****************************************************************************** An Indictment of the U.S. Government and U.S. Politics Cryptography Manifesto ---------------------- 7/4/97-M version "The law does not allow me to testify on any aspect of the National Security Agency, even to the Senate Intelligence Committee" ---General Allen, Director of the NSA, 1975 "You bastards!" ---me ****************************************************************************** This is about much more than just cryptography. It is also about everyone in the U.S.A. being fingerprinted for a defacto national ID card, about massive illegal domestic spying by the NSA, about the Military being in control of key politicians, about always being in a state of war, and about cybernetic control of society. ****************************************************************************** Part 1: Massive Domestic Spying via NSA ECHELON ---- - ------- -------- ------ --- --- ------- o The NSA Admits o Secret Court o Wild Conspiracy Theory o Over the Top o BAM-BAM-BAM o Australian ECHELON Spotted o New Zealand: Unhappy Campers Part 2: On Monitoring and Being Monitored ---- - -- ---------- --- ----- --------- o On Monitoring - Driver's Seat - Five Months Statistics - The FBI Investigations - I Can See What You Are Thinking - Why I Monitor o On Being Monitored Part 3: 1984 Means a Constant State of War ---- - ---- ----- - -------- ----- -- --- War #1 - Drugs War #2 - Guns War #3 - Child Pornography War #4 - Terrorism War #5 - Hackers Part 4: Why unlimited cryptography must be legislated NOW ---- - --- --------- ------------ ---- -- ---------- --- o Key Recovery Means No Cryptography o Key Recovery Isn't Even Feasible o Government Steamroller o Feds' Wacky Pro-GAK Logic - Business Will Demand It - To Safeguard Your Privacy Part 5: There is no part five ---- - ----- -- -- ---- ---- Part 6: Louis Freeh & The Creeping Police State ---- - ----- ----- --- -------- ------ ----- o Louis Freeh o National ID Card o Worldwide Banking and Phone Monitoring o Cybernetic Control of Society o Conclusions ****************************************************************************** ECHELON is NSA's world-wide surveillance network and associated software. DICTIONARY - Keyword searching with exclusion logic software. ORATORY - Speech recognition. Think of it as speech-to-text software. Subject to DICTIONARY searches. CALEA - A 1994 law ("Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act") to force a massive reworking of the U.S. telephone infra- structure so that the government can intrinsically wiretap it. Also called the FBI Digital Telephony Act. It is a domestic extension of ECHELON. GAK - Government Access [to cryptographic] Keys. Any cryptography product with GAK has been compromised so the government can read it. SIGINT - Signals Intelligence = NSA = electronic snooping Key Recovery - See GAK. C-SPAN - Two cable channels dedicated to broadcasting both houses of Congress and other U.S. governmental functions. DEA - U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration DIA - U.S. Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency DIA - U.S. Drug Interdiction Agency (older) FBI - U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation BATF - U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms UKUSA - pronounced 'you-koo-za' - a secret wartime treaty that says member nations can spy on each others population without warrants or limits, and that this can be shared with the spied-on country's SIGINT agency. PGP - Free and unbreakable encryption, available world-wide. CISPES - Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador "Ultra-secret" agencies: NSA - U.S. National Security Agency GCHQ - British Government Communications Headquarters CSE - Canada's Communications Security Establishment DSD - Australian Defense Signals Directorate GCSB - New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau ****************************************************************************** Main() ---- Using mainly publicly available material, here is my documentation of: o Part 1: Massive Domestic Spying via NSA ECHELON This is highly detailed documentation of NSA spying. This spying is illegal, massive, and domestic. The documentation is comprehensive, especially since it is now brought together in this one section. o Part 2: On Monitoring and Being Monitored In this section, I describe the capabilities of ECHELON keyword monitoring. A detailed example --- how to use keywords to pick out conversations of interest --- is given. I also put forth a case of what it means to be monitored heavily by the government. o Part 3: 1984 Means a Constant State of War The politics of war, and the Orwellian tactics employed by by the U.S. Government to control its citizens. o Part 4: Why unlimited cryptography must be legislated NOW In additional to the reasons given in the previous sections, the 'debate' reasons constantly given by the government are reviewed and debunked. And our nation's experts say it will hurt security. The GAO says the same thing. o Part 5: There is no part five. o Part 6: Louis Freeh & The Creeping Police State Basically, Louis Freeh is the anti-Christ leading us to Hell. National ID cards are effectively being implemented without needing to issue cards. The U.S. Government is trying to monitor all phone calls and banking transactions, and have all equipment worldwide designed for their monitoring. They are bent on controlling the world to the point of there being no crime left on the planet. Of course, democracy destroyed is the direct result. ---- This publication advocates five major items: o Passage of ProCode/SAFE legislation, allowing U.S. companies to export unlimited strength cryptography, free from "Key Recovery". Key Recovery means messages are no longer a secret, because the Government has screwed around with it. o Killing the CALEA legislation, which orders all communications equipment be DESIGNED so the Government can spy on it. o Dismantling domestic ECHELON, the Government listening in on our domestic phone calls. o A Cabinet-level U.S. Privacy Commission, with teeth. ---- The "average" American has no idea why cryptography is important to them. It is the only way to begin preventing massive illegal domestic spying. Currently, there are no restrictions on domestic use of unlimited strength cryptography. That is not because the Government hasn't complained about child pornographers or terrorists or other criminals who might use it. No, that's the reason they are giving for why U.S. companies can't EXPORT products, such as web browsers, outside U.S. territory, without compromising it with Government "Key Recovery"; i.e. made stupider and breakable. Why such an indirect control on what they claim is a domestic problem? Because that is how 'The Creeping Police State' works. Slowly, bit-by-bit. Slowly, State-by-State everyone in the U.S. is being fingerprinted. The FBI is now advocating biometric capture of all newborns too. This is an interesting manifesto, please take the time to read it. Cryptography can be used to keep private: Internet traffic, such as email, and telephone conversations (PGP phone). A version of PGP phone that looks and works like a normal telephone --- but can't be spied upon --- would eventually become wide-spread. It begins to change the mind-set that the Police State is inevitable. ---- Major references... In the last several years intelligence operatives, specifically including SIGINT (signal intelligence) people, have started telling the story about the massive domestic use of computer monitoring software in the U.S. Including our domestic phone calls, Internet, fax, everything. I'm going to quote a number of articles and books; they involved talking to over 100 of these intelligence operatives. Buy this book: "Secret Power" by Nicky Hager, ISBN 0-908802-35-8. It describes in detail the ECHELON platform. It's one of the most important. New Zealand people are quite unhappy at their place within ECHELON. Buy this book: "Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments" By Mike Frost [NSA trained sigint person] and Michel Gratton, Toronto Doubleday 1994. Mr. Frost describes missions in the U.S. where he was trained by the NSA to handle domestic jobs that would be illegal for the NSA. These books are quite damning, in a heavily documented way. This is an AMAZINGLY COMPREHENSIVE BOOK: buy it! "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996 Buy this book: "The Secret War Against the Jews", Authors: John Loftus and Mark Aarons, ISBN 0-312-11057-X, 1994. Don't let the title throw you: the authors spoke with a great many intelligence people, and cleverly probed NSA/CIA/FBI by submitting items for publication approval, and when they censored something... Bingo. Because of the Catch-22 situation, the NSA gave up trying to censor many books, since it can be used to confirm questions they would otherwise have refused to answer. The other books referenced within are also suggested reading. I have sometimes edited for brevity the excerpts, especially my newspaper clippings of stories flying by. If I have any news story specifics wrong or if you have more details, please email me. Later versions of this document can be searched for at dejanews.com. Or, you can email me, Subject: Requesting Cryptography Manifesto. ---- ---- Here comes a large 'reasoned polemic': ---- This is a U.S.-centric message, but keep reading even if you are not in the U.S.; British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand citizens are also directly affected. This message is about ECHELON, which is an unbelievably huge world-wide spying apparatus, including the domestic phone calls of many countries. United States citizens' phone calls are being monitored in a dragnet fashion not even George Orwell could have imagined. This was all paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Built in secret. Not debated. The CALEA legislation is a shameful takes-us-into-the-abyss domestic spy bill. It is for the FBI to simultaneously monitor HUGE amounts of our phone calls. And when the judiciary found out about NSA monitoring U.S. citizens' overseas telephone calls without a warrant: they approved the loss of our Fourth Amendment rights. Giving Presidential Directives the same force of law as the Constitution. Congress has lost it too. * The New York Times, undated * * The House is not expected to vote on the search-and-seizure bill until * at least Wednesday. But tonight the Republicans defeated a Democratic * amendment that SIMPLY REITERATED THE WORDS OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT OF * THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. * * The vote was 303 to 121. * * The Democrats were trying to portray the Republicans as wanting to * eliminate the constitutional protection against unlawful searches. * * Indeed, they cornered the Republicans into saying that the measure * containing the Fourth Amendment would gut the seizure bill. Just what is it going to take to restore the U.S. Constitution? Unlimited unregulated cryptography legislation is a beginning baby-step. Sound over-the-top? Wait until you understand the massive surveillance system that our government has put in place, just how powerful it is, and how they've used it repeatedly to control lawful peaceful political protest. ****************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************** Part 1: Massive Domestic Spying via NSA ECHELON ---- - ------- -------- ------ --- --- ------- o The NSA Admits o Secret Court o Wild Conspiracy Theory o Over the Top o BAM-BAM-BAM o Australian ECHELON Spotted o New Zealand: Unhappy Campers People are correct in being paranoid of the U.S. government being totally out of control. The NSA/FBI even have a locked secret court located within the main Justice Department building that only government employees can visit. It has never turned down a request, and doesn't even need suspicion of a crime to authorize a "black-bag job" burglary. Question: Then why bother? Answer: To give the illegal activity the imprimatur of constitutionality. And presidents issue secret directives that obliterate constitutional rights. Like the creation of the NSA. NSA testimony to Congress: "There is no law that prevents our domestic spying". Such is the unconstitutional power of the Presidential Magic Order. It is even threatened to be used to wipe out Congressional legislation: : However, President Clinton has threatened to veto ProCode. : If Congress over-rides a VETO President Clinton signed an : executive order (11/15/96) which states he can revoke any law : passed on national security grounds: : : "Upon enactment of any legislation reauthorizing the : administration of export controls, the Secretary of Defense, : the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General shall : reexamine whether adequate controls on encryption products can : be maintained under the provisions of the new statute and : advise the Secretary of Commerce of their conclusions as well : as any recommendations for action. If adequate controls on : encryption products cannot be maintained under a new statute, : then such products shall, where consistent with law, be : designated or redesignated as defense articles under 22 U.S.C. : 2778(a)(1), to be placed on the United States Munitions List : and controlled pursuant to the terms of the Arms Export : Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. : Any disputes regarding the decision to designate or : redesignate shall be resolved by the President." : : WILLIAM J. CLINTON 11/15/96 : : 1 if by land, 2 if by sea. Paul Revere - encryption 1775 : : Charles R. Smith : SOFTWAR : http://www.us.net/softwar The U.S. Constitution is in tatters, disappearing piece-by-piece, emasculated by politicians constantly beating drums of War for "Law & Order". ****************************************************************************** The NSA Admits --- --- ------ Ready? Let's start out with what the NSA will admit. (extra capitalization is mine) * Court Says U.S. Spy Agency Can Tap Overseas Messages * By David Burnham, The New York Times, 1982 * * Washington, Nov 6 --- A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National * Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States * citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe they * Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages * to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. * * Because the National Security Agency is among the largest and most * secretive intelligence agencies and because MILLIONS of electronic messages * enter and leave the United States each day, lawyers familiar with the * intelligence agency consider the decision to mark a significant increase in * the legal authority of the government to keep track of its citizens. * * The mission of the NSA is to eavesdrop on electronic messages of foreign * governments and protect the electronic communications of the United States. * To accomplish these goals, the agency has SEVERAL THOUSAND listening posts * around the world and a HUGE bank of computers in its heavily guarded head- * quarters at Fort George Meade, MD, near Washington. * * A Special Senate Intelligence Committee report in 1975 found that the * computer system functioned like a "GIANT VACUUM CLEANER" capable of * sweeping in ALL ELECTRONIC MESSAGES to and from the United States. * [snip] * * Mr. Jabara is a lawyer who for many years has represented Arab-American * citizens and alien residents in court. Some of his clients had been * investigated by the FBI. * [snip] * * The FBI's investigation of Mr. Jabara, who has not been formally accused * or indicted for any crimes, began in August 1967. In November 1971, the * Government acknowledged, the FBI asked the NSA "to supply any available * information" about the lawyer that "might come into its possession during * the course of its foreign intelligence activities". * * As a result, the NSA provided the FBI summaries * of six overseas conversations of Mr. Jabara. * * In earlier court proceedings, the FBI acknowledged that it then * disseminated the information to 17 other law-enforcement or intelligence * agencies and three foreign governments. * [snip] * * John Shattuck, Washington director of the ACLU, who represented Mr. Jabara * said "It is difficult to imagine a more sweeping judicial approval of * government action in violation of constitutional rights than the decision * of the panel is this case. Taken to its logical conclusion, the decision * authorizes the Federal Government to restructure its surveillance * activities so that any Federal law-enforcement or intelligence * investigation requiring the interception of private communications could * be conducted WITHOUT A JUDICIAL WARRANT simply by turning to the NSA." * * Under current laws, if the FBI wants to eavesdrop legally on the conversation * of a criminal it must obtain a warrant from a Federal judge. In those cases * where the FBI wants to eavesdrop on a specific individual who it believes * is an agent of a foreign government, it can apply for a warrant from a * special SECRET PANEL of Federal judges established just for that purpose. * * The special missions and advanced technology of the NSA however, make its * operations more difficult to control within the restrictions of the Federal * wiretapping and surveillance laws. * * According to the 1975 report of the Special Senate Intelligence Committee, * the agency has equipment that "sweeps up enormous numbers of communications, * not all of which can be reviewed by intelligence analysts." * * Using "watch lists" --- lists of words and phrases designed to identify * communications of intelligence interest --- NSA computers scan the mass of * acquired communications to select those which may be of specific foreign * intelligence interest", the report said. * * The court ruled Fourth Amendment rights were not violated. * * The Senate investigation in 1975 uncovered evidence the overseas * communications of a number of individuals engaged in organizing * political protests against the war in Vietnam were subjected to * surveillance by the NSA equipment. Mini-recap: o The NSA can listen in on all American citizens' border-crossing communications of any sort without a warrant or any other court procedure, and effectively distribute that information to any and all local law-enforcement agencies. And foreign governments. Loss of Fourth Amendment rights. Not even discussed with the American public. Not even debated by our elected representatives. o Domestic law enforcement agencies can request, receive, and widely disseminate this information without any laws interfering. A major blurring of the lines between Military and civilian control. o Requests for political reasons are acceptable. (last paragraph) o The NSA uses a huge number of computers to listen for "key words" on "watch lists" for ALL border crossing traffic, including voice conversations. That means in 1975 they could convert voice to text, then do keyword searches against it. It's 1997 now. Just how did United States citizens lose these Fourth Amendment rights, granted by the Constitution? And why is the Military monitoring the communications of Americans on U.S. soil and working with domestic law enforcement? Well, one day President Truman issued a secret order creating the NSA. As testified by Library of Congress members on C-SPAN, the names of these presidential findings change with administrations. They are called variously Presidential Decision Directives, National Security Council Decision Directives, Executive Orders, etc. One might think these special override-the-constitution presidential directives (which came out of nowhere) would be used for short-term emergencies. Wrong: the NSA is now a HUGE intelligence organization, eating billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars in budgets each year, and monitoring billions of messages a day. * "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner * The New York Times, November 5 1994 * * By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually * detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United * States intelligence agencies. * * In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information * public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the * secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of * the United States. * * $3.1 billion for the CIA * $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force * and Marines special-operations units * $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA * * The only damage done so far is to the * credibility of those who opposed the measure. There is no constitutional basis for this massive loss of Fourth Amendment rights. It sounds like some wild conspiracy theory, doesn't it? Yet it exists. ****************************************************************************** Secret Court ------ ----- : The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996 : Government surveillance, terrorism and the U.S. Constitution: : The story of a Washington courtroom no tourist can visit. : By Jim McGee and Brian Duffy [snipped article excerpts shown here] : Adapted from the book "Main Justice", 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9. : * Last year, a secret court in the Justice Department authorized a record * 697 'national security' wiretaps on American soil, outside normal * constitutional procedures. * * The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is a 1978 law that permits * secret buggings and wiretaps of individuals suspected of being agents * of a hostile foreign government or international terrorist organization * EVEN WHEN THE TARGET IS NOT SUSPECTED OF COMMITTING ANY CRIME. * * The FISA court operates outside the normal constitutional standards for * searches and seizures. Non-government personnel are not allowed. * The courts files cannot be publicly reviewed. * * The average U.S. citizen might reasonably assume use of this court * is at the least: unusual. * * It is not. In fact, in the United States today it is increasingly * common. In 1994, federal courts authorized more wiretaps for * intelligence-gathering and national security purposes than they * did to investigate ordinary federal crimes. * * The review process to prevent legal and factual errors is virtually * non-existent. * * And the FISA system's courtroom advocacy is monumentally one-sided. * * The court has never formally rejected an application. Not once. * * For the first time in modern U.S. history, the Congress had * institutionalized a process for physical searches outside of * Fourth Amendment standards. * * Not even Congress' intelligence oversight committees review these * special cases on a regular basis. Mini-recap: o Congress voted into existence a court that bypasses our normal Fourth Amendment constitutional rights. Poof they're gone. o Congressional oversite is weak. Such a special court should be subject to the highest standard of continual scrutiny: it is not. ! The New York Times, December 29, 19??, by David Burnham ! ! Because the National Security Agency is actively involved in the ! design [of Key Recovery cryptography], the agency will have the ! technical ability to decipher the messages. ! ! Walter G. Deeley, NSA deputy director for communications security ! said, "Another important safeguard to the privacy of communications ! was the continuous review of NSA's activities by the Senate and House ! intelligence committees." Congressional oversite in real-time was non-existent. Remember Ronald "I am a Contra" Reagan? # U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, March 13, 1987 # # Dear [me], # # Your letter of February 25th in which you inquired about the # association between Mr. Frank Varelli and the FBI has been received. # # An internal FBI inquiry is currently ongoing into the activities of # an Agent associated with Mr. Varelli who left the FBI following an earlier # administrative inquiry. For that reason, it would be premature at this # point to respond to any questions concerning the matter. # # Sincerely, # # William M. Baker # Assistant Director # Office of Congressional and Public Affairs # # Bicentennial of the United States Constitution (1787-1987) * [NJ] The Star-Ledger, Friday, January 29, 1988 * * The documents, released Wednesday, showed that the original target of the * FBI probe was CISPES, but that the investigation broadened to include * more than 100 other groups that opposed Reagan administration policy in * Nicaragua and El Salvador. * * Despite the long investigation, no criminal charges were ever brought * against any of the groups or their members. * * An FBI statement issued Wednesday said the agency only investigated * suspected crimes, not political beliefs or constitutionally protected * freedom of speech. * * Oliver Revell, the FBI's executive assistant director, said that the * FBI did not investigate CISPES because of its political activities, * but for a "wide range of possible crimes." % The New York Times, Thursday, February 4, 1988 % "Reagan Backs FBI Over Surveillance" % % President Reagan is satisfied that the Federal Bureau of Investigation % conducted a proper surveillance campaign against groups opposed to his % policies in Central America, the White House said today. % % The new FBI Director William S. Sessions assured Reagan that there was % a solid basis for the investigation: "We knew CISPES was established % from funding by the Communist Party, U.S.A." Well, Reagan didn't like a peaceful Texas based group called CISPES, which was against the United States' support of the El Salvador government. The El Salvador government was torturing and killing people. * "Officers held in Salvador Abductions", By James LeMoyne, NYT, 4/25/86 * * One of those arrested was accused of killing the head of the Salvadoran * Land Reform Institute and two AMERICAN agrarian advisors. So the FBI had one of their agents infiltrate CISPES using a Frank Varelli, who was born in San Salvador and served in the U.S. Army. # "How the FBI infiltrated CISPES and Assisted the Salvadoran Right Wing" # By James Ridgeway, The Village Voice, NYC # # Varelli met with the Salvadoran National Guard, best known for its # death squads. They gave him a "hit list" of people they wanted. # # When the INS stopped a Salvadoran immigrant, it would call the FBI and # check the name against the list. # # If the detained person's name was on the list, the INS would institute # deportation proceedings, opposing bail on "national security" grounds. # # Varelli would call the Salvadoran National Guard to let them know the # individual was on his way home. In this way, the FBI assisted, over a # three-year period, the work of the Salvadoran death squads. That's right: the FBI murders people. * "FBI Killed Unarmed Man, Inquiry Shows", The New York Times, 1/14/97 * * A 21-year-old murder suspect who the FBI said they shot only after he * opened fire on them, was unarmed when he was killed. * * A spokesman for the FBI, Ann Todd, declined to discuss the discrepancy * between the FBI's initial report that Mr. Byrd had shot at members of * the FBI task force and the subsequent discovery by the Union County * Prosecutor that he was unarmed. * * The FBI shot Mr. Byrd to death as he hid under a bed from them. The FBI had Varelli "plant" a gun. Thus giving CISPES a terrorist organization designation. Not only did the FBI hassle them big time, but also the FBI/NSA broke nationwide into homes and offices that were associated with them and many other groups, including lawyers offices and churches. In almost every incident, documents and files were ransacked while office equipment and other valuable items were left untouched. # "Foes of Reagan Latin American Policies Fear They're Under Surveillance" # By David Burnham, The New York Times, April 19, 198? # # Among those who have cited incidents Sara Murray, staff organizer with # the Michigan Interfaith Committee on Central American Rights, said that # her organization made three separate first-class mailings in the last # few months but that only one out of about 100 letters was ever delivered. # # The Post Office denied any responsibility. # # Miss Murray also said someone had broken into her Detroit office and # stolen a mailing list, several files and two books. [snip] # # A free-lance journalist has brought a suit in Federal District Court # charging that when he returned from Nicaragua the Customs Bureau detained # him until FBI agents came and seized his diary and address book. # # The FBI admitted to interviewing more than 100 people who visited # Nicaragua, but said they were acting under Presidential Executive Order. # # Two women have come forward to complain the IRS audited them IMMEDIATELY # AFTER RETURNING FROM NICARAGUA. # # The IRS denied it had anything to do with political views: "One woman has # never earned more than 12,000 a year, and we found that suspicious." FBI director Sessions ended up apologizing BIG TIME on C-SPAN, saying that sort of thing would NEVER happen again. "We have put procedures in place so that that will NEVER happen again". But, after having been granted the special powers of the court by Congress, noone was arrested and tried for this MASSIVE abuse of power, which was granted by Congress in the good faith that the government would not trade off the Bill of Rights in order to pursue political objectives. It was a worst-case disaster. Even after investigating, Congress basically yawned: "The CISPES case was an aberration, it was lower-level FBI employees who got carried away by their national security mandate. It was not politically motivated" --- The Senate Select Intelligence Committee. * "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996 * * ...something much more sinister was at work. In his carefully documented * analysis of the CISPES matter, 'Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: the * Covert War Against the Central American Movement', Boston writer Ross * Gelbspan argues that a much more extensive conspiracy may have been at * work. Far from being a low-level operation, Gelbspan reports, hundreds * of documents in the CISPES file had been initialed by Oliver "Buck" * Revell, then the number two official in the FBI. [Further evidence * implicates the CIA] Congress is unable to investigate the FBI, let alone the NSA. # "U.S. Recruited Ex-Rebel Despite Links to Deaths, Report Says" # By Tim Golden, The New York Times, January 21, 1997 # # A former Salvadoran guerrilla commander was recruited by American officials # as a paid informer and allowed to resettle in the United States despite # intelligence information from half a dozen rebels that he had planned a # 1985 attack in El Salvador in which SIX AMERICANS and seven others were # killed, newly released Government reports show. It doesn't matter to our government if Americans get killed. Whatever the president wants, he gets. FISA is yet another dagger shredding the U.S. Constitution. : The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996 : "Government surveillance, terrorism and the U.S. Constitution" : from Main Justice, by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9 : : The internal Justice Department FISA watchdog was Mary Lawton: it took : her two years before saying the investigations into CISPES & Co should : be shut down. : : On the day after Thanksgiving in 1993, not quite a month after Mary Lawton : died, Richard Scruggs decided it was time to go through her office on the : sixth floor of Main Justice. : : The deeper Scruggs got into the FISA files, the more uneasy he grew. : : Reading the FISA applications in Lawton's files, Scruggs began finding : errors. The volume of FISA cases was so heavy that the lawyers could spend : only so much time on each one. : : "The review process to prevent factual and legal errors was virtually : nonexistent," Scruggs recalled. : : In high school, Mary Lawton had won a debate about the meaning of the : U.S. Constitution. Nor was it an aberration: the 1980s joined the 1960s and 1970s with yet another massive use of this Orwellian technology for political purposes. And these are when they were caught. It's currently used for the "Drug War", a highly political endeavor. Of course, once CISPES was designated as a terrorist organization... : The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996 : * The CISPES investigation expanded. The FBI conducted a MASSIVE NATIONWIDE * investigation that put under surveillance ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED THIRTY * liberal groups, many of them religious or political organizations. By definition, ECHELON surveillance of 1,330 groups is NOT an "aberration". The state of Congressional oversight (and punishment of FISA violations) is horrifying. Not only did the NSA/FBI use FISA in a criminal manner, they then cross- referenced through everyone ever connecting to CISPES - no matter how distant - to achieve massive domestic spying for political purposes. To crush peaceful lawful political protest. In America. For the President. And they did it WITHOUT getting 1,330 FISA warrants. Question: How do you spy on 1,330 domestic groups? Answer: Electronically, using an existing domestic surveillance network. Just push the button marked 'monitor'. Your phone calls, bank transactions, credit card usage, health/ credit/utility/law-enforcement/TRW/IRS records, your whole life. One big evil eye of Mordor. The Russian State we were told to fear. ****************************************************************************** It gets worse. Much worse. ****************************************************************************** Wild Conspiracy Theory ---- ---------- ------ This is an expanded version of a posting I made promoting unregulated (free from government-has-the-key) cryptography. Attorney John Loftus is the author of four histories of intelligence operations. As a former prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, he had unprecedented access to top-secret CIA and NATO archives. Mark Aarons is an investigative reporter and author of several books on intelligence related issues. One day I was flipping channels, and came across "The Leon Charney Show". Attorney Charney was interviewing Attorney Loftus, who has many many connections in the intelligence world. Mr. Loftus described a room in NSA's Fort Meade that was actually British soil (diplomatic territory), with a British guard posted outside... : [updated here 5/25/97] : Subject: Re: Threaten U.S. Domestic ECHELON : Newsgroups: alt.cypherpunks,talk.politics.crypto,comp.org.eff.talk : Organization: NYC, Third Planet From the Sun : : This is a heavily annotated book. : : Massive domestic spying by the NSA. : : Including our phone calls. : : * "The Secret War Against the Jews" : * Authors: John Loftus and Mark Aarons : * ISBN 0-312-11057-X, 1994 : * : * In 1943 this resulted in the Britain-USA (Brusa) agreement to merge : * the Communications Intelligence (COMINT) agencies of both governments. : * : * One of the little-known features of Brusa was that President Roosevelt : * agreed that the two governments could spy on each others' citizens, : * without search warrants, by establishing "listening posts" on each : * others' territory. [snip] : * : * According to several of the "old spies" who worked in Communications : * Intelligence, the NSA headquarters is also the chief British espionage : * base in the United States. The presence of British wiretappers at the : * keyboards of American eavesdropping computers is a closely guarded : * secret, one that very few people in the intelligence community have : * been aware of, but it is true. : * : * An American historian, David Kahn, first stumbled onto a corner of : * the British connection in 1966, while writing his book The Codebreakers. : * : * One indication of just how sensitive this information is considered on : * both sides of the Atlantic is the fact that Kahn's publishers in New : * York and London were put under enormous pressure to censor a great deal : * of the book. In the main, Kahn simply revealed the existence of the : * liaison relationship, but when he wrote that the NSA and its British : * equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters, "exchange : * personnel on a temporary basis", he had come too close to revealing : * the truth. : * : * The U.S. government told Kahn to hide the existence of British : * electronic spies from the American public. Kahn eventually agreed : * to delete a few of the most sensitive paragraphs describing the : * exchange of codes, techniques, and personnel with the British : * government : * : * His innocuous few sentences threatened to disclose a larger truth. : * : * By the 1960s the "temporary" British personnel at Fort Meade had : * become a permanent fixture. The British enjoyed continued access : * to the greatest listening post in the world. : * : * The NSA is a giant vacuum cleaner. It sucks in every form of : * electronic communication. from telephone calls to telegrams, : * across the United States. The presence of British personnel : * is essential for the American wiretappers to claim plausible : * deniability. : * : * Here is how the game is played. The British liaison officer at : * Fort Meade types the target list of "suspects" into the American : * computer. The NSA sorts through its wiretaps and gives the : * British officer the recording of any American citizen he wants. : * : * Since it is technically a *British* target of surveillance, no : * *American* search warrant is necessary. The British officer then : * simply hands the results over to his American liaison officer. : * : * Of course, the Americans provide the same service to the British : * in return. All international and domestic telephone calls in Great : * Britain are run through the NSA's station in the British Government : * Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Menwith Hill, which allows : * the American liaison officer to spy on any British citizen without : * a warrant. : * : * According to our sources, this duplicitous, reciprocal arrangement : * disguises the most massive, and illegal, domestic espionage apparatus : * in the world. Not even the Soviets could touch the U.K.-U.S. intercept : * technology. : * : * Through this charade, the intelligence services of each country can : * claim they are not targeting their own citizens. This targeting is : * done by an authorized foreign agent, the intelligence liaison : * resident in Britain or the United States. : * : * Thus, in 1977, during an investigation by the House Government : * Operations Committee, Admiral Inman could claim, with a straight face, : * that "there are no U.S. Citizens now targeted by the NSA in the United : * States or abroad, none." : * : * Since the targeting was done not by NSA but by employees of British : * GCHQ, he was literally telling the truth. [snip] : * : * According to a former special agent of the FBI, the you-spy-on-mine, : * I'll-spy-on-yours deal has been extended to other Western partners, : * particularly Canada and Australia. The British, with the help of : * sophisticated NSA computers, can bug just about anyone anywhere. The : * electronic search for subversives continues, particularly in the U.S. : * : * The NSA conceded precisely that point when the U.S. Justice Department : * investigated its wiretapping of American protesters during the Vietnam : * War. : * : * The NSA assured the Justice Department that the information was : * acquired only *incidentally* as part of a British GCHQ collection : * program. : * : * The "incidental" British exception has become the rule. : * : * To this day Congress does not realize that the British liaison officers : * at the NSA are still free to use American equipment to spy on American : * citizens. And, in fact, they are doing just that. Congress has been kept : * in the dark deliberately. : * : * This is a fact, not a matter of conjecture : * or a conclusion based on anonymous sources. : * : * In the early 1980s, during the Reagan administration, one of the authors : * of this book submitted to the intelligence community a draft of a : * manuscript that briefly described the wiretap shell game and mentioned : * the secrecy provisions concerning British liaison relationships with : * the NSA have escaped congressional knowledge. : * : * The result was an uproar. : * : * The intelligence community insisted that all passages explaining the : * British wiretap program had to be censored and provided a list of : * specific deletions. Mini-recap: o The countries sharing intelligence: US, UK, Canada, Australia o Massive domestic spying by the NSA, using an Orwellian "1984" technology to search all communications using computers, including domestic phone calls. o Circumvention of domestic spy laws via friendly "foreign" agents. ****************************************************************************** But could that be true? Could such a massive disregard for the Constitution have taken place under the cheesy logic said to be used by the Military? NSA is Military, headed by a uniformed officer. Could it possibly be true? It's some over-the-top conspiracy theory, right? ****************************************************************************** Over the Top ---- --- --- I haven't received the "Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments" book by Mike Frost yet. So for now I'll quote from his article in CAQ, an issue entitled "The New Age of Surveillance". Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1996-97, Number 59 1500 Massachusetts Ave. NW #732 Washington, DC 20005 202/331-9763, caq@igc.org, http://mediafilter.org/caq Article: "Second Thoughts from the Second Oldest Profession. Inside the US-Canada Spyworld." By Mike Frost [ Pictured is him on two of his Canadian security IDs ] I was a spy. For almost two decades, I spied for Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the most secret and least known branch of National Defense. But although my paycheck came from the Canadian government, more often than not, my orders, assignments, and much of my training --- like those of many other CSE operators --- came from the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland. Over the twelve years I spied for CSE, it became increasingly to resemble the NSA. Both specialize in providing secure communications and signals intelligence (SIGINT); both operated for years with little public knowledge or legislative oversight until they were exposed by the media. [snip] Despite the similarities, CSE is treated more like a subsidiary than an equal partner. US military and economic clout, as well as NSA's vastly superior technical capabilities and near unlimited funds, allow Washington to dominate. And while CSE has only a $200-300 million dollar budget, NSA has an estimated annual budget of almost $4 billion. But the relationship is not without mutual benefits. CSE, NSA, and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) use each other's facilities and personnel to spy on friend and foe alike and, more alarmingly, to circumvent domestic laws and spy on their own populations. [snip] I either participated in or had direct knowledge of operations in which CSE operated alone or joined with NSA or GCHQ to: o intercept communications in other countries from the confines of Canadian embassies around the world with the knowledge of the ambassador; o aid politicians, political parties, or factions in an allied country to gain partisan advantage o spy on its allies o spy on its own citizens; and o perform "favors" that helped its allies evade domestic laws against spying. [snip] Although I visited NSA headquarters at Fort Meade dozens of times, it was at the Special Collection Services (SCS) at College Park, Maryland, that I received my covert operation training and assignments. This facility, set in suburban Washington, DC, dealt exclusively with covert operations. [The facility was relocated closer to Fort Meade in the early 1990s] The first time I was driven there in 1978, I entered through a strip mall and then through a door in the back of a restaurant; the second time, via a dry cleaners. These dinky businesses in a fake shopping center were all owned, operated, and staffed by US espionage agencies. From the street, the installation's high-tech capacity, its antennae and satellite receptors, were camouflaged and it is unlikely that neighbors suspected anything out of the ordinary. But the inside was anything but ordinary. There were scores of rooms crammed with administrative functions, equipment, wires, jury-rigged gizmos, a currency bank, and computers. Every electronic intercept capability NSA denied having was right there. In a small black box, not much bigger than a briefcase, was "Oratory." This portable key-word selection computer could be taken almost anywhere and set to pick out pre-selected words and automatically monitor and record fax, voice, or teletype messages that contained them. Developed by NSA, "Oratory" was "tempest-proof" (i.e. shielded to prevent emmisions that could lead to detection), small, virtually indestructible, and easy to repair: all you had to do was open the lid and replace the self-diagnosed defective component. [snip] In pursuit of plausible deniability, CSE, GCHQ, and NSA have used each others' personnel and resources to evade laws against domestic spying. [ an example given in which the NSA wanted to spy on someone within the US, even though they had no authorization for such an operation ] ...So, two Canadians were sent to conduct a counter-espionage operation on US soil at US taxpayer expense so that NSA could maintain deniability. In every way that counts, NSA broke US law and spied on its own citizens. [ A UK operation by CSE described next. Margaret Thatcher (then Prime Minister) thinks two of the ministers in her cabinet are not 'on side' ...so she wants to find out if they are... So GCHQ asked CSE operators to come to London to bug the ministers ] Increasingly though, both because it's possible and because it's desired, individuals are caught in the broad net of electronic surveillance. The experts can record and analyze all your communications at will. SIGINT organizations in Canada, US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand use supercomputers such as the Cray to select items of interest. The list is very fluid and is adapted rapidly to monitor people and policy areas. At any time, it is likely to contain names of all world leaders, terrorists, drug lords, mafia dons, members of radical groups, labor union activists and leaders, types of weaponry, explosives, financial dealings, money transfers, airline destinations, stock information, international conferences, demonstrations, and politically suspect groups and individuals. As is the case with operations, countries maintain deniability by getting information gathered on their domestic situations by allies. Under development is even more sophisticated "topic recognition" which can home in on guarded conversations that avoid potential trigger words. Nothing and no one is exempt. For example, you are talking on the telephone to a friend discussing your son's school play. "Boy," you say sadly, "Bobby really bombed last night," or perhaps you use the word "assassination" or "sabotage" or any one of the key words the computer has been told to flag. A hard copy of your conversation is produced, passed to the appropriate section (in this case terrorism), and probably ends up in the garbage. But perhaps the conversation is not so clear-cut or the analyst has poor judgement. Then your name is permanently filed under "possible terrorist". Weeks or even years later, you have a similar conversation and use the same words; the computer filters it out again. Since this is your second time, your name moves from the "possible" to the "probable" file. Sound absurd? Not at all; it actually happened while I was at CSE. [snip] SIGINT specialists are honing their skills at monitoring digital information. SIGINT agencies everywhere are increasingly throwing their surveillance web over the Internet and other data networks of interest. [snip] Mini-recap: o The countries sharing intelligence: US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand o Massive domestic spying by the NSA, using an Orwellian "1984" technology to search all communications using computers, including domestic phone calls, via keyword searches. o Circumvention of domestic spy laws via friendly "foreign" agents ****************************************************************************** Wow. How chilling to think the military has set up a real-life domestic Orwellian spy apparatus. Used repeatedly for political purposes. ECHELON has almost no Military purpose left: Russia is practically part of NATO now. We must start dismantling ECHELON before it is too late. 6/3/97: Barnes & Noble informs me his book is no longer available, and that my order is cancelled. ****************************************************************************** BAM-BAM-BAM --- --- --- Let's pause to take a look back at the first and still classic expose of NSA. : The Puzzle Palace : Inside the National Security Agency, : America's most secret intelligence organization : Author James Bamford, 1983 revision, ISBN 0-14-00.6748-5 Page numbers are from the above 1983 release. Ready? P171-172: David Kahn, in a transatlantic phone call, reluctantly agreed to delete a handful of paragraphs dealing with the most sensitive subject of all: NSA's relationship with its supersecret British partner, GCHQ. "The two agencies exchange personnel on a temporary basis... A similar but much smaller liaison program is maintained with Canada and Australia." P399: After two years of compromising and negotiating, the BRUSA Agreement was supplemented in 1947 by the five-power UKUSA Agreement, which, according to one report, established the United States as a first party to the treaty, and Britain, Canada, and Australia-New Zealand as second parties. P391: ...quite likely the most secret agreement ever entered into by the English-speaking world. Signed in 1947 and known as the UKUSA Agreement, it brought together under a single umbrella the SIGINT organizations of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The UKUSA Agreement's existence has never been officially acknowledged by any country even today. P271: Sharing seats alongside the NSA operators, at least in some areas, are SIGINT specialists from Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). According to a former Menwith Hill official, the two groups work very closely together. P229: David Watters, a telecommunications engineer once attached to the CIA's communications research and development branch, pulls out a microwave routing map of the greater Washington area and jabs his index finger at a small circle with several lines entering it and the letters NSA. "There's your smoking pistol right here." Watters says it is tied into the local telephone company circuits, which are interconnected with the national microwave telephone system owned by AT&T. Other specialists testified to the same thing: purely domestic intercepts. P223: "Technical know-how" for microwave communications intercept was aided by William Baker, head of AT&T's Bell Laboratories and at the same time an important member of the very secret NSA Scientific Advisory Board. After all, it was Bell Labs under Baker that, to a great extent, developed and perfected the very system that the NSA hoped to penetrate. [ "The Rise of the Computer State", David Burnham, 1984, ISBN 0-394-72375-9 "A Chilling Account of the Computer's Threat to Society" FYI note: this document's opening quote is from this book. P122: For the last three decades the NSA has been a frequent and secret participant in regulatory matters before the Federal Communications Commission, where important decisions are made that directly affect the structure of the telephone company, the use of radio airwaves and the operation of communication satellites. ] P317: 1962. Now, for the first time, NSA had begun turning its massive ear inward toward its own citizens. With no laws or legislative charter to block its path, the ear continued to turn. P319: The Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI and the DIA submitted entries for the NSA's watch list. The names on the various watch lists ranged from members of radical political groups to celebrities to ordinary citizens involved in protest against their government. Included were such well-known figures as Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverand Ralph Abernathy, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, and Chicago Seven defendants Abbie Hoffman and David T. Dellinger. A frightening side effect of the watch list program was the tendency of most lists to grow, expanding far beyond their original intent. This multiplier effect was caused by the inclusion of names of people who came in contact with those persons and organizations already on the lists. Because of the NSA's vacuum cleaner approach to intelligence collection --- whereby it sucks into its system the maximum amount of telecommunications and then filters it through an enormous screen of "trigger words" --- analysts end up reviewing telephone calls, telegrams, and telex messages to and from thousands of innocent persons having little or nothing to do with the actual focus of the effort. And when a person made the watch list, any conversations EVEN MENTIONING that person are scooped up. P333: By now, the names of U.S. citizens on NSA's many watch lists for fighting the drug war had grown from the hundreds into the thousands. Even when Noel Gayler took over as Director of the NSA in August 1969, NSA personnel waited a year or so before briefing even him on the NSA watch list program. P381-382: NSA Director General Allen testified to Congress that there is no statute that prevents the NSA from interception of domestic communications. Asked whether he was concerned about the legality of expanding greatly its targeting of American citizens, the NSA replied: "Legality? That particular aspect didn't enter into the discussions." P459: Innocent Americans - people neither targeted nor watch-listed - are scooped up into the NSA's giant vacuum cleaner. This happens with considerable frequency because of the way in which names and phrases are jam-packed into the computers. Even though NSA's specialized supercomputers have enormous storage capacities, the tremendous number of targets forces the Agency to squeeze the watch lists together as tightly as possible. P462-465: Its power to eavesdrop, the NSA had always insisted, came under no earthly laws but rather emanated from some celestial "inherent presidential authority" reposed in the chief executive by the Constitution. Senator Edward M. Kennedy tried year after year to pass legislation to require the NSA to submit to judicial review. Finally, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] was signed into law by president Carter on October 25, 1978. The key to the legislation could only have been dreamed up by Franz Kafka: the establishment of a supersecret federal court. The legislation established a complex authorization procedure and added a strict "minimization" requirement to prohibit the use and distribution of communications involving Americans inadvertently picked up during the intercept operations. These requirements constitute the most important parts of the FISA law, and were included to prevent the watch-listing of American citizens, which took place during the 1960s and 1970s. The Supreme Court Chief Justice picks which federal judges serve in the Star Chamber. P466-467: The FISA court judge rules that black-bag jobs of "nonresidential premises under the direction or control of a foreign power" need no court approval. The FISA legislation also exempts from judicial review communica- tions of these sites, including embassies. P464: A final judicial review exception authorized the Agency to distribute the communication if it relates to criminal activity. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** * * * * * * * * * * P468-469: Within the United States, FISA still leaves the NSA free to pull into its massive vacuum cleaner every telephone call and message entering, leaving, OR TRANSITING the country. By carefully inserting the words "by the National Security Agency" into the FISA legislation, the NSA has skillfully excluded from the coverage of the FISA statute as well as the surveillance court all interceptions received from the British GCHQ or any other non-NSA source. Thus it is possible for GCHQ to monitor the necessary domestic circuits and pass them on to the NSA through the UKUSA Agreement, giving them impunity to target and watch-list Americans. * * * * * * * * * * *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * P475: Three decades after its creation, the NSA is still without a formal charter. Instead, there is a super hush-hush surveillance court that is virtually impotent; the FISA, which has enough loopholes and exceptions to render it nearly useless; and an executive order that was designed more to protect the intelligence community from citizens than citizens from the agencies. In addition, because it is an executive order, it can be changed at any time at the whim of a President, without so much as a nod toward Congress. P471: On January 24, 1978, President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order imposing detailed restrictions on the nation's intelligence community. The order was designed to prevent the long list of abuses of the 1960s and 1970s. But four years later President Ronald Reagan scrapped the Carter order and broadened considerably the power of the spy agencies to operate domestically. P473: Under the Reagan executive order, the NSA can now, apparently, be authorized to lend its full support - analysts as well as computers - to "any department or agency" in the federal government and, "when lives are endangered," even to local police departments. [ Yea billions of dollars a year military SIGINT support technology... oh so invisible in its great mass. A total blurring of the lines between Military and civilian control of the domestic population. ] P475-477: Like an ever-widening sinkhole, the NSA's surveillance technology will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and gradually eliminating more and more privacy. If there are defenses to such technotyranny, it would appear, at least from past experience, that they will not come from Congress. Rather, they will most likely come from academe and industry in the form of secure cryptographic applications to private and commercial telecommunications equipment. The same technology that is used against free speech can be used to protect it, for without protection the future may be grim. Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, referring to the NSA's SIGINT technology: At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If the government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence commun- ity has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology... I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. *** end of 'Puzzle Palace' excerpts. Wow. No recap necessary. I'm feeling a bit sick at this point, how about you? ****************************************************************************** Those of you who supported any version of the FBI/NSA Digital Telephony Act sold us down the river, making use of this Orwellian Military technology fully legal domestically for the first time. The descent into the abyss, from which there is no return. : * "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996 : * : * [ Al Bayse was assistant director of the FBI's Technical Services : * Division, in charge of spending more than half a billion dollars : * for research, development and computer operations. ] : * : * "Sure", said Al Bayse of the FBI, "I believe there is an absolute : * right to privacy. But that doesn't mean you have the right to break : * the law in a serious way. Any private conversation that doesn't : * involve criminality should be private" : * : * In other words, as the debate was framed by Bayse, the right to : * privacy is at least partly contingent on a determination by an FBI : * agent or clerk that the conversations they already intercepted and : * understood do not involve a crime. Do you want to live in a real live Big Brother world? It is not at all about trying to keep up with technology in order to wiretap. The phone companies are already able and authorized to listen in on any line at any time, to check the integrity of the network. I've heard some funny stories by old Bell System employees about a bunch of people listening into private conversations, and having a hoot. Question: How can the FBI use computers to monitor thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of phone calls simultaneously, as they said they would do with the bill, when we Americans speak so many different accents and languages? Answer: Thirty years of fine tuning by the NSA, y'all. The Digital Telephony Act will allow them to legally - at full wiretapping capacity - dragnet-monitor the telephone network. Each line monitored will not require a warrant. And how did they get this CALEA legislation? * "Government Access", by Jim Warren * * At the administration's pleading, the [Democrat-controlled] Congress * rammed it through in less than two months, with no substantive hearings. * * Literally in the dark of night, without debate, it passed in the house * by voice vote and two nights later by unanimous consent in the Senate, * only minutes before adjourning to rush home for their important work: * campaigning for re-election. The NSA domestic watch-list is probably already stuffed full enough to use the complete CALEA capacity. You can select many more lines for monitoring than actually end up active at the same time. The effect is indistinguishable from a MUCH larger monitoring capacity. Even greater when the software programmatically decides (at the FBI end) which conversations to continue listening to. I'm sure law-enforcement will be able to dynamically configure their connection to the phone companies' networks. And probably cheat to use ECHELON to direct this programmatic control, yielding no effective monitoring limit for domestic law-enforcement, and domestic political control. Law enforcement has absolutely no need for the Digital Telephony Act except to give them their own access terminals and PRETEND there is a firewall between what the Military is doing versus what the FBI is doing. Of course, to monitor phone calls at full capacity, the FBI will need to use Military surveillance software. We've come a long way from requiring a person to listen to the first minute of conversation to even decide whether the person could continue to monitor. It's a brave new world now. We're there. Surprise. ****************************************************************************** Australian ECHELON Spotted ---------- ------- ------- * http://www.texemarrs.com, Living Truth Ministries 800/234-9673 Texe Marrs and his organization are big on the "Anti-Christ" aspects of all the technology the UKUSA governments have deployed to monitor people. I am just glad he knows the Beast when he sees it, that it is Evil (without the people involved necessarily being evil in intent: agreed!) and that unless we do something soon, it will be too late: Earth will become Hell. His book-jacket bio: Texe Marrs was a career U.S. Air Force officer (retired). He commanded communications-electronics and engineering units around the globe. * "Project L.U.C.I.D.", by Texe Marrs, 1996, ISBN 1-884302-02-5 * * Appendix 2: World Surveillance Headquarters * * The report that follows, originally entitled "National Surveillance", was * written by Australia's Peter Sawer and published in Inside News (P.O. Box * 311, Maleny, Queensland 4552, Australia). It first came to my attention * when it was printed in the U.S. by LtCol Archibald E. Robert's Bulletin, * the newsletter of the highly respected Committee to Restore the Constitu- * tion (P.O. Box 986, Fort Collins, Colorado 80522). * * The article caused a flurry of activity and a round of vigorous denials, * admissions, coverups, and more denials by Australian political leaders. * * The article contends that (1) America's National Security Agency (NSA) * is the world surveillance headquarters, and (2) Australia has it's own * secret "computer center", linked with the NSA via satellite, which * illegally watches over Australia's citizenry. Article snippets... capitalization by the original authors... * On a fateful fall day in America, on November 4th, 1952, a new United * States government agency quietly was brought into existence through * presidential decree. * * The birth of the National Security Agency on that day so long ago * heralded the beginning of the world's most sophisticated and all * encompassing surveillance system, and the beginnings of the greatest * threat to individual liberty and freedom not only in Australia, but * the entire planet will ever see. * * The NSA grew out of the post war "Signals Intelligence" section of the * U.S. War Department. It is unique amongst government organizations in * America, and indeed most other countries, in that there are NO specified * or defined limits to its powers. * * The NSA can (and does) do just about whatever it wants, whenever, and * wherever it wants. Although little known in both the U.S. and elsewhere, * the NSA is quite literally the most powerful organization in the world. * * Not limited by any law, and answerable only to the U.S. National Security * Council through COMSEC, the NSA now controls an information and * surveillance network around the globe that even Orwell, in his novel * "1984", could not have imagined. * * Most people believe that the current "computer age" grew out of either * the space program or the nuclear weapons race; it did not. * * ALL significant advances in computer technology over the last thirty * years, from the very beginnings of IBM, through to the super computers * of today, have been for the NSA. In fact, the world's very first super * computer, the awe-inspiring CRAY, was built to specification for the * NSA, and installed in their headquarters in 1976. * * The entire twentieth century of development of computer technology has * been the result of the NSA's unquenchable thirst for ever bigger, ever * faster machines on which to collect, collate, and cross-reference data * on hundreds of millions of honest, law-abiding, and totally unsuspecting * individuals. And not only in America, but in many other countries as * well. Including, as we shall see, Australia. [ "The Rise of the Computer State", David Burnham, 1984 p134: ...the technical advances that were occurring did so not entirely by chance. The computers' ability to acquire, organize, store and retrieve huge amounts of data was an essential factor leading to the broad definition of intelligence that was fostered by the National Security Agency and its godfather, the National Security Council. Computer research was supported by NSA in a major way by secret research dollars. Thomas C. Reed, Director of the Pentagon's Telecommunications, Command and Control System, referring to domestic intercity telephone microwave radio trunks, said in 1975, "Modern computer techniques make it possible to sort through that traffic and find target conversations easily." p126-127: Since the wiretap law barred the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs from installing a tap on New York City's Grand Central Station pay phones, bureau head John Ingersoll asked the NSA for help. Within a few months the spy agency was sorting through all the conversations it was already acquiring for general intelligence purposes. Of course, the technicians were required to acquire, monitor, and discard a large number of calls made by people with no connection with the cocaine business in South American cities. But so pleased was Mr. Ingersoll with the tips he was getting from the dragnet monitoring that he ultimately persuaded the NSA to monitor simultaneously nineteen other U.S. communication hubs. ] * "Project L.U.C.I.D.", continued... * * Fort Meade is the hub of an information gathering octopus whose tentacles * reach out to the four corners of the earth. * * The principal means of communicating this information is by the National * Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) satellite communications * system, which most people erroneously think exists primarily for the * space program. * * It does not. * * The satellites, indeed NASA and the entire American Space Program, exist * largely to supply the NSA with its telecommunications system. That is why * the bulk of its operations are officially declared 'secret'. This * ultimate 'Big Brother' machine even has an official name 'Project * Platform'. [ "The Puzzle Palace": all these computer systems are linked together under Project Platform. The first Cray went to the NSA. p138 ] * Although the NSA was officially formed in 1952, it grew out of an * International Agreement signed in 1947. Officially termed the "UKUSA * PACT," this was an agreement between Britain, the U.S.A., Canada, New * Zealand, Australia and the NATO countries. * * The UKUSA PACT was, quite simply and bluntly, an agreement between these * countries to collect and collate information on their respective citizens * and to share this information with each other and pass on to Fort Meade. * * On March 9th 1977, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Bill Hayden, asked * "questions on notice" on the subject. On April 19, Prime Minister Malcom * Fraser, declined to answer the questions, "in the interests of national * security." * * The first clue of the Australian Headquarters of PROJECT PLATFORM appeared * in 1975. Then, as today, government undertakings involving expenditure * over a certain amount must be presented to a Senate body, the Joint * Parliamentary Accounts Committee (JPAC). In 1975 JPAC was asked to * examine and approve finance for the construction of a new building in * Deakin, a leafy suburb of Canberra. * * This quite massive building was to be constructed behind an existing, much * smaller one, which, until then, had been known to the public only as the * "Deakin Telephone Exchange." * * That it was not, and never had been, simply a "telephone exchange" finally * came to light in the 1975 JPAC Approval Report, when it admitted that the * existing building had a comprehensive basement which housed NASA's micro- * wave communications headquarters in Australia. Part of the justification * of the "need" for the new, much larger building, was that by 1980, it was * expected that NASA would run out of room in their existing home. * * Apart from NASA, it is now admitted that Deakin houses the National * Computer Headquarters for, amongst others, the Australian Defense * Department, the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Social * Security, the Commonwealth Department of Education, and the Department * of Transport and Communications. * * Both Tax and Social Security are, in turn, directly linked to Medicare. * In fact, the Department of Health used Social Security's computer * facilities there until their own were completed. * * A small, but highly significant, part of the building is, in fact, * occupied by Telecom. This is the part that contains the networking * junctions for the optical-fiber lines leased by the banks for their * "Electronic Funds Transfer System" (EFTS). ALL financial transactions * for the banks pass through there via subsidiary company, "Funds * Transfers Services Pty Ltd." (FTS) * The New York Times INTERNATIONAL Wednesday, May 21, 1997 * by Clyde H. Farnsworth, Woomera, Australia. * * As Darth Vader's Death Star is blown to bits in the newly remastered "Star * Wars" at the local theater, the audience of Australian and American Air * Force personnel, and squadrons of their children, lets out a whoop. As the * lights go on, everyone is beaming. * [snip] * * Pine Gap employs nearly 1,000 people, mainly from the CIA and the U.S. * National Reconnaissance Office. * * It is the ground station for a U.S. satellite network that intercepts * telephone, radio, data links and other communications around the world. Worldwide telephone interception. ****************************************************************************** New Zealand: Unhappy Campers --- ------- ------- ------- You'd be unhappy too if French terrorists - er - French intelligence agency operatives sank a ship (GreenPeace!) on the shores of your country, and the USA controlled ECHELON system failed to warn you. Here comes the usual - GROAN: "the usual" - PLUS a description of the basic mechanisms. Spy tools, come 'n' get yer spy tools...a comprehensive look at ECHELON DICTIONARY. A look at the Beast in your phone. This is the big one. In the section after this, 'On Monitoring', I give detailed examples of the capability of ECHELON DICTIONARY to seek out information from noise. To pick out conversations from a massive dragnet. I even give the keyword monitoring logic for spotting conversations of people actively searching to leave their current job for another employer. First read this section. *** "Secret Power" by Nicky Hager, 1996, ISBN 0-908802-35-8 GCSB is New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau. P8-9 It was with some apprehension that I learned Nicky Hager was researching the activity of our intelligence community. He has long been a pain in the establishment's neck. There are many things in the book with which I am familiar. I couldn't tell him which was which. Nor can I tell you. But it is an outrage that I and other ministers were told so little [yea NSA] and this raises the question of to whom those concerned saw themselves ultimately responsible. David Lange Prime Minister of New Zealand 1984-89 P9 Another aspect of the Second World War that carried over into the Cold War era was the close co-operation between five countries - the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - formalized with the UKUSA Security Agreement of 1948. Although the treaty has never been made public, it has become clear that it provided not only for a division of collecting tasks and sharing of the product, but for common guidelines for the classification and protection of the intelligence collected as well as for personnel security. P20 New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, on June 12 1984, admitted the GCSB liaised closely with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States - the closest the government has ever come to talking about the secret five-nation signals intelligence alliance of which the GCSB is part. P108 The New Zealand analysts have a high level of contact with the overseas agencies, including overseas staff training, postings and exchanges. In the early 1990s the GCSB began conducting its own training courses, teaching them the special procedures and regulations governing the production of signals intelligence reports for the UKUSA network. It is at these courses where the analysts are told about the UKUSA agreement, which is described by senior staff as the 'foundation stone' of all the arrangements with the 'partner' agencies. P110 The GCSB introduces the new trainees to the world of codebreaking by advising them to read two of the greatest exposes of signals intelligence: James Bamford's 'The Puzzle Palace' and David Kahn's 'The Code Breakers'. P22 In 1984, Glen Singleton of the NSA was formally appointed GCSB's Deputy Director of Policy and Plans. Having an American inside the GCSB serving as a foreign liaison officer would be one thing: allowing an officer from another country to direct policy and planning seems extraordinary. [ Unless you think of the NSA as the New World Order. ] P28-29 Intelsat 7s can carry 90,000 individual phone or fax circuits at once. All 'written' messages are currently exploited by the GCSB. The other UKUSA agencies monitor phone calls as well. The key to interception of satellite communications is powerful computers that search through these masses of messages for ones of interest. The intercept stations take in millions of messages intended for the legitimate earth stations served by the satellite and then use computers to search for pre-programmed addresses and keywords. In this way they select out manageable numbers (hundreds or thousands) of messages to be searched through and read by the intelligence analysis staff. Many people are vaguely aware that a lot of spying occurs, maybe even on them, but how do we judge if it is ubiquitous or not a worry at all? Is someone listening every time we pick up the telephone? Are all Internet or fax messages being pored over continuously by shadowy figures somewhere in a windowless building? There is almost never any solid information with which to judge what is realistic concern and what is silly paranoia. What follows explains as precisely as possible - and for the first time in public - how the worldwide system works, just how immense and powerful it is and what it can and cannot do. The electronic spies are not ubiquitous, but the paranoia is not unfounded. The global system has a highly secret codename - ECHELON. The intelligence agencies will be shocked to see it named and described for the first time in print. Each station in the ECHELON network has computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for ones containing pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and email addresses. Every word of every message is automatically searched: they do not need your specific telephone number or Internet address on the list. All the different computers in the network are known, within the UKUSA agencies, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can search for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has been designed to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's Dictionary computers contain not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. For example, each New Zealand site has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ [British], DSD [Australia], and CSE [Canada] in addition to its own. So each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, Internet messages and other electronic communications that its computers have been pre-programmed to select for all the allies and automatically send this intelligence to them. This means that New Zealand stations are being used by the overseas agencies for their automatic collecting - while New Zealand does not even know what is being intercepted from the New Zealand sites for the allies. In return, New Zealand gets tightly controlled access to a few parts of the system. The GCSB computers, the stations, the headquarter operations and, indeed, GCSB itself function almost entirely as components of this integrated system. Each station in the network - not just the satellite stations - has Dictionary computers that report to the ECHELON system P37 United States spy satellites, designed to intercept communications from orbit above the earth, are also likely to be connected into the ECHELON system. These satellites either move in orbits that criss-cross the earth or, like the Intelsats, sit above the Equator in geostationary orbit. They have antennae that can scoop up very large quantities of radio communications from the areas below. A final element of the ECHELON system are facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications systems, completing a near total coverage of the world's communications. The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop (always within line of sight) across the countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country. Intercepting them gives access to international underseas communications (once they surface) and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic communications. Of course, when the microwave route is across one of the UKUSA countries' territory it is much easier to arrange interception. P41 The ECHELON system has created an awesome spying capacity for the United States, allowing it to monitor continuously most of the world's communications. It is an important component of its power and influence in the post-Cold War world order, and advances in computer processing technology continue to increase this capacity. The NSA pushed for the creation of this system and has the supreme position within it. It has subsidized the allies by providing the sophisticated computer programs used in the system, it undertakes the bulk of the interception operations and, in return, it can be assumed to have full access to the allies' capabilities. On December 2 1987, when Prime Minister David Lange announced plans to build a new spy station, he issued a press statement explaining that the station would provide greater independence in intelligence matters: "For years there has been concern about our dependence on others and all that implies. This government is committed to standing on its own two feet." Lange believed the statement. Even as Prime Minister, no one had told him about the ECHELON Dictionary system and the way the new station would fit in. P43 His first experience of the UKUSA alliance was its security 'indoctrination' (they really use this word). The indoctrination was done by GCSB security officer Don Allan, and consisted of a strict lecture about never, for the rest of his life, talking about his job with anyone except other indoctrinated people. GCSB workers are forbidden to say anything about their work, even to their partners. The indoctrination concluded with Holmes signing the two page indoctrination form, which refers to New Zealand laws for punishing infringements (in the Crimes Act) but which originates primarily in UKUSA regulations. Equivalent forms must be signed by staff throughout the UKUSA alliance. P44- In the middle of 1994 Holmes got his first overseas posting - and a prestigious one at that. He is on a three-year posting to the center of the UKUSA alliance, the enormous NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade. This posting was the first ever by a GCSB analyst to the NSA. Before he left New Zealand his daily work, like that of all analysts, revolved entirely around that most striking manifestation of GCSB's links with the NSA: the ECHELON Dictionary system. Each morning the signals intelligence analysts in New Zealand log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary system, just as their equivalents do in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. What follows is a precise description of how the system works, the first time it has been publicly described. [Buy the book for full details] After entering their security passwords, the analysts reach a directory that lists the different categories of intercept available, each with a four digit code; 4066, for instance, might be Russian fishing trawlers, 5535 Japanese diplomatic traffic in the South Pacific, 4959 communications from South Pacific countries and so on. They type in the code for the category they want to use first that day. As soon as they make a selection, a 'search result' appears, stating the number of documents which have been found fitting that category. The day's work begins, reading through screen after screen of intercepted messages. If a message appears worth reporting on, the analyst can select it from the rest and work on it out of the Dictionary system. He or she then translates the message - either in its entirety or as a summary called a 'gist' - and writes it into the standard format of all intelligence reports produced anywhere within the UKUSA network. This is the 'front end' of the Dictionary system, using a commercially available program (called BRS Search). It extracts the different categories of intercepted messages (known just as 'intercept') from the large GCSB computer database of intercept from the New Zealand stations and overseas agencies. [ I interrupt this book excerpt to bring you retrieval results for "BRS Search" from the www.altavista.digital.com search engine: BRS/Search is designed to manage large collections of unstructured information, allowing multiple users to quickly and efficiently search, retrieve and analyze stored documents simply by entering a word, concept, phrase, or combination of phrases, in any length. The product offers the most powerful indexing structure available today, with users able to pinpoint critical information in seconds, even across millions of documents in numerous databases. Hmmm. Sounds like the search engine I just used. You give the search engine keywords to search for, and can specify exclusion logic keywords. e.g. "digital AND NOT watch" ] Before anything goes into the database, the actual searching and selection of intercepted messages has already occurred - in the Dictionary computers at the New Zealand and overseas stations. This is an enormous mass of material - literally all the business, government and personal messages that the station catches. The computers automatically search through everything as it arrives at the station. This is the work of the Dictionary program. It reads every word and number in every single incoming message and picks out all the ones containing target keywords and numbers. Thousands of simultaneous messages are read in 'real time' as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in the telecommunications haystack. Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of other calls and digitally recorded to be listened to by analysts back in the agency headquarters. The implications of this capability are immense. The UKUSA agencies can use machines to search through all the telephone calls in the world, just as they do for written messages. It has nothing to do with whether someone is deliberately tapping your phone, simply whether you say a keyword or combination of keywords that is of interest to one of the UKUSA agencies. P47 The keywords include such things as names of people, ships, organizations, countries and subjects. They also include the known telex and phone numbers and Internet addresses of the individuals, businesses, organizations and government offices they may want to target. The agencies also specify combinations of these keywords to help sift out communications of interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words 'Suva' and 'aid', or cables containing the word 'Suva' but NOT the word 'consul' (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers (and combinations of them), under a particular category, that are placed in the Dictionary computers. The whole system was developed by the NSA. P51- The only known public reference to the ECHELON system was made in relation to the Menwith Hill station. In July 1988, a United States newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, published a story about electronic monitoring of phone calls of a Republican senator, Strom Thurmond. The alleged monitoring occurred at Menwith Hill. Margaret Newsham worked at Menwith Hill as a contract employee of Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation. She is said to have told congress staff that, while at Menwith, she was able to listen through earphones to telephone calls being monitored. When investigators subpoenaed witnesses and sought access to plans and manuals for the ECHELON system, they found there were no formal controls over who could be targeted; junior staff were able to feed in target names to be searched for by the computers without any check of their authorization to do so. None of this is surprising and it is likely to be insignificant compared with official abuse of the system. The capabilities of the ECHELON system are so great, and the secrecy surrounding it makes it so impervious to democratic oversite, that the temptation to use it for questionable projects seems irresistible. In June 1992 a group of current 'highly placed intelligence operatives' from the British GCHQ spoke to the paper Observer: 'We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate.' They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In this case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With the telexes this is called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex 'fixes' on the three organizations. We can then sift through those communications further by selecting keywords to search for. Without actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary system works. Note that it was being used for telephone calls. Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of the ECHELON system means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that the four digit code covering the necessary keywords and exclusion logic for Third World aid be placed. P54 In a further misuse of ECHELON, a former intelligence employee revealed that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had personally ordered interception of the Lonrho company, owners of the Observer newspaper, after that newspaper published a series of articles in 1989 exposing events surrounding a multi- billion dollar British arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The newspaper said the deal had been pushed strongly by Mrs. Thatcher, and it was alleged that massive bribes were made to middlemen, including her son, Mark, who was said to have received a 10 million Pound commission. The former employee of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, Robin Robison, broke his indoctrination oaths and told the Observer that, as part of his job, which involved sorting intelligence reports from the British intelligence agencies, he personally forwarded GCHQ transcripts of intercepted communications about Lonrho to Mrs. Thatcher's office. P9 Intelligence is not just neutral information; it can be powerful and dangerous. Intelligence gathering and military force are two sides of the same coin. Both are used by countries and groups within countries to advance their interests, often at the expense of others. To influence or defeat an opponent, knowledge can be more useful than military force. The type of intelligence described in this book, signals intelligence (SIGINT), is the largest, most secret and most expensive source of secret intelligence in the world today. P-5655 Like the British examples, and Mike Frost's Canadian examples, these stories will only be the tip of the iceberg. There is no evidence of a UKUSA code of ethics or a tradition of respect for Parliament or civil liberties in their home countries. The opposite seems to be true: that anything goes as long as you do not get caught. Secrecy not only permits but encourages questionable operations. Three observations need to be made about the immense spying capability provided by the ECHELON system. The first is that the magnitude of the