NaturalNews) All across America, people who have Sprint service on their iPhones and other mobile devices are receiving repeated calls from the number “865-6696” without any area code. Sprint message boards are full of thousands of complaints of people experiencing this issue, but no one seems to understand the true reason why these calls are being made.
When the call is answered, no one is there. Attempting to call the number back does not work. Spelled out on the phone keypad, the number “865-6696” spells out “UNKNOWN,” adding to the mystery of where these calls are originating or what their purpose might be.
Comments on message boards such as 800notes.com say things like this:
I receive 3 or 4 calls per day from this number… with no area code. just 865-6696. i’ve not answered it for fear of who might be on the other end. i’m not sure how to report this and get this number to stop calling me. VERY aggravating!
Investigation turns up frightening possibility of surveillance code payload
After hearing about this issue from several people I know personally, I decided to investigate.
First, a scan of the message boards indicates this issue is limited almost exclusively to iPhone owners using Sprint. Some people on the message boards have incorrectly assumed these calls must be from telemarketers, but if that were the case, it wouldn’t be limited to just iPhone users, as telemarketers have no way to know what hardware device exists at their target phone numbers. Furthermore, even after blocking this number, people continue to receive calls from it, confirming that these calls are exempted from call blocking.
Here’s another fascinating point: I’ve been able to confirm over and over again that these calls are being placed with foreknowledge of the exact hardware of the target phone number. The originator of these calls, in other words, knows in advance that the user has an iPhone and not an Android or other mobile device.
I have an iPhone 4 with Sprint and I just started receiving these calls a couple days ago. I have been reading you guys’ posts on here and we pretty much ALL have the same things in common: All with Sprint AND ALL have either iPhones 4 or 4s’… I’ve been getting calls from this number non-STOP! When I do pick it up they just either hang up or its dead air and then hangs up. VERY annoying! I opened up a case with Sprint tech support and they had NO solutions for this issue other than to do a master reset (which would just erase all media in my phone not backed up to icloud) or change my number! Not cool at all.
This all but proves these are not random telemarketing calls. The calls are clearly being placed by an organization that knows who owns iPhones and wishes to get them to answer their phones.
But why?
NSA surveillance Trojan Horse installed if you answer?
To find out, I called a contact I’ve known for a few years who is an expert in cyber security. He’s been one of the people closely watching the Edward Snowden disclosures and the NSA surveillance issue. He obviously asked me not to reveal his identity, so I won’t.
He told me that this has been going on for over a year and that he believes the phone calls are a vector by which the NSA can install surveillance code onto iPhone devices but only if you answer the phone. Once you answer, a so-called “digital payload” is quickly downloaded to your phone while you are saying “Hello? Hello?”
“The digital payload requires several seconds for a complete download,” my contact told me. “If you hang up before the download completes, your device won’t be infected [because the code cannot be executed].” The code is carried with the call, I was told, as a parallel digital stream encoded into the call data itself, in much the same way that secret messages can be encoded into JPEG images. Apple deliberately built in this “back door” payload receiving system, a fact which has been confirmed by releases of information from former NSA worker Edward Snowden that show how Apple, Google, Microsoft and other corporations deliberately built in back doors for NSA surveillance.
The purpose of this digital payload, I was told, is not known, but it may be Trojan Horse code that attaches “bread crumbs” to your phone calls that allow the NSA to more easily locate, track and archive your phone calls, text messages and mobile web surfing activity.
CNET and others confirm iPhones can be easily hacked
It is not unusual for iPhones to be hacked in ways that allow other users to access all your private details and even bypass your iPhone passwords. CNET, for example, independently confirmed that an iOS 6.1 hack “lets users see your phone app, place calls.”
“CNET can confirm it works,” says the article. It goes on to explain the hack allows others to “access your phone application, listen to your voice mails, and place calls.”
ZDnet also reports that iPhones can be “hacked in 60 seconds,” and the article even explains how it’s done.
None of these hacks are digital payload hacks installed using phone calls, of course, but they clearly demonstrate the vulnerabilities or back doors built into the iPhone operating system (iOS).
So why are people receiving repeated calls?
If all this is true, it begs the question of why people would be receiving repeated calls from the 865-6696 phone number. When I asked my contact why this would be happening, he answered that, in his belief, this program was a test rollout on the Sprint network only, and that testing was being done to establish human behavior patterns such as answer rates, hold times after answers, and payload install time requirements. This information could then be used to determine whether a more expanded rollout across other phone networks would make sense.
Skeptical of all this, I asked why the NSA couldn’t just install these surveillance programs in the phones when they are manufactured. Why bother with the complication of digital payloads? He answered that surveillance programs ARE installed at the factory, and that “all iPhones already ship with surveillance code installed,” but that older phones such as the iPhone 4 did not have the most up-to-date surveillance code installed and so needed to be remotely updated with the new code via the “digital payload” described in this article.
Personally, I’m not sure if I buy all that, but in an age where the NSA has now had to admit it routinely spies on nearly ALL phone calls of Americans, this scenario is no longer far-fetched. It may, in fact, be routine.
Bottom line? If you receive a call from 865-6696, don’t answer it. Far better to call 867-5309 and ask for Jenny. (Nod to an 80’s rock song, if you’re curious…)
The National Security Agency programs revealed yesterday (Sept. 5) in three media reports were perhaps the most important revelations yet this summer, and have profound implications for everyone who uses the Internet.
The reports make clear that the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been methodically undermining the vast encryption-based “web of trust” that makes possible secure online financial transactions, communications and other sensitive transmissions.
The spy agencies’ activities have gone on for more than a decade. Like a silent but pervasive cancer, they have penetrated and weakened every corner of the Internet.
“Not only does the worst possible hypothetical … appear to be true,” wrote Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green on his blog last night, “but it’s true on a scale I couldn’t even imagine.”
“The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: We can no longer trust them,” wrote American encryption expert Bruce Schneier on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian.
The surveillance programs, named “Manassas,” “Bullrun” and “Edgehill” after battles in the American and English civil wars, not only built powerful computers to crack encryption protocols.
They also coerced technology companies into handing over encryption keys, infiltrated NSA and GCHQ personnel onto corporate staffs, broke into the computer servers of uncooperative companies to steal information and ensured that some companies built “backdoors” into their technology so that the spy agencies would always have access.
Perhaps most egregiously of all, the NSA and GCHQ deliberately poisoned publicly distributed encryption standards, used by hundreds of millions of people across the world every day, so that the standards would be secretly — but fatally — flawed.
“The (actually substantial) goodwill that NSA built up in the public crypto community over the last two decades was wiped out today,” tweeted University of Pennsylvania cryptography expert Matt Blaze.
The implications are that, if they wanted to, the spy agencies could access nearly every Internet-based purchase, money transfer, email, Internet phone call, instant message or file transfer made by anyone, anywhere.
Early hints of secret tampering
The programs were revealed by documents provided in June to The Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has since taken refuge in Russia.
The Guardian, which has come under pressure from GCHQ to stop publishing Snowden material, shared the documents with The New York Times and the American nonprofit online outlet Pro Publica.
All three publications simultaneously posted stories on their websites yesterday afternoon.
The media outlets, wary of undermining national security in both countries, did not specify which encryption protocols have been compromised. (The spy agencies had asked that the stories not be published at all.)
But at least one has already been identified: Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, or Dual_EC_DRBG, a random-number generator developed by the NSA and endorsed by the U.S. federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007. (Random-number generators are essential to the operation of many encryption protocols.)
That same year, Schneier noted that Dual_EC_DRBG was subtly flawed in a way that permitted the holder of a secret key — an unknown numerical constant — to completely undermine encryption protocols based on it.
“Not only is [Dual_EC_DRBG] a mouthful to say, it’s also three orders of magnitude slower than its peers. It’s in the standard only because it’s been championed by the NSA,” Schneier wrote in a November 2007 Wired article. “We have no way of knowing whether an NSA employee working on his own came up with the constants — and has the secret numbers.”
Schneier, a source for some Tom’s Guide articles, revealed yesterday that he has been helping The Guardian analyze the Snowden documents, and for that purpose had even bought a new computer that “has never been connected to the Internet.”
