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(PJMedia) This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the governments 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

One of the central questions behind the Mike Flynn flap that should have been asked but largely wasnt is: who was wiretapping the general? The answer, we know now, was the National Security Agency, formerly known as No Such Agency, the nations foremost signals-intelligence (SIGINT) collection department.

The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at pjmedia.com

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Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers - The Christian Truther

Customizations policy for SonicWall Software products

A customization indicates functionality and configurations added to a product that are not provided as part of the core product release and, as such, would be outside the scope of normal support and maintenance. Customizations may take the form of new or modified scripts used within or alongside our products, as well as additional functionality such as custom reports, dashboards, rules, automated actions, etc. developed by you, your partners, or our Professional Services Organization.

Support and Customizations

We do not perform or maintain customizations. The design and development of customizations to our products is your responsibility. Assistance from Support will be limited to helping ensure that the product's functionality which enables the addition of customizations is functioning as expected. Alternatively, you may obtain guidance through product specific community sites or the Support Knowledge Base.

Advanced Assistance

If more thorough and detailed assistance is needed to design and develop customizations, we recommend that you engage our Professional Services Organization or fully certified partners to assist. Their expertise in designing customized solutions will ensure customers receive maximum value and product adoption. In addition to providing post-implementation expert services, Professional Services also offers a variety of pre-packaged customizations for some products which may meet your specific requirements.

Training & Certification

We recommend that you obtain the appropriate product training before attempting to design, develop, and implement any customization to our products. Our training courses will equip you with the necessary knowledge and ability to design and implement effective changes to our products. For more detail on the training services available, please refer to Training & Certification Services .

Maintaining Customizations

Careful consideration should be given to all customizations during future migration or upgrade exercises to new product and platform versions. Customizations could inhibit the upgrade itself and may require a level of re-work to continue functioning properly. Support does not take ownership for any customizations. We strongly encourage you to document and maintain records on any implemented customization work. These records can be useful in isolating problems that may be attributable to the customization or a defect in the core product.

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Product Support - SonicWALL NSA Series

The US intelligence community continues its war to kick Donald Trump to the curb and destroy his presidency.

Obviously, the NSA, the CIA, and their silent partners want to continue to run this country.

So they spy and leak, spy and leak.

Well get to the guts of the problem in a minute, but first a word from Bill Binney.

William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official turned whistleblower, contended in an exclusive interview today that the National Security Agency (NSA) is absolutely monitoring the phone calls of President Donald Trump.

Binney was an architect of the NSAs surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001 after spending more than 30 years with the agency.

Asked whether he believes the NSA is tapping Trump, Binney replied: Absolutely. How did they get the phone call between the president and the president of Australia? Or the one that he made with Mexico? Those are not targeted foreigners.

Binney further contended the NSA may have been behind a data leak that might have revealed that Michael Flynn, Trumps national security adviser, allegedly misled Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump administration officials about the contents of his phone calls with Russias ambassador to Washington.

Regarding Flynns case, Binney stated of the NSA:

If they werent behind it, they certainly had the data. Now the difference here is that FBI and CIA have direct access inside the NSA databases. So, they may be able to go directly in there and see that material there. And NSA doesnt monitor that. They dont even monitor their own people going into databases.

So, they dont monitor what CIA and FBI do. And theres no oversight or attempted oversight by any of the committees or even the FISA court. So, any way you look at it, ultimately the NSA is responsible because they are doing the collection on everybody inside the United States. Phone calls. Emails. All of that stuff.

Utilizing data provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Guardian and Washington Post in June 2013 released a series of articles reporting that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans.

they [the NSA, Binney said]] are given too much money anyway. When they are given too much money, they get to do wild and crazy things. And this is wild and crazy. Violations of the Constitutions 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.

Now we come to the guts of the problem. Here is my complete article from April 10, 2014:

The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose implications are staggering. Its a different world now. And sometimes it takes a writer of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.

Brad Thors novel, Black List, posits the existence of a monster corporation, ATS, that stands alongside the NSA in collecting information on every move we make. ATS intelligence-gathering capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.

On pages 117-118 of Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:

For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of black dollars for themselves, which they washed through various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.

Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.

In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.

In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one monster- corporation or a consortium of companies, or elite banks, or the NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.

It would be as Thor describes it.

We think about total surveillance as being directed at private citizens, but the capability has unlimited payoffs when it targets financial markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of them.

Total security awareness programs of surveillance are ideal spying ops in the financial arena, designed to suck up millions of bits of inside information, then utilizing them to make investments and suck up billions (trillions?) of dollars.

It gives new meaning to the rich get richer.

Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this: those same heavy hitters who have unfettered access to financial information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes (not their own, of course).

In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments, banks, and corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance companies, and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail these organizations.

We think we know how scandals are exposed by the press, but actually we dont. Tips are given to people who give them to other people. Usually, the first clue that starts the ball rolling comes from a source who remains in the shadows.

What we are talking about here is the creation and managing of realities on all sides, including the choice of when and where and how to provide a glimpse of a crime or scandal.

Its likely that the probe Ron Paul had been pushingaudit the Federal Reservehas already been done by those who control unlimited global surveillance [NSA]. They already know far more than any Congressional investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest truths, they can use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed itself.

The information matrix can be tapped into and plumbed, and it can also be used to dispense choice clusters of data that end up constituting the media reality of painted pictures which, every day, tell billions of people whats news.

In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.

For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis hit did the Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records, that insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they do with that information?

When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was missing from Pentagon accounting books (as Donald Rumsfeld eventually publicly admitted on September 10, 2001), and what did they do with that information?

Did they discover where billions of dollars, in cash, shipped to post-war Iraq, disappeared to?

When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing scandal? Press reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest rates as early as January 2005.

Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for recruiting hired mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in Syria pretending to be an authentic rebel force?

Have they discovered the truth about how close or how far away Iran is from producing a nuclear weapon?

Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?

For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.

Its a new world. These overseers of universal information-detection can enter and probe the most secret caches of data, collect, collate, cross reference, and assemble them into vital bottom-lines. By comparison, an operation like WikiLeaks is an old Model-T Ford puttering down a country road.

Previously, we thought we needed to look over the shoulders of the men who were committing major crimes out of public view. But now, if we want to be up to date, we also have to factor in the men who are spying on those criminals, who are gathering up those secrets and using them to commit their own brand of meta-crime.

And in the financial arena, that means we think of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as perpetrators, yes, but we also think about the men who already know everything about GS and Morgan, and are using this knowledge to steal sums that might make GS and Morgan blush with envy.

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Is the NSA the real president of the United States? - Personal Liberty - Personal Liberty Digest

TRUMP AGENDA: Harward turns down NSA job

Retired Navy Vice Adm. Robert Harward has turned down an offer to become President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

From the Washington Post last night: "Former national security adviser Michael Flynn denied to FBI agents in an interview last month that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country's ambassador to the United States before President Trump took office, contradicting the contents of intercepted communications collected by intelligence agencies, current and former U.S. officials said. The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy. Lying to the FBI is a felony offense. But several officials said it is unclear whether prosecutors would attempt to bring a case, in part because Flynn may parse the definition of the word "sanctions." He also followed his denial to the FBI by saying he couldn't recall all of the conversation, officials said."

NBC: "The creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election has won bipartisan support, according to a senior Democratic lawmaker. In an interview with MSNBC's Chris Hayes, Rep. Elijah Cummings said that such a committee was necessary 'to really get into how all of this happened, what was the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and try to figure out how to make sure that this does not happen again.'"

NBC News confirms that Mike Dubke, the founder of Crossroads Media, will be the White House communications head.

NBC's Ali Vitali wraps yesterday's press conference.

The New York Times: "[H]is 77-minute news conference was dominated by an extraordinarily raw and angry defense of both his administration and his character. At times abrupt, often rambling, characteristically boastful yet seemingly pained at the portrayals of him, Mr. Trump kept summoning the spirit of his successful campaign after a month of grinding governance to remind his audience, again, that he won."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump told aides Thursday morning that he wanted to have the press conference because "my message is being filtered."

The AP goes there on historical comparisons, with this headline: "Remember Nixon? There's history behind Trump's press attacks"

The Washington Post reports on the "logistical nightmare" and high costs of the Trump family lifestyle.

"Donald J. Trump redrew the electoral map with his rousing economic nationalism and evocation of a lost industrial age. It was a message that drew many union members to his cause. And now it is upending the alliances and tactics of the labor movement itself," writes the New York Times.

Trump is planning a new immigration order next week, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Don't miss POLITICO's interview with Mark Sanford, who is not holding back about the president of his own party.

The Washington Post asks: "If Trump can't arrange his own meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, how does he unite the country?"

No, Trump's election victory was not "the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan."

CONGRESS: Paul Ryan's tough tax-reform sell

POLITICO writes that Paul Ryan is having a tough time selling his tax reform plan to fellow Republicans.

Continued here:
First Read's Morning Clips: Harward Turns Down NSA Job - NBCNews.com

A former senior official at the National Security Agency says the planned split between the nations digital spying outfit and its offensive cyber military arm will happen, though likely not for a while.

Prior to the election in November, the outgoing Obama administration had moved to split the NSA, which is focused on espionage and intelligence gathering, from U.S. Cyber Command, which can conduct offensive military operations in cyberspace. Since assuming office in January, however, President Donald Trump has struggled to fill key government positions, like the national security adviser, making any immediate bureaucratic overhauls unlikely.

I think everybody says its inevitable, John Chris Inglis, the former deputy director of NSA, told The Intercept during an interview in San Francisco.

The question is whether you do that now or you do that in a year or two, he continued.

Inglis spoke to The Intercept following a speech he gave on combatting insider threats, entitled How to Catch A Snowden, at the RSA Conference, one of the largest annual cybersecurity events. Inglis was at the NSA in 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of documents to journalists on the surveillance programs.

Currently, the two agencies are under one roof and one dual-hatted director: Adm. Michael Rogers, who has also suggested an eventual split between his agencies. Theres been a heated debate about the benefits and downsides of separating the two entities as Cyber Command grows and develops its parallel mission. Figures like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are vehemently against separating resources between espionage and attack in the digital space at least in the absence of clear policies from the White House.

Though Inglis tells The Intercept he believes the split is bound to occur, he says that President Trump and his White House have other fish to fry right now.

A separation in the coming months, especially with NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett retiring in the spring, might induce instability, Inglis said. And while Adm. Rogers has reportedly been no stranger to controversy and bad reviews facing sinking morale during a major NSA reorganization he doesnt appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

In the meantime, Cyber Command is still maturing. It was first formed under Gen. Keith Alexander and Ingliss leadership in 2009. Cyber Command in still early days needed the NSA, Inglis said. But the split makes sense in the long run, he argued.

The more they stay in that relationship, the less Cyber Command will need NSA, the more theyll be held back by NSA, and the less NSA will need Cyber Command, Inglis said. Its for both of their benefit to essentially give them on scene leadership that can focus entirely on what theyre supposed to do as agencies that are nominally independent but complimentary.

If that split were to happen, it might open the job of NSA director up to a civilian leader.At one point during the Obama administration, Inglis was regarded as a top candidate for the NSA job under the restructuring, though theres no indication hes currently under consideration.

Inglis tells The Intercept he would, if asked, accept a job in the Trump administration in a heartbeat.

Inglis is currently a managing director at Paladin Capital Group, a private equity firm that invests in companies around the world. He started as a computer scientist in the NSA, then worked in signals intelligence, and rose to become deputy director. He spent 41 years in the Department of Defense, nearly 30 of them at NSA.

Inglis would be a superb selection and it is no surprise that he would be willing to serve his country regardless of who was in office, Susan Hennessy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former attorney at NSA, wrote in an email to The Intercept. He is trusted and respected both at NSA and within the government generally.

Describing the current situation as a tumultuous period, Hennessey said that the number of people qualified to lead the NSA is small. Inglis is one of the few people who would top anyones list for that role, Republican or Democrat, she added.

Having not been offered something, it would be inappropriate for me to say I want a job, especially if that job is now held by somebody, Inglis said, laughing.

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NSA Split From Cyberwar Command Inevitable, Says Former Official - The Intercept