Nothing In America Could Be As Bad As The KGB, The Stasi, The Gestapo And The SS… Right?

Tuesday we took a quick look at the story of how the NSA's war against patriotic whistleblower Tom Drake persuaded Ed Snowden to move outside the system to expose the criminal activities the government was perpetrating against the American people. In the story we met William Binney. Up top is the short documentary Laura Poitras did for the NY Times about Binney in 2012. It should scare your socks off.

Binney was a top intelligence officer/code breaker with the NSA for over 30 years. Like Drake-- and with Drake-- he was a by-the-book, patriotic whistleblower when Bush and Cheney decided to shred the Constitution and start illegally surveilling American citizens without warrants. He resigned from the NSA on Halloween, 2001. The infamous FBI raid on his shower took place in 2007.

He continues to claim that virtually every e-mail ever sent by every American citizen has been intercepted by the NSA. He compares them to the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and the SS. This month he and Drake testified at the NSA hearings the German government is holding. It's hard to believe their electrifying testimony in Berlin has been virtually ignored here in the U.S. "The goal is control of the people,” Binney told the Bundestag. "They want to have information about everything; this is really a totalitarian approach."

"Totalitarian" is not a word to be used lightly in Berlin, and the repeated use of the word by the 70-year-old NSA veteran-- an idol of Edward Snowden-- electrified the German committee. Asked about co-operation contracts between the NSA and BND, Binney answered the question only after the committee went into closed session.

A second NSA man turned whistleblower, Thomas Drake, told the committee his former employer’s spying was the “ultimate form of control” that was “strangling the world”. Drake dismissed as “beyond any credibility” German intelligence claims that they knew nothing of mass data collection by the NSA on German soil. He even accused Germany of duplicity in its outrage over US mass surveillance, saying the BND operated as an “addendum appendix of the NSA.”

It is these claims of BND co-operation with the NSA that are likely to cause the most friction in the Berlin inquiry. Such alleged co-operation is one suggested reason why the federal government-- and government MPs in the inquiry-- have been so cool on accepting Edward Snowden’s offer to testify in Berlin. The inquiry members have offered to meet Snowden in Moscow for an informal chat, but the ex-NSA contractor says he is not interested in assisting them unless he is granted asylum to testify in person in Berlin.

Facing into a long, hot summer of hearings, opposition committee members claim the government’s lukewarm approach to Snowden speaks volumes about their true level of concern over NSA surveillance. Things should get interesting when the committee questions the heads of the BND and domestic intelligence about how the NSA managed to spy on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

The key question: did they really know nothing about it until Der Spiegel magazine passed on Snowden information to Merkel’s office? If not, why not?

If need be, the German leader herself may be called to testify alongside German IT student Sebastian Hahn. Like the chancellor’s mobile phone, his computer was identified this week as another target of NSA surveillance via the XKeyscore programme.

Hahn, who operates a server on behalf of the anonymising internet network “Tor,” is now preparing a formal complaint for the German authorities. “It’s a massive invasion of my privacy to have every server connection from my computer in Germany recorded by a foreign intelligence service,” he said.

Yesterday Germany expelled the CIA station chief. Steffen Seibert, a government spokesperson: "The representative of the US intelligence services at the embassy of the United States of America has been told to leave Germany." The chairman of the Bundestag committee overseeing the German secret service said the action was taken because of American spying on German politicians and its failure to co-operate and provide adequate responses.

It's worth going back to a sworn affidavit from Binney in July of 2012 in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s illegal domestic spying case against the NSA. I would think every American would be interested in reading it, although, I'm afraid, that probably isn't really the case. I hope every DWT reader does though.

I, William Binney, declare:

1. I am a former employee of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), the signals intelligence agency within the Department of Defense. Unless otherwise indicated, I have personal knowledge of each and every fact set forth below and can competently testify thereto.

2. A true and correct copy of my resume is attached hereto as Exhibit A.

3. In the late 1990's, the increasing use of the Internet for communications presented the NSA with a special kind of problem: The NSA could not collect and smartly select from the large volume of data traversing the Internet the nuggets of needed information about “Entities of Interest” or “Communities of Interest,” while protecting the privacy of U.S. persons. Human analysts had to manually identify the groups and entities associated with activities that the NSA sought to monitor. That process was so laborious that it significantly hampered the NSA’s ability to do large scale data analysis.

