The Science Of What Is And Isn’t Happening With The NSA’s Phone Surveillance

[Valin]

PJ Media:

What's it all about, George Orwell?

Charlie Martin

6/27/13

 

So, theres this NSA thing. Since the stories about the NSA, Edward Snowden, PRISM, and so on have broken, there has been more misinformation, disinformation, bad information, speculation, ignorant commentary and flat out nonsense going around than any topic in recent memory. And to tell you the truth, Ive been working on this article for two weeks and never finishing because there is always one more howler. Lets see if we can clear some of this up.

 

One of the things Im going to complain about, by the way, is the number of authoritative opinions being offered by people who clearly dont actually know much more about it than what theyve read from other peoples poorly-informed speculation. Someone might reasonably then ask why they should believe me? Especially since recently I seem to have been mainly a diet and health blogger. So lets just summarize.

 

I started working on defense systems in the late 70s, when I got a polygraph clearance an EBI, or extended background check clearance and went to work on some very sensitive stuff and no I cant tell you what even today. But Ive spent a fair bit of time overseas, covert under the law that Valerie Plame certainly wasnt covert under, and Ive worked directly with both the CIA and the NSA on many occasions.

 

Then when I went to graduate school, I got involved in DARPA-funded security research, where I came up with the original architecture for a highly secure version of the X windowing system, and helped write the Navys handbook for evaluating secure and trusted systems under the old DoD TCSEC the Orange Book. Ive been a security subject matter expert on projects for Sun Microsystems, StorageTek, the Navy, and a half-dozen major banks and Wall Street firms, and Ive got about a dozen patents either issued or in process, many of them having to do with security in the cloud, cryptography, and Big Data.

 

Basically, secure systems, cryptography, and Big Data have been my day job for most of the time since about 1979.

 

Talking the talk

 

With that out of the way, lets start by getting some terminology right. To understand how the intelligence business really works, lets make an extended metaphor......(Snip)

[clearvision]

Thanks for the great article.

[Valin]

 

“NSA Surveillance Leaks: Fact and Fiction”

 

Orin Kerr

June 28, 2013

 

Here’s a very interesting panel from earlier in the week in the NSA surveillance programs. I was particularly interested to hear the perspective of Robert Litt, the General Counsel of the Office of the DNI, who begins at the 15:20 mark.

 

[KWARX]

Wellllllllllll . . . my buddies in my Navy Crypto job . . . insisted quite seriously that the PTB have collected with literally ACRES of computers info from ALL electricity based circuits now for at least 40 years. The list of keywords listened to is in the hundreds or more.

 

When a keyword is triggered, purportedly the whole conversation or exchange can be stored. Some say it's all stored anyway.

[Valin]

Wellllllllllll . . . my buddies in my Navy Crypto job . . . insisted quite seriously that the PTB have collected with literally ACRES of computers info from ALL electricity based circuits now for at least 40 years. The list of keywords listened to is in the hundreds or more.

 

When a keyword is triggered, purportedly the whole conversation or exchange can be stored. Some say it's all stored anyway.

I knew some crypto guys, and when asked they would just smile.

This is why I did not get my shorts in a bunch when the story 1st broke. I thought...Yes?...And?

 

I'm still looking for an answer to the simple question...What Do You Want To Do? I see people defending this and attacking it. Those attacking it need to answer the question. Because signals intelligence is not going to go away.

[KWARX]

 

Wellllllllllll . . . my buddies in my Navy Crypto job . . . insisted quite seriously that the PTB have collected with literally ACRES of computers info from ALL electricity based circuits now for at least 40 years. The list of keywords listened to is in the hundreds or more.

 

When a keyword is triggered, purportedly the whole conversation or exchange can be stored. Some say it's all stored anyway.

I knew some crypto guys, and when asked they would just smile.

This is why I did not get my shorts in a bunch when the story 1st broke. I thought...Yes?...And?

 

I'm still looking for an answer to the simple question...What Do You Want To Do? I see people defending this and attacking it. Those attacking it need to answer the question. Because signals intelligence is not going to go away.

 

 

I've never thought ANYTHING functional could be done against it.

 

The PTB are determined to turn those left after their depopulation efforts into biological robots, cogs in their great tyrannical machine.

 

It appears from Scripture that they will be allowed to mostly succeed for 3.5-7 years before Armageddon removes them from the planet.

 

God alone is our refuge.

God alone is our high tower.

God alone is our Salvation in any lasting sense.

 

I just think folks need to wake-up and smell the brimstone that's been building for many decades if not 200-400 years.

 

The PTB can currently mangle virtually reality . . . at least the purported "record" of purported "reality" any way they wish to achieve whatever priority goal they are after. God alone can counter such efforts. Mere individuals are more or less helpless to do so.

 

A walk with God has always been the only protection against evil. It's just that in our era, the contrast and reality of that is being super highlighted for all Creation as a lasting object lesson.

[Valin]

Who Is Defending Edward Snowden"

 

 

(Snip)

In an online petition posted three days ago, the group accused our government of severe abuses of the basic constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and the rights of people in other nations. It declared that Snowden is a brave whistle-blower who, at great personal risk, decided to step forward and inform the U.S. public about what is being done in their name and what is being done to them.

 

(Snip)

 

So who signed the petition? The answer is the usual suspects all leaders of the far-Left fringe in our country. The headline on the petition reads: Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden Urge President Correa to Grant Snowden Asylum.

 

Oliver Stone, as readers of PJ Media well know, is a friend to any leftist thug, from Fidel Castro (whom he honored in two television documentaries) to Hugo Chavez, and of course a man whose recent TV series on Showtime honors the legacy of Joseph Stalin and his appeasers in the United States. Noam Chomsky is an open friend to terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, an enemy of the state of Israel, and a man who is second to none in his hatred of the United States. Tom Hayden, once the hero of the New Left, has descended in his mature years to another in the chorus of left-wing crazies, becoming more and more extreme in his utterances with each judgment.

 

The remaining signers are a virtual whos who of the anti-American far Left. The list includes actors Danny Glover, Shia LaBeouf, John Cusack, and Rosanne Barr reminding us that actors have no more sense than any other set of fools; leftist activist Medea Benjamin of Code Pink; Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine; leftist history professors Peter Kuznick (Stones co-author of the TV series), Carolyn Rusty Eisenberg of Hofstra University, Greg Grandin, Sinclair Thomson, and Marilyn Blatt Young of New York University, and Bob Buzzanco of Houston University; and 60s activist lawyer and historian Staughton Lynd.

 

(Snip)

 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

Gosh What a fine bunch liberty loving people. All that is missing are the names Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to make this list complete.

[Valin]

New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies

Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers reveal 38 targets including EU, France and Italy

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger

 

US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 

One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

Faux outrage from France over NSA spying

Marc Thiessen

July 1, 2013

 

(Snip)Please. In 2008, I traveled to Europe with President George W. Bush. We visited Slovenia, Germany, Italy, the Holy See, the United Kingdom, and France. There was only one country where we were instructed before arrival to leave our blackberries aboard Air Force One, with the batteries removed, as a precaution against potential cyber espionage: France.(Snip)

 

 

More Here

[Valin]

What is PRISM?

A little knowledge and some reasonable speculations make sense of the PRISM revelations.

Charlie Martin

7/4/13

 

There are some technical topics of interest still in the NSA/Snowden/PRISM fuss. As we know, there have been (at least) two NSA programs that have been publicized recently: one program in which they collect the customer billing records from every phone call of most, if not all, cell phone service providers, and the second a program with the overall name PRISM, where Internet traffic is collected at various large providers like Google and Facebook.

 

This is becoming a really fertile place for finding people in politics and journalism who really dont have the beginning of a clue about the issues, technical or social, that go with what theyre attempting to discuss. So, once more into the breach, dear friends, as we try to make sense of what PRISM is really about.

 

(Snip)

 

 

The first step is that someone of interest is identified. According to an article in the Washington Post, there are about 120,000 targets of interest which, honestly, doesnt seem like a surprising number, although there are the usual outbreaks of fainting spells about it. Those targets are described in some fashion Im sure the details are considered very sensitive, but you know its a bunch of rules like has many contacts in Yemen and some of the Yemeni contacts are people weve identified with Islamist leanings and those rules are put into a first layer of the system, called PRINTAURA. But look at the slide the target selectors are put into this Uniform Targeting Tool, and then go through two review processes depending on whether its direct surveillance or stored data like the CDR cell phone records. So, it appears that effectively the FISA-court review happens when they pick the selectors,

 

Coincidentally, this appears to be exactly what theyve been telling Congress, including the original statements Clapper made.

(Snip)

[Valin]

Mike Rogers: ‘More Information in Phonebook than in NSA %5BPRISM%5D Program’

Ian Tuttle

July 28, 2013

 

http://youtu.be/EKDdVyP3Pnc

 

Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the NSA’s controversial phone-number-collection program, PRISM, should not be grouped with IRS and the troubling “data hub” that the Obama administration is building. Immense oversight and “strict requirements” for using the gathered information are the reason “there [are] zero privacy violations on this in the entire length of the program and 54 disrupted terrorist plots.”

[NCTexan]

I spoke to an individual this weekend whom I would describe as "way out there... where the trains don't run". This is on politics and about everything else in life.

 

We were talking about how much technology is packed into phones these days. I showed him a neat app that I just put on my iPhone. It basically takes your pulse rate by having you place you index fingertip on the camera lens. It then projects the camera's flash light on your finger and measures the change in color of your skin as the blood pulses with each beat. (It's called Heart Rate and it's free.)

 

He then tells me that he's learned that "they" can read your DNA from spy satellites and use it to track you.

 

Now I can imagine some kind of optical recognition from these satellites... but I'm pretty suspect about long distance remote DNA sampling.

 

I told him that RM had my cheek swabbed for DNA genealogy testing and I wouldn't be surprised if "they" had me on file some place. I then waved at the sky and said, "Hello Barry... come and get me!"

 

I then realized that he was dead serious.

[Valin]

@NCTexan

 

The problem is there are waaay to many people out there like that.

 

 

One of the things I have noticed sine this story broke. For the most part, those people who actually know what the NSA is, what they can and cannot do, what they are and are not doing, don't seem all that concerned. And those that don't really know or have any experience with this are the ones shouting the loudest. So far I've only seen One person attempt to answer my small question...What Do You Want To Do?

 

At least that is how it appears to me.