Facebook now harvesting the list of all the other websites you visit: total online surveillance is here
Saturday, June 27, 2015 by: Daniel Barker
(NaturalNews) If you’re one of the millions of people who have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, there are now even more reasons for hating the immensely successful social media giant.
You probably know that Facebook collects and stores your personal data and preferences to form a profile that it uses to generate advertising content targeted directly at you. But did you know that Facebook also looks at all the other websites you visit and stores that data, too? Facebook also collects your online search data along with some of the details you give to retailers when you purchase something.
Facebook and the data brokers
Zuckerberg and his Facebook shareholders make huge amounts of money by partnering with what are known as “data brokers.”
Bruce Schneier, a data security expert, defines data brokers as entities which:
“collect demographic information: names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, gender, age, marital status, presence and ages of children in household, education level, profession, income level, political affiliation, cars driven, and information about homes and other property. They collect lists of things you’ve purchased, when you’ve purchased them, and how you paid for them. They keep track of deaths, divorces, and diseases in your family. They collect everything about what you do on the Internet.”
This information is used to target advertising to individuals, but many see it as an illegal invasion of privacy. One of the charges against Facebook is that it deliberately tries to hide the extent of its data mining. Very few people actually read the terms and conditions when they sign up to Facebook, and even those who do typically don’t have a real understanding of what the privacy policies actually mean.
A recent article posted by Phys.org explores the issue and observes:
Users of social media are generally unaware of how much of their fragmented personal data is collated from across social media sites–and even taken from the content of their free, web-hosted emails (e.g. Gmail)–and how this can be used to build detailed personal profiles.
“Opting out” is difficult and basically futile
Facebook claims that its users can opt out of its data-mining practices, but it’s difficult to do so, and, according to data security experts, it doesn’t make much difference if you do.
As a piece on the Sherbit Blog points out:
A ‘note’ on the ‘Facebook and Privacy’ page attempts to comfort users by insisting that “the process is designed so that no personal information is exchanged between Facebook and marketers (or the third parties those marketers work with).” But the truth of the situation is that the ‘data brokers’ already own your personal information–and their collaboration with the social network may allow them to assemble even more detailed profiles of your health and habits in the future.
The bottom line is that Facebook and the data brokers collect and store more personal information than the NSA does, and they make piles of money doing it.
A recent analysis conducted by the Belgian Privacy Commission concluded that these practices are in violation of European law, but it remains to be seen whether or not anyone will be able to curtail Facebook’s snooping practices.
Facebook claims that its data-mining activities make for a better user experience, but I doubt that very many people actually appreciate their spying. “Big Data” is increasingly expanding its reach into our personal lives, and it appears that the age of total online surveillance has arrived.
What many of once thought of as a fun, essentially harmless and amazingly useful social network has turned into a intrusive tracking monster of Orwellian proportions. The NSA has nothing on Mark Zuckerberg and Co., and unless there is a concerted global effort to reverse the trend, we can expect the ever-increasing monitoring of every detail of our lives.
Has everybody gone stupid? The NSA has not stopped spying on Americans… and it never will, either
Tuesday, June 02, 2015
(NaturalNews) There are days I just shake my head in bewilderment at the astonishing, almost incomprehensible gullibility of mainstream Americans and the media that claims to be practicing intelligent journalism. When I see the Associated Press report things like, “The NSA had stopped gathering the records from phone companies hours before the deadline,” I’m almost paralyzed with disbelief.
That’s their story, though. And they apparently believe it. See Either way, no more NSA collection of US phone records. Read the story yourself if you need a really good laugh at an example of extreme gullibility in the media.
What’s so funny about that story? For starters, given that the NSA is a super secret organization with ZERO oversight and a history of repeatedly lying about what it’s really doing, how on Earth are we supposed to believe the NSA when it says it suddenly stopped spying on Americans’ phone calls because it “lost the authority” it never recognized in the first place?
Is the mainstream media really just taking the NSA’s word that it has stopped spying on everybody because it no longer has the “legal authority” to do so? There isn’t a single shred of evidence that the NSA has stopped any spying activities at all. Even more, the Associated Press has no way to verify whether anything has been halted. Trusting the NSA’s statement claiming it has halted its spying activities is about as gullible as trusting Iran’s statements on how it has halted its nuclear fuel enrichment program. Geesh… how hard is it for people to understand that governments lie by default?
Grow up, America. The NSA was spying on us all long before it ever had any legal authority to do so, and when the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked under oath, at a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, about whether the NSA was spying on Americans, he outright lied over and over again, claiming no such spying was taking place.
So now, suddenly, we’re supposed to believe the NSA isn’t spying on us all merely because it says so? Should we pull out our pinkies and do a pinky swear on it, too? Maybe we can be BFF as well?
The NSA recognizes no legal authority, period
It’s just incredible that anyone would think the NSA’s activities are bound by anything even resembling “legal authority.” The NSA does whatever the hell it wants. And why does it do that? Because it can. Because they’ve already gathered up all the records of U.S. Supreme Court judges and they have enough emails, phone calls, web surfing history and search engine history to blackmail practically everyone in Washington D.C. (and everywhere else, for that matter).
“However Congress resolves its impasse over government surveillance, this much is clear: The National Security Agency will ultimately be out of the business of collecting and storing Americans’ calling records,” says the Associated Press. Yeah, right. In your crack-induced fairytale, maybe. But in the real world of hardball politics and blackmail, any organization that has the power to keep collecting all these records will absolutely keep doing so unless and until it is physically forced to stop (i.e. shut off the power, confiscate the servers and close the buildings).
And that’s never gonna happen, folks. Not by a long shot. The spy apparatus is far too valuable to ever be shut down. At best, it will pretend to shut down long enough to shut up the public. But behind the scenes, every single spy server dedicated to this task will continue as normal, without interruption.
Sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but anyone who believes the government is going to voluntarily stop spying on the American people is a complete fool. The way these games are really played is far beyond any recognition of “legal authority.” For example, the NSA can simply take its entire spy operation, transfer the assets to an NSA shell company in the Cayman Islands (without actually moving the servers anywhere), rename it “NSB” and continue operations as normal… all while testifying before Congress that, “The NSA has halted all domestic surveillance operations.” Yep, it has! But NSB has resumed those operations, ha ha.
And if NSB is ever unveiled, they can move it all to “NSC” and so on. The spying never stops, folks. The only thing that changes is the name of the spy organizations conducting it. Does any intelligent person honestly think they’re going to voluntarily shut off all those billions of dollars in servers and storage facilities they built for this purpose? Ain’t gonna happen.
And the way you know this to be true is to ask yourself this question: If you were the director of the world’s most amazing intelligence gathering spy tool that operated utterly without any boundaries or limitations whatsoever, would YOU shut it down? Of course not. No one would. You’d use it precisely because it’s powerful. It’s the Ring of Power from the Lord of the Rings. Almost no human being has the moral integrity to voluntarily part with it. It’s so PRECIOUSSSSS…
True American heroes: Edward Snowden and Rand Paul
Despite the ongoing spy activities of the NSA, it’s worth mentioning something hugely important in all this.
There is only ONE Presidential candidate who has the courage to stand up against the surveillance state and demand an end to these illegal violations of Americans’ privacy. His name is Rand Paul.
As far as I can tell, Rand Paul is the only candidate who has a spine. While Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are both total spy state insiders, Rand Paul is risking not just his political career but even his own neck to take a stand against the surveillance state. That’s historic. It’s truly remarkable, and it may uniquely qualify Rand Paul to be the kind of serious reformer who can take on Washington and knock some heads around.
Edward Snowden is also, of course, the key hero in all this, and I strongly recommend you watch the documentary called Citizen Four to gain a better understanding of Snowden’s contributions to privacy and freedom in America. Edward Snowden has quite literally risked his life — and forfeited his own personal freedom — to blow the whistle on the illegal spying being conducted by the U.S. government on the citizens of America.
What should have happened immediately after Snowden’s shocking revelations was a nationwide movement of pissed off people marching in the streets against Orwellian government. But what really happened instead was a nationwide movement of apathetic sheeple turning on Oprah and munching down some Twinkies before injecting themselves with insulin. In other words, nobody gave a damn because they were too busy cowering in blind obedience and practicing cowardice and conformity.
And so they all are getting the government they deserve: an Orwellian spy state that enslaves them all. This is what they are begging for, after all, when they are so gullible that they’ll believe anything the government tells them. The same people who believe the NSA magically stopped spying on them must also believe the FDA protects the people, the DEA wants to eliminate the drug trade, and the CDC is trying to eradicate infectious disease.
Wake up and smell reality, folks. None of these entities give a damn about the People. They all exist for only one purpose: to expand and assert their own power by any means necessary. That’s the fundamental nature of organizational existence, and it’s precisely why Big Government keeps getting bigger, badder and more dangerous unless its power is somehow limited or halted by the People.
Hence the origins of the Bill of Rights in the first place, over two centuries ago.
We’ve been down this road before, of course. This isn’t the first rise of police state tyranny in the history of our world. And it certainly won’t be the last…
How to avoid Google surveillance and protect your personal data
Friday, May 29, 2015 by: Daniel Barker
(NaturalNews) It all seemed rather innocent in the beginning. It certainly seemed convenient, and still is – maybe more so than ever, to be truthful. But if you haven’t noticed, slowly and gradually, during the past 17 years since its inception, Google has evolved from being a company which once merely provided Internet users with a free search engine and email to becoming an all-encompassing entity that monitors nearly everything you do.
And not only does Google snoop on you, it takes the personal information it has collected and sells it to corporations. Google also provides that information to intelligence agencies, such as the NSA.
A recent article penned by Derek Scally of The Irish Times explores the extent of Google’s tentacles into our private lives and offers some very useful advice on how to “de-Google” your life.
And why should you de-Google your life if you have “nothing to hide”?
From Scally’s article, which is titled “De-Google your life: it’s worth the hassle if you value your privacy”:
“For privacy campaigner Glenn Greenwald, the man who revealed Snowden’s mass surveillance claims against the National Security Agency, the most common response he hears on the road is what he calls the ‘I have nothing to hide’ argument. To this he has a simple answer.
‘Whenever I hear someone say “I have nothing to hide,” ‘ said Mr Greenwald in Berlin last year, ‘I always ask that person for their email password so I can read their messages. No one has ever taken me up on the offer.’ “
How to de-Google your life
Look for storage alternatives – Scally recommends not putting “all your digital eggs” in one basket. For example, he urges people to explore alternatives for storing emails, photos and cloud content. European-based services are preferable due to EU laws which protect privacy. German-based mailbox.org is one example of an alternative mail service that does not sell or give your data to corporate interests.
Change the way you search – Whenever you can, use an alternative search engine that doesn’t track your searches, such as DuckDuckGo.com or GoodGopher.com (GoodGopher is a new search engine described as “the world’s first privacy-protecting search engine that bans corporate propaganda and government disinfo”).
Block cookies – We’re told that cookies “improve the user experience,” but they also track everything you do online. Install a tracking blocker, such as Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe, into your browser. You can also download the privacyfix.com service from AVG, which helps you click the right privacy settings on your computer and the Internet services you currently use.
Find an alternative to Gmail – Scally admits that it’s “difficult” to give up Gmail and its 15GB of “free” storage, but he points out that even though you theoretically retain intellectual property rights to the content stored on Google, you also give the company a: “worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify . . . communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.” Better to use a service such as the above-mentioned mailbox.org or Posteo. Another alternative is to encrypt your emails using PGP.
Stop using Google and Apple cloud services – Keeping your calendars and contacts synced on multiple devices without using the Google or Apple cloud services can also be difficult because, as Scally notes: The “big players deliberately tinker with file standards for their calendar and address-book offerings to make migration possible and keep you inside their golden cage.” This “devious and effective practice” is perhaps not easy to sidestep, but it’s probably worth the hassle. And as Scally says, “if you clear this hurdle, you’re home free.”
Smartphone alternatives – It’s possible to wipe your Android phone and install CyanogenMod, which uses the same OS, only without Google’s presence. However, installing it requires some technical skills. Another alternative is to invest in a Jolla smartphone. Jolla is a Finnish-made smartphone that uses an OS with “no corporate tentacles.” A team of Nokia designers left the company to introduce this product, which aside from offering privacy also has some very innovative features.
NY Cops Used ‘Stingray’ Spy Tool 46 Times Without Warrant
The police department in Erie County, New York fought hard to prevent the New York Civil Liberties Union from obtaining records about its use of a controversial surveillance tool known as a stingray.
The reason why may be because of what the records show: that cops in that county, which includes the city of Buffalo, used the devices 47 times since 2010 but only once sought and obtained a court order to do so. That revelation contradicts what the county sheriff said last year when he asserted that the department only used the devices under “judicial review.”
In the single case in which police sought permission from a court, they asked for a court order rather than a warrant, which carries a higher burden of proof. And in their request, they mischaracterized the true nature of the tool.
“These records confirm some of the very worst fears about local law enforcement’s use of this expensive and intrusive surveillance equipment.”
The records, which the NYCLU published in a blog post today, also show that the county sheriff’s office signed a stringent gag order with the FBI to maintain secrecy about their stingray records. The department was told to withhold information about the devices in any documents filed with courts, such as affidavits and other documents describing how they obtained evidence in criminal cases. The department was even told that the FBI maintained the right to intervene in county prosecutions to request criminal cases be dismissed if there was a chance that a case might result in the disclosure of information about law enforcement’s use of stingrays.
“Stingrays are an advanced surveillance technology that can sweep up very private information, including information on innocent people,” NYCLU Western Region Director John Curr III said in a statement. “If the FBI can command the Sheriff’s Office to dismiss criminal cases to protect its secret stingrays, it is not clear how the $350,000 we are spending on stingray equipment is keeping the people of Buffalo safer.”
The revelations continue a trend in several states across the U.S. wherein law enforcement agencies have gone to great lengths to prevent the public from learning about their use of stingrays. The surveillance tool simulates a legitimate cell phone tower to trick mobile phones and other devices on a cellular network into connecting to the devices and revealing their location. Stingrays emit a signal that is stronger than the signal of other cell towers in the vicinity in order to force mobile phones and other devices to establish a connection with them and reveal their unique ID. Stingrays can then determine the direction from which the phone connected— a data point that can then be used to track the movement of the phone as it continuously connects to the fake tower.
Many police departments have signed non-disclosure agreements with the Harris Corporation, one of the leading makers of the devices, to prevent them from releasing records about the systems or discussing them. In Florida, the U.S. Marshals service went so far as to seize records about a local police department’s use of stingrays in order to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union from obtaining them. And many law enforcement agencies have deceived judges about their use of the devices in order to prevent defendants and the public from learning about how they’re being used.
Erie County similarly fought hard to prevent the NYCLU from obtaining these records but was ordered to turn them over by a court. The documents show that the sheriff’s office used stingrays at least 47 times between May 1, 2010 and October 3, 2014. The one time the department sought judicial approval was in October 2014, contrary to what Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard said in May, 2014: that the devices were used under “judicial review” in all criminal matters, implying that investigators always seek court approval before using them.
Not only this, but the records show that when the department did seek a court order, they identified the spy tool they planned to use as a pen register device, not a stingray or cell site simulator. The use of the term “pen register device” is controversial. Law enforcement agencies maintain that stingrays operate like pen registers and are not invasive, but this doesn’t paint the picture. Pen registers record the numbers dialed from a specific phone number, but stingrays are used primarily to track the location and movement of a device and can be much more invasive than pen registers. By describing the tool as a pen register device to the judge, the law enforcement agency was withholding information about the full capability of the device.
In fact, the public has yet to learn exactly how much these surveillance tools can really do, due to the secrecy around them. Recently, a federal agent admitted to a court that stingrays have the ability to disrupt cellular communications for any device in its vicinity, not just the ones targeted by law enforcement. And there are also stingray devices that have the ability to collect the content of phone calls, though U.S. law enforcement agencies have often insisted that the ones they use have this capability disabled.
Although there’s still much more the public should know about how and when law enforcement uses this invasive spying tool, it’s clear departments will continue to do everything in their power to keep the public, and judges, in the dark.
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.
On Thursday, two of those senators —Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained.
The senators, who also said that Americans would be “stunned” to know what the government thought the Patriot Act allowed it to do, made their remarks in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. after a Justice Department official last month told a judge that disclosing anything about the program “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”
The Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could alert adversaries to how the government collects certain intelligence. It is seeking the dismissal of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union — related to how the Patriot Act has been interpreted.
The senators wrote that it was appropriate to keep specific operations secret. But, they said, the government in a democracy must act within publicly understood law so that voters “can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf” — even if that “obligation to be transparent with the public” creates other challenges.
“We would also note that in recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation,’ ” they added. “This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.”
The dispute centers on what the government thinks it is allowed to do under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which agents may obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing them to get access to any “tangible things” — like business records — that are deemed “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation.
There appears to be both an ordinary use for Section 215 orders — akin to using a grand jury subpoena to get specific information in a traditional criminal investigation — and a separate, classified intelligence collection activity that also relies upon them.
The interpretation of Section 215 that authorizes this secret surveillance operation is apparently not obvious from a plain text reading of the provision, and was developed through a series of classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The letter from Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall also complained that while the Obama administration told Congress in August 2009 that it would establish “a regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions” of the court, since then “not a single redacted opinion has been released.”
The SMDC-ONE is a 10-inch long, 10-pound satellite that is the first in a family of Army nanosatellites that SMDC/ARSTRAT engineers hope to launch as a new capability for the war fighter.
CREDIT: Kari Hawkins/USAG Redstone
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The United States Army is making a serious push to launch swarms of tiny, inexpensive spy satellites, which would serve as eyes and ears for soldiers on the ground.
The move is an attempt to adapt to the changing nature of warfare, which increasingly requires small bands of American soldiers to hunt down elusive targets in rough, isolated terrain, such as the craggy hills of Afghanistan. The new satellites could help reduce the difficulty and danger of such operations.
The first of these nanosatellites launched in December 2010, marking the first time an Army-built satellite made it to orbit since 1960. And many more could be coming soon, Army officials said. [Video: Defense Satellites to Watch Entire World – All the Time]
Tuesday, June 02, 2015
Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz
