-->- Why it isn't JUST about NSA
After the months of Snowden
revelations, it's useful to reflect a bit on what we've learned from
all this – both from the individual articles in various media
outlets around the world - and each single story is truly
remarkable, many of them in themselves front-page news, not to
mention Pulitzer-prize material – but also, more broadly; what to
make of it all, knowing all this.
For the individual stories, Al Jazeera
America has put together a good
Timeline of Snowden's revelations, beginning
with the FISC-order for Verizon to hand over all the call records of
its customers and ending with (at time of writing) the Der Spiegel
story that reveals that NSA is also spying on financial transactions.
It's really worth taking the time to read through it all. (
Here)
The sheer scale of Snowden's
revelations – however many thousands or ten of thousands of Top
Secret documents he liberated from the clutches of the National
Security State – is staggering, and for almost each passing day,
more stories derived from his source-material are broken somewhere
around the world. Most recently India's “The Hindu” newspaper
began publishing a series of articles on US snooping on both Indian
telecommunications as well as “old fashioned” (albeit very
high-tech) spying on Indian diplomatic missions in the US – my
hunch is, that this drip-drip-drip spreading of stories will continue
for quite a long time and this in itself will lead to a more critical
public, more adversarial media that suddenly realized that public
opinion is far ahead of the chattering classes on this, more pushback
from governments and/or parliaments around the world (in the US
congress, interesting things are happening, some of which genuinely
are cause for optimism, while some are just typical “damage-control”
maneuvers).
But hidden – maybe in plain sight –
beneath the fallout from (principally) Greenwald's, Poitras' and
Gellman's continuing disclosures of Snowden's documents is this:
NSA isn't everything; maybe NSA in a
sense isn't even the most important of the numerous US alphabet soup
agencies. (
Snowden docs about the US Intelligence Budget released by Gellman in the Washington
Post, reveals that contrary to popular belief, the CIA is even more
heavily funded than NSA).
Some will argue that this fact makes
whatever is revealed about NSA somehow less important (the retort to
that should be: very well – I'm looking forward to you securing a
comparable trove of documents from a whistleblower within the
CIA/NRO/DHS/DIA/whatever).
From where I'm sitting, the real
insight (at least so far) from all this is: Capabilities.
What Snowden has risked EVERYTHING for
– and what Greenwald & co are running great risks in continuing
to reveal - is to let the public know what NSA is CAPABLE of – not
just what they themselves are actually doing right now. (And do
notice the two qualifiers there: “themselves”, “right now”).
When we're talking NSA we're really first and foremost talking
capability, architecture & technology, not policy and – as I
hope to show – not even law. That said, I should probably clarify:
1) I'm sure that NSA themselves ARE doing horrible stuff – right
now, and 2) that of course policy & legal stuff IS really
important too.
So, without further ado: Let me
introduce the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
You might have heard about them before,
if not, they're the US government organization responsible for
“national and international counterterrorism efforts”. Pretty
vague huh?
Of course they're being overseen by the DNI (headed by
James Clapper who is mainly know for lying to congress under oath
(or, giving the “least untruthful answers”).
In the summer of 2012, no other than
Obamas head of DOJ – Eric Holder – gave the NCTC extremely broad
new powers, with regards to using data on Americans.. basically,
everything is now on the table – no 4th amendment here.
Here's a flashback, to roughly a year
before Snowden stepped forward.
“On March 22, 2012 the Attorney
General, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director
of NCTC
issued an update to the 2008 rules for handling information on US
persons. These were radical changes (to see how different please
check out
redline comparison we did between the 2008 and 2012 guidelines).
The biggest change regards the NCTC’s
handling of “non-terrorism” related information on US persons.
Previously, the intelligence community was barred from collecting
information about ordinary Americans unless the person was a terror
suspect or part of an actual investigation. When the NCTC gobbled up
huge data sets it had to search for and identify any innocent US
person information inadvertently collected, and
discard it within 180 days. This crucial check meant that NCTC was
dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on
innocent Americans, because the data had to then be carefully
screened. The 2012 guidelines eliminate this check, allowing NCTC to
collect and “continually assess” information on innocent
Americans for up to five years.
Once information is acquired, the new
guidelines authorize broad new search powers. As long NCTC says its
search is aimed at identifying terrorism information, it may conduct
queries that involve non-terrorism data points and pattern-based
searches and analysis (data mining).”
More:
“What if a
government spy agency had power to copy and
data mine information
about ordinary Americans from any government database? This could
include records from
law enforcement investigations, health
information, employment history, travel and student records.
Literally anything the government collects would be fair game,
and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of
those records would have little say over whether this happened,
or what the spy agency did with the information afterward. What if
that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or
any other federal agency – could buy from the
huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?”(my
emphasis)
Full article from ACLU
This is quite important. No matter what
“safeguards” the NSA say is in place – an no matter what
“protections” US citizens might think they have from
suspicionless NSA surveillance - whether NSA &; co are lying
through their teeth about these safeguards/protections is a totally
separate matter. Once the data - ALL of it - is passed along to the
NCTC, all of these are out the window.
Now – thanks to Snowden and a few
very hardworking journalists, we begin to see, just what “any
government database” includes. Apart from what is mentioned in the
quote above, here's a quick list of things we now KNOW NSA is
collecting:
-
Just about everything everybody
does online; IP- addresses, history of visited websites,
internet-searches, e-mails, chat logs, social media activity,
Skype/VoIP etc.
Data from GPS/TomTom devices,
billing records and bank records
Further, I think that given - among
other things – the response from head of NSA Keith Alexander when
Senator Ron Wyden demanded to know if they're collection
geo-locations in bulk from cell-phones: Not under THIS program (note:
he was answering under oath) that it's safe to say, that they are
indeed collection location data from cell-phones, both in
domestically and abroad. See the whole exchange here:
This is probably still just the tip of
the iceberg (think: Trapwire/CIA/private Intel companies/biometric data) – and sometimes the devil ISN'T in the detail – but
in the aggregate.
Ex-NSA whistle-blower Bill Binney told us
(pre-Snowden) that NSA is building profiles/social graphs on US
citizens that tells all there is to know about a person:
“Unfortunately,
once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone
in that data,” he said. “You can simply call it up by the
attributes of anyone you want and it’s in place for people to look
at.”(
Article from Wired)
“The agency can
augment the communications data with material from public, commercial
and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information,
Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and
GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified
tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any
restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several
former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on
it for both Americans and foreigners.”
This of course is bad enough in and by
itself – and again, the real point is capabilities; the reality is,
that no matter if the current administration of the National Security
State is packed with rainbow-shitting angels, this IS – in the
words of Bill Binney -
turnkey totalitarianism; or as another incredibly brave NSA
whistle-blower put it: a
“pre-fascist society”
(Thomas Drake).
But back to the ACLU:
“Perhaps most
disturbing, once information is gathered (not necessarily connected
to terrorism),
in many cases
it can be shared with “a federal, state, local, tribal, or
foreign or international entity, or to an individual or entity not
part of a government” –
literally anyone. That sharing can
happen in relation to national security and safety, drug
investigations, if it’s evidence of a crime or to evaluate sources
or contacts. This boundless sharing is broad enough to encompass
disclosures to an employer or landlord about someone who NCTC may
think is potentially a criminal, or at the request of local law
enforcement for vetting an informant.” (please do read the
full article from the ACLU)
So, no matter what rules the NSA
themselves operates under, they're sucking up ALL data on everybody,
all the time – and passing it on to NCTC who are free to do
whatever the hell they want with it, including sharing it with
absolutely anybody – including foreign powers and
individuals(?!?!?) not part of government... without any oversight.
Oh – and the NCTC (by pure chance of
course) is also the entity who's busy making lists for Obama's Terror
Tuesday TM meetings, where he decides who should be
drone-killed/bombed/kill-team'ed without any due process:
The "disposition
matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to
augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists"
maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as
the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed
without due process based upon how one fits into the executive
branch's
"matrix". (
Fantastic pre-Snowden article by Glenn Greenwald)
Good night – and good luck.
/More Later
Opslag