4. One of my roles at the NSA was to find a means of automating the work of human analysts. I supervised and participated in the development of a program called “ThinThread” within the NSA. ThinThread was designed to identify networks of connections between individuals from their electronic communications over the Internet in an automated fashion in real time. The concept was for devices running ThinThread to monitor international communications traffic passing over the Internet. Where one side of an international communication was domestic, the NSA had to comply with the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”). With ThinThread, the data would be encrypted (and the privacy of U.S. citizens protected) until such time as a warrant could be obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

5. The advent of the September 11 attacks brought a complete change in the approach 18 of the NSA toward doing its job. FISA ceased to be an operative concern, and the individual liberties preserved in the U.S. Constitution were no longer a consideration. It was at that time that the NSA began to implement the group of intelligence activities now known as the President’s Surveillance Program (“PSP”). While I was not personally read into the PSP, various members of my ThinThread team were given the task of implementing various aspects of the PSP. They confided in me and told me that the PSP involved the collection of domestic electronic communications traffic without any of the privacy protections built into ThinThread.

6. I resigned from the NSA in late 2001. I could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.

7. The NSA chose not to implement ThinThread. To the best of my knowledge, the NSA does not have a means of analyzing Internet data for the purpose of identifying Entities or Communities of Interest in real time. The NSA has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. The NSA also has the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers. The wholesale collection of data allows the NSA to identify and analyze Entities or Communities of interest later in a static database. Based on my proximity to the PSP and my years of experience at the NSA, I can draw informed conclusions from the available facts. Those facts indicate that the NSA is doing both.

8. The NSA could have installed its intercept equipment at the nation’s fiber-optic cable landing stations. See Greg’s Cable Map, cablemap.info. There are more than two dozen such sites on the U.S. coasts where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If the NSA had taken that route, it would have been able to limit its interception of electronic communications to international/international and international/domestic communications and exclude domestic/domestic communications. Instead the NSA chose to put its intercept equipment at key junction points (for example Folsom Street) and probably throughout the nation, thereby giving itself access to purely domestic communications. The conclusion of J. Scott Marcus in his declaration that the “collection of infrastructure … has all the capability necessary to conduct large scale covert gathering of IP-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but .for purely domestic communications as well," is correct.

9. I estimate that the NSA installed no fewer than ten and possibly in excess of twenty intercept centers within the United States. I am familiar with the contents of Mark Klein’s declaration. The AT&T center on Folsom Street in San Francisco is one of the NSA intercept centers. Mr. Klein indicated that the NSA’s equipment intercepted Internet traffic on AT&T’s peering network. It makes sense for the NSA to intercept traffic on AT &T’s peering network. The idea would be to avoid having to install interception equipment on each of the thousands of parallel data lines that eventually lead into and out of peering networks. By focusing on peering networks, the NSA intercepts data at the choke point in the system through which all data must pass in order to move from one party’s network to another’s. This is particularly important because a block data is often broken up into many smaller packets for transmission. These packets may traverse different routes before reaching the destination computer which gathers them and reassembles the original block.

10. One of the most notable pieces of equipment identified in Mr. Klein’s declaration is the NARUS Semantic Traffic Analyzer. According to the NARUS website, each NARUS device collects telecommunications data at the rate of ten gigabits per second and organizes the data into coherent streams based on the protocol associated with a specific type of collected data. A protocol is an agreed-upon way for data to be broken down into packets for transmission over the Internet, for the packets to be routed over the Internet to a designated destination and for the packets to be re-assembled at its destination. Protocols exist at each layer of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) 7-layer telecommunications model and are used for a wide variety of data, not just electronic communications. That means that NARUS can reconstruct all information transmitted through the peering network and forward all of the electronic communications to a database for analysis. The NARUS device can also select predetermined data from that path and forward the data to organizations having interest in the data. As I indicated above, the predetermined data would involve target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases.

11. A further notable development has been the NSA’s public announcement in October 2009 that it was building a massive, $1.2 billion digital storage facility in Ft. Williams, Utah. According to some reports, the Utah facility will eventually have a data storage capacity measured in yottabytes (1024 bytes). Even if the Utah facility were to have no more than the amount of data storage that is presently commercially available, then one would expect the data storage to be in the range of multiples often exebytes (1018 bytes). See www.cleversafe.com. (According to Cleversafe, its ten exebyte storage solution fills no more than two hundred square feet). In April 2011, the NSA also announced that it would build a new supercomputing center at its Ft. Meade, Maryland headquarters.

12. The amount of data that each NARUS device can process per second is large (10 gigabits is 10 billion bits). To illustrate the sheer size of the data storage capacity ofthe Utah facility, one could assume the installation of twenty-five NARUS devices in the U.S. and that all of the NARUS-processed data is sent via fiber-optic cable to Utah. That means that the NARUS processing rate of 10 billion bits per second means that one machine can produce approximately 4 x 1016 bytes per year. That in turn means that it would take twenty-five devices one year to fill an exebyte or ten years to fill ten exebytes.

13. The sheer size of that capacity indicates that the NSA is not filtering personal electronic communications such as email before storage but is, in fact, storing all that they are collecting. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure far exceeds the capacity necessary for the storage of discreet, targeted communications or even for the storage of the routing information from all electronic communications. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure is consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications.