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Government  Surveillance_2

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Bush's 'National Security Letter'    FBI domestic spying   and   NSA ISP data mining  articles below

 

and go to: Amdocs / Israeli art students, DEA, spies pages

 

Telecom Immunity, the real story

NSA 'Phone sex' recordings  more below

Warrantless Surveillance of American Journalists, authorized by Bush ... FIRSTFRUITS below
Related pages:  Internet           Amdocs         AIPAC             Judiciary           Civil rights           'War on Terrorism'
Email Surveillance       top
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  • 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, 
FBI illegal search       top
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  • 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. 
Firstfruits, Warrantless Surveillance of American Journalists       top
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  • 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.
 
  • Cnet Tech News First
  • Jurist University of Pittsburg, School of Law,   Primary sources. Global perspective 
  • AP Yahoo story below
  • 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.
  • 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  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."
Garden Plot       top
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  • Cnet Tech News First
  • 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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Insurance Inspection, satellite       top
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Infragard   top
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MATRIX  Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Database top
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Microsoft Explorer   top
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Open BSD   top
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Patriot Act       top
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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*
  • 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
  • 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
Is there a connection between NSA phone records database , Amdocs and 9/11?
Israel, Amdocs, Telecom Immunity   top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE*
  • 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

 

Internet Traffic Analysis   top
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE*

 

 

  • 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

 

Click on pic to go to NFU Internet page and also see Totse Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities by DEA
Domestic Spying News    top
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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.

ENDS
Narus, Source: Amdocs                                                                    TOP
ST. LOUIS, MO and REDWOOD CITY, CA - June 22, 1999 - Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX), a major international provider of customer care, billing and order management solutions for the telecommunications industry, and Narus Inc., pioneer of Semantic Traffic Analysis, said today that Amdocs will integrate Narus technology with its Ensemble end-to-end customer care and billing platform. This integrated solution will enable telecommunications companies to differentiate their service and pricing packages by adding usage-sensitive analysis of Internet Protocol (IP) data records
  • VOIP Blocking Notes: pingplotter, selective degrading or blocking VOIP traffic, Saudi Telecom uses Narus, blocking VOIP not illelgal, Skype (Luxemborg) now owned by eBay, supernodes sit on a network and set up VOIP calls, Guardian
  • Providers of VOIP blocking: Bitek International, Packeteer, iPoque, Blue Coat Systems Guardian
  • How blocking works: usually done by blocking 'ports', denying access to specific IP addresses (but Skype can defeat this), can only be blocked by investigating the headers of every single packet, via Narus  Guardian
  • Narus, Israel?

 
Narus / Amdocs   top             More
PROGRESSIVE  REFERENCE CONSERVATIVE*
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  • Cryptome search Narus spy
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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."

Martel, Yann,  searchenginewatch.com

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