“What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it’s in. Period,” Schneier wrote in an opinion piece published on the Guardian website yesterday.
How to protect yourself — maybe
On the Guardian site, Schneier offered advice to readers seeking to keep their data private: Use the anonymizing Internet service Tor, encrypt emails and other communications and use open-source encryption software instead of commercial encryption products.
“My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly backdoors,” Schneier wrote, “and many foreign ones probably do as well.”
Yet even Schneier’s informed recommendations may be only hopeful guesses. Because the Snowden documents did not name all the encryption protocols, pieces of software and technology companies compromised by the NSA and GCHQ, few people know what’s safe and what’s not.
Tor only offers partial security, and the Times’ story implied that the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) open-source security standard, which underlies nearly all secure Web transactions, had been compromised.
Likewise, the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) open-source encryption standard, which Schneier also recommended, is so old, so widely used and was once such an irritant to the U.S. government that it would be first on a list of things for the NSA to crack.
However, just because the NSA and GCHQ could be watching you, it doesn’t mean they are.
“Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA — so it probably isn’t,” wrote Schneier.
If everyone sees it, no one can lie
It’s likely some of the newer open-source technology, such as the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 Web-security standard (meant to replace SSL but not yet widely adopted), or the free RedPhone and Secure Text Android apps, are not compromised. Their code is openly available for expert review and revision.
It’s also likely that closed-source technology developed by major U.S. or British corporations has been compromised. The paranoid rants dating back to the 1990s about NSA backdoors in Microsoft software or Intel chips suddenly make sense.
Even the story published last month by the German magazine Die Zeit, which suspected that Microsoft’s Trusted Computing chips were secret NSA backdoors, and which we dismissed as exaggerated, no longer seems unreasonable.
“I’m no longer the crank,” wrote Green on his blog yesterday, referring to his own speculation about NSA activities. “I wasn’t even close to cranky enough.”
The NSA and GCHQ will argue that undermining every possible piece of encryption and security is necessary for the greater good of keeping the U.S. and Britain free from terrorism, and that their adversaries in Russia and China are trying to do the same thing. (Some intelligence experts think Snowden has been a Russian agent all along.)
“Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said in a statement today (Sept. 6) and posted on Pro Publica’s website. “Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that. … The fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news.”
“The stories published yesterday, however, reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity,” the statement said. “Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”
But the collateral damage from these programs may be worse than a terrorist attack. From now on, suspicion will be cast on all products from major U.S. technology companies — the key players in an industrial sector in which the U.S. is trying to maintain dominance.
Why should consumers, business or foreign governments trust software from Microsoft or McAfee, hardware from Intel or Cisco, or anything from Apple? Why buy American when cheaper Chinese products are no less secure?
A statement made a month ago by Ladar Levison, founder of the small secure email provider Lavabit, which shut down in response to government pressure, has even more resonance today.
“I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States,”
Among other things, Pew finds that “a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.” And “an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.” Moreover, “63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications.” That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government’s three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we’re not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.
But the most striking finding is this one:
“Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.“
For anyone who spent the post-9/11 years defending core liberties against assaults relentlessly perpetrated in the name of terrorism, polling data like that is nothing short of shocking. This Pew visual underscores what a radical shift has occurred from these recent NSA disclosures:
Perhaps more amazingly still, this shift has infected the US Congress. Following up on last week’s momentous House vote – in which 55% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans defied the White House and their own leadership to vote for the Amash/Conyers amendment to ban the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program – the New York Times has an article this morning which it summarizes on its front page this way:
The article describes how opposition to the NSA, which the paper says was recently confined to the Congressional “fringes”, has now “built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House.”
It describes how GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner – a prime author of the Patriot Act back in 2001 and a long-time defender of even the most extremist War on Terror policies – has now become a leading critic of NSA overreach. He will have “a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court.”
Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren is quoted this way: “There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here”. Yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Democratic Sen Dick Durbin, one of Obama’s closest Senate allies, said that the recently revealed NSA bulk record collection program “goes way too far”.
The strategy for the NSA and its Washington defenders for managing these changes is now clear: advocate their own largely meaningless reform to placate this growing sentiment while doing nothing to actually rein in the NSA’s power. “Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions,” says the NYT.
The primary problem enabling out-of-control NSA spying has long been the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. That’s an ironic twist given that those were the committees created in the wake of the mid-1970s Church Committee to provide rigorous oversight, as a response to the recognition that Executive Branch’s surveillance powers were being radically abused – and would inevitably be abused in the future – without robust transparency and accountability.
But with a few rare and noble exceptions, the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress are filled with precisely those members who are most slavishly beholden to, completely captured by, the intelligence community over which they supposedly serve as watchdogs. Many receive large sums of money from the defense and intelligence industries.
There is a clear and powerful correlation between NSA support and amounts of money received by these members from those industries, as Wired’s Dave Kravets adeptly documented about last week’s NSA vote and has been documented before with similar NSA-protecting actions from the Intelligence Committee. In particular, the two chairs of those committees – Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House – are such absolute loyalists to the NSA and the National Security State generally that it is usually impossible to distinguish their behavior, mindset and comments from those of NSA officials.
In sum, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are the pure embodiment of the worst of Washington: the corrupting influence of money from the very industries they are designed to oversee and the complete capture by the agencies they are supposed to adversarially check. Anything that comes out of the leadership of those two Committees that is labeled “NSA reform” is almost certain to be designed to achieve the opposite effect: to stave off real changes in lieu of illusory tinkering whose real purpose will be to placate rising anger.
But that trick seems unlikely to work here. What has made these disclosures different from past NSA scandals – including ones showing serious abuseof theirsurveillance powers – are the large numbers of the NSA’s own documents that are now and will continue to be available for the public to see, as well the sustained, multi-step nature of these disclosures, which makes this far more difficult for NSA defenders to predict, manage and dismiss away. At least as much as they are shining long-overdue light on these specific NSA domestic programs, the NSA disclosures are changing how Americans (and peoplearound the world) think about the mammoth National Security State and whether it can and should be trusted with unchecked powers exercised in the dark. Those public opinion shifts aren’t going to disappear as the result of some blatantly empty gestures from Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers masquerading as “reform”.
Despite the substantial public opinion shifts, Pew found that Americans are largely split on whether the NSA data-collection program should continue. The reason for this is remarkable and repugnant though, at this point, utterly unsurprising:
Nationwide, there is more support for the government’s data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%), but both parties face significant internal divisions: 36% of Democrats disapprove of the program as do 50% of Republicans.
Just as Democrats went from vehement critics of Bush’s due-process-free War on Terror policies to vocal cheerleaders of Obama’s drone kills and even Guantanamo imprisonments, the leading defenders of the NSA specifically and America’s Surveillance State generally are now found among self-identified Democrats. That was embodied by how one of the most vocal Democratic NSA critics during the Bush years – Nancy Pelosi – in almost single-handedly saved the NSA from last week’s House vote. If someone had said back in 2007 that the greatest support for NSA surveillance would be found among Democrats, many would find the very idea ludicrous. But such is life in the Age of Obama: one of his most enduring legacies is transforming his party from pretend-opponents of the permanent National Security State into its most enthusiastic supporters.
But despite that hackish partisan opportunism, the positive opinion changes toward NSA surveillance and civil liberties can be seen across virtually all partisan and ideological lines:
The largest changes toward demanding civil liberties protections have occurred among liberal Democrats, Tea Party Republicans, independents and liberal/moderate Republicans. Only self-identified “moderate/conservative Democrats” – the Obama base – remains steadfast and steady in defense of NSA surveillance. The least divided, most-pro-NSA caucus in the House for last week’s vote was the corporatist Blue Dog Democrat caucus, which overwhelmingly voted to protect the NSA’s bulk spying on Americans.
As I’ve repeatedly said, the only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That’s enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes – as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House – but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.
June 17, 2013 i(BeforeItsNews) – One of BIN contributor, Ye Olde False Flag, recently posted an excellent article about a Firefox plug-in that warns computer users about potential government surveillance. Ye Old False Flag explains that a 28-year-old artist and developer from Brooklyn, NY has found a fun way to alert users of potential NSA snooping by creating the “The Dark Side of The Prism’ browser extension, which plays songs from Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “The Dark Side of The Moon” each time a questionable website is crossed.
