Mediaboss Marketing

A Washington Post Notable Book

Important and disturbing. . . . This revealing and provocative book is necessary reading . . . Bamford goes where the 9/11 Commission did not fully go.Senator Bob Kerrey, The Washington Post Book World

Fascinating. . . . Bamford has distilled a troubling chapter in American history.Bloomberg News

At its core and at its best, Bamfords book is a schematic diagram tracing the obsessions and excesses of the Bush administration after 9/11. . . . There have been glimpses inside the NSA before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency. . . . Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the directors safe.The New York Times Book ReviewEngaging. . . . Chilling. . . . Bamford is able to link disparate facts and paint a picture of utter, compounded failurefailure to find the NSAs terrorist targets and failure to protect American citizens communications from becoming tangled in a dragnet.The San Francisco ChronicleThe bad news in Bamfords fascinating new study of the NSA is that Big Brother really is watching. The worse news . . . is that Big Brother often listens in on the wrong people and sometimes fails to recognize critical information. . . . Bamford convincingly argues that the agency . . . broke the law and spied on Americans and nearly got away with it. The Baltimore Sun

Read this article:
The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping ...

NSA deleting nearly 700 million call records

National Security Agency analysts found technical irregularities in data provided by phone companies; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from Washington.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is purging what appears to be hundreds of millions of phone recordscollected byU.S. telecom companies that the agency had acquired since 2015.

The agency released a statement on Thursday saying it began deleting records in May after "analysts noted technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers."

The records date back to 2015 and were obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The statement added that "the root cause of the problem has since been addressed" for future call record collecting.

In a written follow-up statement to the Associated Press, the NSA said it is "following a specific court-authorized process," but technical irregularities resulted in the production of some call records that the NSA "was not authorized to receive."

The NSA faced a legal battle surrounding its Internet surveillance data collection program in 2017, when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union could move forward.

David Kris, a member of the Justice Department during the Obama administration, told the New York Times that theagency's announcement represents a "failure" of the Obama administration to properly implement the Freedom Act, a surveillance law passed in 2015 after the controversial Patriot Act expired.

Others placed the blame elsewhere.

Telecom companies hold vast amounts of private data on Americans, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told the Times. This incident shows these companies acted with unacceptable carelessness, and failed to comply with the law when they shared customers sensitive data with the government."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Christopher Carbone is a reporter covering global affairs, technology and national news for FoxNews.com. He can be reached at christopher.carbone@foxnews.com or on Twitter @christocarbone.

View post:
NSA deletes phone records, citing 'technical ...

Judge Andrew Napolitano and Stuart Varney had a lively debate (video above) on FBN this morning after the NSA's bulk collection of phone records was found to be illegal.

A federal appeals court ruled that the NSAcannot collect the phone records of millions of Americans under the current version of the Patriot Act.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The NSA has used the Patriot Act to justify collecting records of nearly every call made in the U.S. and entering them into a database to search for possible contacts among terrorism suspects.

The scope of the program was revealed when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents describing the program, triggering a national debate over the extent of the data collection.

The ruling by the three-judge panel in New York comes at a delicate point in the national debate over government surveillance, as Section 215 of the Patriot Act is due to expire next month and lawmakers are haggling about whether to renew it, modify it, or let it lapse.

Varneyasked the judge whether authorities would be able to go back and look at illegally-obtained data in the event of a terrorist attack.

Napolitano said that probably would not be legal, but added that the NSA would likely do it anyway in that situation.

"I would say do it and you would not," Varneysaid.

Napolitano explained that "federal spies" failed to stop the two gunmen that attacked a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, last weekend.

He argued that the government is missing suspects because it's collecting far too much unnecessary information.

"It's a failure of principle because it gives the NSA too much to go through. The Constitution limits them to probable cause. If they followed the Constitution, they would only be going after the bad guys," said Napolitano.

He said the broad surveillance tactics are "blatantly unconstitutional," and even if Congress would like to, they "cannot change the Constitution."

Watch the debate above.

Napolitano also reacted on "America's Newsroom," explaining that it's now up to Congress to decide whether to allow the massive surveillance to continue.

The court is not blocking the program, instead letting Congress take action one way or the other on renewing or modifying the Patriot Act.

"Congress must move by the end of May or this law expires and the NSA spying will stop dead in its tracks," Napolitano said.

There could now be an appeal of this particular ruling, which would then take the case to the Supreme Court.

Napolitano said that right now, the law doesn't allow bulk collection without an individual warrant.

He recalled that in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed the spying to be conducted based on a provision of the Patriot Act.

"Without anybody knowing it, President Bush took a clause of the Patriot Act, had his lawyers give an interpretation to it that said, 'the NSA can listen in on every phone call, and read every text message and every email.' Fast-forward to today and a federal appeals court in New York City ruled that's an improper interpretation of the act. Congress never authorized it. The NSA spying is illegal," the judge said.

Watch Judge Napolitano's analysis on "America's Newsroom" below.

See the original post here:
'Blatantly Unconstitutional!': Judge Nap Battles Varney ...

ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated by the US with the aid of four other signatory nations to the UKUSA Security Agreement[1]: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.[2][3][4]

The ECHELON program was created in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, and was formally established in 1971.[5][6]

By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as "ECHELON" had allegedly evolved beyond its military and diplomatic origins, to also become "a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications" (mass surveillance and industrial espionage).[7]

The European Parliament's Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System stated, "It seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail".[7] The U.S. intelligence community uses many code names (see, for example, CIA cryptonym).

Former NSA employee Margaret Newsham claims that she worked on the configuration and installation of software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California, in the United States, and in Menwith Hill, England, in the UK.[8] At that time, according to Newsham, the code name ECHELON was NSA's term for the computer network itself. Lockheed called it P415. The software programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX intercepted communications. An image available on the internet of a fragment apparently torn from a job description shows Echelon listed along with several other code names.[9][10]

Britain's The Guardian newspaper summarized the capabilities of the ECHELON system as follows:

A global network of electronic spy stations that can eavesdrop on telephones, faxes and computers. It can even track bank accounts. This information is stored in Echelon computers, which can keep millions of records on individuals.

Officially, however, Echelon doesn't exist.[11]

In 1972, former NSA analyst Perry Fellwock under pseudonym Winslow Peck, first blew the whistle on ECHELON to Ramparts in 1972,[12] where he gave commentary revealing a global network of listening posts and his experiences working there. Fellwock also included revelations such as the Israeli attack on USSLiberty was deliberate and known by both sides, the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel in 1972, the widespread involvement of CIA and NSA personnel in drugs and human smuggling, and CIA operatives leading Nationalist China (Taiwan) commandos in burning villages inside PRC borders.[13]

In 1982, James Bamford, investigative journalist and author wrote The Puzzle Palace, an in-depth look inside the workings of the NSA, then a super-secret agency, and the massive eavesdropping operation under the codename "SHAMROCK". The NSA has used many codenames, and SHAMROCK was the codename used for ECHELON prior to 1975.[14][15]

In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a Lockheed employee under NSA contract, disclosed the ECHELON surveillance system to members of congress. Newsham told a member of the U.S. Congress that the telephone calls of Strom Thurmond, a Republican U.S. senator, were being collected by the NSA. Congressional investigators determined that "targeting of U.S. political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start."[16]

Also in 1988, an article titled "Somebody's Listening", written by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman, described the signals intelligence gathering activities of a program code-named "ECHELON".[16] James Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.[17]

In 1996, a detailed description of ECHELON was provided by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network.[18] Two years later, Hager's book was cited by the European Parliament in a report titled "An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control" (PE 168.184).[19]

In March 1999, for the first time in history, the Australian government admitted that news reports about the top secret UKUSA Agreement were true.[20] Martin Brady, the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) told the Australian broadcasting channel Nine Network that the DSD "does co-operate with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship."[21]

In 2000, James Woolsey, the former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed that U.S. intelligence uses interception systems and keyword searches to monitor European businesses.[22]

Lawmakers in the United States feared that the ECHELON system could be used to monitor U.S. citizens.[23] According to The New York Times, the ECHELON system has been "shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove."[23] Critics said the ECHELON system emerged from the Cold War as a "Big Brother without a cause".[24]

The program's capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001.[7] In July 2000, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was established by the European parliament to investigate the surveillance network. It was chaired by the Portuguese politician Carlos Coelho, who was in charge of supervising investigations throughout 2000 and 2001.

In May 2001, as the committee finalised its report on the ECHELON system, a delegation travelled to Washington, D.C. to attend meetings with U.S. officials from the following agencies and departments:

All meetings were cancelled by the U.S. government and the committee was forced to end its trip prematurely.[26] According to a BBC correspondent in May 2001, "The US Government still refuses to admit that Echelon even exists."[5]

In July 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System released its final report.[27] On 5 September 2001, the European Parliament voted to accept the committee's report.[28]

The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic), and microwave links.[7]

Two internal NSA newsletters from January 2011 and July 2012, published as part of the Snowden-revelations by the website The Intercept on 3 August 2015, for the first time confirmed that NSA used the codeword ECHELON and provided some details about the scope of the program: ECHELON was part of an umbrella program codenamed FROSTING, which was established by the NSA in 1966 to collect and process data from communications satellites. FROSTING had two sub-programs:[29]

The UKUSA intelligence community was assessed by the European Parliament (EP) in 2000 to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states:

The EP report concluded that it seemed likely that ECHELON is a method of sorting captured signal traffic, rather than a comprehensive analysis tool.[7]

In 2001, the EP report (p.54 ff)[7] listed the following ground stations as likely to have, or to have had, a role in intercepting transmissions from telecommunications satellites:

The following stations are listed in the EP report (p.57 ff) as ones whose roles "cannot be clearly established":

The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic.[7] During World War II and through the 1950s, high-frequency ("short-wave") radio was widely used for military and diplomatic communication[50] and could be intercepted at great distances.[7] The rise of geostationary communications satellites in the 1960s presented new possibilities for intercepting international communications.

In 1964, plans for the establishment of the ECHELON network took off after dozens of countries agreed to establish the International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (Intelsat), which would own and operate a global constellation of communications satellites.[20]

In 1966, the first Intelsat satellite was launched into orbit. From 1970 to 1971, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of Britain began to operate a secret signal station at Morwenstow, near Bude in Cornwall, England. The station intercepted satellite communications over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Soon afterwards, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) built a second signal station at Yakima, near Seattle, for the interception of satellite communications over the Pacific Ocean.[20]

In 1981, the GCHQ and the NSA started the construction of the first global wide area network (WAN). Soon after Australia, Canada, and New Zealand joined the ECHELON system.[20] The report to the European Parliament of 2001 states: "If UKUSA states operate listening stations in the relevant regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all telephone, fax, and data traffic transmitted via such satellites."[7]

Most reports on ECHELON focus on satellite interception. Testimony before the European Parliament indicated that separate but similar UK-U.S. systems are in place to monitor communication through undersea cables, microwave transmissions, and other lines.[51] The report to the European Parliament points out that interception of private communications by foreign intelligence services is not necessarily limited to the U.S. or British foreign intelligence services.[7]

The role of satellites in point-to-point voice and data communications has largely been supplanted by fiber optics. In 2006, 99% of the world's long-distance voice and data traffic was carried over optical-fiber.[52] The proportion of international communications accounted for by satellite links is said to have decreased substantially to an amount between 0.4% and 5% in Central Europe.[7] Even in less-developed parts of the world, communications satellites are used largely for point-to-multipoint applications, such as video.[53] Thus, the majority of communications can no longer be intercepted by earth stations; they can only be collected by tapping cables and intercepting line-of-sight microwave signals, which is possible only to a limited extent.[7]

British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager asserted in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes.[51] Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[7][54] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.[55]

In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the U.S. intelligence agencies.[7]

American author James Bamford provides an alternative view, highlighting that legislation prohibits the use of intercepted communications for commercial purposes, although he does not elaborate on how intercepted communications are used as part of an all-source intelligence process.

In its report, the committee of the European Parliament stated categorically that the Echelon network was being used to intercept not only military communications, but also private and business ones. In its epigraph to the report, the parliamentary committee quoted Juvenal, "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes." ("But who will watch the watchers").[7] James Bamford, in The Guardian in May 2001, warned that if Echelon were to continue unchecked, it could become a "cyber secret police, without courts, juries, or the right to a defence".[56]

Alleged examples of espionage conducted by the members of the "Five Eyes" include:

The first American satellite ground station for the ECHELON collection program was built in 1971 at a military firing and training center near Yakima, Washington. The facility, which was codenamed JACKKNIFE, was an investment of ca. 21.3 million dollars and had around 90 people. Satellite traffic was intercepted by a 30-meter single dish antenna. The station became fully operational on 4 October 1974. It was connected with NSA headquarters at Fort Meade by a 75-baud secure Teletype orderwire channel.[29]

In 1999 the Australian Senate Joint Standing Committee on Treaties was told by Professor Desmond Ball that the Pine Gap facility was used as a ground station for a satellite-based interception network. The satellites were said to be large radio dishes between 20 and 100 meters in diameter in geostationary orbits. The original purpose of the network was to monitor the telemetry from 1970s Soviet weapons, air defence- and other radar's capabilities, satellite's ground station's transmissions and ground-based microwave communications.[68]

The television series Alias made recurring references to ECHELON throughout its run.

The antagonist of the anime series Digimon Tamers, D-Reaper, was created by ECHELON.

Echelon Conspiracy, inspired by the surveillance system ECHELON, is a 2009 action thriller film directed by Greg Marcks. It tells the story of Max Peterson (Shane West), an American computer specialist who attempts to uncover a secret plot to turn the world into a global police state. After being chased down by NSA agent Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen), Peterson decides to flee to Moscow.

The video game series Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell also draws inspiration from this. The series features the protagonist, Sam Fisher, a trained operative belonging to a fictional branch of the National Security Agency called Third Echelon (later, in Splinter Cell: Blacklist, the unit is replaced by the Fourth Echelon).

The 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum makes several references to ECHELON. A CIA listening station in London is alerted when ECHELON detects the keyword "Blackbriar" in a cell phone conversation between a journalist and his editor.[69] Later in the film, CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy requests an "ECHELON package" on the main character, Jason Bourne.

Alternative rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars' first album includes a song called "Echelon". Their fan base is also referred to as the Echelon, though an explanation has not been given as to why the fanbase and the song are referred to as such.

In the 2000 computer game Deus Ex, the signals intelligence supercomputers Daedalus and Icarus (later Helios) are referred to as Echelon IV.

The sci-fi crime thriller, Person of Interest, a television show which aired from 2011 to 2016 on the CBS network, had a data-collecting supercomputer as its central narrative.

Link:
ECHELON - Wikipedia

After arriving in Baghdad grungy and tired, the staffer would later write, he discovered that the CIA and its partner, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had moved beyond talking to locals and were now intent on looking through their computer files. Marines would bring the NSA man laptops, hard drives, CDs, phones and radios. Sometimes the devices were covered in blood and quite often they contained pornography, deemed extremely useful in humiliating and breaking down for interrogation the people who owned them.

The story of how theNational Security Agency harvested porn for use against prisoners in Iraq is just one of the revelations disclosed in the agencys internal newsletter SIDtoday during the second half of 2005.

Theres also the tale of how some intercepts would be rushed almost instantly to the president at Camp David via golf cart with virtually no oversight.

Then theres one about how the NSA declared it could find not many Arabic translators it could trust among the largest Arabic-speaking population in the United States.

Or the story of how the agency listened as the Egyptian government dictated through its communication channels the final results for an election that had barely begun.

Told in more detail below, these are highlights from some 297 SIDtoday articles published today by The Intercept as part of an ongoing project to release, after careful review, material provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

From the same SIDtoday release our sixth thus far we are publishing three other articles. One is an investigation into a secretive global intelligence-sharing alliance led by the NSA, comprising 18 members and known as the SIGINT Seniors. Another looks at increased surveillance in the United Kingdom following the London bombings in 2005 and discloses for the first time a secret agreement to share metadata harvested from the vast data repositories of the NSA and its counterparts in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Also today, in collaboration with the Norwegian Broadcaster NRK, we shine light on a large spy base located outside Oslo. The base was built with the NSAs help to aid Norways military and counterterrorism operations overseas. But it has also swept up Norwegian citizens phone and email records and is now at the center of a dispute over illegal surveillance.

The NSA declined to comment for this article.

U.S. Marines of the 1st Battalion 2nd Marines inspect the bedroom of a suspect, while patrolling on Oct. 8, 2004 in the insurgent stronghold of Haswah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq.

Photo: Scott Peterson/Getty Images

An NSA staffer deployed to Iraq led a counterterrorism and counterintelligence mission involving forensic investigations on computers seized in raids. The staffers Media Exploitation team found pornographic videos and photos alongside thousands of audio files of the Quran and sermons, and recruitment and training CDs with video of bombings, torture, and beheadings. The team jokingly referred to the content as the three big Ps porn, propaganda and prayer.

Reports and files were distributed to the NSA and other intelligence agencies; the staffer was detailed to the Iraq Survey Group, a joint venture between theCIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to find weapons of mass destruction and disrupt terrorist activities. But among the customers of the material gathered by the NSA staffer were the military units interrogating captured insurgents and suspects. Special Forces interrogators found the pornography extremely useful in breaking down detainees who maintained that they were devout Muslims, but had porn on their computers, according to an account by the NSA staffer in SIDtoday. (The accountmakesno acknowledgment of the human rights abuses by staff at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which were in the news starting in April 2004, nearly four months before the account was published, and which were, at the time, still under investigation.)

As the conflict with insurgents escalated in Fallujah into Operation Phantom Fury/Al Fajr, NSA staff with top-secret clearances were deployed to the combat zone. Marines gave the NSA staff seized computers, CDs, phones, and radios directly from the battlefield, some covered in blood. This material, too, was used in interrogations that helped keep the bad guys behind bars. No smoking WMD evidence was found, according to the SIDtoday account.

A former interrogator at the U.S. detention center at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, has said, in a statement obtained by the New Yorker, that pornography was used at the facility to reward some detainees and as a tool against others, who were forced to look at the material. The Associated Press has also reported on the use of pornography at Guantnamo as an inducement.

The intelligence community has also used seized pornography as a form of propaganda. In November 2017, the CIA released files recovered from the fatal raid of Osama bin Ladens hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan in an effort to further enhance public understanding of al-Qaida. The agency noted that the overall trove recovered from the compound contained pornography that it was not releasing with the other files. The discovery of pornography on bin Ladens computers in 2011 was leaked to the media within days of the raid, and a New York Times story focused on the porn reported that the adult material will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.

Egypts jailed opposition leader Ayman Nur sits in the dock behind bars during his trial at a court in Cairo on Jan. 23, 2007.

Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

The NSA used signals intelligence to uncover apparent fraud in a referendum on how Egypts presidential elections would be run.

Rules supported by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would allow direct election of the president, abolishing the old system, in which the parliament forwarded a single candidate to voters for approval. But the rules also imposed major barriers to appearing on the ballot, including a requirement that independent candidates win support from 65 of 444 members of parliament and that other candidates come from a party with at least 5 percent representation in parliament which at the time no opposition party held. These requirements engendered significant opposition, including a callto boycott the referendum.

The agency apparently intercepted government communications early on election day, instructing underlings to report a yes vote of about 80 percent and turnout of 40 to 50 percent. Official results then showed a yes vote of 83 percent and turnout of 54 percent, pretty much in line with the instructions. Most foreign observers on the scene described actual voter turnout as very light, nowhere near 50 percent, SIDtoday reported.

The referendum was followed by Egypts historic first multi-candidate presidential election, on September 7, 2005. Although the winner, Mubarak, was a foregone conclusion, there was much interest about whether this vote count would be honest. With only 23 percent voter turnout, Mubarak won 88.6 percent of the vote. The NSAs analysis? SIGINT provided good evidence that there was no massive fraud in the vote count, according to the same senior reporter/subject matter expert who described the suspicious referendum. Local vote totals reported on the day of the election by Egyptian authorities conformed closely to the final results. Also, the runner-up, Ayman Nour, with 7.6 percent of votes, was a surprise to top Egyptian officials who had wanted a different candidate to come in second, the NSA staffer added. The opposition claimed there were irregularities, but Egypts electoral commission was satisfied with the process.

Just three months after the election, surprise favorite Nour was jailed on charges of election fraud and imprisoned for the next five years.

Samuel Chahrour is illuminated by a shaft of light at while praying at the the Islamic Center of America mosque in Dearborn, Mich., Sept. 30, 2005. The Detroit suburb of Dearborn is arguably the capital of Arab America and anchors an estimated 300,000-strong Arab-American community in southeastern Michigan.

Photo: Paul Sancya/AP

As the NSA swept up Arabic communications from Iraq and other hotspots in the global war on terror, it found its translation capabilities severely lacking. This shortcoming must be rectified, an NSA senior language authority wrote in 2004. In September 2005, the agency convened a career invitational in Detroit, hoping to draw on the high proportion of Arabic-speaking residents in the area and recruit them as linguists for a language center on nearby Selfridge Army National Guard Base.

But the invitational may not yield many hires due to unspecified agency concerns about the candidates, an NSA assistant deputy directory wrote in SIDtoday. After gathering 750 resumes, the NSA homed in on 145 potential candidates through preliminary processing, and of these, at least 43 passed two placement exams. These finalists were subjected to special source checks; other documents throughout the Snowden archive use the phrase special source in connection with surveillance operations, including by the agencys Special Source Operations unit, which at one point was said to be responsible for 80 percent of NSA collection, including its notorious PRISM program implying that signals intelligence may have been used to vet the candidates. The special source checks caused eight individuals to be removed from the applicant pool and led to plans for significant and lengthy investigation[s] into at least some of the remaining candidates investigations that may not sufficiently resolve the identified issues, SIDtoday noted. Although the language center on the Selfridge base could accommodate 85 linguists across four daily shifts, the assistant deputy director made clear that filling the seats was far from imminent and wrote, We will continue to review other sites to fill the need for linguists.

The NSAs aggressive probing of Americans of Middle Eastern descent was not confined to job applicants or to Detroit; earlier Intercept reporting on documents supplied by Snowden revealed that the agency used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor the communications of prominent Muslim-American community leaders and politicians. Internally, the intelligence community continues to lag in employee diversity, with a 2015 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that racial and ethnic minorities comprise less than a quarter of the agencies staff.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, center, speaks during a morning meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, left, and Palestinian Chair Yasser Arafat on July 25, 2000 at Camp David in Maryland.

Photo: Ralph Alswang/Newsmakers

In the course of arguing for more new hires, the deputy chief of the NSAs Middle East and North Africa line told an interviewer in SIDtoday that intelligence provided by the unit had shaped history. One way this occurred was through golf cart reporting. During the 2000 peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David, the NSA intercepted communications on the stances of participating diplomats in near real-time, the deputy chief said, and would stamp draft on it and fax it to a CIA liaison officer up in Thurmont, Maryland who in his own golf cart would race across the grounds to give it directly to the President or Secretary of State. Imagine the thrill and the responsibility of providing with virtually no oversight intelligence going directly to the President!

U.S. negotiators would know the Israeli and Palestinians positions prior to the teams arrival.

The deputy chief further credits his units reporting as the basis for the U.S.s refusal to negotiate with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, stating the division had smoking-gun evidence that Arafat was still supporting terrorism. Its unclear to which precise chapter of Middle East peace talks this claim refers, but President George W. Bush formally refused to accept Arafat as a negotiation partner in 2002, amid speculation that the Palestinian leader was implicated in the 2000 outbreak of the second Intifada.

The Camp David talks were hardly the first instance of NSA diplomatic spying, a key activity for the agency. Previously published documents have shown the agency spying on heads of state, U.N. headquarters, and representatives to a climate change summit.

Mirek Topolanek, chair of Czech opposition Civic Democratic Party, known as ODS, watches a general elections exit poll in the party election headquarters in Prague, Saturday, June 3, 2006.

Photo: Michal Kamaryt/AP

In 2006, then-U.S. Ambassador William J. Cabaniss was worried and unburdened himself to Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolnek, saying he hoped intelligence-sharing between the two nations would not be adversely affected by structural changes in how Czech intelligence was managed. Topolnek assured the ambassador that things would be fine, despite a transition of a key spy agency to parliamentary control. As described in a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, the Prime Minister said that UZSI, the foreign intelligence branch, has been effective and we dont want to change that.

U.S. concern over changes at UZSI was understandable, as at least one element of the American intelligence community had spent the prior year gushing over the benefits of newly secured access to UZSI intel. The NSA, as previously reported, was essentially let inside UZSIs SIGINT vault in early 2005. By late 2005, the U.S. and Czech Republic appeared to have officially solidified their Third Party signals intelligence-sharing partnership and UZSI, over the course of at least three visits in six months, presented their American counterparts with a slew of information, largely about Russian government and business interests according to two articles in SIDtoday. These files included information about the communications of Russian and Belarusian arms dealers, banking networks, and counterintelligence targets. They also gave the Americans a program designed to identify Russian words in voice communications. Our ability to jointly produce valuable SIGINT while enjoying each others company and learning about our cultural differences may indeed make this the start of a beautiful friendship, wrote a staffer from the central European branch of the NSAs foreign affairs directorate.

(One of the SIDtoday articles alleged that the Belarus company, BELTECHEXPORT, was involved in weapons proliferation. The U.S. State Department in 2011 imposed, but in 2013 lifted, sanctions against the company for weapons proliferation.)

An anti-imperialist activist sets a tent in front of the Italian Foreign Ministry building in Rome, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005.

Photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP

A previous SIDtoday release noted the NSAs interest in a European leftist group called the Anti-Imperialist Camp. The NSA had accused the group of toeing a line between legitimate political activity and abetting terrorism. In a later SIDtoday article,titled Terrorism or Political Action? The Anti-Imperialist Camp Crosses the Line, a member of the NSAs indigenous European terrorism branch describes the AIC as a duplicitous organization and touts the NSAs interception of Anti-Imperialist Camps communications as a pathway into [an] expansive network of extremists and terrorists. The article alleged that the organization maintained contacts with such individuals, and said that insights into [this] expansive network led to the identification of a Jordanian extremist with extensive links to other extremists, a new organization that calls itself the Resistant Arab Peoples Alliance, and several other individuals and groups.

Longtime Anti-Imperialist Camp member and spokesperson Wilhelm Langthaler told The Intercept that he could not identify one single activity, participant, or interlocutor from this list of what SIDtoday strongly implied were contacts of the group.

The SIDtoday article further stated that the U.S. government had recent[ly], as of August 2005, approached the Italian government and demanded the arrest of individuals involved with the Italian wing of the AIC. Several individuals associated with the AIC had been arrested in April 2004 as part of a multinational effort against the Turkish militant organization, DHKP-C. The three AIC members, initially charged with conspiracy or subversive association with an alleged member of the terrorist group, were released and ultimately absolved of all charges in September 2010. In her decision, Judge Beatrice Cristiani observed that if the AIC did indeed help the DHPK-C, it was because they intended to assist a dissident and not a terrorist essentially verifying the groups legitimate political intent, which the NSA so adamantly decried.

NSA analysts can often identify and track particular mobile phones by monitoring cellular networks for 15-digit handset identifiers called the International Mobile Subscriber Identities. Events on the network, like making a call, receiving an SMS text message, or connecting to a new cell tower, are normally tagged with such numbers.

But starting in the 1990s, NSA analysts had struggled whenever cellular networks implemented Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identities (TMSIs), according to a July 2005 SIDtoday article. TMSIs obscure the true identities of the cellular subscribers being referenced in call records, location events, and SMS, the author wrote, because TMSIs can change every few hours or even with every phone call. And, to make matters worse, two cellular networks in Iraq had just implemented TMSIs, obscuring the NSAs collection efforts there.

The ASSOCIATION program solved this problem. With advances in metadata collection, processing, and storage, the NSA discovered thatit could use individual metadata records to work backward from a TMSI to obtain the original IMSI and thus, associate cellphone events with the exact phone that made them.

A guest uses Skype and Microsoft automatic translation software to live-chat with a man in China during the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Centers TechFair, June 10, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

At the end of 2005, the NSA faced serious new challenges in spying on Skype calls. At the time, Skype was a 2-year-old service that was growing in popularity. At this time, SIGINT targets have a method to freely obscure their communications on the global Internet, an analyst wrote in SIDtoday, thus hindering our ability to collect vital communications intelligence.

Unlike traditional phone calls, anyone with internet access anywhere in the world could make a free, anonymous Skype account, identified only by a username. And unlike the phone network,in which calls get routed through (and eavesdropped on) at central offices, Skype calls were peer-to-peer, making central eavesdropping impossible. On top of all this, Skype calls were also encrypted, and the NSA did not yet know how to decrypt them.

A reader wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that internet calling systems like Skype also complicate the NSAs ability to comply with USSID-18, an NSA policy through which the agency attempts to not spy on Americans. Anyone with any brains will register a U.S. phone number for their account, they wrote, even though this phone number can be used from anywhere in the world.

The NSAs troubles with spying on Skype calls were eventually resolved. New York Times reporting, based on Snowden documents, revealed that in 2008, Skype began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials.

Archive of thefacebook.com at Feb. 12, 2004.

Image: Facebook

Social networking is truly the wave of the future, Eric Mesa, a young software engineer at the NSA wrote in a December 2005 letter to the editor of SIDtoday. A lot of you may not know this, but college students (of which I finally ceased to be in May 2005) have been voluntarily assembling their own social networks online!

He went on to describe a service known as The Facebook and explained how it worked, including that through the link visualize my social network they can see a diagram similar to the ones we use to map terrorist networks.

Top photo: U.S. Marines escort nine detainees captured in Fallujah, half of them from other countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states, to a local prison as other U.S. Marines of the 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, Alpha company engage four insurgents during house searches on Nov. 23, 2004 in Fallujah, Iraq.

Read more:
NSA Used Porn to Break Down Detainees in Iraq and ...