical Chemical burn Biological Epidemic Hazardous Hazardous material incident Industrial spill Infection Powder (white) Gas Spillover Anthrax Blister agent Chemical agent Exposure Burn Nerve agent Ricin Sarin North Korea Outbreak Contamination Exposure Virus Evacuation Bacteria Recall Ebola Food Poisoning Foot and Mouth (FMD) H5N1 Avian Flu Salmonella Small Pox Plague Human to human Human to Animal Influenza Center for Disease Control (CDC) Drug Administration (FDA) Public Health Toxic Agro Terror Tuberculosis (TB) Agriculture Listeria Symptoms Mutation Resistant Antiviral Wave Pandemic Infection Water/air borne Sick Swine Pork Strain Quarantine H1N1 Vaccine Tamiflu Norvo Virus Epidemic World Health Organization (WHO) (and components) Viral Hemorrhagic Fever E. Coli Infrastructure security Airport CIKR (Critical Infrastructure & Key Resources) AMTRAK Collapse Computer infrastructure Communications infrastructure Telecommunications Critical infrastructure National infrastructure Metro WMATA Airplane (and derivatives) Chemical fire Subway BART MARTA Port Authority NBIC (National Biosurveillance Integration Center) Transportation security Grid Power Smart Body scanner Electric Failure or outage Black out Brown out Port Dock Bridge Cancelled Delays Service disruption Power lines Drug cartel Violence Gang Drug Narcotics Cocaine Marijuana Heroin Border Mexico Cartel Southwest Juarez Sinaloa Tijuana Torreon Yuma Tucson Decapitated U.S. Consulate Consular El Paso Fort Hancock San Diego Ciudad Juarez Nogales Sonora Colombia Mara salvatrucha MS13 or MS-13 Drug war Mexican army Methamphetamine Cartel de Golfo Gulf Cartel La Familia Reynosa Nuevo Leon Narcos Narco banners (Spanish equivalents) Los Zetas Shootout Execution Gunfight Trafficking Kidnap Calderon Reyosa Bust Tamaulipas Meth Lab Drug trade Illegal immigrants Smuggling (smugglers) Matamoros Michoacana Guzman Arellano-Felix Beltran-Leyva Barrio Azteca Artistic Assassins Mexicles New Federation Terrorism Al Qaeda (all spellings) Terror Attack Iraq Afghanistan Iran Pakistan Agro Environmental terrorist Eco terrorism Conventional weapon Target Weapons grade Dirty bomb Enriched Nuclear Chemical weapon Biological weapon Ammonium nitrate Improvised explosive device IED (Improvised Explosive Device) Abu Sayyaf Hamas FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces Colombia) IRA (Irish Republican Army) ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) Basque Separatists Hezbollah Tamil Tigers PLF (Palestine Liberation Front) PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization Car bomb Jihad Taliban Weapons cache Suicide bomber Suicide attack Suspicious substance AQAP (AL Qaeda Arabian Peninsula) AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) Yemen Pirates Extremism Somalia Nigeria Radicals Al-Shabaab Home grown Plot Nationalist Recruitment Fundamentalism Islamist Emergency Hurricane Tornado Twister Tsunami Earthquake Tremor Flood Storm Crest Temblor Extreme weather Forest fire Brush fire Ice Stranded/Stuck Help Hail Wildfire Tsunami Warning Center Magnitude Avalanche Typhoon Shelter-in-place Disaster Snow Blizzard Sleet Mud slide or Mudslide Erosion Power outage Brown out Warning Watch Lightening Aid Relief Closure Interstate Burst Emergency Broadcast System Cyber security Botnet DDOS (dedicated denial of service) Denial of service Malware Virus Trojan Keylogger Cyber Command 2600 Spammer Phishing Rootkit Phreaking Cain and abel Brute forcing Mysql injection Cyber attack Cyber terror Hacker China Conficker Worm Scammers Social media
Digital TV       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
 
 
There is a connection between NSA phone records database , Amdocs and 9/11.
DNA databases       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
 
Drones & Balloons, HART / HURT      top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Wikipedia The Heterogeneous Aerial Reconnaissance Team (HART) -- formerly known as the "Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team (HURT)" -- program was an aerial surveillance project funded by the Information Processing Technology Office (which was merged into the Wikipedia Information Innovation Office) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with program managers John Bay and Michael Pagels. The purpose of the program was to develop systems that could provide continuous, real-time, three-dimensional surveillance of large urbanized areas, using unmanned aerial vehicles. The project team was led by Northrop Grumman corporation, and involved several other academic and corporate researchers.The unique features of the HART program are that it developed systems to "decouple soldiers from flight control" -- that is, the UAVs automatically pilot themselves—taking care of flight control, collision prevention, and camera/sensor control automatically. When the drones notice suspicious activity, they notify the person with the HART control panel so that they can monitor the situation. Another feature of HART was to design handheld devices, to display surveillance video to small unit leaders in the field (as opposed to only being available to officers/agents in a control room). A third significant feature is that troops can request surveillance in an area, and a set of drones will automatically come over and take care of it themselves—all the soldiers have to do is ask for it, and then they can forget about it.
and also see Totse Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities by DEA Remember FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King, 

What are connections between Amdocs, Narus (Semantic Traffic Analysis) and NSA phone records database?  Tony Snow, Carl Cameron, FoxNews report on Israeli art students removed?  Why?

Drug Testing       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
DSL Internet Service  top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
Echelon       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
Einstein, Network Infrastructure, Deep Packet Inspection
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • RipoffReport Certifion   Certifion Corporation - Locate America ripoff company made additional charges of $60+ to my credit card without my permission Internet *Editor's Suggestions on how to get your money back into your bank account!
  • notes: Accurint, ChoicePoint's Autotrack or LexisNexis
  • GlobalResearch  Under the rubric of cybersecurity, the Obama administration is moving forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.
  • Certifion
  • Entersect a subsidiary of Certifion,
  • LocatePlus  claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans.
  • Washington Post
  • notes Despite protests to the contrary by securocrats, like other Bush and Obama “cybersecurity” initiatives the Einstein program is a backdoor for pervasive state surveillance. Government Computer News reported in December 2008 that Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said that “the misuse or exposure of sensitive data from such a program [Einstein] could undermine the security arguments for surveillance.”
  • WMR "... WMR has learned from government sources that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the "Einstein" program.  ...   Billed as a cyber-security intrusion detection system for federal computer systems and networks, WMR has been told that the actual intent of Einstein is to initially monitor the email and web surfing activities of federal employees and contractors and not in protecting government computer systems from intrusion by outsiders.   ...  In February 2008, President Bush signed a directive that designated the National Security Agency (NSA) as the central administrator for the federal government's computer and network security.   ...   Although Einstein is primarily a program under the aegis of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) of the National Cyber Security Division of the Homeland Security Department, WMR has learned that it has the personal support of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, a former NSA director. Einstein is advertised as merely conducting traffic analysis within the dot (.) gov and dot (.) mil domains, including data packet lengths, protocols, source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, time stamp information, and autonomous system numbers. However, WMR has learned that Einstein will also bore down into the text of email and analyze message content. In fact, most of the classified budget allotted to Einstein is being used for collecting information from the text of messages and not the header data." full story ... more search terms: PINWHEEL, PINWALE, GCSB, New Zealand, private sector surveillance, black projects, .com, .edu, .int, .gov, .mil, FCC, black budgets, Vodaphone, cellular phone eavesdropping, Greece, locked field, trap door, sub system,
  • GlobalResearch Called the “flagship system” in the national security state’s cyber defense arsenal, The Wall Street Journal reports that Einstein is “designed to protect the U.S. government’s computer networks from cyberspies.” In addition to cost overruns and mismanagement by outsourced contractors, the system “is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns.” According to the Journal, Einstein is being developed in three stages: Einstein 1: Monitors Internet traffic flowing in and out of federal civilian networks. Detects abnormalities that might be cyber attacks. Is unable to block attacks. Einstein 2: In addition to looking for abnormalities, detects viruses and other indicators of attacks based on signatures of known incidents, and alerts analysts immediately. Also can’t block  attacks. Einstein 3: Under development. Based on technology developed for a National Security Agency program called Tutelage, it detects and deflects security breaches. Its filtering technology can read the content of email and other communications. (Siobhan Gorman, “Troubles Plague Cyberspy Defense,” The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009)
Electronic Passport, top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Notes: search terms, carrier-grade networks, NetDiscovery, IP-based, intelligent infrastructure services, IP security and compliance management, NarusSecure, monitoring, VOIP, IMS, IPTV, real-time traffic insight, NarusInsight, 
Email Surveillance, top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Notes: search terms, carrier-grade networks, NetDiscovery, IP-based, intelligent infrastructure services, IP security and compliance management, NarusSecure, monitoring, VOIP, IMS, IPTV, real-time traffic insight, NarusInsight, 
Entersect       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • RipoffReport Certifion   Certifion Corporation - Locate America ripoff company made additional charges of $60+ to my credit card without my permission Internet *Editor's Suggestions on how to get your money back into your bank account!
  • notes: Accurint, ChoicePoint's Autotrack or LexisNexis
  • Certifion
  • Entersect a subsidiary of Certifion,
  • LocatePlus  claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans.
  • Washington Post
  •  
  • WayneMadsenReport An April 2, 2008 article in The Washington Post by Robert O'Harrow that reported on the expansion of intelligence "fusion centers" around the country that are compiling personal information on Americans from a CIA database called "Proton," the FBI, police departments, and private data mining firms referred to a little-known private data company called Entersect, which is routinely tapped by Maryland law enforcement and homeland security entities.  ...  The Post article stated that Entersect has 12 billion files on 98 percent of Americans. Entersect is headquartered in Santa Ana, California and is a subsidiary of Certifion Corporation, which is, in turn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of LocatePlus Holdings Corporation. LocatePlus' other subsidiaries are LocatePlus Corp., Dataphant, Inc. (which acquired Voice Power Technology, Inc.), and Metrigenics, Inc., a biometrics firm.
  • WMR  NSA / Trailblazer   More high-level fraud at NSA uncovered    January 18-19, 2012 --   WMR's sources at the National Security Agency (NSA) have reported more high-level fraud at the agency that now combines signals intelligence and cyber-warfare functions under one officer, Army General Keith Alexander, the NSA director and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.    ...   When Alexander's predecessor at NSA, Air Force General Michael Hayden, was shopping for his own replacement, Alexander was the Deputy Chief of Staff for G-2 for the U.S. Army. Alexander would only take the job, according to our sources who were embedded in the Director of NSA's office, if Dr. James Heath became the senior science adviser to Alexander at NSA.    ...   There was only one problem. Heath had his own company, Object Sciences Corporation, a firm which was intimately involved with tracking "Al Qaeda" operatives prior to the 9/11 attacks. Object Sciences provided deep data mining services to the Army's Land Information Warfare Agency's and Defense Intelligence Agency's ABLE DANGER and its affiliated DORHAWK GALLEY data mining programs.    ...   At the same time, Hayden had shown favoritism to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in awarding the firm, as prime contractor, the over one billion dollar signals intelligence overhaul program known as TRAILBLAZER. Hayden hired William Black, a former NSA official who had retired and went to work for SAIC, as his Deputy Director at NSA. The issue with Heath was solved when SAIC purchased Object Sciences, providing a handsome profit to Heath prior to his taking the science adviser position under his friend Alexander. Black eventually returned to SAIC from his stint as NSA deputy director.    ...   The following press release was issued on May 12, 2005: "Science Applications International Corp. has completed its acquisition of Object Sciences Corp., the company announced today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed . . . OSC's involvement in reshaping how intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance information is processed and analyzed has provided critical assistance to combat forces in specific theaters, such as Iraq and Korea, as well as the war on global terrorism in general, SAIC said."    ...   Alexander took over as NSA director on August 1, 2005, a few months after the SAIC-OSC deal. Heath then became Alexander's chief science adviser.     ...   Another former SAIC principal who, like Black, transitioned from SAIC to NSA and back again to SAIC was Sam Visner. After joining NSA from SAIC, Visner was the senior acquisition manager for NSA and was key to the award of the TRAILBLAZERcontract to SAIC. A less expensive signals intelligence re-engineering solution code-named THIN THREAD, was rejected by NSA in favor of the TRAILBLAZER, which was later canceled after SAIC pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars.    ...   Hayden went on to become the first deputy Director of National Intelligence and, ultimately, the CIA director. He now works with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at Chertoff Group. His pet project, TRAILBLAZER, was canceled due to cost overruns and failed deliveries and was replaced by another reported contractor boondoggle called TURBULENCE. A number of senior NSA, Justice Department, and congressional officials were harassed and one, Thomas Drake, prosecuted for revealing the corruption. Those coming under NSA and FBI scrutiny, all subjected to harassment and threat of prosecution, included, in addition to Drake, Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm, House Intelligence Committee budget specialist Diane Roark, NSA officials William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Ed Loomis, and others, never mentioned in press accounts, who were interviewed by WMR.    ...   One former NSA official who was terminated and then placed under NSA Security and FBI surveillance after reporting through proper channels fraud, waste, and abuse with TRAILBLAZER and associated contracts, told WMR, "we are not whistleblowers but witnesses to major crimes committed by NSA and contractors."    ...   Among the spin-offs of TRAILBLAZERwas the unconstitutional STELLAR WIND program that permitted NSA to engage in wholesale warrantless wiretapping of phone calls, emails, and faxes, particularly journalists and elected political leaders.    ...   Hayden, who has become a national security adviser to Mitt Romney and would be assured a top-level job in a Romney administration, perhaps National Security Adviser, is also involved with a subscription web service called LIGNet, or "Langley Intelligence Group Network" as a "LIGNet adviser." WMR has been told by intelligence community insiders that LIGNet is an operational security (OPSEC) problem because a wealth of borderline classified information appears on the web site.    ...   Some of the LIGNet information makes what was released in the WikiLeaks Department of State cable release pale in comparison. As for charges that Private First Class Bradley Manning was responsible for downloading over a quarter million classified cables from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), a former senior NSA official told WMR: "That is impossible. All SIPRNet drives are non-writable for CDs and as far as thumb drives are concerned, install one and security alarms are immediately set off."
EZPass       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • AP Yahoo story below
  • MotorAuthority  Kapsch has a ten-year agreement in place to provide transponders for 22 electronic toll systems across the United States. Kapsch’s latest patent filing is for a transponder equipped with a multi-function camera system, for the purpose of verifying the number of occupants within a vehicle. In other words, future Kapsch transponders may have the ability to monitor the inside of your car.
  • FBI
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
  • MotorAuthority  Automated toll transponder systems, like EZ Pass used in the Northeast, make life easier for those who commute on toll roads, across bridges and through tunnels. Despite initial paranoia over the devices’ ability to track your speed from one point to another, no tickets have ever been issued to motorists who arrived at a toll plaza early, courtesy of a heavy right foot. With that in mind, there are two ways to look at the latest advance in transponder systems: it’s either no big deal, or it’s the stuff of an Oliver-Stone-film-induced nightmare. Kapsch TrafficCom AG is an Austrian company that manufactures transponders for programs such as EZ Pass. In fact, Kapsch has a ten-year agreement in place to provide transponders for 22 electronic toll systems across the United States. Kapsch’s latest patent filing is for a transponder equipped with a multi-function camera system, for the purpose of verifying the number of occupants within a vehicle. In other words, future Kapsch transponders may have the ability to monitor the inside of your car.
Facial Recognition, NGI      top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • AP Yahoo story below
  • RT reported on the FBI’s ramped up efforts to implement a vast state-of-the-art face recognition project across the entire country, a system that has so far cost the Federal Bureau of Investigation at least $1 billion and has involved no fewer than seven years’ worth of development. Defense contractors Lockheed Martin were awarded the contract in 2008 and with that were tasked with creating the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, an intelligence infrastructure that the FBI insisted must be able to identify subjects in public databases, conduct automated surveillance and track personal movement from place-to-place.
  • FBI
  • Lockheed Martin
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
FBI Tracking Devices      top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Ifixit We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car.
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • AP Yahoo story below
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • FBI
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
  • Ifixit We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car. If you're curious where this one came from, Wired has posted a writeup about Kathy Thomas, the woman who found this tracker under her car. They've also posted a video of Kyle doing the teardown.   ...  The device comprises of a GPS unit for receiving the car's position, an RF transmitter for relaying your location to the interested authority (aka the FBI), and a set of sweet D-cell batteries that power the whole enchilada. But we didn't stop there, of course. Read on to find out exactly what components make this secretive device tick.    ...   Disclaimer: We love the FBI. We've worked with them on several occasions to fight crime and locate criminals. We've helped them with instructions on gaining entry into certain devices. We have nothing against them, and we hope they don't come after us for publishing this teardown.
FBI, CIA Surveillance      top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • FBI
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
FDIC Bank Transaction Surveillance    top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • FBI
  • FDIC
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
  • FDIC The FDIC has prescribed in its regulations, Section 326, Subpart B- Procedures for Monitoring Bank Secrecy Act Compliance (12 CFR Part 326.8) a requirement that depository institutions establish and maintain procedures reasonably designed to assure and monitor the compliance with the BSA and the implementing regulations 31 CFR 103. The FDIC monitors compliance with the BSA-related regulations by conducting on-site examinations of every FDIC-supervised depository institutions. BSA compliance is a safety and soundness issue due to the reputational, regulatory, legal, and financial risk exposure to the bank for being involved in money laundering schemes or willfully violating the BSA statute. Civil money penalties and regulatory enforcement actions may be imposed for noncompliance with money laundering regulations which can endanger capital and earnings. Furthermore, banks may be criminally prosecuted for willful violations of money laundering statutes, which could ultimately lead to termination of FDIC insurance.
  • Wikipedia The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (or BSA, or otherwise known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act) requires financial institutions in the United States to assist U.S. government agencies to detect and prevent money laundering. Specifically, the act requires financial institutions to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments, and file reports of cash purchases of these negotiable instruments of more than $10,000 (daily aggregate amount), and to report suspicious activity that might signify money laundering, tax evasion, or other criminal activities. Many banks will no longer sell negotiable instruments when they are purchased with cash, requiring the purchase to be withdrawn from an account at that institution. The BSA was originally passed by the Congress of the United States in 1970, and amended several times since then, including provisions in title III of the USA PATRIOT Act. (See 31 USC 5311-5330 and 31 CFR Chapter X.) The BSA is sometimes referred to as an "anti-money laundering" law ("AML") or jointly as “BSA/AML”. [1]
FEMA secret databases, Main Core, Pinwale    top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • FBI
  • FEMA
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
  • Wikipedia  Main Core is the code name of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of the United States. Main Core contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security. The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other sources, is collected and stored without warrants or court orders. The database's name derives from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community." The Main Core database is believed to have originated with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1982, following Ronald Reagan's Continuity of Operations plan outlined in the National Security Directive (NSD) 69 / National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55, entitled "Enduring National Leadership," implemented on September 14, 1982. As of 2008 there are reportedly eight million Americans listed in the database as possible threats, often for trivial reasons, whom the government may choose to track, question, or detain in a time of crisis. The existence of the database was first reported on in May 2008 by Christopher Ketcham and in July 2008 by Tim Shorrock.
  • WMR has now learned details of the Bush surveillance plan that so upset the Justice Department that there could have been a mass exodus in March 2004. In the 1980s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), then run by one of Ronald Reagan's cronies from California, former California National Guard commander Gen. Louis Giuffrida, managed to obtain from the FBI a list of some 12,000 names contained in the FBI's domestic intelligence files. When FBI Director William Webster learned that Giuffrida had used the list as a basis to create a database of 100,000 American citizens who were considered threats to national security, he demanded that Giuffrida return the list and all copies to the FBI. The list contained the names of individuals opposed to U.S. policies in Central America, tax protesters, and people known as survivalists.    ...   However, FEMA did not return all of the copies of its lists to the FBI. In the 1980s, White House official Oliver North, working with FEMA, developed a "continuity of government" contingency plan called REX-84, or "Readiness Exercise 1984," that would have instituted plans to round up and intern hundreds of thousands of American citizens in the event martial law was declared. Then-Attorney General William French Smith formally protested the existence of the North-Giuffrida plan to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. ...   FEMA, unknown to Congress, the Justice Department, and other agencies, continued to maintain its database of Americans at its underground bunker in Mount Pony in Culpepper, Virginia. After FEMA closed the Mount Pony facility, the database was moved to another secret FEMA facility.   ...   According to our well-informed sources, Card and Gonzales were trying to get Justice's approval on the reinstatement of the old FEMA plan to target American citizens with warrantless surveillance and possible incarceration pursuant to unconstitutional presidential fiat.   ...   What occurred in Ashcroft's hospital room on March 10, 2004, was a replay of 1984. Then, it was Webster and Smith who opposed North and Giuffrida on maintaining a secret database of U.S. citizens. In March 2004, it was Ashcroft, Comey, and FBI Director Robert Mueller who opposed Card's and Gonzales' illegal targeting of American citizens.    ...   After 9/11, the Bush White House used FEMA's secret and illegal database of American citizens, code-named Main Core, to target American citizens with electronic and other surveillance. FEMA's database had increased in size with the addition of raw telecommunications intercept data on American citizens obtained from the National Security Agency (NSA). Records obtained from NSA by Freedom of Information Act requests indicate that the NSA's General Counsel's office was objecting as early as 1999 to attempts by outside "consumers" of its intelligence to obtain access to raw intercept data from NSA databases.
 