Since I already have many plug-ins, proxies, gadgets and other goodies that keep me invisible to prying eyes online, I definitely had to give this one a try. I installed the plug-in and accessed several web pages that Ive always been a tad suspicious about. Well, the songs went off on pretty much most of the ones I suspected!
Below are some of the websites where the “alarm” went off. I’ve compiled news, social media, alternative news, government and pro-constitution websites. Now the question is if these sites are unknowingly being tracked to keep tabs on visitors or if the ones behind them are nothing but government shills feeding the masses controlled opposition. You decide. Comments are more than welcomed so we can extend the discussion.
James Clapper admits lying to the American people in the ‘least untruthful manner possible’ about NSA spying
Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) The tortured logic and pained explanations (and justifications) being given by top government officials and lawmakers in the wake of the disclosure that the National Security Agency snoops on every American is as astounding as it is pathetic. But then again, they are being made by people who are a) offended that you and I would dare question their conduct and intent; and b) don’t think we have the right to do so in any case.
This Big Government arrogance was epitomized by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who recently sought to “clarify” his previous false testimony to a congressional panel that the NSA does not collect metadata and other personal information on Americans. In an interview with NBC News‘ Andrea Mitchell, he said that during his testimony he gave the “least untruthful” answer possible in regards to the NSA’s surveillance program.
On March 12, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Clapper was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., if the NSA gathers “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” said Clapper, “not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
The ‘Dewey Decimal’ excuse
That answer contradicts revelations contained in an explosive story published in early June by The Guardian, a British newspaper, based on details provided by NSA employee Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on the agency’s massive domestic spying. But during the NBC News interview, Clapper parsed his earlier claim, saying Wyden’s very simple question did not have a very simple answer.
“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked – ‘When are you going to start – stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is meaning not – answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no,” Clapper said in the interview, which aired June 9. “So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no’.”
Further, Clapper said his remarks were reflective of his definition of “collection” – which he said means something very specific in the context of discussing intelligence.
“What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers – of those books in that metaphorical library – to me, collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it,” he said.
Is Clapper being advised by former President Bill Clinton? “Well, that depends on with the definition of ‘is’ is,” Clinton – the artful (draft) dodger – once said during his impeachment saga.
For his part, Wyden isn’t playing the word game.
In a statement issued June 11, the Oregon senator said he gave Clapper his question in advance, giving the DNI plenty of notice and every chance in the world to give a “straight answer” to a very straightforward question.
“So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer,” Wyden said. “Now public hearings are needed to address the recent disclosures and the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives.”
Clapper’s lie was quantified by the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, who “said Clapper is one of the most honest people she knows and suggested he misunderstood the question,” according to the Washington Post.
Defending the indefensible
Sure. The director of national intelligence is too stupid to understand a simple question that was provided to him well in advance of his testimony. Don’t you find it offensive that these people think you’re stupid enough to believe that?
Make no mistake – Clapper, President Obama, Feinstein and the growing chorus of Democrats, Republicans and political appointees who are defending the NSAdespise those of us who are now trying to hold them accountable. They don’t for one second believe that we have the right to insist upon their accountability, or question their motives, or hold them to the same standards in which they hold us.
They truly believe they are above reproach and that We, the People, are neither smart enough, nor are in any position to question them. What’s more, they believe what they are doing is both justified and proper, despite the fact that neither the law nor the Constitution they swore to uphold gives them the authority they exercise.
Welcome to post-constitutional America, where right is wrong, wrong is right, and the ruling class can barely contain its contempt for you and me.
(NaturalNews) The USA is reeling today from the explosive discovery that the Obama administration has been spying on all Verizon phone customers by surveilling their phone usage on a daily basis for the last several years. This is a wholesale, routine spy surveillance program that has “Big Brother” written all over it. It was first exposed by The Guardian which has published the secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all phone call data on an “ongoing, daily basis.”
As the Guardian writes:
Under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
As background, please note that websites like Natural News and www.InfoWars.com have been warning people for years that the NSA was secretly listening to their phone calls and surveilling their bank accounts, emails and web surfing behavior. Giggling deniers in the liberal media have routinely referred to all this as a “conspiracy theory” while deriding those who warned about all this as “tin foil hat” wearing people or even promoters of “hate speech.”
As it turns out, we were once again right all along: the government really is spying on all your phone calls, emails and other records. The NSA routinely records everything you do even though such actions are blatantly illegal under federal law. Every time the NSA taps your mobile phone (which happens every day, we now know), they are committing a felony crime. But no one is stopping them. And why? Because the government itself has become a lawless criminal operation that answers to no one.
Obama admits it’s all true
Today Obama himself admitted the wholesale surveillance of Verizon phone users is, indeed, taking place. Yes, the NSA is vacuuming up all phone records on an ongoing, daily basis, completely outside of law. But it’s a good thing, Obama insists.
“From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming,” said It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.”
Exactly what data is being surveilled by the NSA?
According to the secret surveillance order that has now been exposed, Verizon is handing over all the following information to the NSA for every phone call being made from a Verizon device:
• The phone number of both people on the call
• The geographic location of the Verizon phone user (whoa!)
• Call duration
• Unique identifiers (i.e. phone ID, allowing that phone to be tracked)
According to the Guardian, this information can then be used by the NSA to reveal:
• Your name
• Your home address
• Your social security number
• Your driver’s license number
• Your credit history
• Your place of employment
• Your criminal history
Yes, just from surveilling your phone, the NSA can acquire all this information about you. And this is just fine with Obama, who actually defends the program even though it is wildly illegal to conduct such surveillance domestically, against the American people.
Oh, and by the way, the government’s surveillance order specifically forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the secret order to anyone else. So while the government is secretly surveilling all Verizon phone users, the company itself would face criminal charges if it warned its own users about the surveillance. How’s that for freedom in a “free society?”
It’s not just Verizon, folks
Don’t ditch your Verizon phone out of fear of being tracked, however. The fact is the NSA has similar surveillance orders in place with all mobile phone companies.
Every American who uses a mobile phone is being tracked on a daily basis by their own government. It’s being done routinely, and the NSA is building a massive data center in Utah in order to be able to analyze, in real time, the actual voice content of all phone calls.
Those phone calls are already being recorded and archived, by the way. That’s been admitted by the FBI. But in the near future, the government will be able to analyze every phone call happening in real time, then flag “suspicious” conversations for possible action against the offending phone users.
This is your America, folks: A runaway criminal police state where the routine government spying on your private conversations is openly admitted and even justified by the President.
Oh, but giggling control freaks like Rachel Maddow have always insisted this was nothing but loony conspiracy theory talk. You can trust your government, she says. Because government would never do anything bad… like tapping all your phone calls. That’s hate speech to even suggest such a thing!
At what point do you realize just how onerous, dangerous and out of control this has all become?
As Mark Rumold, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a Guardian story: “This is confirmation of what we’ve long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country. We hope more than anything else that the government will allow a judge to decide whether this is constitutional, and we can finally put an end to this practice.”
Good luck with that. The abuses of government are already so far out of control that it’s questionable whether we can reign in this criminal government with anything less than a full-fledged citizens revolt.
The Program: The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
By LAURA POITRAS
Published: August 22, 2012
It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agencyturned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”
Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.
“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.
The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.
Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker who has been nominated for an Academy Award and whose work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America. This Op-Doc is adapted from a work in progress to be released in 2013.
This video is part of a series by independent filmmakers who have received grants from the BRITDOC Foundation and the Sundance Institute.
not sure whether the video link came through, you can get it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html
Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz
The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
UTAH DATA CENTER
When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.
1 Visitor control center
A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.
2 Administration
Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.
3 Data halls
Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.
4 Backup generators and fuel tanks
Can power the center for at least three days.
5 Water storage and pumping
Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.
6 Chiller plant
About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.
7 Power substation
An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.
8 Security
Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.
Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan
A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.
A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”
For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.
Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
The NSA’S SPY NETWORK
Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.
1 Geostationary satellites
Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.
2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.
4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio
Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.
5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
6 Domestic listening posts
The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.
7 Overseas listening posts
According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.
8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah
At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.
9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.
10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.
Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz
