New Documents Shed Light on NSA's Dragnet Surveillance

With the Obama administration in full damage control mode over revelations of blanket surveillance of global electronic communications, new documents published by The Guardian, including the draft of a 2009 report by the NSA's Inspector General marked Top Secret and a Secret 2007 Justice Department memo prepared for then US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, show that "a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata 'every 90 days'."

An unnamed "senior administration official" confirmed the existence of a Bush-era surveillance program which gobbled-up "vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans," but claimed, without evidence, that "it ended in 2001," according to The Guardian.

Early last month, the British newspaper began publishing documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including a Top Secret FISA court order to Verizon Business Services, which requires the firm "on an ongoing, daily basis" to hand over information on all telephone calls within its system.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA's "monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions." The secret state's spying initiative "also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T; Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information."

Days later, The Washington Post revealed that the Bush administration's "warrantless wiretapping" program known as STELLAR WIND, had been succeeded by four "collection programs" two of which, MAINWAY and MARINA, "process trillions of 'metadata' records for storage and analysis."

Additional programs, the Post reported, operating "on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content," one of which "intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON."

Although the news outlets principally responsible for bringing these stories to light, principally The Guardian, Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and now Der Spiegel, have not (as yet) published complete sets of NSA documents, and their reporting has barely scratched the surface of content-siphoning deep packet inspection (DPI) programs for internet and telephone surveillance (indeed, PRISM may be a subset of larger and more pernicious programs that collect, analyze and store everything), what we have learned so far is deeply troubling and pose grave threats to civil liberties.

New PRISM Slides, More Questions

Filling in some of the blanks, on June 29 The Washington Post published four additional PRISM slides from the 41-slide deck provided to The Guardian and Post by Edward Snowden.

Confirming what civil libertarians, journalists and political analysts have long maintained, NSA can and probably does "acquire" anything an individual analyst might request as Snowden averred. This includes, according to new information provided by the Post: chats, email, file transfers, internet telephone, login/ID, metadata, photos, social networking, stored data in the cloud, video, video conferencing.

If that isn't a surveillance dragnet, then words fail.

Recall, that previous reporting disclosed that major US internet and high tech firms, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple gave NSA "direct access" to their systems.

"The program," according to The Guardian, "facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US."

"It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants," a near probability in this writer's opinion.

In a report that appeared the same day, The Washington Post disclosed that NSA and the FBI "are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets," and that the agency "s accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers."

Although the firms all denied that they hand over customer data to the government, their self-serving claims are undercut by evidence that NSA-cleared company personnel, including "collection managers," send "content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations," rather than directly to company servers.

"Under Prism," the Associated Press reported, "the delivery process varied by company."

"Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process."

"With Prism," AP reported, "the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property."

"Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too."

The slides published June 29 shed some light on how the process works. We learn for example that when an analyst "tasks" PRISM for information on a new "target," it is automatically passed on to a supervisor who "who reviews the 'selectors' or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst's 'reasonable belief,' defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection."

Tasking orders can be sent to multiple sources, "for example, to a private company and to an NSA access point that taps into the Internet's main gateway switches." (for background see: Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine, Klein's affidavit in EFF's lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T; and his groundbreaking 2006 piece for Wired Magazine).

The FBI "uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA." (see Verizon whistleblower Babak Pasdar's affidavit on how FBI "tasking" is accomplished via its Quantico circuit).

"For stored communications, but not for live surveillance" we're informed that the Bureau's Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit (ECSU) "consults its own databases to make sure the selectors do not match known Americans."

If this is what the Bureau is now claiming, it is disingenuous at best. In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported back in 2009, the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), a virtual Library of Babel, is a content management and data mining system with the ability to access and analyze aggregated data from some fifty hitherto separate datasets. That the Bureau would feel compelled to "minimize" domestic information it provides to a "sister" agency beggars belief.

In fact, one of the new PRISM slides reveal that from "the FBI's interception unit on the premises of private companies, the information is passed to one or more 'customers' at the NSA, CIA or FBI."

"Depending on the company," Barton Gellman and Todd Lindeman report, "a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and 'metadata' that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target."

Elapsed times from "tasking to response" from the above-named firms or other "partners" such as banks, credit card companies, etc. range from "minutes to hours." An unnamed "senior intelligence official" told the Post, "Much as we might wish otherwise, the latency is not zero."

"After communications information is acquired," the data is "processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and 'digital network information' that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets."

We also learn how some of these code named systems function.

For example, PRINTURA is described as a tool "which automates the traffic flow." The Post reports that "the same FBI-run equipment sends the search results to the NSA." Once it is received, in bulk, "PRINTURA sorts and dispatches the data stream through a complex sequence of systems that extract and process voice, text, video and metadata."

Once dispatched from PRINTURA, described as a "librarian and traffic cop," SCISSORS and Protocol Exploitation "sort data types for analysis in NUCLEON (voice), PINWALE (video), MAINWAY (call records) and MARINA (internet records)."

While the Post claims that "systems identified as FALLOUT and CONVEYANCE appear to be the final filtering to reduce the intake of information about Americans," information provided by NSA whistleblower William Binney dispute such assertions.

In fact, Binney told investigative journalist James Bamford for his Wired Magazine piece on NSA's giant Utah Data Center, that the agency "could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stations--the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law."

"Instead," the former cofounder of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC) told Bamford that NSA "chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country--large, windowless buildings known as switches--thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US."

"The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T; building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. 'I think there's 10 to 20 of them,' Binney says. 'That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast'."

In other words, NSA's network of "secret rooms" were installed at key junctures that would facilitate, not "minimize" wholesale domestic surveillance.

Expanding on just how intrusive NSA "collection" programs are, Binney told The New Yorker in a Jane Mayer piece on the Obama regime's prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, that a surveillance program he helped design as SARC director, ThinThread, was "bastardized" after 9/11 and "stripped of privacy controls" that would filter out Americans' communications.

"'It was my brainchild,' Binney told Mayer. "'But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.' He said that although he was not 'read in' to the new secret surveillance program, 'my people were brought in, and they told me, 'Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on US citizens! They're putting pen registers'--logs of dialed phone numbers--'on everyone in the country!'"

And they continue to do so today without one iota of oversight from a thoroughly compromised Congress.

New Programs Exposed

The programs described above all evolved from the Bush administration's so-called President's Surveillance Program, PSP, which has continued under Obama. As Antifascist Calling reported in 2009, citing a declassified 38-page report by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, the Departments of Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report failed to disclose what these programs actually do, claiming they are "too sensitive" for an "unclassified setting."

Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state's war against the American people.

For example, the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General described FBI participation in the PSP as that of a "passive recipient of intelligence collected under the program." Recent revelations by Edward Snowden expose such statements as bald-faced lies. And when the OIG claimed that Bureau efforts "to improve cooperation with the NSA to enhance the usefulness of PSP-derived information to FBI agents," that too, is a craven misrepresentation given what we now know about the key role the FBI plays in NSA's PRISM program.

However, the unclassified version of NSA's Inspector General's report on the PSP published by The Guardian paints a far-different picture.

A close reading of the document reveals that a federal judge sitting on the FISA would approve a bulk collection order for metadata "every 90 days," as long as it "involved" the "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

"Eventually," Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman reported, the agency "gained authority to 'analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States'."

Although the administration now claims that specific program ended in 2011, online collection of data on Americans continues today.

Last week The Guardian reported that NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate running PRISM is collecting and analyzing "significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets."

"The NSA," Greenwald and Ackerman disclosed, "called it the 'One-End Foreign (1EF) solution'."

That program, code named EVIL OLIVE, was intended to broaden "the scope" of what it is able to surveil and relied, "legally, on 'FAA Authority', a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions."

"This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. 'The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter,' the SSO December document reads. 'This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories'."

After EVIL OLIVE's "deployment, traffic has literally doubled."

Referencing another NSA collection program, this one code named SHELL TRUMPET, an SSO official wrote that the program had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record."

"Explaining that the five-year old program 'began as a near-real-time metadata analyzer ... for a classic collection system', the SSO official noted: 'In its five year history, numerous other systems from across the Agency have come to use ShellTrumpet's processing capabilities for performance monitoring' and other tasks, such as 'direct email tip alerting'," The Guardian reported.

These, and hitherto as yet unknown programs, are advancing by leaps and bounds due to technological breakthroughs, the result of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars showered on the agency in wake of the 9/11 provocation. As Greenwald and Ackerman reported, "almost half of those trillion pieces of internet metadata were processed in 2012, the document detailed: 'though it took five years to get to the one trillion mark, almost half of this volume was processed in this calendar year'."

"Another SSO entry," this one dated February 6, 2013, "described ongoing plans to expand metadata collection. A joint surveillance collection operation with an unnamed partner agency yielded a new program 'to query metadata' that was 'turned on in the Fall 2012'."

Two additional programs, code named MOON LIGHT PATH AND SPINNERET, "are planned to be added by September 2013." Curiously enough, this is when NSA's Utah Data Center is slated to "go live."

In fact, these programs and their siblings are useful not simply for harvesting metadata, but for "collecting" and storing all electronic communications, including their content; hence the rather circumspect reference to "direct email tip alerting."

Fully a transatlantic affair, Greenwald and Ackerman noted that another SSO entry dated September 21, 2012 revealed that a program called TRANSIENT THURIBLE is "'a new Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) managed XKeyScore (XKS) Deep Dive was declared operational.' The entry states that GCHQ 'modified' an existing program so the NSA could 'benefit' from what GCHQ harvested."

There is much we do not yet know about these programs, how "collected" data is exploited by government agencies, nor the present and future implications for civil liberties and privacy in the United States and globally. What we do know however, is that the Obama administration, including their national security spokespeople and their media and political apologists are lying.

What the NSA Revelations Tell Us about America's Police State

Ongoing revelations by The Guardian and The Washington Post of massive, illegal secret state surveillance of the American people along with advanced plans for waging offensive cyberwarfare on a global scale, including inside the US, underscores what Antifascist Calling has reported throughout the five years of our existence: that democracy and democratic institutions in the United States are dead letters.

Last week, Guardian investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that NSA "is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April."

That order from the FISA court "requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries."

"The document shows for the first time that 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."

The latest revelations track directly back to what USA Today reported in 2006: "The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T;, Verizon and BellSouth," and that secretive NSA program "reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans--most of whom aren't suspected of any crime."

"'It's the largest database ever assembled in the world,' said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders," USA Today disclosed.

Mission accomplished!

The publication of the FISA order confirms what whistleblowers such as former AT&T; technician Mark Klein, Babak Pasdar, as well as NSA insiders William Binney, Russell Tice and Thomas Drake have been warning for years: the architecture of an American police state is not only in place but fully functioning.

According to Binney, just one Narus STA 6400 "traffic analyzer" installed in one of AT&T;'s "secret rooms" exposed by Klein (there are upwards of 20 scattered across the United States) can can analyze 1,250,000 1,000-character emails every second, or some 100 billion emails a day.

While the Obama administration and their coterie of media flacks argue that these programs are "legal," we would do well to recall that in 2009, The New York Times reported that NSA "intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."

Although Justice Department and intelligence officials described NSA's massive communications' dragnet as simple "overcollection" that was "unintentional," documents published so far expose such statements for what they are: lies.

Babak Pasdar's Verizon Disclosure

More than five years ago I wrote that "a new FISA whistleblower has stepped forward with information about a major wireless provider apparently granting the state unrestricted access to all of their customers' voice communications and electronic data via a so-called 'Quantico Circuit'."

That whistleblower, Babak Pasdar, the CEO of Bat Blue, revealed in a 2008 affidavit filed with the Government Accountability Project (GAP) that Verizon maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that allowed the FBI, the agency which oversees the "Quantico Circuit," virtually "unfettered" access to Verizon's wireless network, including billing records and customer data "transmitted wirelessly."

A year prior to Pasdar's disclosure, Wired Magazine revealed that the FBI was deploying malware which it described as a "computer and internet protocol address verifier," or CIPAV, to spy on selected targets.

Wired disclosed, citing a court affidavit filed in US District Court in the Western District of Washington, that "the spyware program gathers a wide range of information, including the computer's IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer's registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL."

Compare Wired's description of CIPAV with what we have learned about the NSA's black program, PRISM, from The Guardian and The Washington Post.

According to Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill's reporting in The Guardian: "The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Additionally, one "chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more."

"Once that data is gathered," Wired reported in 2007, "the CIPAV begins secretly monitoring the computer's internet use, logging every IP address to which the machine connects," and sends that data "to a central FBI server located somewhere in eastern Virginia."

"The server's precise location wasn't specified, but previous FBI internet surveillance technology--notably its Carnivore packet-sniffing hardware--was developed and run out of the bureau's technology laboratory at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia."

According to Pasdar, with such access the FBI and the NSA are allowed to listen in and record all conversations en-masse; collect and record mobile phone data en-masse; obtain the data that a subscriber accessed from their mobile phone, including internet access, email and web queries; trend individual call patterns and call behavior; identify inbound and outbound callers; track all inbound and outbound calls and trace the user's physical location.

And as we learned last week from The Guardian and The Washington Post, the secret state's technical capabilities have evolved by whole orders of magnitude since initial stories of secret government surveillance were first reported nearly eight years ago by The New York Times.

For example, under NSA's internet-tapping PRISM program the Guardian and Post revealed that "nine leading US Internet companies," have given over access to their central servers to the FBI and NSA, thereby enabling high-tech spooks to extract "audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs."

So pervasive, and intrusive, are these programs, that the whistleblower who revealed their existence, who we now know is former CIA technical specialist Edward Snowden, who had "firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities," are what led him "to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. 'They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type'," the officer said."

Hints of the frightening capabilities of these, and other as yet unknown programs, had been revealed years earlier.

When Pasdar was in the process of migrating Verizon servers and installing a newer and more secure set of firewalls, the security specialist discovered an unnamed "third party" had installed the above-mentioned DS-3 line, a "45 megabit per second circuit that supports data and voice communications."

Stunned when he learned that Verizon officials insisted the circuit should "not have any access control" and "should not be firewalled," Pasdar was told in no uncertain terms that the "owners" of the DS-3 line specified that no record of its existence should ever be made.

"'Everything at the least SHOULD be logged,' I emphasized."

"I don't think that is what they want."

A top project manager who drove out to the site warned Pasdar to "forget about the circuit" and "move on" with the migration. He was further warned that if he "couldn't do that then he would get someone who could."

When the manager left, Pasdar asked one of his Verizon colleagues, "Is that what I think it is?"

"What do you think?", he replied.

"I shifted the focus. 'Forgetting about who it is, don't you think it is unusual for some third party to have completely open access to your systems like this? You guys are even firewalling your internal offices, and they are part of your own company!'"

His colleague replied, "Dude, that's what they want."

"I didn't bother asking who 'they' were this time. 'They' now had a surrogate face,'" top manager dubbed "DS" by Pasdar. "They told me that 'they' went all the way to the top [of Verizon], which is why the once uncertain DS could now be so sure and emphatic."

Disturbed that Verizon was turning over access of their communications infrastructure to secret government agencies, Pasdar wrote: "For the balance of the evening and for some time to come I thought about all the systems to which this circuit had complete and possibly unfettered access. The circuit was tied to the organization's core network. It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions."

"What really struck me," Pasdar noted, "was that it seemed no one was logging any of the activity across this circuit. And if they were, the logging system was so abysmal that they wouldn't capture enough information to build any type of a picture of what had transpired. Who knew what was being sent across the circuit and who was sending it? To my knowledge no historical logs of the communications traversing the 'Quantico Circuit' exists."

The security consultant affirmed that government snoops "may be able to access the billing system to find information on a particular person. This information may include their billing address, phone number(s), as well as the numbers and information of other people on the plan. Other information could also include any previous numbers that the person or others on their plan called, and the outside numbers who have called the people on the plan."

And once the Electronic Security Number (ESN) of any plan member's phone has been identified, well, the sky's the limit!

"With the ESN information and access to the fraud detection systems, a third party can locate or track any particular mobile device. The person's call patterns and location can be trended and analyzed."

"With the ESN," Pasdar averred, "the third party could tap into any and all data being transmitted from any particular mobile device. This would include Internet usage, e-mails, web, file transfers, text messages and access to any remote applications."

"It would also be possible in real-time to tap into any conversation on any mobile phone supported by the carrier at any point."

While the major firms identified by Guardian and Post reporters in the PRISM disclosures deny that NSA has built backdoors into their systems, The New York Times revealed although Twitter declined to make it easier for the government to spy on their users, "other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so."

According to the Times, the "companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions," the same tech giants called out by the PRISM revelations.

"In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook," reporter Claire Cain Miller disclosed, "one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said."

So much for their non-denial denials!

More pertinently however, the "digital version of the secure physical rooms" described by the Times track directly back to what whistleblower Mark Klein told Wired, along with supporting documents in 2006, about AT&T;'s secret Room 641A housed in San Francisco.

Klein revealed: "In 2003 AT&T; built 'secret rooms' hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities."

And as with the "separate, secure portals" described by the Times, AT&T;'s "secret rooms" are staffed with NSA-cleared corporate employees of the tech giants.

Klein informed us: "The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the 'secret room,' which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room." (emphasis in original)

How Extensive Is the Surveillance? Well, Boundless!

Back in 2008, The Wall Street Journal reported that NSA "now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called 'transactional' data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns."

With the Verizon and PRISM disclosures, we now know who those "private companies" are: major US high tech and telecommunications giants.

Journalist Siobhan Gorman revealed that the NSA's "enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements."

"The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say."

Amongst the "black programs" disclosed by The Guardian, we learned last week that through the NSA's top secret Boundless Informant program the agency "has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications."

As Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill disclosed, the "Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, 'What type of coverage do we have on country X' in 'near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure'."

Like their Bushist predecessors, the Obama regime claims the security apparatus is "not listening in" to the phone calls of Americans, asserting instead they are "merely" harvesting metadata, the digital footprints and signatures of electronic devices.

But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out: "Metadata provides enough context to know some of the most intimate details of your lives. And the government has given no assurances that this data will never be correlated with other easily obtained data. They may start out with just a phone number, but a reverse telephone directory is not hard to find. Given the public positions the government has taken on location information, it would be no surprise if they include location information demands in Section 215 orders for metadata."

Conservative estimates since the 9/11 provocation have revealed that the NSA phone database now contains upwards of 1.9 trillion call-detail records under a program code name MARINA and that a similar database for email and web queries also exists, PINWALE.

The FISA court order signed in April by Judge Roger Vinson directs Verizon to hand over to the NSA "on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order, unless otherwise directed by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls."

One can only assume that other carriers such as AT&T; and Sprint have been issued similar orders by the FISA court.

According to the Order, "Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (ISMI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call."

While the order specifies that "telephony metadata" does not include the "substantive content of any communication" or "the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer," that information, should an individual come in for "special handling" by the secret state, call and internet content is fully-retrievable, courtesy of US high-tech firms, under the MARINA, PINWALE and PRISM programs.

As the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden told The Guardian last Sunday: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."

"What they're doing,” Snowden said, poses "an existential threat to democracy."

If what the Bush and now, Obama regimes are doing is not Orwellian blanket surveillance of the American people, then words fail.

Another Day, Another Shameful Ruling on Police State Spying

Recently, federal district court Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California, dismissed a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on grounds of bogus "state secrets privilege" claims made by the Obama administration.

That suit, Fazaga v. FBI, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The plaintiffs forcefully argued that the Bureau illegally spied on Muslim residents in southern California, targeting them for "special handling" solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.

The atrocity played out in Carney's court against a citizens' right to due process under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, constitutional guarantees that extend to all government actions and proceedings that can result in harm to an individual either civilly or criminally, is only the latest in a long line of capitulatory rulings by a diminished Judicial Branch.

Under Bush, and now Obama, the Justice Department demanded that Fazaga be thrown out on the most specious grounds: that presidential authority in all matters relating to national security cannot be challenged by those who are the victims of predatory actions, regardless of their egregious nature, by the secret state.


Denouncing Carney's cave-in to the Justice Department, Ahilan Arulanantham, the deputy legal director for the ACLU of Southern California said: "Under today's ruling dozens of law-abiding Muslim Americans in Southern California will never know if the government violated their constitutional rights. Every American should be deeply troubled when the government can win dismissal of a case involving the most basic constitutional rights by claiming that it is acting, in secret, in the interests of national security. The notion that our basic safety requires relinquishing our most cherished liberties is as inconsistent with the Constitution as it is frightening."

But in a collapsing Empire, where the indefinite detention or even the liquidation of "terrorism" suspects, alongside illegal warrantless spying, the trampling of First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, the persecution of government whistleblowers who bring high state crimes to light, are now deemed unreviewable by any court by a quasi-fascist "Unitary Executive."

According to a case summary posted by the ACLU of Southern California, Peter Bibring informed us: "From the term 'state secrets,' you might think the case involved spies, hush-hush arrangements with foreign governments, or people detained at secret foreign prisons--as some state secrets cases do. But this one involves the FBI's investigation into law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents in Orange County, California, called 'Operation Flex'."

"In June 2006," Bibring wrote, "FBI agents recruited Craig Monteilh, a man with a file full of felony convictions, to pose as a convert to Islam at one of the largest mosques in the area. The FBI paid Monteilh to spend the next fourteen months meeting as many members of the Muslim community as he could. He made audio recordings of every interaction, as he gathered names, telephone numbers, e-mails, political and religious views, travel plans, and other information on hundreds of individuals in the Muslim community. According to Monteilh's own sworn statement, he was told to pay special attention to community leaders and those who seemed especially devout."

FBI snitch Monteilh, a steroid-enhanced "fitness freak" and con man, who the Orange County Weekly reported had once told an unwitting dupe of one of his scams, "my body is my business card," that is, before "liberating" her of tens of thousands of dollars even as he pocketed upwards of a quarter million more from the Bureau, was eventually sent back to state prison for grand-theft.

"When asked if the FBI had particular targets in the Muslim community that they wanted to have investigated, Monteilh said, 'No. They said the targets would come to me.' In other words," Bibring averred, "Operation Flex was a fishing expedition that targeted people because of their religion. But in the end, after Monteilh began incessantly about jihad and violence, members of the community did exactly what you're supposed to do: they reported him to the FBI. After hundreds of hours of Monteilh's time and thousands of taxpayer dollars 'Operation Flex' resulted in zero criminal convictions. No one was ever even charged with a terrorism offense."

Monteilh's "cover" was blown when members of the Islamic Center of Irvine grew increasingly suspicious--and disturbed--by his provocative chatter about "jihad" and "terrorism." Two members of the Orange County mosque contacted Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR's Southern California chapter, and told him that during a car ride Monteilh said he "wanted to blow up buildings."

Ayloush contacted J. Stephen Tidwell, an FBI assistant director who mendaciously told a gathering at the Islamic Center of Irvine in 2006 that the FBI "would never spy on mosques."

"'I am calling to report a possible terrorist'," Ayloush told the assistant director, the Weekly disclosed. "'He is a white convert in Irvine.' As soon as Ayloush uttered those words, he says Tidwell cut him off. 'Okay,' he reportedly replied. 'Thanks for letting us know'."

"Ayloush offered to provide the FBI with the man's name and address, but, he says, Tidwell told him to give the information to the Irvine P.D., which he promptly did. 'Neither the FBI nor the Irvine P.D. ever bothered to talk to the guy after he was reported,' Ayloush says."

Instead of "preventing terrorism" however, Operation Flex like a score of other filthy entrapment exercises run by the FBI worked precisely as intended: as a means to terrorize the Muslim community and let the "hajis" know who's boss.

As Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press investigative journalists Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported last week, the New York City Police Department's sinister Demographics Unit, tasked with "spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques ... never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation."

"The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program," Goldman and Apuzzo wrote, and was "built with help from the CIA." With millions of taxpayer-provided "homeland security" handouts, the unit "assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames."

"But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case," AP reported, "Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case."

"'Related to Demographics,' Galati testified that information that has come in 'has not commenced an investigation'."

But when it comes to evidence of widespread FBI abuse uncovered in Fazaga, we're supposed to believe that none of this can be discussed, let alone litigated in open court, since to do so would let the "terrorists" win!

The court, caving-in to arguments made by Hope and Change™ fraudster Barack Obama's Justice Department, tossed the case on the basis of assertions made by government attorneys that to allow the plaintiffs their day in court "would require or unjustifiably risk disclosure of secret and classified information regarding the nature and scope of the FBI's counterterrorism investigations, the specific individuals under investigation and their associates, and the tactics and sources of information used in combating possible terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies."

In ruling against victims of the Bureau's anti-Muslim witchhunt, Judge Carney averred that "the state secrets privilege is specifically designed to protect against disclosure of such information that is so vital to our country's national security."

"The state secrets privilege strives to achieve a difficult compromise between the principles of national security and constitutional freedoms," Carney wrote.

But as Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee BORDC), wrote: "First, by invoking the state secrets privilege, the decision extends the judiciary's capitulation to executive lawlessness across the Bush & Obama administrations. Since initially emerging as a narrow evidentiary doctrine (in a 1953 case that ultimately proved to be part of a Pentagon coverup), federal courts have recently accepted the privilege as a wholesale immunity doctrine, a 'get out of jail free' card for executive abuses of various kinds."

If we were inclined to believe the good judge (we're not), with logic worthy of a Monty Python skit, Carney claimed that "The state secrets privilege can only be invoked and applied with restraint, in narrow circumstances, and infused with judicial skepticism. Yet, when properly invoked, it is absolute--the interest of protecting state secrets cannot give way to any other need or interest."

Accordingly, Carney, appointed to the federal bench by that champion of civil liberties and human rights, George W. Bush, asserted that "the proper application of the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security."

Seeking to immunize himself from charges that he is little more than a toady for Executive Branch mandarins, Carney went to great lengths to cover his juridical ass-ets: "Plaintiffs raise the specter of Korematsu v. United States... and protest that dismissing their claims based upon the state secrets privilege would permit a 'remarkable assertion of power' by the Executive, and that any practice, no matter how abusive, may be immunized from legal challenge by being labeled as 'counterterrorism' and 'state secrets.' But such a claim assumes that courts simply rubber stamp the Executive's assertion of the state secrets privilege. That is not the case here."

Perish the thought! After all, only anti-patriotic, terrorist-loving, constitutional "extremists" would countenance otherwise! Never mind that the Bush and Obama regimes have raised the specter of "state secrets" to dismiss a score of cases relating to kidnapping and forced disappearance ("extraordinary rendition"), indefinite detention, torture, illegal wiretapping and state murder.

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, filed a declaration on the case which claimed that various aspects of the case would be "too sensitive" to be aired in open court. Indeed, according to Holder several categories of information that would be presented by plaintiffs' attorneys "could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to the national security."

This is the same Eric Holder who as Deputy Attorney General under President Clinton, pimped himself out to secure the last-minute pardon of fugitive financier and Democratic Party moneyman Marc Rich before the Great Triangulator left office.

Commenting on Holder's role in securing Rich's pardon, investigative journalist Jim Hougan wrote: "Other than Richard Nixon, I can think of no other felon, or quasi-felon, who has been pardoned for his crimes without having first been convicted of them. Perhaps the explanation is that Rich and [Pinky] Green have been helping their countries--the United States and Israel--behind the scenes. Like Hollywood tycoon Arnan Milchan, who is widely alleged to have long used his businesses to help finance the operations of the Mossad, former 20th Century Fox honcho Rich may well have done the same...if not for the Mossad, then perhaps for the CIA."

But wait, there's more!

Proving once again that crime pays, if you're well-connected, upon leaving office Holder, a shrewd operator who knows which side his bread is buttered, joined the white shoe law firm of Covington & Burling. From his D.C. perch, Holder helped negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department over charges that Chiquita Brands International had ponied-up "protection money" to the drug-dealing Colombian death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC.

Close allies of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, three of whose relatives were recently extradited to the United States where they face cocaine trafficking charges, only after American taxpayers had doled out billions of dollars to "fight drugs" under Plan Colombia that is, Chiquita hired far-right AUC killers to murder trade unionists, peasant activists and human rights' campaigners to protect their blood-soaked "investments."

According to case files, Chiquita arranged payments totaling millions of dollars during a 1997 meeting between late AUC, Israeli-trained führer Carlos Castaño and officials from Chiquita subsidiary Banadex.

At the time, Colombia's attorney general, Mario Iguarán, charged that Chiquita had used one of its ships to smuggle some 3,400 AK-47 assault rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition to AUC drug lords. Although Iguarán had sought the extradition of Chiquita executives over these charges, none were. It is unknown whether or not cocaine was transported into the United States by that ship on its return voyage. In the wake of the $25 million "settlement" with the Justice Department, Holder then represented Chiquita in a civil action that followed the criminal case.

More recently, as financial journalist Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Holder's "predictable decision" not to criminally pursue Goldman Sachs for massive fraud is "not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration--supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic--made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses."

"No," Taibbi wrote, "the real reason this wasn’t surprising is that Holder's decision followed a general pattern that has been coming into focus for years in American law enforcement. Our prosecutors and regulators have basically admitted now that they only go after the most obvious and easily prosecutable cases."

Like the persecution of Muslims, antiwar activists, national security whistleblowers or anyone else who's rocked the boat: easy prey for an FBI stitch-up.