FirstFruits, Warrantless Surveillance of American Journalists       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ACLU  and NSA lawsuit
  • Arstechnica  evesdropping on American Journalists, for data mining,.
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation working to protect civil and free speech
  • Big Brother and the ministry of Homeland Security
  • DailyKOS
  • Insider Magazine reprint Madsen  Bill Gertz of The Washington Times features prominently in the database. Before Hayden's reign and during the Clinton administration, Gertz was often leaked classified documents by anti-Clinton intelligence officials in an attempt to demonstrate that collusion between the administration and China was hurting U.S. national security.
  • Arstechnica  evesdropping on American Journalists, for data mining,.
  • notes: WMR has learned from additional National Security Agency (NSA) sources that this editor's (Madsen) communications -- cell phone, e-mail, text messages, and faxes -- are under a full digital interception order by the NSA. Previously, I was informed by NSA sources that a "full digital" surveillance package was authorized on all my communications.  ...   It is becoming apparent that the "Eyes Only"/compartmented code word program authorized by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the wake of the 9/11 attacks included warrantless surveillance of American journalists and their sources. WMR exposed the existence of a database containing journalist surveillance data that was code-named "FIRSTFRUITS" before the code name was changed after our disclosure.
  • What is Tearerism ?
  • Summary, 
  • NSA listening to private conversations of  Americans, data mining, blackmail? ABCNews , Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller investigating. 
  • FIRSTFRUITS NSA wiretaps of American Journalists, program revealed by Wayne Madsen, name of program then changed.  WMR  Higher Than Top Secret
  • Daily Newscaster Martial Law Training, Indianapolis --- June, 2008
  • Neil Entwistle, 911, FAA, NORAD, Ptech, foreknowledge of 911 communication systems role in 911, convicted of murder, questionable trial, proceedings.
 
  • ABCNews  
  • FBI
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • Whitehouse  Bush
  • Republicans opposed to Bush Warrantless wiretapping are irrelevant and impotent. 
  • UPI  file  In order that the database did not violate United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, which specifies that the names of "U.S. persons" are to be deleted through a process known as minimization, the names of subject journalists were blanked out. However, in a violation of USSID 18, certain high level users could unlock the database field through a super-user status and view the "phantom names" of the journalists in question. Some of the "source" information in FIRSTFRUITS was classified—an indication that some of the articles in database were not obtained through open source means. In fact, NSA insiders report that the communications monitoring tasking system known as ECHELON is being used more frequently for purely political eavesdropping having nothing to do with national security or counter terrorism.
  • WMR  August 18, 2008 -- NSA continues surveillance of journalists; WMR editor subject of espionage investigation  ...  On May 10, 2005, WMR reported on the existence of a highly-classified database at the National Security Agency (NSA), formerly code-named "FIRSTFRUITS," that monitored journalists who reported on the activities of the eavesdropping agency, as well as other intelligence matters. A few weeks later, according to an executive-level source at the NSA, and confirmed by a related source within NSA's "Q" Directorate, the Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, this editor has been a subject of a national security investigation since June 2005 that remains ongoing. The investigation of this editor is classified at the level SECRET/COMINT (NOFORN). COMINT is "Communications Intelligence" and NOFORN denotes "Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals/Governments/Non-US Citizens."   ...   According to National Security Agency/Central Security Service Policy 1-27, dated March 20, 2006 and signed by NSA Chief of Staff Deborah Bonanni, the investigation of the public disclosure of the unconstitutional and illegal FIRSTFRUITS surveillance system would be coordinated by the NSA, Department of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Justice.
  • WMR  Higher Than Top Secret  "One of the most classified surveillance programs in the Bush administration was so limited in access only very few individuals, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington, CIA director Michael Hayden, FBI director Robert Mueller, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and three successive Attorneys General -- John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey -- know of its existence.  ...   Known by a code word, sometimes abbreviated, following the classification TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY and which was contained on some files that Gonzales took home with him and kept in an unsecured manner against Justice Department regulations, the warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program was so beyond legality that acting Attorney General James Comey refused to re-certify it upon its expiration in March 2004. There is a strong possibility that the code word program was connected to the NSA surveillance program aimed at tracking down leaks of classified information to the media from government sources. The leak tracking program was code named FIRSTFRUITS. Due the program's revelations by WMR, NSA has renamed the operation with a new code word. Previously, WMR learned from an informed source that part of the domestic surveillance system may have also involved a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) database of suspect Americans. The database is called Main Core. "
  • DailyKOS "Apparently, they've also been spying on other members of the government who may have been potential whistleblowers, journalists and even members of Congress. ... NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices. ... The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden."
  •  Wired blog  "Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA's Wiretapping of Americans Abroad  ...   A top secret NSA wiretapping facility in Georgia accused of spying on Americans illegally was hastily staffed with inexperienced reservists in the months following September 11, where they worked under conflicting orders and with little supervision, according to three former workers at the spy complex.   ...    "Nobody knew exactly what the heck we were doing," said a former translator for the project, code named Highlander, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We were figuring out the rules as we were going along."   ...   Former Army Reserve linguist Adrienne Kinne, who worked at the facility at Fort Gordon, won new attention this week for her year-old claim that she and her group intercepted and transcribed satellite phone calls of American civilians in the Middle East for the National Security Agency. Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) opened a probe into the alleged abuses after ABC News reported on them Thursday." Oct 2008
Garden Plot, Blog Tracking, Database Theft  top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*

Go to Bush / Obama warrantless surveillance of American Journalists...program: FirstFruits
  • Garden Plot  Summary, 
  • Wikipedia  Operation Garden Plot, also known as The Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan (18 USC 1385 Posse Comitatus Act) is a general U.S. Army and National Guard plan to respond to major domestic civil disturbances within the United States. The plan was developed in response to the civil disorders of the 1960s and is now under the control of the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). It provides Federal military and law enforcement assistance to local governments during times of major civil disturbances.  (inluding 9/11)
  • WMR has learned that the thefts of personal data from corporations and government agencies, most of which were accomplished by stealing computer hard drive devices, is more than coincidental. Intelligence sources report that many of the large scale thefts are part of a well-planned covert intelligence operation to obtain data on hundreds of millions of people in order to accomplish what former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) official John Poindexter was not able to bring about through his defunct (but secretly restored) Total Information Awareness (TIA) system   more below
  • TechDirt William Binney
  • Neil Entwistle, 911, FAA, NORAD, Ptech

 
  • WMR  has been reporting on the covert U.S. intelligence operation to steal personal data to populate the databases of a renewed Total Information Awareness surveillance system. Even the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not been immune to this covert operation. A computer hard drive containing the Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, and financial information on 100,000 employees of TSA who worked for the agency between January 2002 and August 2005 was stolen from a secure area within the TSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.    The theft of personal information over the past few years has included personal information on millions of Americans, Britons, Canadians, and Australians (four of the five members of the secret UKUSA signals intelligence sharing alliance). Some of the funding for the joint National Security Agency-Department of Homeland Security "black bag" project, according to our sources, is laundered through classified contracts at the Department of Energy.   wmr
  • Wikipedia The Operation Garden Plot is a map of the U.S. Army and the National Guard of the United States to respond to major disasters in civil society within the United States. The plan was developed in the 1960s to respond to civil disorder and is now under the control of Northern Command ( NORTHCOM ). It allows the military to help U.S. federal law enforcement to assist local governments in the States of the United States for public order problems. Operation Garden Plot was implemented to provide military assistance to civil authorities during the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York triggering the operation Noble Eagle Protection airspace. The Pentagon has also developed this project to restore public order during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles . "The monitoring of these missions on national security should be provided by the NGB (National Guard Bureau) based on the model" Garden Plot "to which National Guard units are trained and equipped to support our missions to the civil authorities Crowd control problems and maintaining public order. " 1
  • AngelBabe43 Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.
  • WMR has been investigating a covert operation involving active duty and reserve U.S. military personnel who infiltrate anti-war groups in the United States, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan veterans groups opposed to the Bush administration's war policies.  The move by the Bush administration appears to be a resurrection of Operation Garden Plot, a 1960s program that saw the use of National Guard units to quell civil disturbances in the United States, in addition to the infiltration of anti-war groups by National Guard and Reserve intelligence personnel.  
  • WMR On April 11, 2002, Major General (ret.) Richard Alexander, the executive director of the National Guard Association of the United States, tipped his hand on Garden Plot when he testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Homeland Defense. Alexander stated, "Oversight of these homeland security missions should be provided by the National Guard Bureau based on the long-standing Garden Plot model in which National Guard units are trained and equipped to support civil authorities in crowd control and civil disturbance missions."  The governing directive for Garden Plot is Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot. The Air Force implements Garden Plot in United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot, dated July 11, 1984, while the Army implements Garden Plot with Department of the Army (DA) Civil Disturbance Plan - GARDEN PLOT, dated March 1, 1984.  Acting in coordination with the FBI's Domestic Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), military intelligence agents infiltrated anti-war groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).  

 
Geographic Information Systems GIS,      top
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GPS Location Technology       top
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Health Information Systems       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • History of the Internet DARPA
  • Tetradyne Jeffrey Engel, M.D. State Epidemiologist NC DHHS, Division of Public health  Presentation – NC initiatives Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 October 18,, 2007 Calls on the federal DHHS to "establish an operational national epidemiologic surveillance system for human health, with international connectivity where appropriate,
  • Tetradyne Biosurveillance:: Big Brother or Homeland Security? Jeffrey Engel, M.D. State Epidemiologist NC DHS, Division of Public health  Presentation – NC initiatives Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 October 18,, 2007 Calls on the federal DHS to "establish an operational national epidemiologic surveillance system for human health, with international connectivity where appropriate, that is predicated on State, regional, and community-level capabilities and creates a networked system to allow for two-way information flow between and among Federal, State, and local government public health authorities and clinical health care providers." Key Terms Operational: organizational expertise and resources that produce real information products as early as possible National: emphasis is on the national picture and reflects a gap in nationwide perspective International connectivity: this national picture should look toward early detection and characterization of external threats to human health that could be imported Predicated on…build first on what exists and establish current capabilities
Infragard   top
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Inslaw, PROMIS       top
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  • Wikipedia Inslaw, Inc. is a small, Washington, D.C.-based, information technology company. In the mid-1970s, Inslaw developed for the United States Department of Justice a highly efficient, people-tracking, software program known as: Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw's principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government (acting as principal to the Department of Justice) for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings. During ensuing investigations, the Department of Justice was accused of deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations of foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan; and of becoming directly involved in murder. Later developments implied that derivative versions of Enhanced Promis sold on the black market may have become the high-tech tools of worldwide terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and international money launderers and thieves. more
Insurance Inspection, satellite       top
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Internet,  Traffic Analysis, ISP  top
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  • CBS down
  • C/Net downloads, spyware
  • Findlaw, Dean
  • History of the Internet DARPA
  • Info / Law, Harvard Blog filtering, modes of internet regulation: code, law, markets, and social norms  LINKS
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • MSNBC  VOIP Blocking
  • Narus Bill Crowell,  past positions have included President and Chief Executive Officer of Cylink, a leading provider of e-business security solutions as well as a series of senior positions at the National Security Agency, including Deputy Director of Operations and Deputy Director of the Agency
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file Dec 16, 2005
  • OpenNet Initiative, search Narus
  • Notes: search terms, carrier-grade networks, NetDiscovery, IP-based, intelligent infrastructure services, IP security and compliance management, NarusSecure, monitoring, VOIP, IMS, IPTV, real-time traffic insight, NarusInsight, 
  • Schneier search terms: Operation Shamrock, FISA, FISC, and:legal links
  • Skype VOIP blocking
  • USA Today NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
  • Vonage search VOIP blocking
  • Wired News, Mark Klein, "Whistleblower Outs NSA Spy Room  ... Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego."
  • Are Republicans who oppose Bush warrantless spying  irrelevant and impotent?
  • Center for Strategic and International
  • Comda Ltd. Israel
  • ComSign, Israel
  • Narus Partners see Pen-Link, Man-tech, Verisign, Datacraft, Giza Systems...more
  • Republicans who are against Bush warrantless spying are an irrelevant impotent.
  • Defense Tech Telcos Deny NSA Ties - and Allowed to Lie?
  • Mathaba search content based billing, VOIP  blocking
  • Narus see Pen-Link, Man-tech, Verisign, Datacraft, Giza Systems.
  • Narus / Verisign  IP lawful intercept
  • NICE, Shami, Shamir, Oz, Cohen, Huberman,  Menkes, Shaul, Zaltzman, Eidelman, Gorev, Ginat ...
  • Verisign Sclavos, Evan, Korzenliewski, Lin, Balogh, Haddad, McLaughlin, Ulam, Bidzos, Chenevich, 
  • Verso Technologies Inc, VOIP Blocking

 

  • PressTV U.S. companies are involved in providing technology that helps the Egyptian government to crack down on communications and monitor protestors on the Internet and mobile phones. ... A U.S. company appears to have sold Egypt technology to monitor Internet and mobile phone traffic that is possibly being used by the ruling regime to crack down on communications as protests erupt throughout the country. ...
    Boeing-owned, California-based company Narus sold Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider, "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment, more commonly known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. Common Dreams ,,, HIGHLIGHTS
    The company is also known for creating "NarusInsight," a supercomputer system allegedly used by US' National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time. Common Dreams ...
    Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness. .... Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway. ... "Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, Narus' marketing vice president, once boasted to Wired about the service. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on; we can reconstruct their (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls.” ... Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egypt's government "not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media.” Huffington Post .... FACTS & FIGURES Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients. ... In addition to Narus, there are a number of companies, including many others in the United States, that produce and traffic in similar spying and control technology: Zeugma Systems (Canada), Camiant (USA), Procera Networks (USA), Allot (Israel), Ixia (USA), AdvancedIO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others. ... When commercial network operators use DPI, the privacy of Internet users is compromised. But in government hands, the use of DPI can crush dissent and lead to human rights violations. ... Virtually all internet access in Egypt is cut off as the government battles to contain the street protests that threaten to topple President Hosni Mubarak. Telegraph HJ/KA/DB... more search terms: Egypt, Elbaradai, Tunisia, Algeria, Tunisia, protest, regime change,
Israel / Mossad   top
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  • WMR  A list of 90 contract security guards at the U.S. embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, all employees of the U.S. private security firm EOD Technology, Inc. (EODT) of Lenoir City, Tennessee, was being maintained by a suspected leader of a Mossad cell operating in the Central American nation.   ...   In an e-mail to WMR, a spokesperson for EODT stated: "EOD Technology, Inc. has a longstanding and strict practice of not providing or confirming any information about its employees, customers or contracts, and will not in this case." Although WMR already decided not to publish the list of the contract security guards, which we obtained from our Latin American intelligence sources, EODT reinforced the sensitivity of the information by stating, "We would hope that you consider the ramifications of releasing individual names in this context, as it may endanger them."   ...   In addition to the 90 security guards, the Mossad cell in San Jose maintained information on the vehicles used to transport State Department and other personnel to and from the U.S. embassy to the San Jose international airport, as well as the alternating routes used by the vehicles. Over the past two months the Mossad cell has vanished from their known front businesses in San Jose, which included a Krav Maga (Israeli self defense) instructor school, a restaurant, and a bar.     ...   According to leaked State Department cables, distributed by WikiLeaks, Israeli private security firms and Israeli security consultants operating in Latin America are considered suspect by U.S. diplomats in the region. Among those highly suspect by the State Department is retired Israeli Defense Force Major General Yisrael Ziv who heads the Israeli security company Global CST .    ...   In a cable dated December 17, 2009, U.S. ambassador to Panama Barbara Stephenson raised the issue of Ziv's work for the Panamanian government with Panama's president Ricardo Martinelli. The cable stated: more   In WMR's January 4 report, it was revealed that the Mossad cell in Costa Rica had recruited double agents inside the Shining Path. Coupled with the attempt by Global CST to sell classified Colombian documents to the FARC and the Israelis' dealings with the Shining Path of Peru, it appears that the Israeli gambit is to sign multi-million dollar security contracts with countries like Colombia and Peru and then offer to sell classified Colombian and Peruvian counter-insurgency information on the FARC and Shining Path to those very groups.   ...   Israeli security firms have also been active in Africa. Ziv and Global CST, which had also hired former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami and Tel Aviv police commissioner David Tzur, were involved in providing security support for Guinean leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power in a December 2008 coup d'etat. The Israeli services were provided in contravention of a U.N. military embargo on Guinea. Global CST has also provided services to Togo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Nigeria.  more
Liberty Alliance Project   top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • History of the Internet DARPA
  • ISP Planet news
  • Wikipedia  The Liberty Alliance was formed in September 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management. Today it has a global membership of more than 150 organizations, including technology vendors, consumer-facing companies,
  • Security Focus News Microsoft
  • SecureLab Computer security news and consulting
  • USA Today NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
  • Wikipedia  The Liberty Alliance was formed in September 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management. Today it has a global membership of more than 150 organizations, including technology vendors, consumer-facing companies, educational organizations and governments from around the world, as well as hundreds of additional organizations that participate in Liberty's various open community Special Interest Groups (SIGs). It has released Frameworks that address Federation (since contributed to OASIS for the SAML standard), Identity Assurance, Identity Governance, and Identity Web Services, as various services applications. It has also been active in privacy and policy issues relative to identity. As of 2006, the Liberty Alliance has tracked well over one billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices in fields as diverse as defense & law enforcement to telecommunications to egovernment. Management Board members include AOL, British Telecom, Computer Associates (CA), Fidelity Investments, Intel, Internet Society (ISOC), Novell, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems. As of June 2009, the work of the Liberty Alliance is transitioning to the Kantara Initiative.
MATRIX  Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Database, NCTC top
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  • OccupyCorporatism American has quickly grown into a big brother control and surveillance nation. Internet Service Providers (ISP) will begin the biggest civilian surveillance operation in history. On July 12, 2012, your ISP will be watching your movements on the internet. They will profile your activity and report to the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAAA) and National Security Agency (NSA) under direction of the Obama administration. Their goal: to penalize as many internet users as it takes to justify their infringement on our right to freedom of information.   ...   A facility in Utah has been built to assist the NSA and CIA in spying more efficiently on Americans. Every mode of communication (i.e. text messages, emails, phone calls, internet activity, etc . . . ) will be recorded, deciphered and filed for use at the distraction of the US government.   ...   Department of Justice Attorney General Eric Holder has signed new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). These guidelines will allow the NCTC access to data on American citizens once held under right to privacy. The NCTC will focus on collecting and sharing information; regardless of whether or not there is the threat of terrorism. The will collaborate with local state officials, tribal courts and private partners; as well as the FBI and DHS and other federal agencies.
Microsoft Explorer   top
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Rupert Murdoch   top
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  • Wikipedia Murdochgate The News International phone-hacking scandal — dubbed "Hackgate", "Rupertgate", or "Murdochgate" by the press — is an ongoing controversy involving the defunct News of the World and other British newspapers published by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories. Investigations conducted from 2005–2007 concluded that the paper's phone hacking activities were limited to celebrities, politicians and members of the British Royal Family. In July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombings were also accessed, resulting in a public outcry against News Corporation and owner Rupert Murdoch. Advertiser boycotts contributed to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July, ending 168 years of publication.[1] Continued public pressure later forced News Corporation to cancel its proposed takeover of the British telecommunications company BSkyB. British prime minister David Cameron announced on 6 July 2011, that a public inquiry would look into the affair after police investigations had ended. On 13 July 2011, Cameron named Lord Justice Leveson as chairman of the inquiry, with a remit to look into phone hacking and police bribery by the News of the World, while a separate inquiry would consider the culture and ethics of the wider British media.[2] He also said the Press Complaints Commission would be replaced "entirely".[1] The inquiries led to several high-profile resignations, including Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton; News International legal manager Tom Crone; and chief executive Rebekah Brooks. The commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police Service, Sir Paul Stephenson, also resigned his post. Former News of the World managing editor Andy Coulson, former executive editor Neil Wallis, and Brooks were all arrested. Murdoch and his son, James, were summoned to give evidence before the Leveson Inquiry.
  • WMR July 14-15, 2011 -- Murdoch intelligence-gathering network extended to U.S. Congress   ...   U.S. Congressional sources have confirmed to WMR that the U.S. Capitol Police and other congressional officials shared sensitive information on members of Congress with Rupert Murdoch's media outlets in Washington, including Fox News, in a manner similar to the situation in the United Kingdom where reporters for Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World bribed British law enforcement officials for sensitive information on public officials and private citizens.     ....   Representative Peter King (R-NY) has already leveled charges that News of the World reporters tried to bribe U.S. law enforcement officials for phone records and transcripts of wiretaps of victims of the 9/11 attack. King did not elaborate on why law enforcement would have found it necessary, in the first place, to wiretap the conversations of 9/11 victims and their surviving next-of-kin.    ...   On March 28, 2007, WMR first reported the relationship between the newly-appointed U.S. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer, who was formerly the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, and Fox News in three highly-publicized incidents involving only Democratic members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The three incidents involved Fox News receiving information directly from Gainer on incidents involving then-Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), then-Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), and an aide to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA).    ...   After a highly-publicized scuffle involving McKinney and an aggressive U.S. Capitol Police officer, one in which McKinney was physically assaulted by the officer, Fox News was the first to report the incident. The media hype resulting from the incident resulted in a criminal referral to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia. Shortly after Gainer resigned as chief and his being appointed by Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, Representative Kennedy was involved in a minor automobile accident on Capitol Hill. Again, Fox News was the first to receive the information about the incident and Gainer stated publicly that Kennedy should have been given a sobriety test by the Capitol cops.    ...   The third incident involved Phillip Thompson, the executive assistant to Virginia Democratic Senator Jim Webb, who was arrested by the Capitol Police at the Russell Senate Office Building for carrying a loaded pistol allegedly given to him by Webb. The Capitol Police enforced a DC law in force at the time that prohibited anyone other than law enforcement officers from carrying weapons in the District. Webb said he has a license to carry a concealed weapon in Virginia and Thompson, an ex-Marine, inadvertently carried the weapon into the building after dropping Webb off at the airport. WMR's March 2007 report stated: "Details of the [Thompson] incident were leaked by the cops to Fox News and other neo-con outlets." WMR also reported that the leaks by US Capitol Police and Sergeant-at-Arms staff also occurred in the cases of McKinney and Kennedy.    ...    Gainer is a long-time Republican who unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Richard M. Daley, Jr. as the Republican candidate for Cook County (Illinois) State's Attorney in 1988. Gainer got his start in law enforcement as a rookie Chicago cop in 1968 where he helped put down riots at the Democratic National Convention, a melee that saw Chicago cops clubbing anti-Vietnam War protesters.    ...   As U.S. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, Gainer is responsible for the installation and maintenance of the Senate's telecommunications networks and computer and other equipment, including those that handle Senators' e-mail, phone calls, faxes, Blackberry tweets, and photocopies of documents.    ...   Some members of Congress have indicated the investigation of Murdoch's News Corporation's information-gathering practices warrant a full-scale investigation in the United States. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) told CNN, "My bet is we'll find some criminal stuff . . . This is going to be a huge issue." Rockefeller said he may launch his own investigation. Perhaps he might want to start with the Senate's Sergeant-at-Arms and ask Harry Reid why he chose to appoint Gainer, a Republican, to the post after evidence surfaced that tied Gainer to leaks of law enforcement information to Fox News.    ...    In Britain, law enforcement officials, including royal guards, reportedly asked the News of the World for money in exchange for personal information about the Royal family, including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Duchess of Cornwall Camilla, Duchess of Cambridge Catherine, and others. While he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was also subjected to private communication surveillance by private detectives who had a close relationship with law enforcement agencies, including Scotland Yard. 
NIST / NSA integration   top
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  • SANS  2012 NIST Issues (Flawed) Draft Updates to Cybersecurity Guides (July 30, 2012) The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued updated versions of two publications aimed at helping federal agencies and private organizations protect their networks from attacks, intrusions, and malware infections. The Guide to Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems and the Guide to Malware Incident Prevention and Handling for Desktop and Laptops have been updated to incorporate current best practices in cybersecurity. NIST is accepting public comment on the documents through August 31, 2012. The intrusion detection publication was originally released in February 2007 and has not been updated since then.   and NSA  NSA Director Asks Defcon Attendees to Help Defend Cyberspace (July 27 & 29, 2012) Speaking at the Defcon hacker conference, General Keith Alexander, who heads both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Cyber Command, asked attendees for help securing cyberspace. Alexander told those present that "In this room right here is the talent our nation needs to secure cyberspace," and spoke about the "superb" program called Defcon Kids, which guides kids in the direction of white-hat hacking. Alexander also told his audience that the NSA does not compile dossiers on US citizens. However, a former NSA employee speaking on a panel at the same conference said that the NSA does collect information about US citizens' email messages, tweets, online searches and other information.
  • Epic  New NIST/NSA Revelations Less than three weeks after the White House announced a controversial initiative to secure the nation's electronic communications with government-approved cryptography, newly released documents raise serious questions about the process that gave rise to the administration's proposal. The documents, released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, suggest that the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) dominates the process of establishing security standards for civilian computer systems in contravention of the intent of legislation Congress enacted in 1987.    ...   The released material concerns the development of the Digital Signature Standard (DSS), a cryptographic method for authenticating the identity of the sender of an electronic communication and for authenticating the integrity of the data in that communication. NIST publicly proposed the DSS in August 1991 and initially made no mention of any NSA role in developing the standard, which was intended for use in unclassified, civilian communications systems. NIST finally conceded that NSA had, in fact, developed the technology after Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) filed suit against the agency for withholding relevant documents. The proposed DSS was widely criticized within the computer industry for its perceived weak security and inferiority to an existing authentication technology known as the RSA algorithm. Many observers have speculated that the RSA technique was disfavored by NSA because it was, in fact, more secure than the NSA-proposed algorithm and because the RSA technique could also be used to encrypt data very securely. ...   The newly-disclosed documents -- released in heavily censored form at the insistence of NSA -- suggest that NSA was not merely involved in the development process, but dominated it. NIST and NSA worked together on the DSS through an intra-agency Technical Working Group (TWG). The documents suggest that the NIST-NSA relationship was contentious, with NSA insisting upon secrecy throughout the deliberations. A NIST report dated January 31, 1990, states that    ...   The members of the TWG acknowledged that the efforts expended to date in the determination of a public key algorithm which would be publicly known have not been successful. It's increasingly evident that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the concerns and requirements of NSA, NIST and the general public through using this approach. more
  • OpinionMaker Q-Group WMR  WMR's intelligence sources report that the National Security Agency's "Q Group," the directorate responsible for overall security for NSA, is actively investigating and harassing NSA employees who have reported on senior officials at the sprawling intelligence agency, which now includes the new U.S. Cyber Command, of engaging in adulterous trysts with subordinates and possessing improper sexual material, including child pornography. WMR has previously reported on the improper activities of the Q Group, which has become a virtual uncontrolled FBI within the NSA. Q continues to protect NSA senior officials who engage in and promote a culture of sexual exploitation of junior employees at the intelligence agency. Q Group has also misused NSA psychologists and psychiatrists to deem anyone who charges senior officials of the agency with sexual misconduct or harassment unfit to hold a security clearance for reasons of mental impairment.
 
NSA, Domestic phone records database,  NFU pages index
  • Issues to research
  • How is the internet and phone system tapped?   Narus
  • Are there ties between the recent NSA warrantless wiretapping and the old 'Israeli art students' revelations?  How does Comverse Infosys (Verint), Amdocs, Telrad, Israel fit?
  • How does it all tie back to 9/11?  FoxNews, Carl Cameron, Israeli art students?
  • What lawsuits are now pending? 
  • What are administrative subpoenas, National Security letters?
  • William T. Crowell, Narus Board of Directors, was Deputy Director of Operations of NSA.
  • Wired News, Mark Klein, Whistleblower Outs NSA Spy Room  ...more 
  • Israeli companies dominate phone billing and firewall markets
  • News

 
National Security Agency  NSA   top       and go to Amdocs
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ACLU  lawsuit, wiretap without a warrant on U.S. soil.  and NSA lawsuit
  • Center for Constitutional Rights New York, letter to Senate Intelligence Committee,
  • CommonDreams search terms: lawsuit, AT&T, submitted under seal, illegal electronic surveillance, Negroponte, Lt. General Keith Alexander (director of NSA), state secrets privilege used to deny info on NSA, phone and internet records turned over illegally without a warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing. class action, 
  • CommonDreams "In a 72-page written ruling (.pdf), U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker rejected the government's argument that merely allowing the case to proceed would cause critical harm to U.S. national security.
  • Constant Pated, blog Narus STA-6400, state secrets, prove Bush broke the law.
  • John Conyers
  • CounterPunch, Bush wiretaps to identify whistleblowers. 
  • Dailykos Narus ST-6400
  • Detroit Free Press "U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declared the administration's secret spying program unconstitutional and blocked the government from intercepting calls into this country from abroad that might involve terrorists without getting warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation working to protect civil and free speech, search AT&T lawsuit. 
  • Huffington Post NSA, amdocs, Hayden and Hayden "the sudden resignation of Goss as the Foggo sex scandal comes creeping centerwise provided the Department of Defense its best-yet opportunity to finally seize its long-time intelligence and covert operations rival for itself"
  • Indymedia
  • The Nation History and structure of global telegraphic surveillance 
  • NSAWatch formerly EchelonWatch, resources, surveillance networks, documents.
  • OpEdNews "Amdocs, Hayden, CIA, phone records, database, billing data, Israeli-based company, 9/11, students, Bobby Ray Inman, AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon, legality of surveillance, Sen. Spector
  • RawStory, 
  • Salon  Israeli art students, DEA, Amdocs searchable file
  • TimesOnline.UK "A report in the newspaper USA Today, which claimed that since the 9/11 attacks the National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly collected the records of billions of domestic calls, also cast doubt on the confirmation prospects for General Michael Hayden, Mr Bush’s choice to head the CIA"
  • TomPaine search: Bush's NSA Spying Defense
  • Wayne Madsen Report, exclusive1
  • Wired News, Mark Klein, "Whistleblower Outs NSA Spy Room  ... Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego."
  • BBC George W Bush personally stopped an inquiry into a controversial programme to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of Americans, a top official has said. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said internal investigators wanted to look at the role justice department lawyers had played in drafting the programme
  • Findlaw, Dean, Bush's impeachability..
  • search terms: Amdocs, Hayden, CIA, phone records, database, billing data, Israeli-based company,
  • Use NSA data to mine all of Karl Rove's phone calls....right....
  • search terms: Hayden was architect of Bush's domestic spying program. The Federal Intelligence Security Act (FISA) is prohibited in monitoring people inside the U.S. without express permission of a federal judge.  Nixon era controls.  2005 Bush issued executive order undermining FISA.  
  • State secrets privilege defense says a lawsuit must be dismissed if it can't be litigated without the risk of exposing military secrets.  But there is political fallout from this.
  • How does all this tie back to Israel spying: Jonathon Pollard, Pentagon, Douglas Feith, Mega, 
  • Jurist, legal news and research, Bush used argument that warrantless was implicitly authorized by the resolution for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan, but....more
  • Rense All US Phone Call Records And Billing Done In Israel - Part 2 Carl Cameron Investigates FoxNews.com 12-13-1
  • Schneier search terms: Operation Shamrock, FISA, FISC, and:legal links
  • Yahoo, BellSouth denies working with NSA.  Included in $200 billion lawsuit
  • Wikipedia
  • go to Amdocs
  • search internet: Tony Snow, FoxNews, Carl Cameron, Israeli Art Students.
  • also see Jonathan Pollard.com
  • Are Republicans who oppose Bush warrantless spying are an irrelevant impotent group?
  • AT&T lawsuit $200 billion
  • Amdocs  Israel, phone records database, Hayden
  • BellSouth
  • Cato Institute
  • Defense Tech Telcos Deny NSA Ties - and Allowed to Lie?
  • FCC, won't investigate warrantless wiretapping because Bush effectively used the State Secrets defense to shut them down.
  • GOP search
  • GOP Insight search
  • Haaretz search
  • Heritage.org "....this critical counterterrorism effort isn't intrusive, illegal or unnecessary...?  commentary.  see Smith v. Maryland 1979. 
  • Markle Foundation
  • MiddleEast Info  discussion
  • Middle East Intelligence Bulletin  Daniel Pipes
  • Narus Semantic Traffic Analysis
  • Narus & Amdocs more below
  • Narus Board of Directors: William T. Crowell (DARPA, Markle Foundation, Cylink, Deputy Director of Operations NSA, Presidents Export Council on Encryption.  Also Yogen K. Dalal (Mayfield Fund), Andrew Kau (Walden International), Greg Oslan (CNET Inc, AT&T),  Tony Pantuso ( NeoCarta, GE), Shahan D. Soghikian (JP Morgan Partners).
  • National Institute for Public Policy, Iran policy
  • New York Times NSA executive order authorizing data mining of phone calls and file.
  • TMCnet  Amdocs, Israeli Business Arena Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge,
  • Topix Amdocs DOX page
  • US-Israel.org
  • US News & World Report , Gergen rebuttal to "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"
  • NSA 
  • Verizon
  • Walden Media, Walden International, Walden Israel Ventures II, Walden VC II, Ambex
  • Whitehouse  Bush
 
Summary of NSA issues
  • BusinessInsider NSA Whistleblower Details How The NSA Has Spied On US Citizens Since 9/11 ...  National Security Agency whistleblower NYTIMESWilliam Binney explains how the secretive agency run its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen without warrants under the code-name Stellar Wind. Binney details how the top-secret surveillance program, the scope of which has never been made public, can track electronic activities—phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media—and map them to collect "all the attributes that any individual has" in every type of activity and build a profile based on that data. "So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time," Binney says. The 8-minute video, adapted from an ongoing project by Poitras that is to be released in 2013, has footage of the construction of the NSA's $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, which Binney says "has the capacity to store 100 years worth of the world's electronic communications." The purpose of the program, according to Binney, is "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with. "The danger here is that we fall into a totalitarian state," Binney says. "This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had." Poitras, who has been detained and questioned more than 40 times at U.S. airports, has been working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America.
  • ABC News  Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER Oct. 9, 2008— Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination. "We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary." continued below
  • New York Times  and file   A  senior government official, granted anonymity to speak for publication about the classified program, confirmed on Friday that the security agency (NSA) had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. The official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of identifying regular contacts of "known bad guys." The official would not discuss the details of the program, including the identity of companies involved.  lawsuit  (EFFsuit) see Amdocs / Narus 
  • New York Times  and file In 2004, more than 80 percent of the 463 billion domestic calls made in the United States were local, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon said yesterday that "phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls.".    but see Narus 
  • New York Times Because federal law protects the privacy of phone records in the absence of warrants, companies providing such records could face legal action. Yesterday in Manhattan, a class-action suit filed against Verizon after the USA Today article appeared was expanded to include BellSouth and AT&T as defendants, The Associated Press reported. It asked $200 billion in damages.
  • ACLU "The American Civil Liberties Union today strongly condemned a new proposal drafted by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) that embraces the president’s claims of inherent power to secretly wiretap Americans without meaningful checks. Also today, the organization renewed its request to the Justice Department’s Inspector General to open an investigation into the involvement of the department in the warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency  ....  Specter’s new draft would replace a bill he had previously introduced, S.2453, the National Security Surveillance Act of 2006. The new version would pardon the president for authorizing the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, in violation of current criminal and intelligence laws. Specifically, the new bill would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the criminal code by allowing wiretapping at the direction of the president outside of those existing laws. This move would create a retroactive exception to criminal liability when warrantless wiretapping is done at the president’s direction under a claim of inherent authority."
  • ACLU v. NSA lawsuit:  "The ACLU is suing the National Security Agency for violating the U.S. Constitution. The illegal NSA spying program authorized by President Bush just after September 11, 2001, allows the NSA to intercept vast quantities of the international telephone and Internet communications of innocent Americans without court approval.  Without a system of checks and balances, the government can monitor any phone call or e-mail they want, and they can collect and disseminate any data they find however they like. Just knowing that the government is spying without cause on innocent Americans sends a chilling message to all of us that our conversations are not our own.  The NSA's warrantless surveillance must end and checks and balances be restored."
  • Information Clearing House on Fox News (Carl Cameron) investigative report and Eric Umansky BellSouth subcontracts with an Israeli company known as Amdocs to handle its billing, as do several other U.S. phone companies. In 2001, U.S. intelligence officials were on record as saying that the information that Amdocs handled was so valuable that a great deal could be learned if sophisticated data-mining techniques were used against that information -- Brit?    Information Clearing House  search Amdocs, Israeli art students.
  •  
  • Information Clearing House Fox News has learned that the N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used. At one NSA briefing, a diagram by the Argon national lab was used to show that if the phone records are not secure, major security breaches are possible.
  • see Amdocs / Narus  relationship
  • Information Clearing House, Carl Cameron report:  Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs, gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide.
  • Wired Blog:  One of the questions to emerge in press analysis of Wednesday's court hearing in the EFF's case against AT&T is whether the company might be legally immunized if the attorney general wrote a secret letter authorizing the alleged internet wiretaps.  Declan McCullagh at CNET News.com parsed the AT&T lawyer's oral arguments carefully, and concluded that the company may have received certification from the Justice Department under this section of Title 18 U.S.C. 2511
  • London's 7/7 where Visor Consulting headed up by the ex-spokesman of Scotland Yard Peter Power was conducting drills of a terrorist attack at the exact locations at the exact times where Verint Systems (Comverse) was running security and hasn't released the videos from inside the tube,
  • CommonDreams "FBI Plans New Net-Tapping Push"  search terms: new legislation that would require ISP's to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance...introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, Ohio Republican, CALEA
  • CommonDreams "In a 72-page written ruling (.pdf), U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker rejected the government's argument that merely allowing the case to proceed would cause critical harm to U.S. national security.  search terms: Case 3:06-cv-00672-VRW  Document 308, Northern District of California, Tash Hepting et al Plaintiffs,v AT&T CORPORATION, et al Defendants.  AT&T Inc., violate First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, by illegally intercepting, disclosing, divulging and/or using plaintiffs' communications.  collaborating with the National Security Agency NSA in a massive warrantless surveillance program.  Section 109 of FISA, Section 802 of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Section 705 of Title VII of the Communications Act of 1934, Section 201 of Title II of the ECPA, Seciton 201 of the Stored Commications Act, California Unfair Competition Law, Mark Klein, J. Scott Marcus, state secrets privilege, Negroponte, Alexander, 
  •      Click on pic to go to NFU Internet page
  • NSA ISP data mining, Narus   source:  Scoop  Are We Paranoid Enough Yet?  utunga.blogspot.com On 26 Jan 2006 I wrote:   Particularly scary is that the Patriot act gives the feds the right to basically march up to every ISP in the country and install special 'black boxes' [doing] God only knows what and the ISP's cannot even mention this fact publicly let alone not comply... ********* Now we have confirmation from a whistleblower that this is exactly what they've been doing.

    "I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room." .. he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego."While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400... "  And what can we find out about the Narus 6400? Well the google cache appeared busted on the subject but the preview gives us this one sentence..

    Fully configured, the Model 6400 captures application-layer usage details via NARUS Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) on up to six full-duplex 100 BaseTADVERTISEMENT (Update: Dailykos has since published an artice All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400 which fills out a lot of the details).  In my opinion the key words here are "Semantic Traffic Analysis".   As I wrote previously:  Many people think ECHELON simply targets 'keywords'. However, based on patents filed by various government agencies you can assume it is *much* more sophisticated than that, for instance rudimentary 'language recognition' patents as well as 'topic classification' patents. The topic classification patent is especially interesting, because, if they are able to create a map of all the types of people / types of conversations that people have, then they can more easily filter out the 'Jana's having a baby!' conversations and zero in on the 'lets organize a march' conversation of radicals and other undesirables - oh, yeah, and [those] "terrorists" and "drug dealers" - the only problem here is that to find the largest number of these in the most cost effective way all they would need to do is walk down the hall start arresting people.. The words semantic analysis are used somewhat differently in the patents I mention than in the technical specs for the Naurus 6400, but forgive me for assuming that the NSA has technology that is more advanced (by a small margin and in the same direction) than what is available to the general public.

    ********* I guess this casts the Google action in preventing DOJ into their data centers in a quite different light. As I said previously, this isn't about reading the query log - this was always about the right to install a room of 'black servers' right in the middle of the google data center. Google's actions in standing up to that are all the more laudable.  ********* Just to be crystal clear on this; at this time what we now have is clear evidence of (sophisticated) *monitoring and analysis* of internet and phone traffic - something we pretty much knew for a long time.  Thats very scary (and illegal, in my opinion), but its certainly better than actual direct government censorship of content on the internet ('chilling effects' on free speech aside).  On the pessimistic side, however, direct (but covert) censorship is probably the next obvious step once you have the right hardware installed in the key data centers.

    It may be that if you want to actually directly censor and block information all you need to do is control the choke points - which means ISP's (like AT&T) and not the search engines (like Google). However, it could well be that a more sophisticated (and probably more practical) form of censorship is to control the search engines. Certainly the Chinese found that controlling the search engine content was more effective (and subtle) form of censorship than outright blocks on entire search engines or particular websites.

    My suspicion (OK, its a total guess) is that, in the States at least, the NSA and other parts of the state/non-state military-technological apparatus are probably experimenting with the censorship of certain specifc pieces of information even right now. A good place for them to start might be, for instance, information about themselves, their methods and what they plan to do next.

    At this time I'm pretty sure that direct censorship or control of political discourse on the internet is something that organisations such as the NSA wouldn't consider themselves able to do. Despite all their technology and hardware, the number of bits to flip and the sheer volume of content to mechanically 'understand' and filter makes that effectively impossible. It can be argued that have achieved a high degree of success in the mass media - ask someone who's actually lived in the states for a few years and I'm sure you'll see what i mean - but its still too hard for them to control the discourse of 'blogosphere' directly at this stage - but you just wait and see.. as soon as they believe they can do this - they will. Furthermore, if 'they' are smart they won't give any indication that this is their next step until they are ready to go.  "The internet" may be the last truly free bastion of political free speech in the States at ths time.. and if that were to be closed down via a more sophisticated version of 'the chinese firewall" .. well God help us all.

  • Wikipedia Clipper Chip  The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the U.S. National Security Agency[1] as an encryption device to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission. It was announced in 1993 and by 1996 was entirely defunct.    The Clipper chip used a data encryption algorithm called Skipjack[1] to transmit information and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange-algorithm to distribute the cryptokeys between the peers. Skipjack was invented by the National Security Agency of the U.S. Government; this algorithm was initially classified SECRET, which prevented it from being subjected to peer review from the encryption research community. The government did state that it used an 80-bit key, that the algorithm was symmetric, and that it was similar to the DES algorithm. The Skipjack algorithm was declassified and published by NSA on June 24, 1998. The initial cost of the chips was said to be $16 (unprogrammed) or $26 (programmed), with its logic designed by Mykotronx, and fabricated by VLSI Technology, Inc.[citation needed] But the heart of the concept was key escrow. In the factory, any new telephone or other device with a Clipper chip would be given a "cryptographic key", that would then be provided to the government in "escrow". If government agencies "established their authority" to listen to a communication, then the key would be given to those government agencies, who could then decrypt all data transmitted by that particular telephone. The newly formed Electronic Frontier Foundation preferred the term "key surrender" to emphasize what they alleged was really occurring.[citation needed]ENDS
  • NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system 'This is Big Brother', says corporate insider
    The Register  NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system 'This is Big Brother', says corporate insider ....   By Lewis Page • , 8th July 2010 09:20 GMT    ...   The US National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking on a secret domestic surveillance project dubbed "Perfect Citizen", intended to monitor and protect important national infrastructure such as power grids and transport systems.    ...   The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed government and industry sources, says that the NSA has awarded a "black" (classified) $100m contract to defence contractor Raytheon which will see secret monitoring equipment installed within US networks deemed to be of national importance.    ...   According to the WSJ, Perfect Citizen has caused some disquiet among those in the know. It could be seen as the NSA - a military combat support agency whose focus is supposed to be on external threats - carrying out massive automated surveillance of American companies and citizens. The paper quotes an internal Raytheon email as saying that "Perfect Citizen is Big Brother".    ...   The stated purpose of the project is to get a clear idea of the level of threat facing American infrastructure IT. Many older systems, designed in the pre-network world, have since been hooked up to the internet for ease of use and maintenance. It is feared by some in the US intelligence / defence community that unfriendly powers and organizations are already engaged in probing these systems with a view to learning how to attack them.    ...   The NSA's Perfect Citizen equipment would be designed to flag up unusual network events indicating an impending cyber attack, according to the WSJ's sources.    ...   "You've got to instrument the network to know what's going on, so you have situational awareness to take action," an unnamed military source told the paper.    ...   Many of the networks that the NSA would wish to place Perfect Citizen equipment on are privately owned, however, and some could also potentially carry information offering scope for "mission creep" outside an infrastructure-security context. For instance, full access to power company systems might allow the NSA to work out whether anyone was at home at a given address. Transport and telecoms information would also make for a potential bonanza for intrusive monitoring.    ...   The full scope of the project remains to be determined, according to the WSJ report, with no certainty as yet on which companies or types of companies would be asked to cooperate - or how much information the NSA would get access to.    ...   The NSA - whose boss has now also been confirmed as head of the Pentagon's uniformed Cyber Command - apparently got the job by default, as it is considered the only US agency with enough network and cyber savvy to take the task on.    ... The Reg has contacted Raytheon and the NSA for comment on Perfect Citizen, but thus far has not received any reply. ®
Open BSD FBI Backdoor  top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ArsTechnica FBI accused of planting backdoor in OpenBSD IPSEC stack  ... In an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant "a number of backdoors" in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago.   ...  Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers. Perry also suggests that knowledge of the FBI's backdoors played a role in DARPA's decision to withdraw millions of dollars of grant funding from OpenBSD in 2003.   ...   "I wanted to make you aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI," wrote Perry. "This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same."   ...  The e-mail became public when de Raadt forwarded it to the OpenBSD mailing list on Tuesday, with the intention of encouraging concerned parties to conduct code audits. To avoid entanglement in the alleged conspiracy, de Raadt says that he won't be pursuing the matter himself. Several developers have begun the process of auditing the OpenBSD IPSEC stack in order to determine if Perry's claims are true.
Patriot Act       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*

  • Click on pic to go to NFU Internet page
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
 
 
 
 
Police Departments tracking protesters, Pre-crime Surveillance, Mobile Backscatter Vans, Sneek & Peek Search Warrants      top
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  • Common Dreams Police depts tracking local protesters
  • EndoftheAmericanDream Police all over America will soon be driving around in unmarked vans looking inside your cars and even under your clothes using the same "pornoscanner" technology currently being utilized by the TSA at U.S. airports....
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • , info
  • National Security Agency 
RFID Technology       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • eWeek
  • EETimes
  • Intelnet news from 500 sources automated  
  • InfoWorld  for IT Managers
  • Internet News  for IT Managers
  • RFID, remotely storing and retrieving info from product stickers, tags, via radio signals.
  • Axalto, BearingPoint, Infineon, Supercom, passport chips contracts.  ICAO, Enhanced Border Security Act
  • Wikpedia, definition, info
Restroom taping       top
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  • EndoftheAmericanDream 14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Be Using To Spy On You
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
Road Sensors, Red Light Cameras, Speed Traps       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
Satellites       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • FAS, Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.
  • Privacy Watch, Cotse.net Internet Privacy Website, Civil liberty watchdog
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
  • search Beaulieu, Arctic Slope Regional Corp, Chenega Corp, ANSCA, NIMA, no bid contracts, roads in Alaska.
  • American Federation of Government Employees, Bush gave no-bid contracts for mapping project to Native Indian contractors.  (Union busting)
Search engines       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Google Desktop Search automatically reads and records locally Outlook e-mail, also saves copies of web pages, chat conversations in AOL IM, and finds Word Powerpoint and Excel files on your computer.  Google says it has no access.   But its multi-user  capabilities reveal security flaws. 
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
Stoplight Cameras       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion       top
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  • Code Pink under surveillance by SKMIF,     
  • Schema-Root military intelligence, news feeds
  • Sen. Joe Dunn, tracking California National Guard spying on citizens
  • Veterans for Peace
  • San Jose Mercury News
  • SignOnSanDiego search
  • notes: National Guard Bureau investigating if SKMIF spied on citizens, protesters.  similar to Viet Nam era surveillance?
  • National Guard Bureau search legal division.
  • Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion unit.  Schwarzenegger
SWIFT,  Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication        top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • ACLU, National ID card,
  • EPIC  Electronic Privacy Information Center, National ID card,
  • Privacy International, Swift violated European and Asian data protection rules, fishing expedition, not a legally authorized investigation, 
  •  
  • Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 
  • San Jose Mercury News
  • European Union, Stras
  • Financial Times, SWIFT, bank transaction data mining,  "Tens of thousands of electronic searches have been conducted under a secret US programme to monitor global financial transfers for signs of terrorist activity" more search terms: Stuart Levy (under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, US Treasury), SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication),  Bush used International Emergency Economic Powers Act to gain access to the data. 
  • People's Party, largest and most influential bloc in the European Parliament,  demand compensation, Swift did not seek approval from European authorities.
  • Wikipedia SWIFT, Terrorist Finance Tracking Program
  • CIA
  • FBI 
  • New York Times
  • Senate Republicans support warrantless wiretaps of international financial transactions.
  • SWIFT Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, Brussels,
  • Terrorist Finance Tracking Program
TALON, Threat and Local Observation Notice       top
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  •  
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
  • Washington Post "TIDE, Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" or "TIDE" and "Railhead."  TIDE, Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" or "TIDE" and "Railhead."  ...   In 2006, authorities quietly launched Railhead, a project worth as much as $500 million over five years, to improve TIDE and eventually replace it and some related systems with technology that would significantly expand their capabilities.   ...  After more than a year and about $100 million, the Railhead project has become the focus of criticism from some counterterrorism analysts and contractors, who have said it does not provide the search capabilities they expected and appears to be behind schedule. One lawmaker has taken up those questions and publicly asked for an investigation by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saying his congressional staff has information from a contractor whistle-blower that shows the project is on the "brink of collapse," possibly threatening national security.
Telecommunications Companies, ISP, Speech Recognition, Wifi    top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • Wikipedia  NSA National Security Agency, warrantless wiretapping, administrative subpoena, National Security letter.
  • EFF NSA Spying  The U.S. government with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.   ...   News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports plus a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of their telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution.    ...   The evidence also shows that the government did not act alone. EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed “this isn’t a wiretap it’s a country-tap.”
  • WMR  February 25-26, 2010 -- UPDATED -- NSA threatened Qwest CEO with repercussions if he didn't cut a surveillance deal   ...   WMR has learned from sources who worked in senior positions for the telecommunications company Qwest that its former Chairman and CEO Joseph Nacchio was threatened with retaliation after he refused to participate in an unconstitutional and illegal National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping program after he met with NSA officials on February 27, 2001, some six months before the 9/11 attacks. Nacchio refused to turn over customer records without a court order -- something NSA did not possess at the time it made its request.    ...   After Nacchio refused NSA's request on the grounds that it was illegal, sources close to Nacchio reported his legal problems with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission began in earnest. First, Qwest lost out on several lucrative federal government contracts and second, Nacchio was indicted and convicted in 2007 of 19 counts of insider stock trading. Nacchio was sentenced to six years the Schuykill federal prison camp in Minersville, Pennsylvania where he is now assigned prisoner number 33973-013.    ...   In January, US District Judge Marcia Krieger of the 10th Circuit Court in Denver denied Nacchio's motion for a new trial. Krieger was nominated for the federal bench by President George W. Bush on September 10, 2001. The September 10 date is significant -- it was then clear that Nacchio was not going to be a player in the NSA and FBI illegal surveillance programs and it was the day before the Bush administration would sweep aside the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Qwest is headquartered in Denver.
  • DigitallyMediatedSurveillance Ohm asserts that we should focus on individual harms stemming from surveillance and recognize that technological, economic, and ethical forces all point towards a “storm of unprecedented, invasive ISP monitoring” (4). He maintains that ISPs oversell their ability to anonymize collected data, that providers’ claims of needing to more deeply inspect content are suspect, and that we should distrust suggestions that users and ISPs have entered consensual agreements around DPI-based surveillance. To determine the risk of individual harms stemming from surveillance, ISPs and regulators should adopt a three-step process that asks how sensitive is the information at risk, whether there there been harmful breaches in the past and if so, requires policymakers to make predictions about the future. ...   Critically, “anonymity cannot effectively address the harm to the sense of repose. The harm comes from the fear that one is being watched. It can result in self-censorship. It is not the kind of harm that is easily offset by hypertechnical arguments about encryption and one-way hash functions” (49). Thus, novel surveillance systems like DPI must be (largely) restricted to preventing hacking and viral outbreaks and traditional monitoring systems that cannot capture personal information relied upon for network management. Most importantly, Ohm argues that privacy, freedom, liberty, and autonomy must be introduced into the otherwise technocratic discussions of network neutrality and management to ensure that ISPs’ networks facilitate these key democratic values.
  • WMR In 2006, it was revealed that AT&T had permitted NSA to have a direct link to its switching center's 4ESS equipment at its Folsom Street, San Francisco facility to conduct massive warrantless surveillance of long distance and international phone calls, as well as e-mail. Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician stated that similar systems had been installed at AT&T centers in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The Bush administration responded to several lawsuits against the program by invoking the draconian State Secrets Privilege.

 
Terahertz Spectroscopy       top
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  • Wikipedia Typically, the terahertz pulses are generated by an ultrashort pulsed laser and last only a few picoseconds. A single pulse can contain frequency components covering the whole terahertz range from 0.05 to 4 THz. For detection, the electrical field of the terahertz pulse is sampled and digitized, conceptually similar to the way an audio card transforms electrical voltage levels in an audio signal into numbers that describe the audio waveform. In THz-TDS, the electrical field of the THz pulse interacts in the detector with a much-shorter laser pulse (e.g. 0.1 picoseconds) in a way that produces an electrical signal that is proportional to the electric field of the THz pulse at the time the laser pulse gates the detector on. By repeating this procedure and varying the timing of the gating laser pulse, it is possible to scan the THz pulse and construct its electric field as a function of time. Subsequently, a Fourier transform is used to extract the frequency spectrum from the time-domain data. [edit]Advantages of THz radiation THz radiation has several distinct advantages over other forms of spectroscopy: many materials are transparent to THz, THz radiation is safe for biological tissues because it is non-ionizing (unlike for example X-rays), and images formed with terahertz radiation can have relatively good resolution (less than 1 mm). Also, many interesting materials have unique spectral fingerprints in the terahertz range, which means that terahertz radiation can be used to identify them. Examples which have been demonstrated include several different types of explosives, polymorphic forms of many compounds used as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) in commercial medications as well as several illegal narcotic substances. Since many materials are transparent to THz radiation, these items of interest can be observed through visually opaque intervening layers, such as packaging and clothing. Though not strictly a spectroscopic technique, the ultrashort width of the THz radiation pulses allows for measurements (e.g., thickness, density, defect location) on difficult to probe materials (e.g., foam). The measurement capability shares many similarities to that observed with pulsed ultrasonic systems. Reflections from buried interfaces and defects can be found and precisely imaged. THz measurements are non-contact however.
Traffic Stop, drug sniffing  dogs       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
TRAPWIRE       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Wikipedia, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
US-VISIT, FISC, FISA       top
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  • National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
  • U.S. English
  • National Immigrants' Rights Project
  • Wikipedia MKUltra Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]
Utilities monitoring     top
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  • AP  White House Tracking Bug
  • DailyMail The CIA wants to spy on you through your TV: Agency director says it will 'transform' surveillance Devices connected to internet leak information CIA director says
  • CAMERA AP “Israeli spying” story an “Urban Myth” according to Justice Department
  • Dept of Homeland Security ID all immigrants, potential terrorists?
  • Fox
  • US Info search: collect biometric data on foreigners
  • DailyMail  The CIA wants to spy on you through your TV: Agency director says it will 'transform' surveillance Devices connected to internet leak information CIA director says these gadgets will 'transform clandestine tradecraft' Spies could watch thousands via supercomputers People 'bug' their own homes with web-connected devices By ROB WAUGH PUBLISHED: 08:20 EST, 16 March 2012 | UPDATED: 08:55 EST, 16 March 2012   ...  When people download a film from Netflix to a flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what they are doing and where they are. Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home - the rise of 'connected' gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people 'bug' their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus. The CIA claims it will be able to 'read' these devices via the internet - and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home.
White House, 'web tracking bug', Executive Order 12333       top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
  • AP  White House Tracking Bug
  • CAMERA AP “Israeli spying” story an “Urban Myth” according to Justice Department
  • Dept of Homeland Security ID all immigrants, potential terrorists?
  • Fox
  • US Info search: collect biometric data on foreigners
  • Wikipedia Executive Order 12333,  On December 4, 1981 President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, an Executive Order intended to extend powers and responsibilities of US intelligence agencies and direct the leaders of U.S. federal agencies to co-operate fully with CIA requests for information. This executive order was entitled United States Intelligence Activities. It was amended by Executive Order 13355: Strengthened Management of the Intelligence Community, on August 27, 2004. On July 30, 2008, President Bush issued Executive Order 13470 amending Executive Order 12333 to strengthen the role of the DNI.  Part 2.11 of this executive order reiterates a proscription on US intelligence agencies sponsoring or carrying out an assassination. It reads:[5] No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. Previously, EO 11905 (Gerald Ford) had banned political assassinations and EO 12036 (Jimmy Carter) had further banned indirect U.S. involvement in assassinations. As early as 1998, this proscription against assassination was reinterpreted, and relaxed, for targets who are classified by the United States as connected to terrorism.
 
Smile - You're on Candid Cable Surveillance Camera!  http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2734.htm  The Voice of the White House  Washington, D.C., August 10, 2007: “How do they watch you? Let me count the ways. With the new surveillance law being voted in by a weak-kneed Congress, the useless AG, Gonzales can now listen to any conversation or read any email without a court order. I have several additional comments to be made on this subject. Let’ s consider a means by which you can be spied on without a warrant. The first is by using your very own television set to listen to you. Sounds fantastic? Another nutty blog idea? Think again. Here I am quoting from an in-house memorandum: ‘The methodology of using a commercial television set connected to a cable network system being used as a transmitter as well as a receive, allowing other parties to hear conversations conducted in the vicinity of the set utilizes the medium of a digital oscillator installed in television sets. This use is only for a set itself connected to a cable system. The additional use of a cable box connected to the television set is the only means by which the set can be used to listen to nearby conversations because these boxes are designed to feed back information through the cable system. This feedback makes it possible for a subscriber to cable to use his telephone to call the cable company for the inclusion of a special program to the subscriber’s system. The cable company is automatically able to ascertain the telephone number from the call and using that information, send the desired program to the television set via their network and the box. The subscriber code of the subscriber matches the data on the subscriber’s box. This makes the use of the box as an instrument of clandestine surveillance possible.. It is then possible for such information to be fed into other channels, including investigative ones. The use by private parties of the cable system to obtain clandestine information in this manner would be difficult if not impossible but the NSA and FBI techniques in other electronic surveillance matters are more than sufficient to ensure electronic eavesdropping. ••••••••••••

 
 WMR How 9/11 began the process of a massive grab by the government of personal data.  January 28-30, 2011
With the neo-fascist Republican Party now in charge of the House of Representatives, there is proposed data retention legislation that would give the FBI virtual unfettered access to stored Internet transactional data from a variety of service providers with or without a criminal predicate. Democrats like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz from Florida also support the proposed mandatory data retention legislation. Government "fishing expeditions" for personal data had its beginning in the weeks after 9/11. This hunger for personal data has culminated in a massive $1.5 billion National Security Agency data warehouse now under construction at Camp Williams in Utah.

Although NSA insists that it will have few analysts at its new data warehouse, the NSA Utah Data Center, the government's grab for Internet user data clearly shows intent by NSA to conduct more sophisticated forms of data mining, extraction, and analysis than NSA and other federal agencies sought in the weeks and months after 9/11. JetBlue provided passenger data to a firm called Torch Concepts, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama, that had major plans to apply military- and intelligence-level data analysis programs to the American public. American and Delta Airlines had rejected requests for their passenger data by Torch.

Torch's conclusions were that poorer people who did not live in their homes for a long period of time time posed a greater terrorist risk (passenger stability indicator) than wealthier long-term homeowners.

The Census Bureau is also vulnerable to seeing its massive databases acquired by NSA Utah for data mining purposes. This editor previously reported on the value of U.S. Census data to intelligence analysts in 2004:

HOMELAND SECURITY MINES CENSUS DATA FILES

Possible Violation of Federal Law

By Wayne Madsen

According to US Census Bureau documents, the U.S. Census Bureau shared confidential census data files with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Of particular interest to DHS were census files on U.S. citizens of Arab ancestry sorted by individual ZIP code tabulation areas. In a U.S. Census Bureau memo dated April 23, 2004, a senior systems analyst with the Population Division writes to DHS that "my superiors are now asking questions about the usage of the data, given the sensitivity of different data requests we have received about the Arab population."

The Branch Officer of the DHS Customs and Border Protection Bureau's Container Security Division Operational Support and Oversight Branch responds to the Census Bureau concern by stating that the information on Americans of Arab ancestry is required for "U.S. Outbound operations; which include both cargo and passenger operations." The Branch Chief continues by stating, "at U.S. International airports, U.S. Customs posts signage informing various nationalities of the U.S. Customs regulations to report currency brought into the US upon entry. Current regulations require passengers bringing more than $10,000 into the U.S. to claim it on a currency entry declaration . . . My reason for asking for U.S. demographic data is to aid the Outbound Passenger Program Officer in identifying which language of signage, based on U.S. ethnic nationality population, would be best to post at the major International airports. Some cases this would identify multiple copies needed of a specific language sign versus other cities only one copy."

The Branch Chief then assures Census, "the data obtained from Census was used only for the above purpose and subsequently has been purged from my files!" Although the Branch Chief's name was blocked out in the released documents, the names of two DHS officials involved in the Census data request, Jerome A. Walfish and Mark S. Ziner, were not redacted.

Privacy experts point out that the reasoning given by DHS for obtaining the Arab ancestry files has some major flaws. One, is why someone involved with Outbound operations would be concerned with entry currency declarations. Another is why DHS requested data files on Arab ancestry populations in New England that include a number of second, third, and fourth generation Maronite Christian Lebanese whose language is English and would, therefore, not require airport signage written in Arabic.

The confidentiality of U.S. Census data is established in federal law. Title 13 U.S.C. Section 9, states that U.S. census data is confidential. In addition, Title 13, U.S.C. Section 9 (a) (a) states that non-employees of the Census Bureau must take an "oath of non disclosure," and must be special sworn status (SSS) officers if they are from another department or agency. There is no indication that DHS personnel who viewed the confidential Census records were special sworn status officers of the Census Bureau.

DHS was particularly interested in a 2000 Census file denoting the "population of Arab ancestry" from all places in the United States with 10,000 or more population. The information would be helpful in the possible targeting by DHS of cities with large percentages of Arab-American citizens, particularly Dearborn, Michigan with a 30.01 percent Arab-American population; Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, 0.69 percent; Hamtramck, Michigan, 9.39 percent; Dearborn Heights, Michigan, 7.86 percent; Bridgeview, Illinois, 7.18; Tyson's Corner, Virginia, 6.53 percent; and Lackawanna, New York, 5.83. Lackawanna is home to the "Lackawanna Six," six Yemeni-Americans who were convicted of aiding Al Qaeda. There were allegations of U.S. Justice Department prosecutorial misconduct in the case against the six, mainly that the government threatened to indefinitely jail the six in a military detention facility unless they voluntarily pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.

In addition, DHS was provided with very detailed Arab-American demographic data from the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and the commonwealth territory of Puerto Rico. In the case of New Hampshire, the census data yielded some very definitive information on Arab-Americans broken down by ZIP codes into small towns and cities. In the case of Nashua, New Hampshire, the combined ZIP codes of 03060,03062, 03063, and 03064 indicates the presence of 269 Lebanese-Americans. This community of Maronite Christian Catholics includes some of New Hampshire's best-known politicians and their families, including current Republican Senator John E. Sununu and his three children and former Nashua Mayor Brenda Elias.

In the case of Salem, New Hampshire (ZIP code 03079), the 594 Lebanese Americans include former New Hampshire Republican Governor and chief of staff to former President George H. W. Bush, John H. Sununu, the father of Senator Sununu. In Bedford (ZIP code 03110), the 44 Lebanese-Americans in the town include members of the Sununu family. In the case of Dover (ZIP Code 03820), the Lebanese-American community includes Bill Shaheen, the husband of former Democratic Governor Jeanne Shaheen, and their three children. Jeanne Shaheen is currently the national co-chair of Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign.*

DHS also obtained specific breakdowns of Iraqi-Americans and Palestinian-Americans. In certain towns, where their respective populations are low, it would not be difficult for DHS to ascertain the identities of the individuals by family unit. Such are the cases with the Iraqi-American populations of the Massachusetts towns of Longmeadow (7 people), Andover (8 people), Cambridge (6 people), Chelsea (8 people), and East Providence, Rhode Island (5 people). The same situation applies to Palestinian-Americans in the census records where the breakdown shows 5 members of that ancestry in Springfield, Massachusetts and 3 in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

* Shaheen is now the senior Senator from New Hampshire.

 
 

 

 
anonymous
This administration likes to write memos to itself, justifying the most horrendous acts. Wars of aggression, torture, assassination, the destruction of 800 years of our common law heritage (habeas corpus), and 250 years of American law in the body of our Constitution.

Some of these are public. Two more have recently come partially into the light.

The first is an awareness of some kind of communication surveillance. Currently some groups believe that this is limited to the data mining of so called pen register information. But, pen register data does not require a warrant for access. This data is composed of basic information about individual calls like date, time, length, and number called. There is no need for the NSA to collect this data either. All most all billing of American phone calls is done by an Israeli company called Amdocs. This data would be most cheaply and conveniently purchased directly from Amdocs.

NSA also has the legal "right" to collect basic email data without a warrant as well. This includes the information in the email header including but not limited to sender, recipients, data, time, length, attachment names, etc. The legal precedent for the NSAs gathering of basic email data without a warrant was actually based on its existing "right" to pen register data.

So this current debacle is over something more than pen register data. For around two decades, academic publication of much optical computing theory and technology has been suppressed by our government. The suppression of academic information is nothing new. I specifically recall that during the 1970's our government prevented the publication of biomedical research because the research referred to unapproved uses of FDA cleared drugs.

Specialized optical units and array processors will massively increase the parallel processing capacities of the real time capacity required to effectively provide voice recognition capabilities on a large scale. The NSA has been rumored to have these capacities for some time. It is much more likely that the contents of the phone calls themselves are being monitored and data mined. Otherwise, there would be no furor over this whole issue.

The other significant Constitutional attack that is presently coming into the light is about a program of warrant-less sneak and peek searches of Muslim owned homes, businesses and property. These illicit searches are reputed to center around searches for radioactive material. At first 100 such searches were said to have taken place, but more recent reports have upped that number to over 500.

It is clear that this tyrant president will not accept any limitations on his power. Even though the law is clear, his minions tout the line that his war powers are unlimited. Our entire legal and societal heritage as well as our way of life is under viscious attack from our own leaders.

 
Wired   Appeals Court Allows Classified Evidence in Spy Case By David Kravets February 27, 2009 | 3:49:39 PMCategories: Surveillance A federal appeals court dealt a blow to the Obama administration Friday when it refused to block a judge from admitting top secret evidence in a lawsuit weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress, as President George W. Bush did, and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

The legal brouhaha concerns U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision in January to admit as evidence a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004. The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor — sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the top secret memo to them.

The courts had ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case after the Bush administration declared it a state secret. The document's admission to the case is central for the two former lawyers of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity to acquire legal standing so they may challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless-eavesdropping program Bush publicly acknowledged in 2005.

Absent intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, the one-line decision (.pdf) by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means the lawyers' case is the only lawsuit likely to litigate the merits of a challenge to Bush's secret eavesdropping program adopted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"We're trying to establish a legal precedent: A rule that the president must comply with legislation passed by Congress," said Jon Eisenberg, the attorney for the two lawyers. "The president is not above the law. This case is important to establish a legal precedent."

The lawyers' suit looked all but dead in July when they were initially blocked from using the document to prove they were spied on. They were forced to return it to the government after it was declared a state secret.

But last month, Walker said the document could be used in the case because there was sufficient, anecdotal evidence unrelated to the document that suggests the lawyers for the Al-Haramain charity were spied upon. Without the document, the lawyers didn't have a case.

The Bush and the Obama administration's said the document's use in the trial was a threat to national security. The document at issue isn't likely to ever become public.  Walker's Jan. 5 order only allows lawyers in the case to view it, and they are forbidden to publicly discuss its contents.

Bush acknowledged the existence of the so-called Terror Surveillance Program in 2005. It authorized the NSA to intercept, without warrants, international communications to or from the United States that the government reasonably believed involved a member or agent of al-Qaeda, or affiliated terrorist organization. Congress authorized such spying activity in July.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims the TSP went further, and accuses the nations' telecommunication companies of funneling all electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. However, as part of the spy bill approved in July, the government immunized the telcos from lawsuits accusing them of being complicit with the Bush administration.

The Obama administration on Thursday urged Judge Walker, the same judge in the Al-Haramain case, to dismiss the EFF's challenge to the immunity legislation. Walker's decision is pending. The U.S. government had designated Al-Haramain a terror organization.  The Justice Department declined comment.

 

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Warrantless searches by FBI
WASHINGTON - The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.  Friday's disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration's sweeping anti-terror law.

The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In some cases, the bureau demanded information about one person from several companies.

The numbers from previous years remain classified, officials said.  The department also reported it received a secret court's approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records.

The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005.  The spike is expected to be temporary, however, because the Patriot Act renewal that President Bush signed in March made it easier for authorities to obtain subscriber information on telephone numbers captured through certain wiretaps.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The FBI security letters have been the subject of legal battles in two federal courts because, until the Patriot Act changes, recipients were barred from telling anyone about them.  Ann Beeson, the associate legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the report to Congress "confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval."  The number disclosed Friday excludes requests for subscriber information, an exception written into the law. It was unclear how many FBI letters were not counted for that reason.
Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER Oct. 9, 2008— Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination. "We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary." "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." WATCH Kinne discuss why it was 'awkward' listening to her fellow Americans. She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States. Watch "World News Tonight with Charles Gibson" and "Nightline" for more of Brian Ross' exclusive report. Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. "Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk. WATCH Faulk discuss what a day on the job was like listening to Americans. The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program. "There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February. But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism. US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions. "I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said. In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted. "It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified. He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?" "No, sir," General Hayden replied. Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance." "They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program. "This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said. Listening to Aid Workers NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders. "We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News. WATCH Kinne describe how listening to aid workers was part of the job. A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: "The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers." Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans. "It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information," Kinne said. Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives. "IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said. NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh to join the Navy after 9/11. Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack. "By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security." The NSA: "The Shadow Factory" Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, "The Shadow Factory," to be published next week. "It's extremely rare," said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark "Puzzle Palace" which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency. "Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn't be done, and that's what forces whistleblowers." WATCH Bamford describe how the NSA missed signals leading up to 9/11. A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: "At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face."
NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system 'This is Big Brother', says corporate insider
The Register  NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system 'This is Big Brother', says corporate insider ....   By Lewis Page • , 8th July 2010 09:20 GMT    ...   The US National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking on a secret domestic surveillance project dubbed "Perfect Citizen", intended to monitor and protect important national infrastructure such as power grids and transport systems.    ...   The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed government and industry sources, says that the NSA has awarded a "black" (classified) $100m contract to defence contractor Raytheon which will see secret monitoring equipment installed within US networks deemed to be of national importance.    ...   According to the WSJ, Perfect Citizen has caused some disquiet among those in the know. It could be seen as the NSA - a military combat support agency whose focus is supposed to be on external threats - carrying out massive automated surveillance of American companies and citizens. The paper quotes an internal Raytheon email as saying that "Perfect Citizen is Big Brother".    ...   The stated purpose of the project is to get a clear idea of the level of threat facing American infrastructure IT. Many older systems, designed in the pre-network world, have since been hooked up to the internet for ease of use and maintenance. It is feared by some in the US intelligence / defence community that unfriendly powers and organizations are already engaged in probing these systems with a view to learning how to attack them.    ...   The NSA's Perfect Citizen equipment would be designed to flag up unusual network events indicating an impending cyber attack, according to the WSJ's sources.    ...   "You've got to instrument the network to know what's going on, so you have situational awareness to take action," an unnamed military source told the paper.    ...   Many of the networks that the NSA would wish to place Perfect Citizen equipment on are privately owned, however, and some could also potentially carry information offering scope for "mission creep" outside an infrastructure-security context. For instance, full access to power company systems might allow the NSA to work out whether anyone was at home at a given address. Transport and telecoms information would also make for a potential bonanza for intrusive monitoring.    ...   The full scope of the project remains to be determined, according to the WSJ report, with no certainty as yet on which companies or types of companies would be asked to cooperate - or how much information the NSA would get access to.    ...   The NSA - whose boss has now also been confirmed as head of the Pentagon's uniformed Cyber Command - apparently got the job by default, as it is considered the only US agency with enough network and cyber savvy to take the task on.    ... The Reg has contacted Raytheon and the NSA for comment on Perfect Citizen, but thus far has not received any reply. ®
Electronic Frontier Foundation  
AP SAN FRANCISCO - The Justice Department said Friday it was moving to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program.   The lawsuit, brought by the Internet privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not include the government.  Instead, it names AT&T, which the San Francisco-based group accuses of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.

The government, in a filing here late Friday, said the lawsuit threatens to expose government and military secrets and therefore should be tossed. The administration added that its bid to intervene in the case should not be viewed as a concession that the allegations are true.  As part of its case, the EFF said it obtained documents from a former AT&T technician showing that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T's network, and those documents are under seal. The former technician said the documents detail secret NSA spying rooms and electronic surveillance equipment in AT&T facilities.

Next month, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will hold a hearing on whether they should be divulged publicly.  President Bush confirmed in December that the NSA has been conducting the surveillance when calls and e-mails, in which at least one party is outside the United States, are thought to involve al-Qaida terrorists.  In congressional hearings earlier this month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested the president could order the NSA to listen in on purely domestic calls without first obtaining a warrant from a secret court established nearly 30 years ago to consider such issues.

Gonzales said the administration, assuming the conversation related to al-Qaida, would have to determine if the surveillance were crucial to the nation's fight against terrorism, as authorized by Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks.  The EFF lawsuit, alleging AT&T violated U.S. law and its customers' privacy, seeks to stop the surveillance program.  The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said it follows all applicable laws.

 

 

60 Minutes on NSA corruption and incompetence. Report follows WMR report by six years   May 24, 2011 -- WayneMadsenReport
CBS "60 Minutes" reported on May 22 on former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake's charges of high-level corruption and incompetence within the eavesdropping agency.

WMR is re-publishing our report on NSA, which includes a reference to "Thinthread," the first ever report in the media on this system. There is an Israeli espionage angle to the story about Drake, NSA mathematician Bill Binney, NSA analyst J. Kirk Wiebe, NSA computer scientist Ed Loomis, House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark, Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm and NSA espionage against U.S. citizens. "The New Yorker" article by Jane Mayer fails to mention this important element, which may be the real reason for the prosecution of Drake and the prosecution, recently aborted, of Tamm. Because when it comes to Israeli espionage in the United States, it's "see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil."

NSA and selling the nation's prized secrets to contractors

June 1, 2005

On August 1, 2001, just five and a half weeks before the 911 attacks, NSA awarded Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) a more than $2 billion, ten-year contract known as GROUNDBREAKER. The contract was never popular with NSA's career professionals. Although GROUNDBREAKER was limited to outsourcing NSA's administrative support functions such as telephones, data networks, distributed computing, and enterprise architecture design, the contract soon expanded into the operational areas -- a sphere that had always been carefully restricted to contractors. NSA was once worried about buying commercial-off-the-shelf computer components such as semiconductors because they might contain foreign bugs. NSA manufactured its own computer chips at its own semiconductor factory at Fort Meade. Currently, NSA personnel are concerned that outsourcing mania at Fort Meade will soon involve foreign help desk technical maintenance provided from off-shore locations like India.

CSC had originally gained access to NSA through a "buy in" project called BREAKTHROUGH, a mere $20 million contract awarded in 1998 that permitted CSC to operate and maintain NSA computer systems. When General Michael V. Hayden took over as NSA Director in 1999, the floodgates for outside contractors were opened and a resulting deluge saw most of NSA's support personnel being converted to contractors working for GROUNDBREAKER's Eagle Alliance (nicknamed the "Evil Alliance" by NSA government personnel), a consortium led by CSC. NSA personnel rosters of support personnel, considered protected information, were turned over to Eagle, which then made offers of employment to the affected NSA workers. The Eagle Alliance consists of CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, CACI, Omen, Inc., Keane Federal Systems, ACS Defense, BTG, Compaq, Fiber Plus, Superior Communications, TRW (Raytheon), Verizon, and Windemere.

In October 2002, Hayden, who has now been promoted by Bush to be Deputy Director of National Intelligence under John Negroponte, opened NSA up further to contractors. A Digital Network Enterprise (DNE) team led by SAIC won a $280 million, 26 month contract called TRAILBLAZER to develop a demonstration test bed for a new signals intelligence processing and analysis system. SAIC's team members included Booz Allen Hamilton, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Eagle Alliance team leader CSC. TRAILBLAZER, according to Hayden's own testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now behind schedule and over budget to the tune of over $600 million.

But that is not the only consequence of these two mega-contracts for NSA's ability to monitor global communications for the next 911, which could be a terrorist nuclear strike on the United States.

NSA insiders report that both contract teams have melded into one and that NSA's operations are being adversely impacted. From simple tasks like phones being fixed to computers being updated with new software, the Eagle Alliance has been a disaster. The Eagle Alliance and DNE team members are rife with former NSA top officials who are reaping handsome bonuses from the contracts -- and that has many NSA career employees crying conflict of interest and contract fraud.

CACI, called "Colonels and Captains, Inc." by critics who cite the revolving door from the Pentagon to its corporate office suites, counts former NSA Deputy Director Barbara McNamara as a member of its board of directors. CACI alumni include Thomas McDermott, a former NSA Deputy Director for Information Systems Security. Former NSA Director Adm. Mike McConnell is a Senior Vice President of Booz Allen. Former NSA Director General Ken Minihan is President of the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), an intelligence business development association that includes Boeing, Booz Allen, CACI, CSC, the Eagle Alliance, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SAIC, and Windemere, all GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER contractors, among its membership. SASA's board of directors (surprise, surprise) includes CACI's Barbara McNamara. One of SASA's distinguished advisers is none other than General Hayden.

Although contractors are required to have the same high level security clearances as government personnel at NSA, there are close connections between some NSA contractors and countries with hostile intelligence services. For example, CACI's president and CEO visited Israel in early 2004 and received the Albert Einstein Technology Award at ceremony in Jerusalem attended by Likud Party Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. The special ceremony honoring CACI's president was sponsored by the Aish HaTorah Yeshiva Fund. The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party's Jerusalem Mayor, Uri Lupolianski, was also in attendance. According to Lebanon's Daily Star, CACI's president also met with notorious racist Israeli retired General Effie Eitam who advocates expelling Palestinians from their lands. The U.S. delegation also included a number of homeland security officials, politicians, and businessmen. CACI has also received research grants from U.S.-Israeli bi-national foundations. A few months after the award ceremony for CACI's president, the Taguba Report cited two CACI employees as being involved in the prison torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The U.S. military commander for the Iraqi prisons, General Janis Karpinski, reported that she witnessed Israeli interrogators working alongside those from CACI and another contractor, Titan.

When the Taguba Report was leaked, the office of Deputy Defense Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith issued an order to Pentagon employees not to download the report from the Internet. Feith is a well-known hard line supporter of Israel's Likud Party and, according to U.S. government insiders, his name has come up in FBI wiretaps of individuals involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons material to Israel via Turkish (including Turkish Jewish) intermediaries. These wiretaps are the subject of a Federal probe of who compromised a sensitive CIA counter-proliferation global operation that used a carve out company called Brewster Jennings & Associates to penetrate nuclear weapons smuggling networks with tentacles extending from Secaucus, New Jersey to South Africa and Pakistan and Turkey to Israel.

According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, some six months before the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was first uncovered, one of Feith's assistants, Larry Franklin, met with two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the Tivoli Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top secret information to Steve Rosen, AIPAC's then policy director, and Keith Weissman, a senior Iran analyst with AIPAC. Franklin has been indicted for passing classified information to AIPAC. In addition, three Israeli citizens have been identified as possible participants in the spy scandal. They are Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington; Uzi Arad, an analyst with the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya (the northern Tel Aviv suburb where the headquarters of Mossad is located); and Eran Lerman, a former Mossad official who is now with the American Jewish Committee.

What has some NSA officials worried is that with pro-Israeli neocons now engrained within the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), State Department, and National Security Council, NSA is ripe for penetration by Israeli intelligence. NSA has a troubled past with Israel. In 1967, Israeli warplanes launched a premeditated attack on the NSA surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, killing and wounding a number of U.S. sailors and NSA civilian personnel. Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard compromised a number of NSA sensitive sources and methods when he provided a garage full of classified documents to Israel. But NSA is also aware of an incident where Israelis used a contractor, RCA, to gain access to yet additional NSA sources and methods. In the 1980s, against the wishes of NSA, the Reagan administration forced NSA to permit RCA, one of its major contractors, to develop a tethered aerostat (balloon) signals intelligence and direction finding system for the Israeli Defense Force. According to NSA officials, the Israeli-NSA joint project, codenamed DINDI, was established at a separate facility in Mount Laurel, New Jersey and apart from the main NSA developmental center at RCA's facility in Camden, New Jersey. Although NSA and RCA set up a strict firewall between the contractor's national intelligence contract work and the separate DINDI contract, Israeli engineers, who were working for Mossad, soon broke down the security firewall with the assistance of a few American Jewish engineers assigned to the DINDI project. The security breach resulted in a number of national intelligence developmental systems being compromised to the Israelis, including those code named PIEREX, MAROON ARCHER, and MAROON SHIELD. DINDI was quickly cancelled but due to the sensitivity surrounding the American Jewish engineers, the Reagan Justice Department avoided bringing espionage charges. There were some forced retirements and transfers, but little more. But for NSA, the duplicity of the Israelis added to the enmity between Fort Meade and Israeli intelligence.

With outside contractors now permeating NSA and a major Israeli espionage operation being discovered inside the Pentagon, once again there is a fear within NSA that foreign intelligence services such as the Mossad could make another attempt to penetrate America's virtual "Fort Knox" of intelligence treasures and secrets.

Thanks to some very patriotic and loyal Americans inside NSA, this author is now in possession of an internal NSA contract document from November 2002 that shows how GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER have allowed the Eagle Alliance and other contractors to gain access to and even virtual control over some of the most sensitive systems within the U.S. intelligence community. One suspect in this unchecked outsourcing is the person Hayden hired from the outside to act as Special Adviser to his Executive Leadership Team, Beverly Wright, who had been the Chief Financial Officer for Legg Mason Wood Walker in Baltimore. Before that, Wright had been the Chief Financial Officer for Alex Brown, the investment firm at which George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, once served as a board member. As one senior NSA official sarcastically put it, "She's highly qualified to work in intelligence!"

According to the document, the future of some 10,000 Windows NT and UNIX workstations and servers that handle some of NSA's most sensitive signals intelligence (SIGINT) (the Signals Intelligence Directorate workstation upgrade is code named BEANSTALK) and electronics intelligence (ELINT) applications, including databases that contain communications intercepts, are now firmly in the grasp of the Eagle Alliance. Operational workstations are being migrated to a less-than-reliable Windows/Intel or "WINTEL" environment. The document boldly calls for the Eagle Alliance to establish a SIGINT Service Applications Office (SASO) to "provide and maintain Information Technology services, tools, and capabilities for all [emphasis added] SIGINT mission applications at the NSA." This is a far cry from the non-operational administrative support functions originally specified in the GROUNDBREAKER contract.

The document also calls for NSA to provide extremely sensitive information on SIGINT users to the contractors: "Identification of target sets of users in order to successfully coordinate with the Eagle Alliance modernization program." The Eagle Alliance is involved in a number of systems that impact on other members of the U.S. intelligence community, foreign SIGINT partners, and national command authorities. These systems include INTELINK, Common Remoted Systems, National SIGINT Requirements Process, Overhead Tasking Distribution, RSOC (Regional SIGINT Operations Center) Monitoring Tool, RSOC Modeling Tool, Speech Activity Detection, Network Analysis Tools, Network Reconstruction Tools, Advanced Speech Processing Services, Automatic Message Handling System, CRITIC Alert, Cross Agency Multimedia Database Querying, Message Format Converter, Central Strategic Processing and Reporting, Collection Knowledge Base, Language Knowledge Base and Capabilities, K2000 Advanced ELINT Signals, Speech Content Services, Speech Information Extraction, Dominant Facsimile Processing System and DEFSMAC Support, Data Delivery (TINMAN), High Frequency Direction Finding (HFDF) Database, Satellite database, Protocol Analysis Terminal, Global Numbering Database, Intercept Tasking Databases, DEFSMAC Space Systems Utilities, Message Server, Extended Tether Program, Language Knowledge Services, Trend Analysis in Data Streams, Signal Related Database, SANDKEY Support (SIGINT Analysis and Reporting), and the SIGINT interception database ANCHORY and the ELINT database WRANGLER. In fact, the document states that the contractors' plans foresee the inclusion of NSA's intelligence community partners (foreign and domestic) in the contractors' revamping of NSA's operational systems.

The servers include those that support mission-critical National Time Sensitive Systems (NTSS). These National Time Sensitive System servers have been assigned various cover terms:

CANUCKS DOLLAR EASTCAKE HEALYCUFF MUDDYSWELT NEEDYWHAT RIMTITLE RISKDIME ROWLOAD SEAWATER CURACAO HALF HEALYMINK LEARNGILT LINEFURL MOBLOOSE SPELLBEAK THOSEHOT.

A number of SIGINT applications are also impacted by the outsourcing mania. They are also assigned cover terms:

ADVERSARY ADVERSARY GOLD CHECKMATE FANBELT FANBELT II FIREBLAZE GALE-LITE (the primary owner of which is DIA) GALLEYMAN GALLEYPROOF JAGUAR KAFFS MAGNIFORM MAINCHANCE OILSTOCK PATHSETTER PINSETTER SIGDASYS FILE II, III, and KL TEXTA SPOT

In fact, the document indicates that literally hundreds of NSA intelligence applications are now subject to the whims of outside contractors. These systems include

ABEYANCE, ACROPOLIS, ADROIT, ADVANTAGE, AGILITY, AIRLINE, AIRMAIL, ALERT, ALCHEMIST, ANTARES, APPLEWOOD II, ARCHIVER, ARCVIEW GIS, ARROWGATE, ARROWWOOD, ARTFUL, ASPEN, ASSOCIATION, ATOMICRAFT, ATTRACTION, AUTOPILOT, AUTOSTAR, AXIOMATIC

BABBLEQUEST, BACKSAW, BANYAN, BARAD, BASERUNNER, BEAMER, BEIKAO, BELLVIEW, BIRDSNEST, BISON, BLACKBIRD, BLACKBOOK, BLACKFIN, BLACKHAWK, BLACKNIGHT/SHIPMASTER, BLACKMAGIC, BLACKONYX, BLACKOPAL, BLACKSEA, BLACKSHACK, BLACKSHIRT, BLACKSMYTH, BLACKSNAKE, BLACKSPIDER, BLACKSTAR, BLACKSTORM, BLACKSTRIKE, BLACKWATCH PULL, BLOODHUNTER, BLACKSWORD, BLOSSOM, BLUEBERRY, BLUESKY, BLUESTREAM, BOTTOM, BOTTOMLINE, BOWHUNT, BRAILLEWRITER, BRICKLOCK, BRIGHTENER, BROADWAY, BRIO INSIGHT, BUCKFEVER, BUILDINGCODE, BULK, BUMPER

CADENCE, CAINOTOPHOBIA, CALLIOPE, CALVIN, CANDID, CANDELIGHTER, CANDLESTICK, CAPRICORN, CARNIVAL, CARRAGEEN, CARTOGRAPHER, CAT, CATCOVE, CELLBLOCK, CELTIC II, CELTIC CROSS, CENTERBOARD, CENTERCOIL, CENTERPOINT, CENTRALIST, CERCIS, CHAGRIN, CHAMELEON, CHAMITE, CHAPELVIEW, CHARIOT, CHARMANDER, CHARTS, CHATEAU, CHECKMATE, CHECKWEAVE, CHERRYLAMBIC, CHEWSTICK, CHICKENOFF, CHILLFLAME, CHIMERA, CHIPBOARD, CHUJING, CIVORG, CHUCKLE, CLEANSLATE, CLIPS, CLOSEREEF I, CLOUDBURST, CLOUDCOVER, CLOUDCOVER II, CLUBMAN, COASTLINE, COASTLINE COMPASSPOINT, CLIENT, CODEFINDER, COMMONVIEW, CONCERTO, CONDENSOR, CONESTOGA, CONFRONT, CONTRIVER, CONUNDRUM, CONVEYANCE, COPPERHEAD, CORESPACE, CORTEZ, COUNTERSINK, COUNTERSPY, CRAZYTRAIN, CRISSCROSS, CRUISESHIP, CRYSTALLIZE, CYBERENGINE, CYGNUS

DAFIF, DANCEHALL, DARKSHROUD, DATATANK, DAYPUL, DAZZLER, DEATHRAY, DECOMA, DELTAWING, DEPTHGAUGE, DESERTFOX, DESOTO, DESPERADO, DIALOG, DIAMONDCHIP, DIFFRACTION, DISPLAYLINE, DITCHDIGGER, DITTO/UNDITTO, DIVINATION, DOITREE, DOLLARFISH, DOUBLEVISION, DRAGONMAKER, DUALIST

EAGERNESS, EAGLESTONE, EASYRIDER, ECTOPLASM, ELATION, ELECTRIFY, ELTON, ELEVATOR, EMPERORFISH, ENCAPSULATE, ENGRAFT, ETCHINGNEEDLE, EXPATRIATE, EXPERTPLAYER, EXTENDER, EXTRACTOR, EUREKA, EYELET

FAIRHILL, FAIRVIEW, FALCONRY, FALLOWHAUNT, FANATIC, FANCINESS, FASCIA II, FATFREE, FENESTRA, FIESTA, FINECOMB, FIREBOLT, FINETUNE, FIREBRAND II, FIRELAKE, FIRERUNG, FIRETOWER, FIRSTVIEW, FISHERMAN, FISHINGBOAT, FISHWAY, FLAGHOIST (OCS), FLASHFORWARD, FLEXAGON, FLEXMUX, FLEXSTART, FLIP, FLOTSAM, FOLKART, FORESITE, FORTITUDE, FOURSCORE, FOXFUR, FPGA GSM ATTACK, FIRSTPOINT, FARMHOUSE, FLODAR, FLOVIEW, FOSSIK, FROZENTUNDRA, FREESTONE, FRENZY/GRANULE, FUSEDPULL

GALAXYDUST, GARDENVIEW, GATCHWORK, GATOR, GAUNTLET, GAYFEATHER, GAZELLE, GEMTRAIL, GENED, GHOSTVIEW, GHOSTWIRE, GIGACOPE, GIGASCOPE B, GISTER, GIVE, GLIDEPLANE, GOLDVEIN, GOLDPOINT, GNATCATCHER-GRADUS, GOKART, GOLDENEYE, GOLDENFLAX, GOLDENPERCH, GOLDMINE, GOMBROON, GOTHAM, GRADIENT, GRANDMASTER, GRAPEANGLE, GRAPEVINE, GRAPHWORK, GREATHALL, GREENHOUSE, GREMLIN, GUARDDOG, GUIDETOWER

HACKER, HABANERO, HAMBURGER, HAMMER, HARPSTRING, HARVESTER, HARVESTTIME, HEARTLAND II, HEARTLAND III, HEDGEHOG, HELMET II, HELMET III, HERONPOND, HIGHPOWER, HIGHTIDE, HILLBILLY BRIDE, HIPPIE, HOBBIN, HOKUSAI, HOMBRE, HOMEBASE, HOODEDVIPER, HOODQUERY, HOPPER, HOST, HORIZON, HOTSPOT, HOTZONE, HOUSELEEK/SPAREROOF, HYPERLITE, HYPERWIDE

ICARUS, ICICLE, IMAGERY, INFOCOMPASS, INNOVATOR, INQUISITOR, INROAD, INSPIRATION, INTEGRA, INTERIM, INTERNIST, INTERSTATE, INTRAHELP, IOWA, ISLANDER, IVORY ROSE, IVORY SNOW

JABSUM, JACAMAR, JADEFALCON, JARGON, JARKMAN, JASPERRED, JAZZ, JEALOUSFLASH, JEWELHEIST, JOVIAL, JOBBER INCOMING, JOSY, JUMBLEDPET, JUPITER

KAHALA, KAINITE, KEBBIE, KEELSON, KEEPTOWER, KEYCARD, KEYMASTER, KEYS, KEYSTONE WEB, KINGCRAFT, KINGLESS, KINSFOLK, KLASHES, KLOPPER, KNOSSOS, KRYPTONITE

LADYSHIP, LAKESIDE, LAKEVIEW, LAMPSHADE, LAMPWICK, LARGO, LASERDOME, LASERSHIP, LASTEFFORT, LATENTHEART, LATENTHEAT, LEGAL REPTILE, LETHALPAN, LIBERTY WALK, LIGHTNING, LIGHTSWITCH, LINKAGE, LIONFEED, LIONHEART, LIONROAR, LIONWATCH, LOAD, LOCKSTOCK, LOGBOOK, LONGROOT, LUMINARY

MACEMAN, MACHISMO, MADONNA, MAESTRO, MAGENTA II, MAGIC BELT, MAGICSKY, MAGISTRAND, MAGYK, MAKAH, MAINWAY, MARINER II, MARKETSQUARE, MARLIN, MARSUPIAL, MARTES, MASTERCLASS, MASTERSHIP, MASTERSHIP II, MASTING, MATCHLITE, MAUI, MAVERICK, MECA, MEDIASTORM, MEDIATOR, MEDIEVAL, MEGAMOUSE, MEGASCOPE, MEGASTAR, MERSHIP (CARILLON), MESSIAH, MICOM, MIGHTYMAIL, MILLANG, MONITOR, MONOCLE, MOONDANCE, MOONFOX, MOORHAWK, MORETOWN, MOSTWANTED, MOVIETONE III, MUSICHALL, MUSTANG, MYTHOLOGY

NABOBS, NATIONHOOD, NAUTILUS, NDAKLEDIT, NEMESIS, NERVETRUNK, NETGRAPH, NEWSBREAK, NEWSHOUND, NEXUS, NIGHTFALL 16, NIGHTFALL 32, NIGHTWATCH, NOBLEQUEST, NOBLESPIRIT, NOBLEVISION, NSOC SHIFTER, NUCLEON, NUMERIC

OAKSMITH, OBLIGATOR, OCEANARIUM, OCEANFRONT, OCTAGON, OCTAVE, OFFSHOOT, OLYMPIAD, ONEROOF, ONEROOF-WORD 2000 TRANSCRIPTION, OPALSCORE, OPENSEARCH, OPERA, ORCHID, ORIANA, OUTERBANKS, OUTFLASH, OUTREACH

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Terahertz Spectroscopy
Wikipedia Typically, the terahertz pulses are generated by an ultrashort pulsed laser and last only a few picoseconds. A single pulse can contain frequency components covering the whole terahertz range from 0.05 to 4 THz. For detection, the electrical field of the terahertz pulse is sampled and digitized, conceptually similar to the way an audio card transforms electrical voltage levels in an audio signal into numbers that describe the audio waveform. In THz-TDS, the electrical field of the THz pulse interacts in the detector with a much-shorter laser pulse (e.g. 0.1 picoseconds) in a way that produces an electrical signal that is proportional to the electric field of the THz pulse at the time the laser pulse gates the detector on. By repeating this procedure and varying the timing of the gating laser pulse, it is possible to scan the THz pulse and construct its electric field as a function of time. Subsequently, a Fourier transform is used to extract the frequency spectrum from the time-domain data. [edit]Advantages of THz radiation THz radiation has several distinct advantages over other forms of spectroscopy: many materials are transparent to THz, THz radiation is safe for biological tissues because it is non-ionizing (unlike for example X-rays), and images formed with terahertz radiation can have relatively good resolution (less than 1 mm). Also, many interesting materials have unique spectral fingerprints in the terahertz range, which means that terahertz radiation can be used to identify them. Examples which have been demonstrated include several different types of explosives, polymorphic forms of many compounds used as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) in commercial medications as well as several illegal narcotic substances. Since many materials are transparent to THz radiation, these items of interest can be observed through visually opaque intervening layers, such as packaging and clothing. Though not strictly a spectroscopic technique, the ultrashort width of the THz radiation pulses allows for measurements (e.g., thickness, density, defect location) on difficult to probe materials (e.g., foam). The measurement capability shares many similarities to that observed with pulsed ultrasonic systems. Reflections from buried interfaces and defects can be found and precisely imaged. THz measurements are non-contact however.
Prodigal
Cherie Anderson runs a travel company in southern California, and she’s convinced the federal government is reading her emails. But she’s all right with that. “I assume it's part of the Patriot Act and I really don't mind,” she says. “I figure I'm probably boring them to death.” It's likely Anderson is not alone in her concerns that the government may be monitoring what Americans say, write, and read. And now there may be even more to worry about: a newly revealed security research project called PRODIGAL -- the Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning -- which has been built to scan IMs, texts and emails . . . and can read approximately a quarter billion of them a day.

“Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization,” David Bader, a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering and a principal investigator on the project, told FoxNews.com. PRODIGAL scans those records for behavior -- emails to unusual recipients, certain words cropping up, files transferred from unexpected servers -- that changes over time as an employee "goes rogue." The system was developed at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army's secretive research arm that works on everything from flying cars to robotic exoskeletons. Initially, PRODIGAL will scan only the communications of military volunteers and people who work in federal agencies. But the very existence of such a project is sure to unnerve citizens like Anderson. Is the government reading my emails? Are they already monitoring me? "Some people say it's one step further toward a police state," said Anthony Howard, a book author and security expert who has consulted for the Department of Homeland Security. But Bader and other experts are quick to dismiss the idea that PRODIGAL could be used to monitor everyone in America. The scans work only on internal systems, they say -- not across the entire Internet. And the experts say such a project is long overdue: by monitoring for "anomalies" and predicting extreme behavior, catastrophes can be prevented, such as a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or a government employee sharing key classified information. “Today, an analyst may receive tens of thousands of 'anomalies' per day, where an anomaly is an unexplained event,” Bader said. The new system is designed to aid analysts in processing those anomalies. And it's not alone. Bader equated the PRODIGAL system to Raytheon SureView, an internal scanning system that looks for suspicious activity and alerts federal agencies about possible threats. Another system is the Einstein project, which was developed after 9/11 and scans government employees for key words and links suspicious activity to National Security Agency databases. But PRODIGAL scans vastly more data than those systems: as much as a terabyte or more per day, what Georgia Tech described as "massive data sets." PRODIGAL is part of an existing DARPA security project called Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS), which was announced earlier this year. Details about how ADAMS works are not widely known; Georgia Tech's recent announcement is one of the first reports to explain how these detection engines work.

According to Bader, PRODIGAL uses complex "graph-processing" algorithms to analyze threats and piece together a jigsaw puzzle of communications. The system then ranks the unusual activity before feeding the most suspicious threats to agents. Cyber-security expert Joseph Steinberg, CEO of Green Armor Solutions, said ADAMS is unique in that it scans through a massive stream of data. He says the new project, which will take about two years to develop and will cost $9 million, will be more effective at analyzing threats and determining if they are valid. But the issue is not the scanning technology itself; it’s how the information is interpreted -- and whether it ultimately helps at all, Howard told FoxNews.com. "Since there is no real data publicly available to substantiate that any of this technology is preventing terrorist attacks or strengthening our borders from within, [we can't] really say definitively that this technology is doing any good," he said. The challenge, he said, is that criminals and terrorists often use multiple channels of communication, some encrypted -- and know how to avoid existing detection systems. Nevertheless, PRODIGAL’s ability to scan reams of data is clearly the next step in tracking unusual activity, and it’s guaranteed to raise a red flag for Anderson and others. "Since people tend to be imperfect, the data captured can easily be mishandled. Where does it end?" Howard said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/03/could-us-government-start-reading-your-emails/#ixzz1fUgqaOeA

 
WMR  NSA spying operation targeting journalists focused but massive
April 20-22, 2012 -- NSA spying operation targeting journalists focused but massive  National Security Agency (NSA) sources have reported the following to WMR: The NSA has conducted a targeted but massive surveillance operation against certain journalists who have routinely exposed NSA's illegal domestic communication surveillance program, code named STELLAR WIND.    ...   NSA has, for some time, kept tabs on journalists who wrote about the communication spying agency. In its embryonic stage, the journalist surveillance system, originally code-named FIRSTFRUITS, was basically a clipping service that provided NSA and CIA analysts with copies of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles that mentioned one or both of the two agencies.    ...   Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, visited NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland with a list of individuals he wanted NSA to spy on and provide Cheney's office with transcripts of phone calls and e-mails. From that visit, STELLAR WIND was developed as an illegal surveillance system targeting journalists, members of Congress, and other "persons of interest" for the White House.    ...   In March 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled STELLAR WIND illegal but the next day he became critically ill with pancreatitis. When White House chief of staff Andrew Card and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales visited Ashcroft in his hospital room to demand he sign off on the program, Ashcroft deferred to his deputy James Comey and FBI director Robert Mueller who both refused to authorize the program. George W. Bush overruled Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller and continued to authorize STELLAR WIND. President Obama has continued to authorize STELLAR WIND, according to NSA sources.    ...   Although STELLAR WIND continues to generally target journalists who write about intelligence and national security matters, NSA has concentrated its efforts on three journalists, in particular. They are New York Times' reporter and author of State of War James Risen, journalist and author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets James Bamford, and WMR editor Wayne Madsen. Risen continues to fight a grand jury subpoena to testify about his sources on Operation Merlin, a CIA program to deliver flawed nuclear design technology to Iran. Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling has been indicted and charged under the Espionage Act for revealing details of the program. Risen's subpoena was quashed by Judge Louise Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, but the Obama administration has appealed the decision to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia and oral arguments in the case are scheduled for next month.    ...   NSA sources report: Wayne Madsen's e-mails and phone conversations back to 2002 are in the possession of the NSA. The phone calls range from those with his mother to those with government sources. All passwords to social networking websites, banks, phone companies, credit card companies, and his website, WayneMadsenReport, are held by the NSA. The data includes the list of his subscribers to WayneMadsenReport, as well.    ...   The same level of detailed data is maintained on Risen and Bamford.    ...   Personal observation: It is very clear that a number of individuals who contacted this editor over the past several years to pass on information were stymied at the last minute from maintaining contact. These individuals were willing to provide information on: the movement and temporary "loss" of nuclear weapons from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana in 2007 coupled with the murder of Air Force special operation Captain John Frueh in Washington state; documents proving Canadian military involvement in torture of detainees in Afghanistan; information on the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor being a "false flag" attack; evidence that there were no human remains found at the crash site of United flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and evidence showing that Harvard virologist Dr. Don Wiley, who was investigating the initial anthrax attacks, was murdered in Memphis in November 2001.    ...   In all these cases, individuals who contacted this editor and were willing to provide information ceased contact after their initial phone calls, letters, and email.    ...   NSA also maintains mail covers on addresses of certain individuals in the event that contact is made via the U.S. Postal Service or private companies such as FedEx or DHL.    ...   FIRSTFRUITS, which is now known by a different cover name, contains, in addition to articles, complete transcripts of phone calls, e-mails, faxes, and letters, in addition to the numbers and names of all individuals who have been in contact with targeted journalists. In addition to the three high priority targets -- Risen, Bamford, and Madsen -- other journalists who are a subject of the NSA warrantless surveillance include Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane of The New York Times, Siobhan Gorman, formerly of The Baltimore Sun and now with The Wall Street Journal, and Seymour Hersh with The New Yorker.   ..   So far, the Obama administration has brought Espionage Act charges against six individuals for contact with the media. They are charged with providing classified information to journalists and "aiding the enemy."    ...   However, the Justice Department may take an even more draconian turn. This editor has heard from NSA insiders that there is a willingness by some quarters to charge two of the three key targeted journalists under the Espionage Act. Since Bamford and Madsen both once worked at NSA and both signed non-disclosure agreements -- Bamford in the 1960s and Madsen in the mid-1980s -- there has been talk of indicting them also for violations of the Espionage Act, along with their sources in the intelligence community.

 
RT Stratfor emails reveal secret, widespread TrapWire surveillance system
Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous. Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented. The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing. Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails. On Wednesday, an administrator for the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that the site suspected that the motivation for the attacks could be that particularly sensitive Stratfor emails were about to be exposed. A hacker group called AntiLeaks soon after took credit for the assaults on WikiLeaks and mirrors of their content, equating the offensive as a protest against editor Julian Assange, “the head of a new breed of terrorist.” As those Stratfor files on TrapWire make their rounds online, though, talk of terrorism is only just beginning. Mr. Ferguson and others have mirrored what are believed to be most recently-released Global Intelligence Files on external sites, but the original documents uploaded to WikiLeaks have been at times unavailable this week due to the continuing DDoS attacks. Late Thursday and early Friday this week, the GIF mirrors continues to go offline due to what is presumably more DDoS assaults. Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the WikiLeaks server were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabytes of traffic per second on the site. According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is “designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports.” A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be "analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.” In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write, “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas’ staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces. What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf). “Suspicious activity reports from all facilities on the TrapWire network are aggregated in a central database and run through a rules engine that searches for patterns indicative of terrorist surveillance operations and other attack preparations,” Crime and Justice International magazine explains in a 2006 article on the program, one of the few publically circulated on the Abraxas product (pdf). “Any patterns detected – links among individuals, vehicles or activities – will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations, enabling them to begin investigations into the suspected surveillance cell.” In a 2005 interview with The Entrepreneur Center, Abraxas founder Richard “Hollis” Helms said his signature product “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” He calls it “a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed,” and that, “The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically.” An internal email from early 2011 included in the Global Intelligence Files has Stratfor’s Burton allegedly saying the program can be used to “[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go w/facial recognition software.” Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the "See Something, Say Something" program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well. In one email from 2010 leaked by Anonymous, Stratfor’s Fred Burton allegedly writes, “God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.” Files on USASpending.gov reveal that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense together awarded Abraxas and TrapWire more than one million dollars in only the eleven months. News of the widespread and largely secretive installation of TrapWire comes amidst a federal witch-hunt to crack down on leaks escaping Washington and at attempt to prosecute whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, a former agent with the NSA, has recently spoken openly about the government’s Trailblazer Project that was used to monitor private communication, and was charged under the Espionage Act for coming forth. Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas.
FBI / BioMetric   Facial Recognition and Identification Initiative.pdf text and RT
Facial Recognition and Identification Initiatives Richard W. Vorder Bruegge Federal Bureau of Investigation 2 Image Technology in the Forefront • Unparalleled ease of capturing, storing, copying, and sharing images • Proliferation of surveillance cameras, expanding global media enterprises, and average citizens with mobile phone still and video camera capabilities • Unprecedented level of sharing images and videos via the internet and other advanced communication methods • Photographs and videos depicting victims, suspects, and eyewitnesses are becoming the subject of investigations Face: Forensic Discipline And Biometric 3 Biometrics Forensics • A measurable biological (anatomical and physiological) or behavioral characteristic used for identification – Facial Recognition (FR) - the automated searching of a facial image in a computer database, typically resulting in a group of facial images ranked by computer evaluated similarity computer- evaluated • Visible physical characteristics one can use for the purposes of measurements or comparisons that are collected after an event – Facial Identification (FI) - the manual examination of the differences and similarities between two facial images for the purpose of determining if they represent different persons or the same person Event 4 FI & FR Address Multiple Missions • Mission Areas: – Access control – Automated identity verification – Human identification – Screening – Surveillance – Law enforcement & national security investigations – Identity intelligence to understand intent 5 FBI Facial Use Cases • Identifying fugitives and missing persons in FR systems • Identifying unknown persons of interest from images (1:N) • Tracking subjects movements to/from critical events (e.g., 9/11) • Conducting automated surveillance at lookout locations (1:M, where 1<M<<N) • Identifying subjects in public datasets • Identifying subjects from images in seized systems • Verifying mug shots against National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) records (1:1) • Controlling access 6 Identifying Subjects from Images for 40 Years • The FBI’s Facial Recognition/Identification work is performed within the Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit (FAVIAU) • The FAVIAU is one of only a few accredited laboratories in the world that conducts examinations in the disciplines of video, image, and audio analysis The Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE) is the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) program for exploring and advancing the use of new and enhanced biometric technologies and capabilities for integration into operations 7 Driving New FBI Biometric Capabilities 8 Sponsoring Applied Research • Ongoing applied research, development, test & evaluation: – Universal Face & Iris Workstation – FBI Facial Collaboration-Facial Land marking/Facial Aging – Automated Face Detection and Recognition in Video – FI/FR of Twins (blemishes) – Obscuring Identity in Video – Repro Face (2D-3D-2D) – Facial Image and Camera Certification Process – Automated Retrieval of Scars, Marks, and Tattoos – Ear Recognition – Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge/Multiple Biometric Evaluation/ III Data Set Testing 9 Sponsoring Standards Development • Facial Identification Scientific Working Group (FISWG) • Sponsored by the BCOE and established in 2009 • Mission - “develop consensus standards, guidelines, and best practices for the discipline of image-based comparisons of human features” • Participants include federal, state, local, and international government agencies, as well as invited non-governmental organizations • Next meeting scheduled for November 15-18 in San Antonio, Texas • Visit www.FISWG.org Deepening FR Collaboration • Sponsored the International Face Collaboration Meeting – 5 foreign countries and 11 U.S. agencies participated • Participated in the FR workshop “From Bones to Bits” – 55 U.S. government and 47 contractor attendees • Sponsored the U.S. Government Facial Collaboration Meeting – 88 attendees representing numerous law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies 10 Analyzing Legal And Privacy Concerns Tasks associated with this analysis include: • Identifying databases external to the FBI to which the FBI has legal access • Defining policy for both automated and human-tandem searching of databases and methods of how the images are used in searching and how they are destroyed or retained • Identifying privacy implications of applied research using images of human subjects 11 Developing Training Curriculum 12 Preparing for FR incorporation into Next Generation Identification (NGI) • The NGI system: – Incremental replacement of the current IAFIS – Improving current functionality and providing new functionality – Developing multimodal collection and search identification services  An upgrade to IAFIS – The FBI is developing an automated, interoperable multimodal biometric system 13 Enhanced ten print services 2011 Palmprints and latents 2012 Photos/Facial, scars, marks, and tattoos 2013 Iris 2014 13 Value Of the FBI-DMV Pilot Operational Results FR System Testing Identification of Follow-On Projects The BCOE-sponsored FR pilot program with NC DMV led to more than 700 leads including: • One federal fugitive apprehension • Six state fugitive apprehensions • One missing person resolution FACEMASK has also served as an opportunity for FBI analysts to operationally test a FR system and determine its strengths and weaknesses. This aids the FBI as it develops its own FR capability Due to this success, the FBI took advantage of an ongoing survey of U.S. DMVs and used it as an opportunity to identify other prospective state DMVs for follow-on projects Purpose Of The DMV Survey Initial Purpose • Collect DMV FR POC Information • Identify DMVs that have implemented FR systems Expanded Purpose • Gather data about FR vendors, state laws, and search protocol to help the FBI identify a DMV for a potential follow-on project • Technical systems information • Receptiveness to collaborating with the FBI • Various concerns and suggestions voiced by the DMVs and trends were recorded The FBI wanted to identify key FR POC in order to direct inquiring investigators and agencies. The original DMV survey focuses around contact information; however, with the success of the original pilot the purpose and scope of the data gathering effort changed. Potential FBI-DMV FR Pilot Expansion Active FR System NO FR System Unknown/No Response Key Takeaway: More than half of all state DMVs have FR systems. Their main goal is to detect and combat fraud Responses current as of (05/28/2010) 16 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Permit Law Enforcement Access to Data * DMV Survey High Level Findings Specific Findings  The vast majority of states that have FR Systems use L1 Technologies Technology Vendors Legal Requirements Funding Knowledge  Many DMV image databases are maintained and searched by their vendors. This presents privacy issues that should be explored   Across the nation, there are widely varying legal requirements. To initiate searches, some DMVs require Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) while some just require the requesting agency to buy their vendor’s software  Due to a lack of funding, some states who had planned to develop FR systems had to delay or cancel their plans due to budgetary constraints  Many DMV POCs lacked technical knowledge about their systems and the legal issues involved in their use. Since most POCs were unable or unwilling to nominate alternative POCs, more in-depth research may be required before FBI collaboration can be considered (i.e., researching state laws that apply to the DMV’s FR system or interviewing a DMV’s vendor for more specific systems information)  Questions / Comments Contact Information: Richard Vorder Bruegge Email: Richard.VorderBruegge@ic.fbi.gov Additional Resources: www.BiometricCoE.gov Email: BiometricCoE@leo.gov
WMR GROUNDBREAKER   NSA and selling the nation's prized secrets to contractors
June 1, 2005

On August 1, 2001, just five and a half weeks before the 911 attacks, NSA awarded Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) a more than $2 billion, ten-year contract known as GROUNDBREAKER. The contract was never popular with NSA's career professionals. Although GROUNDBREAKER was limited to outsourcing NSA's administrative support functions such as telephones, data networks, distributed computing, and enterprise architecture design, the contract soon expanded into the operational areas -- a sphere that had always been carefully restricted to contractors. NSA was once worried about buying commercial-off-the-shelf computer components such as semiconductors because they might contain foreign bugs. NSA manufactured its own computer chips at its own semiconductor factory at Fort Meade. Currently, NSA personnel are concerned that outsourcing mania at Fort Meade will soon involve foreign help desk technical maintenance provided from off-shore locations like India.

CSC had originally gained access to NSA through a "buy in" project called BREAKTHROUGH, a mere $20 million contract awarded in 1998 that permitted CSC to operate and maintain NSA computer systems. When General Michael V. Hayden took over as NSA Director in 1999, the floodgates for outside contractors were opened and a resulting deluge saw most of NSA's support personnel being converted to contractors working for GROUNDBREAKER's Eagle Alliance (nicknamed the "Evil Alliance" by NSA government personnel), a consortium led by CSC. NSA personnel rosters of support personnel, considered protected information, were turned over to Eagle, which then made offers of employment to the affected NSA workers. The Eagle Alliance consists of CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, CACI, Omen, Inc., Keane Federal Systems, ACS Defense, BTG, Compaq, Fiber Plus, Superior Communications, TRW (Raytheon), Verizon, and Windemere.

In October 2002, Hayden, who has now been promoted by Bush to be Deputy Director of National Intelligence under John Negroponte, opened NSA up further to contractors. A Digital Network Enterprise (DNE) team led by SAIC won a $280 million, 26 month contract called TRAILBLAZER to develop a demonstration test bed for a new signals intelligence processing and analysis system. SAIC's team members included Booz Allen Hamilton, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Eagle Alliance team leader CSC. TRAILBLAZER, according to Hayden's own testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now behind schedule and over budget to the tune of over $600 million.

But that is not the only consequence of these two mega-contracts for NSA's ability to monitor global communications for the next 911, which could be a terrorist nuclear strike on the United States.

NSA insiders report that both contract teams have melded into one and that NSA's operations are being adversely impacted. From simple tasks like phones being fixed to computers being updated with new software, the Eagle Alliance has been a disaster. The Eagle Alliance and DNE team members are rife with former NSA top officials who are reaping handsome bonuses from the contracts -- and that has many NSA career employees crying conflict of interest and contract fraud.

CACI, called "Colonels and Captains, Inc." by critics who cite the revolving door from the Pentagon to its corporate office suites, counts former NSA Deputy Director Barbara McNamara as a member of its board of directors. CACI alumni include Thomas McDermott, a former NSA Deputy Director for Information Systems Security. Former NSA Director Adm. Mike McConnell is a Senior Vice President of Booz Allen. Former NSA Director General Ken Minihan is President of the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), an intelligence business development association that includes Boeing, Booz Allen, CACI, CSC, the Eagle Alliance, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SAIC, and Windemere, all GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER contractors, among its membership. SASA's board of directors (surprise, surprise) includes CACI's Barbara McNamara. One of SASA's distinguished advisers is none other than General Hayden.

Although contractors are required to have the same high level security clearances as government personnel at NSA, there are close connections between some NSA contractors and countries with hostile intelligence services. For example, CACI's president and CEO visited Israel in early 2004 and received the Albert Einstein Technology Award at ceremony in Jerusalem attended by Likud Party Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. The special ceremony honoring CACI's president was sponsored by the Aish HaTorah Yeshiva Fund. The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party's Jerusalem Mayor, Uri Lupolianski, was also in attendance. According to Lebanon's Daily Star, CACI's president also met with notorious racist Israeli retired General Effie Eitam who advocates expelling Palestinians from their lands. The U.S. delegation also included a number of homeland security officials, politicians, and businessmen. CACI has also received research grants from U.S.-Israeli bi-national foundations. A few months after the award ceremony for CACI's president, the Taguba Report cited two CACI employees as being involved in the prison torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The U.S. military commander for the Iraqi prisons, General Janis Karpinski, reported that she witnessed Israeli interrogators working alongside those from CACI and another contractor, Titan.

When the Taguba Report was leaked, the office of Deputy Defense Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith issued an order to Pentagon employees not to download the report from the Internet. Feith is a well-known hard line supporter of Israel's Likud Party and, according to U.S. government insiders, his name has come up in FBI wiretaps of individuals involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons material to Israel via Turkish (including Turkish Jewish) intermediaries. These wiretaps are the subject of a Federal probe of who compromised a sensitive CIA counter-proliferation global operation that used a carve out company called Brewster Jennings & Associates to penetrate nuclear weapons smuggling networks with tentacles extending from Secaucus, New Jersey to South Africa and Pakistan and Turkey to Israel.

According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, some six months before the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was first uncovered, one of Feith's assistants, Larry Franklin, met with two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the Tivoli Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top secret information to Steve Rosen, AIPAC's then policy director, and Keith Weissman, a senior Iran analyst with AIPAC. Franklin has been indicted for passing classified information to AIPAC. In addition, three Israeli citizens have been identified as possible participants in the spy scandal. They are Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington; Uzi Arad, an analyst with the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya (the northern Tel Aviv suburb where the headquarters of Mossad is located); and Eran Lerman, a former Mossad official who is now with the American Jewish Committee.

What has some NSA officials worried is that with pro-Israeli neocons now engrained within the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), State Department, and National Security Council, NSA is ripe for penetration by Israeli intelligence. NSA has a troubled past with Israel. In 1967, Israeli warplanes launched a premeditated attack on the NSA surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, killing and wounding a number of U.S. sailors and NSA civilian personnel. Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard compromised a number of NSA sensitive sources and methods when he provided a garage full of classified documents to Israel. But NSA is also aware of an incident where Israelis used a contractor, RCA, to gain access to yet additional NSA sources and methods. In the 1980s, against the wishes of NSA, the Reagan administration forced NSA to permit RCA, one of its major contractors, to develop a tethered aerostat (balloon) signals intelligence and direction finding system for the Israeli Defense Force. According to NSA officials, the Israeli-NSA joint project, codenamed DINDI, was established at a separate facility in Mount Laurel, New Jersey and apart from the main NSA developmental center at RCA's facility in Camden, New Jersey. Although NSA and RCA set up a strict firewall between the contractor's national intelligence contract work and the separate DINDI contract, Israeli engineers, who were working for Mossad, soon broke down the security firewall with the assistance of a few American Jewish engineers assigned to the DINDI project. The security breach resulted in a number of national intelligence developmental systems being compromised to the Israelis, including those code named PIEREX, MAROON ARCHER, and MAROON SHIELD. DINDI was quickly cancelled but due to the sensitivity surrounding the American Jewish engineers, the Reagan Justice Department avoided bringing espionage charges. There were some forced retirements and transfers, but little more. But for NSA, the duplicity of the Israelis added to the enmity between Fort Meade and Israeli intelligence.

With outside contractors now permeating NSA and a major Israeli espionage operation being discovered inside the Pentagon, once again there is a fear within NSA that foreign intelligence services such as the Mossad could make another attempt to penetrate America's virtual "Fort Knox" of intelligence treasures and secrets.

Thanks to some very patriotic and loyal Americans inside NSA, this author is now in possession of an internal NSA contract document from November 2002 that shows how GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER have allowed the Eagle Alliance and other contractors to gain access to and even virtual control over some of the most sensitive systems within the U.S. intelligence community. One suspect in this unchecked outsourcing is the person Hayden hired from the outside to act as Special Adviser to his Executive Leadership Team, Beverly Wright, who had been the Chief Financial Officer for Legg Mason Wood Walker in Baltimore. Before that, Wright had been the Chief Financial Officer for Alex Brown, the investment firm at which George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, once served as a board member. As one senior NSA official sarcastically put it, "She's highly qualified to work in intelligence!"

According to the document, the future of some 10,000 Windows NT and UNIX workstations and servers that handle some of NSA's most sensitive signals intelligence (SIGINT) (the Signals Intelligence Directorate workstation upgrade is code named BEANSTALK) and electronics intelligence (ELINT) applications, including databases that contain communications intercepts, are now firmly in the grasp of the Eagle Alliance. Operational workstations are being migrated to a less-than-reliable Windows/Intel or "WINTEL" environment. The document boldly calls for the Eagle Alliance to establish a SIGINT Service Applications Office (SASO) to "provide and maintain Information Technology services, tools, and capabilities for all [emphasis added] SIGINT mission applications at the NSA." This is a far cry from the non-operational administrative support functions originally specified in the GROUNDBREAKER contract.

The document also calls for NSA to provide extremely sensitive information on SIGINT users to the contractors: "Identification of target sets of users in order to successfully coordinate with the Eagle Alliance modernization program." The Eagle Alliance is involved in a number of systems that impact on other members of the U.S. intelligence community, foreign SIGINT partners, and national command authorities. These systems include INTELINK, Common Remoted Systems, National SIGINT Requirements Process, Overhead Tasking Distribution, RSOC (Regional SIGINT Operations Center) Monitoring Tool, RSOC Modeling Tool, Speech Activity Detection, Network Analysis Tools, Network Reconstruction Tools, Advanced Speech Processing Services, Automatic Message Handling System, CRITIC Alert, Cross Agency Multimedia Database Querying, Message Format Converter, Central Strategic Processing and Reporting, Collection Knowledge Base, Language Knowledge Base and Capabilities, K2000 Advanced ELINT Signals, Speech Content Services, Speech Information Extraction, Dominant Facsimile Processing System and DEFSMAC Support, Data Delivery (TINMAN), High Frequency Direction Finding (HFDF) Database, Satellite database, Protocol Analysis Terminal, Global Numbering Database, Intercept Tasking Databases, DEFSMAC Space Systems Utilities, Message Server, Extended Tether Program, Language Knowledge Services, Trend Analysis in Data Streams, Signal Related Database, SANDKEY Support (SIGINT Analysis and Reporting), and the SIGINT interception database ANCHORY and the ELINT database WRANGLER. In fact, the document states that the contractors' plans foresee the inclusion of NSA's intelligence community partners (foreign and domestic) in the contractors' revamping of NSA's operational systems.

The servers include those that support mission-critical National Time Sensitive Systems (NTSS). These National Time Sensitive System servers have been assigned various cover terms:

CANUCKS DOLLAR EASTCAKE HEALYCUFF MUDDYSWELT NEEDYWHAT RIMTITLE RISKDIME ROWLOAD SEAWATER CURACAO HALF HEALYMINK LEARNGILT LINEFURL MOBLOOSE SPELLBEAK THOSEHOT. A number of SIGINT applications are also impacted by the outsourcing mania. They are also assigned cover terms:

ADVERSARY ADVERSARY GOLD CHECKMATE FANBELT FANBELT II FIREBLAZE GALE-LITE (the primary owner of which is DIA) GALLEYMAN GALLEYPROOF JAGUAR KAFFS MAGNIFORM MAINCHANCE OILSTOCK PATHSETTER PINSETTER SIGDASYS FILE II, III, and KL TEXTA SPOT In fact, the document indicates that literally hundreds of NSA intelligence applications are now subject to the whims of outside contractors. These systems include

ABEYANCE, ACROPOLIS, ADROIT, ADVANTAGE, AGILITY, AIRLINE, AIRMAIL, ALERT, ALCHEMIST, ANTARES, APPLEWOOD II, ARCHIVER, ARCVIEW GIS, ARROWGATE, ARROWWOOD, ARTFUL, ASPEN, ASSOCIATION, ATOMICRAFT, ATTRACTION, AUTOPILOT, AUTOSTAR, AXIOMATIC

BABBLEQUEST, BACKSAW, BANYAN, BARAD, BASERUNNER, BEAMER, BEIKAO, BELLVIEW, BIRDSNEST, BISON, BLACKBIRD, BLACKBOOK, BLACKFIN, BLACKHAWK, BLACKNIGHT/SHIPMASTER, BLACKMAGIC, BLACKONYX, BLACKOPAL, BLACKSEA, BLACKSHACK, BLACKSHIRT, BLACKSMYTH, BLACKSNAKE, BLACKSPIDER, BLACKSTAR, BLACKSTORM, BLACKSTRIKE, BLACKWATCH PULL, BLOODHUNTER, BLACKSWORD, BLOSSOM, BLUEBERRY, BLUESKY, BLUESTREAM, BOTTOM, BOTTOMLINE, BOWHUNT, BRAILLEWRITER, BRICKLOCK, BRIGHTENER, BROADWAY, BRIO INSIGHT, BUCKFEVER, BUILDINGCODE, BULK, BUMPER

CADENCE, CAINOTOPHOBIA, CALLIOPE, CALVIN, CANDID, CANDELIGHTER, CANDLESTICK, CAPRICORN, CARNIVAL, CARRAGEEN, CARTOGRAPHER, CAT, CATCOVE, CELLBLOCK, CELTIC II, CELTIC CROSS, CENTERBOARD, CENTERCOIL, CENTERPOINT, CENTRALIST, CERCIS, CHAGRIN, CHAMELEON, CHAMITE, CHAPELVIEW, CHARIOT, CHARMANDER, CHARTS, CHATEAU, CHECKMATE, CHECKWEAVE, CHERRYLAMBIC, CHEWSTICK, CHICKENOFF, CHILLFLAME, CHIMERA, CHIPBOARD, CHUJING, CIVORG, CHUCKLE, CLEANSLATE, CLIPS, CLOSEREEF I, CLOUDBURST, CLOUDCOVER, CLOUDCOVER II, CLUBMAN, COASTLINE, COASTLINE COMPASSPOINT, CLIENT, CODEFINDER, COMMONVIEW, CONCERTO, CONDENSOR, CONESTOGA, CONFRONT, CONTRIVER, CONUNDRUM, CONVEYANCE, COPPERHEAD, CORESPACE, CORTEZ, COUNTERSINK, COUNTERSPY, CRAZYTRAIN, CRISSCROSS, CRUISESHIP, CRYSTALLIZE, CYBERENGINE, CYGNUS

DAFIF, DANCEHALL, DARKSHROUD, DATATANK, DAYPUL, DAZZLER, DEATHRAY, DECOMA, DELTAWING, DEPTHGAUGE, DESERTFOX, DESOTO, DESPERADO, DIALOG, DIAMONDCHIP, DIFFRACTION, DISPLAYLINE, DITCHDIGGER, DITTO/UNDITTO, DIVINATION, DOITREE, DOLLARFISH, DOUBLEVISION, DRAGONMAKER, DUALIST

EAGERNESS, EAGLESTONE, EASYRIDER, ECTOPLASM, ELATION, ELECTRIFY, ELTON, ELEVATOR, EMPERORFISH, ENCAPSULATE, ENGRAFT, ETCHINGNEEDLE, EXPATRIATE, EXPERTPLAYER, EXTENDER, EXTRACTOR, EUREKA, EYELET

FAIRHILL, FAIRVIEW, FALCONRY, FALLOWHAUNT, FANATIC, FANCINESS, FASCIA II, FATFREE, FENESTRA, FIESTA, FINECOMB, FIREBOLT, FINETUNE, FIREBRAND II, FIRELAKE, FIRERUNG, FIRETOWER, FIRSTVIEW, FISHERMAN, FISHINGBOAT, FISHWAY, FLAGHOIST (OCS), FLASHFORWARD, FLEXAGON, FLEXMUX, FLEXSTART, FLIP, FLOTSAM, FOLKART, FORESITE, FORTITUDE, FOURSCORE, FOXFUR, FPGA GSM ATTACK, FIRSTPOINT, FARMHOUSE, FLODAR, FLOVIEW, FOSSIK, FROZENTUNDRA, FREESTONE, FRENZY/GRANULE, FUSEDPULL

GALAXYDUST, GARDENVIEW, GATCHWORK, GATOR, GAUNTLET, GAYFEATHER, GAZELLE, GEMTRAIL, GENED, GHOSTVIEW, GHOSTWIRE, GIGACOPE, GIGASCOPE B, GISTER, GIVE, GLIDEPLANE, GOLDVEIN, GOLDPOINT, GNATCATCHER-GRADUS, GOKART, GOLDENEYE, GOLDENFLAX, GOLDENPERCH, GOLDMINE, GOMBROON, GOTHAM, GRADIENT, GRANDMASTER, GRAPEANGLE, GRAPEVINE, GRAPHWORK, GREATHALL, GREENHOUSE, GREMLIN, GUARDDOG, GUIDETOWER

HACKER, HABANERO, HAMBURGER, HAMMER, HARPSTRING, HARVESTER, HARVESTTIME, HEARTLAND II, HEARTLAND III, HEDGEHOG, HELMET II, HELMET III, HERONPOND, HIGHPOWER, HIGHTIDE, HILLBILLY BRIDE, HIPPIE, HOBBIN, HOKUSAI, HOMBRE, HOMEBASE, HOODEDVIPER, HOODQUERY, HOPPER, HOST, HORIZON, HOTSPOT, HOTZONE, HOUSELEEK/SPAREROOF, HYPERLITE, HYPERWIDE

ICARUS, ICICLE, IMAGERY, INFOCOMPASS, INNOVATOR, INQUISITOR, INROAD, INSPIRATION, INTEGRA, INTERIM, INTERNIST, INTERSTATE, INTRAHELP, IOWA, ISLANDER, IVORY ROSE, IVORY SNOW

JABSUM, JACAMAR, JADEFALCON, JARGON, JARKMAN, JASPERRED, JAZZ, JEALOUSFLASH, JEWELHEIST, JOVIAL, JOBBER INCOMING, JOSY, JUMBLEDPET, JUPITER

KAHALA, KAINITE, KEBBIE, KEELSON, KEEPTOWER, KEYCARD, KEYMASTER, KEYS, KEYSTONE WEB, KINGCRAFT, KINGLESS, KINSFOLK, KLASHES, KLOPPER, KNOSSOS, KRYPTONITE

LADYSHIP, LAKESIDE, LAKEVIEW, LAMPSHADE, LAMPWICK, LARGO, LASERDOME, LASERSHIP, LASTEFFORT, LATENTHEART, LATENTHEAT, LEGAL REPTILE, LETHALPAN, LIBERTY WALK, LIGHTNING, LIGHTSWITCH, LINKAGE, LIONFEED, LIONHEART, LIONROAR, LIONWATCH, LOAD, LOCKSTOCK, LOGBOOK, LONGROOT, LUMINARY

MACEMAN, MACHISMO, MADONNA, MAESTRO, MAGENTA II, MAGIC BELT, MAGICSKY, MAGISTRAND, MAGYK, MAKAH, MAINWAY, MARINER II, MARKETSQUARE, MARLIN, MARSUPIAL, MARTES, MASTERCLASS, MASTERSHIP, MASTERSHIP II, MASTING, MATCHLITE, MAUI, MAVERICK, MECA, MEDIASTORM, MEDIATOR, MEDIEVAL, MEGAMOUSE, MEGASCOPE, MEGASTAR, MERSHIP (CARILLON), MESSIAH, MICOM, MIGHTYMAIL, MILLANG, MONITOR, MONOCLE, MOONDANCE, MOONFOX, MOORHAWK, MORETOWN, MOSTWANTED, MOVIETONE III, MUSICHALL, MUSTANG, MYTHOLOGY

NABOBS, NATIONHOOD, NAUTILUS, NDAKLEDIT, NEMESIS, NERVETRUNK, NETGRAPH, NEWSBREAK, NEWSHOUND, NEXUS, NIGHTFALL 16, NIGHTFALL 32, NIGHTWATCH, NOBLEQUEST, NOBLESPIRIT, NOBLEVISION, NSOC SHIFTER, NUCLEON, NUMERIC

OAKSMITH, OBLIGATOR, OCEANARIUM, OCEANFRONT, OCTAGON, OCTAVE, OFFSHOOT, OLYMPIAD, ONEROOF, ONEROOF-WORD 2000 TRANSCRIPTION, OPALSCORE, OPENSEARCH, OPERA, ORCHID, ORIANA, OUTERBANKS, OUTFLASH, OUTREACH

PADDOCK, PACESETTER, PALINDROME, PAPERHANGER II, PARTHENON, PARTHENON II, PASSBACK, PASTURE, PATCHING, PATHFINDER, PATRIARCH, PAYMASTER, PAYTON, PEDDLER, PEARLWARE, PERFECTO, PERSEUS, PERSEVERE, PICKET, PINWALE, PIEREX, PILEHAMMER, PINNACLE, PINSTRIPE, PITONS, PIXIEDUST, PIZARRO, PLATINUM PLUS, PLATINUMRING, PLUMMER, PLUS, PLUTO, POLARFRONT, POLYSTYRENE, POPPYBASE, POPTOP, PORCELAIN, PORTCULLIS, POSTCARD, POWDERKEG, POWERPLANT, PRAIRIE DOG, PRANKSTER, PREDATOR, PRELUDE, PROSCAN, PROSPERITY, PRIZEWINNER, PROPELLER, PROTOVIEW, PUFFERFISH, PYTHON II

QUARTERBACK, QUASAR, QUEST, QUICKER, QUICKSILVER

RAGBOLT, RAINGAUGE, RAINMAN, RAKERTOOTH, RAMJET, RAP, RAPPEL, RAUCOVER, REACTANT, RECEPTOR, RECOGNITION, RED ARMY, RED BACK, RED BELLY, RED DAWN, RED DEMON, RED ROOSTER, RED ROVER, REDALERT, REDCAP, REDCENT, REDCOATS, REDMENACE, REDSEA, REDSTORM, REDZONE, RELAYER, RENEGADE, RENOIR, RIGEL LIBRARY, RIKER, RIMA, ROADBED, ROADTURN, ROCKDOVE, ROOFTOP, ROOTBEER, ROSEVINE, RUTLEY

SAGACITY, SANDSAILOR, SASPLOT, SATINWOOD, SATURN, SAYA, SCANNER, SEALION, SEAPLUM, SCISSORS, SCREENWORK, SEABEACH II, SEARCHLIGHT, SELLERS, SEMITONE, SENIOR GLASS, SENTINEL, SHADOWBOXER, SHADOWCHASER, SHANTY, SHARK, SHARKBITE, SHARKKNIFE, SHARPSHOOTER, SHILLET, SHILOH, SHIPMASTER, SHORTSWING, SIDEMIRROR, SIGHTREADY, SIGNATURE, SILKRUG, SILVERFISH, SILVERHOOK, SILVERLINER, SILVERVINE, SINGLEPOINT, SINGLESHOT, SITA, SKEPTIC, SKILLFUL, SKYBOARD, SKYCAST, SKYGAZER, SKYLINE, SKYLOFT, SKYWRITER, SLAMDANCE, SLATEWRITER, SLIDESHOW, SMOKEPPIT, SNAKEBOOT, SNAKECHARMER, SNAKEDANCE II, SNAKERANCH II, SNORKEL, SNOWMAN, SOAPOPERA, SOAPSHELL, SOFTBOUND, SOFTRING, SORCERY, SPANISH MOSS, SPARKVOYAGE, SPEARHEAD, SPECOL, SPECTAR, SPIROGRAPH, SPLINTER, SPLITTER, SPORADIC, SPOTBEAM, SPRINGRAY, SPUDLITE, STAIRWAY, STAR SAPPHIRE, STARCICLE, STARGLORY, STARLOG, STARQUAKE, STARSWORD, STATIONMASTER, STEAKHOUSE, STELLAH, STONEGATE, STORMCHASER, STORMPEAK, STOWAWAY, STRONGHOLD, SUBSHELL, SUNDIAL, SUPERCODING, SURREY, SWEETDREAM, SWEETTALK, SWEEPINGCHANGE, SWITCHPOINT

TABLELAMP, TALION, TANGOR, TAROTCARD, TARP, TARSIS, TART, TAXIDRIVER, TEAS, TECBIRD, TEL, TELE, TELESTO, TELLTALE, TELLURITE, TEMAR, TERMINAL VELOCITY, THINKCHEW, THINTHREAD, THUNDERWEB, TIDYTIPS III, TIEBREAKER, TIGER, TIMELINE, TIMEPIECE, TIMETRAVELER, TINKERTOY, TINSEL, TIPPIE, TOPSHELF, TOPSPIN II, TOPVIEW, TRACECHAIN, TRAILBLAZER, TRBUSTER, TREASURE, TREASURE TROVE, TRED, TRIFECTA, TRINFO, TRINIAN, TROLLEYTRACK, TROLLEYMASTER, TRUNK MOBILE, TRYSTER, TSUNAMI, TWILIGHT, TWOBIT

UMORPH, UNLIMITED

VIEWEXCHANGE, VEILED DATABASE, VEILED FORTHCOMING, VENTURER II, VICTORY DAEMON, VINTAGE HARVEST, VIOLATION, VISIONARY, VISIONQUEST, VOICECAST, VOICESAIL, VOIP SEED

WARGODDESS, WARSTOCK, WATCHOUT, WAXFLOWER, WAYLAND, WEALTHYCLUSTER, WEBSPINNER, WEBSPINNER -- ACCESS TO DBS, WESTRICK, WHARFMAN II, WHITE SEA, WHIRLPOOL, WHITE SHARK, WHITE SWORD, WHITESAIL, WHITEWASH, WILDFIRE, WINDSHIELD, WINTERFEED, WIREDART, WIREWEED, WORLDWIDE, WIZARDRY, WOLFPACK, WRAPUP

XVTUBA

YELLOWSTONE, YETLING

ZENTOOLS, ZIGZAG, and ZIRCON

 
 NSA establishing large Internet surveillance facility in Tennessee ... Multiprogram Research Facility    April  2012
Sources in the U.S. intelligence community report that the National Security Agency (NSA) is establishing a major Internet surveillance at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that is dedicated to decrypting encoded communications, including file transfers, over the Internet and within private private networks such as those used by banks, foreign governments, and multinational corporations.

The new multi-structure NSA facility is called the Multiprogram Research Facility and will work in tandem with the massive NSA data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah on acreage that is part of the Camp Williams Utah National Guard base. The Utah center will store massive amounts of intercepted data and the Oak Ridge facility will rely on new generation supercomputers to decode encrypted data stored at the Bluffdale facility and that which is captured in real time from NSA's worldwide signals intelligence system.

The Oak Ridge center will also complement the NSA's High Performance Computing Center at Fort Meade, currently under construction and scheduled for completion in 2015. It is rumored that the building at Fort Meade will contain the world's fastest computer, the speed of which will be measured in Exa-FLOPs. A FLOP means FLoating point OPerations per Second and exa means a 1 followed by 19 zeros.

WMR was first alerted to the Oak Ridge facility when NSA began transferring personnel from its Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters to Oak Ridge. The NSA has, for the past decade, been spreading out its functions to facilities around the country, including at regional facilities at Fort Gordon, Georgia (NSA Georgia); San Antonio, Texas (NSA Texas); and Kunia, Hawaii (NSA Hawaii). The Utah and Tennessee facilities represent a further expansion of NSA's "Big Brother" surveillance network to additional regions of the United States.

And with the new NSA facility at Oak Ridge comes the expansion of the Obama administration's already-massive counter-intelligence (anti-whistle blowing) operations into Tennessee. The FBI field office in Knoxville, working with NSA's Q Group, have been active in ensuring that NSA employees and contractors refrain from discussing the new Oak Ridge center with uncleared individuals, including members of the media.

 
WMR What's behind all the personal data thefts?
June 17, 2006 (UPDATED) -- What's behind all the personal data thefts? Populating the surveillance databases specified by John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) system? WMR has learned that the thefts of personal data from corporations and government agencies, most of which were accomplished by stealing computer hard drive devices, is more than coincidental. Intelligence sources report that many of the large scale thefts are part of a well-planned covert intelligence operation to obtain data on hundreds of millions of people in order to accomplish what former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) official John Poindexter was not able to bring about through his defunct (but secretly restored) Total Information Awareness (TIA) system -- the population of intelligence and surveillance databases with files on the financial, medical, employment, telecommunications, and other sensitive data of Americans and foreigners. Much of the new TIA work is being conducted under the umbrella of the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency.    ...   A number of computer security experts have said the recent rash of data thefts is unprecedented in scope, method, and frequency. Some claim that the thefts appear to be coordinated and targeted at specific data types.    ...   The physical theft of personal data is unprecedented in the history of computer security in the United States. Intelligence sources reveal massive data theft is part of a plan to populate U.S. surveillance databases.   The following is a compilation of the recent reported data thefts (not all may be related to the data gathering operation):

Date Number of persons affected Type of data Method Nebraska Treasurer's Office June 2006 300,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Minnesota Department of Revenue June 2006 2,400 taxpayers/48,000 businesses SSNs, other personal data Physical theft Allstate, Huntsville, AL June 2006 Unknown Insurance info Physical theft Department of the Navy June 2006 28,000 SSNs, DOBs Leak Department of Agriculture June 2006 26,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking ING Bank June 2006 13,000 SSNs, financial data Physical theft University of Alabama - Birmingham June 2006 9,800 SSNs, medical data Physical theft VISA USA June 2006 possibly millions financial data Leak Federal Trade Commission June 2006 1,100 FTC employees SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Denver Election Commission June 2006 150,000 Voter's records Physical theft Oregon Dept. of Revenue June 2006 2,200 Tax records Trojan horse Union Pacific Railroad June 2006 30,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft KDDI Telco, Japan June 2006 4,000,000 Phone numbers, DOBs Leaked Minnesota State Auditor June 2006 493 state employees SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Humana Medicare Program June 2006 17,000 SSNs, DOBs,Medical info Poss. compromise Hanford Nuclear Reservation June 2006 4,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Royal Ahold (Giant, Tops, Stop & Shop supermarkets) June 2006 Unknown number SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Buckeye Community Health Plan (Ohio) June 2006 72,000 SSNs, medical data Physical theft Internal Revenue Service June 2006 291 IRS employees SSNs, fingerprints, DOBs Physical theft YMCA Rhode Island May 2006 65,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Equifax May 2006 2,500 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft University of Delaware May 2006 1,076 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Sacred Heart University May 2006 unknown SSNs, DOBs Hacking Mercantile Potomac Bank May 2006 48,000 SSNs, account data Physical theft Florida International University May 2006 thousands SSNs, DOBs Hacking American Red Cross, Texas May 2006 unknown DOBs, medical information Physical theft University of Kentucky May 2006 6,500 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Miami University of Ohio May 2006 851 SSNs, DOBs Loss of hardware American Institute of CPAs May 2006 330,000 SSNs, DOBs Loss of hardware Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corp. May 2006 1,300,000 SSNs, DOBs Loss of hardware University of Ohio Hudson Health Center May 2006 60,000 SSNs, medical data Hacking Humana Medicare Program May 2006 250 Medicare applicants Paper applications Physical theft Wells Fargo Bank May 2006 unknown SSNs, account data Physical theft Dept. of Veterans Affairs May 2006 28,700,000 SSNs, medical information Physical theft Columbus Bank & Trust May 2006 2,000 Credit card data Physical theft University of Ohio Apr 2006 137,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Purdue Engineering School Apr 2006 1,351 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Department of Defense Apr 2006 14,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Aetna Apr 2006 38,000 SSNs, other data Physical theft Morgan Stanley, Clydesdale Bank (UK), Master Card Apr 2006 2,000 Credit card data Hacking University of Texas McCombs Business School Apr 2006 197,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Fraser Health Authority, Br. Columbia Apr 2006 thousands SINs, DOBs Physical theft University of Alaska Fairbanks Apr 2006 38,941 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Ohio Secretary of State Apr 2006 7,700,000 voters SSNs "Leak" on CDs Iron Mountain, Inc. Apr 2006 17,000 Long Island Railroad employees and retirees, Bronx VA Hospital SSNs, other data Physical theft American Red Cross Mar 2006 8,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft American International Group (AIG) Mar 2006 930,000 SSNs, medical information Physical theft U.S. Marine Corps Mar 2006 207,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Georgia Technology Authority Mar 2006 570,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Vermont State Colleges Mar 2006 14,000 SSNs, credit data Physical theft Verizon Mar 2006 significant number SSNs, other data Physical theft Hewlett-Packard/Fidelity Investments Mar 2006 196,000 SSNs, other data Physical theft Ernst & Young Mar 2006 thousands of records on IBM employees SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Medco Health Solutions Mar 2006 4600 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Hotels.com Feb 2006 243,000 Credit card information Physical theft Choice Point Feb 2006 150,000 Subscriber data Leak Georgetown University Feb 2006 41,000 elderly DC residents SSNs, DOBs Hacking Metropolitan College (Denver) Feb 2006 93,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Olympic Funding Chicago Feb. 2006 unknown SSNs, financial data Physical theft Ernst & Young Feb. 2006 unknown SSNs, financial data Physical theft Deloitte & Touche Feb. 2006 9,000 McAfee employees SSNs, financial data Physical theft PriceWaterhouseCoopers Feb. 2006 4,000 SSNs, health data Physical theft Mount St. Mary's Hospital (NY) Feb. 2006 unknown SSNs, health data Physical theft US Department of Agriculture Feb. 2006 350,000 SSNs, DOBs Leak Providence Home Services Jan. 2006 365,000 SSNs, medical data Physical theft State of Hawaii Jan. 2006 40,000 state employees plus family members SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Ameriprise Financial, Inc. Jan. 2006 226,000 SSNs, financial data Physical theft People's Bank Jan. 2006 90,000 SSNs, financial data Physical theft Atlantis Resorts (Bahamas) Jan. 2006 55,000 SSNs, credit data Physical theft California National Guard Jan. 2006 hundreds of Guardsmen SSNs, other data Physical theft University of Washington Medical Ctr. Jan. 2006 1,600 SSNs, medical data Physical theft Marriott Dec. 2005 206,000 SSNs, credit data Physical theft Ford Motors Dec. 2005 70,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft LaSalle Bank/ABN Amro Mortgage Dec.2005 2,000,000 SSNs, financial data Lost/recovered First Trust Bank Dec.2005 thousands SSNs, financial data Physical theft ING Bank Dec. 2005 8,500 SSNs, financial data Physical theft TransUnion Nov. 2005 3,623 credit data Physical theft Safeway Nov. 2005 1,400 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Keck School of Medicine (USC) Nov. 2005 50,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Univ. of Tennessee Medical Center Oct. 2005 3,800 SSNs, medical data Physical theft Wilcox Memorial Hospital Oct. 2005 130,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft National Nuclear Safety Administration Sep 2005 1,500 SSNs, DOBs Hacking Children's Health Council (Palo Alto) Sep. 2005 6,000 SSNs, medical data Physical theft North Fork Bank Sep. 2005 9,000 SSNs, financial data Physical theft Kent State University Sep. 2005 100,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft J. P Morgan Chase Aug.2005 unknown SSNs, financial data Physical theft Arizona Biodyne (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) Jul 2005 57,000 SSNs, medical data Physical theft City National Bank (LA) Jul 2005 unknown SSNs, financial data Physical theft Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Jun 2005 6,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft American Red Cross, Texas Jun 2005 unknown DOBs, medical information Physical theft Motorola Jun 2005 unknown financial, call data Physical theft U.S. Department of Justice/Omega Travel Jun 2005 80,000 travel, credit data Physical theft Cleveland State University Jun 2005 44,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft California Dept. of Health Services May 2005 21,600 SSNs, medical data Physical theft Colorado State Health Department May 2005 1,600 families SSNs, medical data Physical theft Lexis-Nexis May 2005 310,000 Phone records Hacking Bank of America, Wachovia, Commerce Bancorp, PNC Bank NA May 2005 676,000 Bank account information Hacking Valdosta State May 2005 40,000 SSNs, DOBs Hacking MCI April 2005 16,500 SSNs, employment data Physical theft Georgia Southern Univ. April 2005 thousands SSNs, credit card Hacking San Jose Medical Group April 2005 185,000 SSNs, medical data Physical theft Iron Mountain, Inc. Mar 2005 600,000 Time Warner employees SSNs, financial data Physical theft University of California, Berkeley Mar 2005 100,000 SSNs, DOBs Physical theft Ameritrade Feb. 2005 200,000 SSNs, financial data Physical theft Bank of America Feb. 2005 1,200,000 Federal employees SSNs, credit data Physical theft Australian High Tech Crime Center Feb. 2005 3,500 financial data, law enforcement data Loss
PatentlyApple Apple Wins Surprising Anti-Big Brother Surveillance Patent
One of the most surprising patents ever to be granted to Apple has been made public today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. It is one of the most interesting patents that I have ever read. It reads like a science fiction novel borrowing from George Orwell's 1949 book titled "Nineteen Eighty-Four." It also has shades of the 1982 movie the "Blade Runner," where the Master Cloner invents a method of implanting false memories into clones so as to provide them with a confident self-image. It also borrows from the movie "The Matrix," where fooling the bots of your presence was an everyday means of survival. Apple's patent is about saving your online identity from what they describe as the "Little Brothers Dataveillance." It's about a method of assisting users to keep their personal information hidden in a Cyberworld that is constantly building a profile on them. It appears that Apple will be able to "save us" from these Little Brothers in the future and it looks as though they're going to execute this via your iCloud ID. Today's report is deliberately lengthy so that you don't miss a detail of Apple's very important anti-big brother surveillance patent. This is really wild stuff. more
National Security letter,  Administrative subpoena   color coding airline passengers    top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE 1%*
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National ID Card   top
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