…“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.” …
…
…Mr. Rotenberg, referring to the constitutional limits on search and seizure, said, “It is a bit of a fantasy to think that the government can seize so much information without implicating the Fourth Amendment interests of American citizens.”
–from “How the U.S. Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly,” by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, New York Times (Page A1, June 9, 2013)
James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s lead article in Sunday’s
NY Times, “
How the U.S. Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly,” is one of the most important pieces I’ve read on America’s ever-expanding surveillance state. In some ways, it may very well be a milestone in U.S. news reporting, too.
“BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” AND
NSA’S PURSUIT OF INFORMATION LEAKS
Aside from some exceptionally stunning insights into the ongoing development of our country’s surveillance infrastructure, the Times’ lead article covers some of the details regarding two pieces of hard news that have started to play out over the past 24 hours. It describes some details of the just-released Guardian piece based upon yet another information leak(s) regarding the NSA’s new, top secret data-mining tool, “Boundless Informant,” which is a story I covered extensively in a post I published here just a couple of hours ago. And, Risen and Lichtblau also inform us that: “…on Saturday night, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that ‘a crimes report has been filed by the N.S.A.,’” in reference to our government’s self-evident desire to prosecute the parties that leaked a series of top secret documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald over the past week (with the Boundless Informant story being the latest in that series) which have served as the basis for a subsequent series of scoops published by him in the Guardian on the inner workings of our nation’s largest intelligence organization.
PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES, “PRISM,” AND
THE CRITICAL NATURE OF CONTEXTUAL ANALYTICS
IN OUR SECURITY STATE
Near the beginning of Risen’s and Lichtblau’s piece, the authors discuss the exponential expansion of the relationship between our nation’s intelligence and defense communities and the various tech firms in Silicon Valley, focusing upon Palantir Technologies, the creators of the “PRISM” software application suite, which is introduced to us in the article as: “The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto, Calif., company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal…” Rather than getting into too much detail about that aspect of this story, I wanted to direct you to an excellent post from community member jamess from Friday afternoon on this exact subject, “Palantir’s PRISM Software casts a very wide Net.” It’s actually much more thorough than the treatment it’s given by Risen and Lichtblau, too.
Speaking of excellent, timely commentary from other community members regarding critical subject matter directly related to these breaking news stories on our surveillance state, I also wanted to point out yet another must-read post by Kossack Steve Masover, on Friday, “Not your granddaddy's metadata: don't believe the PRISM anti-hype.” Like Kossack jamess did, research-wise with Palantir, Kossack Steve Masover lends his extensive technical experience to provide us with tremendous depth concerning the two-liner at the very top of this post, which acts as a summary for much of the Times’ journalists’ lengthy explanation as to why: “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”
THE EXPANSION OF OUR SURVEILLANCE STATE AS
IT SHIFTS ITS FOCUS TO CONTEND WITH
MOUNTAINS OF METADATA
This is where Risen and Lichtblau quote Rotenberg (repeating part of the quote at the top of this post):
“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”
It is here where the journalists momentarily dance around the reality that our government does
maintain access to most telephone call
content in the U.S. (And, I use the term, “dance,” because one of the most fascinating aspects of this article is that the authors actually
do come out and infer it rather matter-of-factly—the reality that our nation does, in fact, maintain access to the content of most telephone calls made in the U.S., today, if nowhere else than in their reference to the San Francisco AT&T call switching comment, at the very end of this post).
And, here’s their segue into that, but from a rather diametrically opposite point…
…When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases — matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use — intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations. Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call, a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time.
“We can find all sorts of correlations and patterns,” said one government computer scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “There have been tremendous advances…”
And, the reason I refer to it as a segue from a “diametrically opposite point” is due to the fact that, in broad strokes—and in just a handful of sentences—they breeze through the Bush administration’s NSA history, while tacitly acknowledging that, indeed, universal content examination of all phone calls in the U.S.—both domestic and international--have been occurring since the early 2000’s, while not coming out and directly stating it as such.
”SECRET PROGRAMS”
(The line above is the original subhead copy from the article.)
They note that in 2003, the Bush Administration’s “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programs were challenged by the public. But, what the authors don’t directly state is that the TIA programs were only shutdown for a matter of weeks. In fact, the reality is the Bush administration went full-steam ahead and continued to expand upon the TIA programs.
And. that’s why the article suddenly and strangely segues into the next sentence…
…But since then, the intelligence community’s data-mining operations have grown enormously, according to industry and intelligence experts…
Frankly, at this point, the article becomes quite muddied, so I’m going to fill in a few “blanks.” See, in-between the "triple-pound" marks. (After the second set, farther down, below, I pickup today's lead NYT story's conclusion.)
# # #
From the Wiki page on our nation’s Terrorist Surveillance Program
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005 The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. [1] Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, describe how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."[2]
…
…in response to the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy following disclosure of the program. It is claimed that this program operated without the judicial oversight mandated by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and legal challenges to the program are currently undergoing judicial review. Because the technical specifics of the program have not been disclosed, it is unclear if the program is subject to FISA. It is unknown if this is the original name of the program; the term was first used publicly by President Bush in a speech on January 23, 2006.[4]
On August 17, 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled the program unconstitutional and illegal. On appeal, the decision was overturned on procedural grounds and the lawsuit was dismissed without addressing the merits of the claims,[5] although one further challenge is still pending in the courts.
…and…
From the Wiki page on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy…
…
…On September 28, 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act (H.R. 5825).[40] That bill now has been passed to the U.S. Senate where three competing, mutually-exclusive, bills—the Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006 (S.2455) (the DeWine bill), the National Security Surveillance Act of 2006 (S.2455) (the Specter bill), and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Improvement and Enhancement Act of 2006 (S.3001) (the Specter-Feinstein bill) -- were themselves referred for debate to the full Senate by the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 13, 2006.[41] Each of these bills would in some form broaden the statutory authorization for electronic surveillance, while still subjecting it to some restrictions. The Specter-Feinstein bill would extend the peacetime period for obtaining retroactive warrants to seven days and implement other changes to facilitate eavesdropping while maintaining FISA court oversight. The DeWine bill, the Specter bill, and the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act (passed by the House) would all authorize some limited forms or periods of warrantless electronic surveillance subject to additional programmatic oversight by either the FISC (Specter bill) or Congress (DeWine and Wilson bills).
On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders by letter that the program would not be reauthorized by the President.[2] "Any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," according to his letter.[42]
On September 18, 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet-privacy advocacy group, filed a new lawsuit against the NSA, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other government agencies and individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless surveillance. They sued on behalf of AT&T customers to seek redress for what the EFF alleges to be an illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. An earlier, ongoing suit by the EFF may be bogged down by the recent changes to FISA provisions, but these are not expected to impact this new case.[43][44]
On January 23, 2009, the administration of President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor when it urged U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to set aside a ruling in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation et al. v. Obama, et al.[45] The Obama administration also sided with the former administration in its legal defense of July, 2008 legislation that immunized the nation's telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicity in the eavesdropping program, according to testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder.[46]
So, here we are in this “missing part” of the timeline in today’s NY Times lead story, which brings us to the very first days of the Obama administration, in January 2009…
RUSSELL TICE
Enter former NSA employee and whistleblower Russell Tice.
This was the same week that Russell Tice appeared on Keith Olbermann (1/21/2009)
MARK KLEIN
About six months prior to Russell Tice’s appearance on Olbermann, retired AT&T technician Mark Klein appeared on Nightline (see mention of Mr. Klein on the Wiki page on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy…
Mark Klein on Nightline (6/19/2008)
(Note: Please note Mark Klein’s comments just after the 7:00 mark in this video, where he references data-mining and its effect on record selection on captured calls at the switching station[s].)
In 2011, according to a slew of information requests made by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of law enforcement organizations throughout the U.S., as noted in this NY Times lead story, “U.S. Law Enforcement Made 1.3 Million+ Surveillance Requests Of Cell Carriers In 2011.”
At the very end of 2012, President Obama re-upped on warrantless wiretapping, per this January 9th, 2013 excerpt from Alex Kane, who noted this over at Salon.com…
Warrantless Wiretapping
One of the enduring scandals of the George W. Bush years was that administration’s practice of wiretapping American citizens with no warrant in order to spy on suspected terrorists. TheNew York Times, which broke the story in 2005, reported that “months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” The move raised concerns that the Bush administration was crossing constitutional limits on wiretapping Americans.
But the outcry from those concerned with civil liberties has largely been muted in the Obama era. In late December 2012, President Obama signed an extension of a law that allows the U.S. to “eavesdrop on communications and review email without following an open and public warrant process,” as NPR summed it up. The law was an extension of the 2008 law that legalized the Bush administration’s wiretapping of American citizens.
As national security blogger Marcy Wheeler notes in a recent piece for the Nation, the president’s signature on the new bill on wiretapping means that the U.S. “has nearly unrestrained authority to eavesdrop on those who communicate with people outside the country. The government doesn’t even need to show that these foreign targets are terrorists or that the conversations center around a plot. This means any international communication may be subject to wiretapping.”
TIM CLEMENTE
In addition to his appearance in early May, last month, on CNN with Erin Burnett and renowned defense attorney Mark Geragos, former FBI counterterrorism expert Tim Clemente appeared the next evening on CNN to further elaborate upon his knowledge that virtually all digital records (which would include most phone calls) are warehoused by our government.
Tim Clemente CNN (5/2/13)
So, while it's documented above that this is about wiretaps, pen registers, track and trace requests, cell-tracking, Internet use, and text/Twitter tracking by LOCAL/STATE law enforcement, to the tune of over 1,000,000 surveillance requests per year over the past few year...
At the NATIONAL level, Marc Ambinder sums it up best in this article from Thursday evening: "Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies."
The 2008 FISA Amendments Act allow the NSA to analyze, with court orders, domestic communications of all types for counter-terrorism, counter-espionage, counter-narcotics and counter-proliferation purposes. If the agency believes that both ends of the communication, or the circle of those communicating, are wholly within the U.S., the FBI takes over. If one end of the conversation is outside the U.S., the NSA keeps control of the monitoring. An administration official said that such monitoring is subject to "extensive procedures," but as the Washington Post reported, however, it is often very difficult to segregate U.S. citizens and residents from incidental contact.
One official likened the NSA's collection authority to a van full of sealed boxes that are delivered to the agency. A court order, similar to the one revealed by the Guardian, permits the transfer of custody of the "boxes." But the NSA needs something else, a specific purpose or investigation, in order to open a particular box. The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said the standard was "a reasonable, articulatable" suspicion, but did not go into details.
Legally, the government can ask companies for some of these records under a provision of the PATRIOT Act called the "business records provision." Initially, it did so without court cognizance. Now, the FISC signs off on every request.
Armed with what amounts to a rubber stamp court order, however, the NSA can collect and store trillions of bytes of electromagnetic detritus shaken off by American citizens. In the government's eyes, the data is simply moving from one place to another. It does not become, in the government's eyes, relevant or protected in any way unless and until it is subject to analysis. Analysis requires that second order.Note: That's 50 companies, not just the 9 mentioned in the PRISM program in press coverage over the past few days, and it includes all the major phone companies (and it has included all the major phone companies, for a much lengthier period of time than the social media outlets), too.
# # #
IN CONCLUSION
Lichtblau and Risen discuss tremendous advancements in technology, both in terms of data-mining and with regard to cellphone tracking.
Among other realities, they cite:
-- the Stellar Wind project,
-- the fact that Verizon "...had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line running from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center," and...
-- Mark Klien's (see video, above) San Francisco-based, AT&T switching center
And, they note...
...Nothing revealed in recent days suggests that N.S.A. eavesdroppers have violated the law by targeting ordinary Americans...
...
...On Friday, President Obama defended the agency’s collection of phone records and other metadata, saying it did not involve listening to conversations or reading the content of e-mails. “Some of the hype we’ve been hearing over the past day or so — nobody has listened to the content of people’s phone calls,” he said.
But, when one realizes that the Pulitzer Prize winners had already reported on the previous evening's top secret news leak (see my other piece published here today), earlier in the story (which, for all intents and purposes, demonstrated those last two blockquote comments, immediately above, were little more than disinformation), it just proves to us that no matter how
censored heavily edited a story might be, even when it's about one of the most politically-charged news stories of our generation, a good reporter always gets their message through!
# # #
A few notes on the Wiki on the journalists that authored this story…
James Risen
James Risen (born c. 1955) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist for The New York Times who previously worked for the Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion…
…
…Risen is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2006 for his stories about President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. He was also a member of The New York Times reporting team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for coverage of 9/11 and terrorism. Risen has written three books: Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (Basic Books) (Judy Thomas, co-author) 1998; The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (Random House) (Milt Bearden, co-author) 2003; and State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (The Free Press) 2006. State of War was a New York Times bestseller. In 2007, Risen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences…
…
…Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2006 for a series of controversial investigative reports that they co-wrote about the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications originating or terminating in the United States codenamed "Stellar Wind" and about a government program called Terrorist Finance Tracking Program designed to detect terrorist financiers, which involved searches of money transfer records in the international SWIFT database.[1][2] The Associated Press reported on May 24, 2011 that Risen is being called as a witness in the Jeffrey Sterling trial for alleged leaks of classified information.
Eric Lichtblau
Lichtblau joined The Times in September 2002 as a correspondent covering the Justice Department. Previously, Lichtblau worked at the Los Angeles Times for 15 years, where he also covered the Justice Department in their Washington bureau from 1999 to 2002. Prior to that, Lichtblau did stints on the L.A. Times investigative team in Los Angeles and covered various law enforcement beats. Lichtblau was born in Syracuse, N.Y., and graduated from Cornell University in 1987. With fellow New York Times reporter James Risen, Lichtblau was awarded a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He is the author of Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice.[1]
# # #
For more on my posts concerning press leak stories and my occasional focus upon news regarding our surveillance state, checkout these links:
NYT: All U.S. phone metadata records monitored by gov’t for past 7 years, per Feinstein (Updated) (6/6/13)
“Breaking” News: DoJ, Holder Parse Emily Litella In Clarification On Rosen Prosecution (Updated) (6/3/13)
32 Minutes With Kafka and Orwell: “Naked Citizens” vs. The Naked Truth About Conspiracy Theories (5/29/13)
Done Deal: Our Government's Subpoenas For "Information" Are Little More Than Kabuki These Days (5/26/13)
How Many Former NSA and FBI Counterterrorism Employees Will It Take For This Story To Reach The MSM? (5/20/13)
Rolling Stone/John Knefel: "What's at Stake When the Department of Justice Seizes AP Phone Records" (5/19/13)
Reports On DoJ’s Seizure of AP Journalists’ Phone Records and the Shield Law (Part II of III) (5/18/13)
Reports On the DoJ’s Seizure of AP Journalists’ Phone Records and the Shield Law (Part I of III) (5/18/13)
NYT Lead: U.S. Law Enforcement Made 1.3 Million+ Surveillance Requests Of Cell Carriers In 2011 (7/9/12)
NYT Lead: ACLU Documents Rampant, Warrantless Phone-Tracking By Police Throughout U.S. (4/1/12)
NYT's Orwellian Lead: AG Holder Officially Signs Off On "Total Information Awareness" For All (3/23/12)
Wired’s Mind-Blowing Scoop On “Stellar Wind” And The “Enormity” of U.S. Domestic Spying (3/17/12)