global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War it has not been demobilized and budgets have not been significantly cut. Indeed the network has grown in power and reach. Yet the public justifications, for example that 'economic intelligence is now more important', do not even begin to explain why this huge spy system should be maintained. In the early 1980s the Cold War rhetoric was extreme and global war was seriously discussed and planned for. In the 1990s, the threat of global war has all but disappeared and none of the allies faces the remotest serious military threat. The second point about the ECHELON capabilities is that large parts of the system, while hiding behind the Cold War for their justification, were never primarily about the Cold War at all. The UKUSA alliance did mount massive operations against the Soviet Union and other 'communists', but other elements of the worldwide system, such as the interception of Intelsat communications, microwave networks and many regional satellites, were not aimed primarily at the Russians, the Iraqis or the North Koreans. Then, and now, they are targeting groups which do not pose any physical threat to the UKUSA allies at all. But they are ideal to use against political opponents, economic competitors, countries where the allies may want to gain some advantage (especially access to cheap resources) and administrations (like Nicaragua's Sandinista government) which do not fit an American-dominated world order. The third observation is that telecommunications organizations - including the telephone companies - are not blameless in all of this. These companies, to which people pay their monthly bills believing that the phone calls they make and the faxes they send are secure, should well be aware of the wholesale interception of 'private' communications that has been occurring for decades. Yet they neither invest in encryption technology nor insist that organizations such as the Washington-based Intelsat Corporation provide encryption. They do not let their customers know that their international communications are open to continuous interception. Wittingly or unwittingly, this lack of action assists large-scale spying against the individuals, businesses and government and private organizations that innocently entrust their communications to these companies. ECHELON is a staggeringly comprehensive and highly secret global spying system. Around the world there are networks of spy stations and spy satellites which can intercept communications anywhere on the planet. P18 Over the last 10 years a lot has been heard in New Zealand about the dangers of 'bureaucratic capture', about senior officials controlling their ministers rather than the other way around. The area of government activity described in this book is the ultimate example of bureaucratic capture. Politicians, whom the public has presumed will be monitoring the intelligence organizations on their behalf, have been systematically denied the information required to do that job. If a democratic society wants to control its secret agencies, it is essential that the public and politicians have the information and the will to do so. P113 Good encryption systems, such as PGP, developed privately by American Phil Zimmerman, are publicly available, although they are still used only by relatively few people in the know. The UKUSA agencies have been attempting to curb the spread of this technology, which is a major threat to their influence, so far without enough success to stop it. It remains to be seen how much the public can find a technological answer to maintaining privacy in a world with systems like ECHELON. *** end of 'Secret Power' excerpt ****************************************************************************** Throughout the Cold War, the United States government pounded into us again and again how Russia and China were evil because they monitored and controlled the political expression of their people, had sham laws and sham courts, all dedicated to maintaining the power of the all-important State. How the philosophy of communism was the rights of the individual were subservient to the needs of the State, as determined by the State. i.e. the antithesis of constitutional democracy Ironically, it was the United States that built the ultimate Orwellian surveillance mechanism. There was no public discussion about it. And used sham laws: Executive Orders and Congressional legislation. To create a secret agency and a secret sham court. Used repeatedly to control lawful domestic political protest. The Soviet Union and China we were told to fear. ****************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************** Part 2: On Monitoring and Being Monitored ---- - -- ---------- --- ----- --------- o On Monitoring - Driver's Seat - Five Months Statistics - The FBI Investigations - I Can See What You Are Thinking - Why I Monitor o On Being Monitored If you are an ordinary citizen, you may not notice the INVISIBLE massive spy apparatus until it is too late. As has already happened repeatedly: the government will use this National Spying Apparatus to crush political protests, and monitor the politically incorrect. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s... and the 1990s. Question: Why argue against something that would catch crime? Answer: ECHELON is so invasive we lose all privacy. It is infinitely abusable. It has been abused repeatedly. CALEA takes us into the abyss. Would monitoring really turn up that many violations? Meaning: is it really that effective a mechanism? ****************************************************************************** On Monitoring -- ---------- I am a traffic analysis person. Internet email. Company spook. Boo. The bad news: getting people fired. The good news: really great Internet humor is picked up too. From the land of "Put the shrimp on the barby, Marlene:" I was travelling on a tram the other day and in one seat there was an old digger (Australian soldier or ex soldier) reading his newspaper. Across from him was a juvenile with a spikey mohawk haircut coloured pink, green, orange and yellow. The old digger kept looking over his newspaper at him. Finally the young bloke spat the dummy, and yelled at the elderly gent, "What the f......k are you looking at you silly old bastard, haven't you ever done anything outrageous yourself ? As cool as a cucumber the old digger put down his paper and said, "I screwed a parrot once, and I was wondering if you were my son" Actually, I consider the people to have fired themselves. It's weird when you're on the controlling side: I almost started putting skull stickers on my terminal for each 'kill'. Thought it would be funny. (Real Country Song Title:) I'm Just A Bug On The Windshield Of Life ---------------------------------------- Tom and Linda were driving their car behind Lorena Bobbit on the day she cut her husband's penis off. When she threw it out the window, it hit Tom's windshield. Tom turned the windshield wipers on, cleared the mess, turned to Linda and said, "Did you see the dick on that bug?" For the past two years on Wall Street, I have monitored employee Internet email, using homegrown snarf code. Monitored by keyword spotting software with keyword spotting exclusion logic. I call this software: the Internet Risk Management Analytics. The NSA calls theirs DICTIONARY. The results of monitoring were stunning. Absolutely stunning. ---- All company names are real. All people's names in security incident reports are changed, as are any proprietary data/numbers. Any personal-personal traffic (the person's own words with outside friends) is changed so it is not the actual traffic that went across, but it will have the same visceral-word impact as the original. Picture yourself inside a company. You are an office worker. Like everyone else you have a desktop computer. It is on the company network. The company has an Internet connection. You can send/receive email over the Internet. Ready? Ready to keyword monitor roughly seven thousand people? Driver's Seat -------- ---- Both sites started with a bang. The smaller site had two security incidents within the first three hours. Two different format (Microsoft Access DB, Excel spreadsheet) copies of employee social security numbers and other personal personnel information flew out of the smaller site's Internet connection. Internet firewalls have no protection against file transfer via email. Yet companies often disallow FTP, another command for transferring files. ALL email is transferred as a file. My two managers shook their heads at people being so stupid as to mail company confidential information over the Internet in the clear. Their security rule was "Don't send it out over the Internet unless it's okay to read about in the next day's paper." The transmissions included the managers' social security numbers too. For non-U.S. people: a defacto key for accessing all of ones personal records. And why did I create and turn on email monitoring at that site? Well, those business magazines for the computer industry like to sell big screaming "Internet Security: the Sky is Falling!!!" covers now and then. So, one triggered the Chairman to start making strange noises about shutting down the Internet connection for security reasons. Also said something about having email printed out at the Internet system and hand-delivered. Now THAT scared the hell out of the rest of us, from geeks to managers, so, being the hired gun for doing Internet security, I created some capture code. All email in and out of the firm was now being copied to a 'save' directory. Each night I went over it - all email traffic - with the aid of my analytics: keyword spotting and keyword excluding software. I had never heard of ECHELON or DICTIONARY or anything like it. It was just obvious what to do from trying to check all (each and every one) email personally at first. There was way too much of it for me to do that. All the analytics I set up, including what I call the daily 'radar' file, depended entirely on keyword monitoring. Items selected for review met a series of include/exclude keyword matches. Everything. ********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** Ope's movie "Apollo 13" starring Tom Hanks had just come out: > Date: Thu, 21 Mar 96 13:03:43 EST > From: me > To: > Subject: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM > Cc: > > > Out bound from Salomon: From "Howie Windows" > In bound to Silicon Graphics: To: hojerk@sgi.com > Subject: sar source code > > internet:root 543> wc -l *.[ch] > 129 sa.h > 626 sadc.c > 532 saga.c > 496 sagb.c > 45 saghdr.h > 1463 sar.c > 220 timex.c > 3511 total > > 3500 lines of source, across seven sources, each clearly labelled: > > /* Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T */ > /* All Rights Reserved */ > > /* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T */ > /* The copyright notice above does not evidence any */ > /* actual or intended publication of such source code. */ > > ...followed by another email with a subset of the same source, > slightly modified, and the proprietary header stripped out. > > I hope it didn't flow past AT&T's ISP connections... [snip] ********** end excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** This transfer of proprietary source code that USED to be owned by AT&T did not even qualify for action. Salomon legal stated Salomon has a lower obligation for third-party copyrights than they did for software they contracted for themselves, like Sybase. Salomon didn't have a UNIX source license, so obviously the employee had gotten it elsewhere. In the following statistic, it was the only non-Salomon source code. We went from zero monitoring of Internet email traffic to... > On 3/21/96 we had our first security incident report. > > By 3/26/96 we had an astonishing 38,000 lines of proprietary source code > outbound. > > We were mentally unprepared. Figuratively we were pulling our hair out > wondering when the madness would stop. > > It never did. As I said, the results of keyword monitoring were stunning. If you look up computer security literature and read up on security incidents, you'll notice none are more articulate about inside-employee incidents other than to describe the people as "disgruntled employees". Wrong. I'll go over some of the major categories of incidents I encountered. Keyword monitoring is abstract to most people; these results show how powerful the technique is. Here are two from the category: o People innocently trying to get work done. This usually happens between the programmer and a third-party vendor. SISS stands for 'Salomon Information Security Services'. The configurations and passwords to Salomon's network control devices - the heart of the network - flew out of our Internet connection to vendor Cisco in a seemingly unstoppable whirlwind. This was the fourth report in a row. ********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* SECURITY INCIDENT REPORT, 6/27/96 ROUTER PASSWORDS BRIDGE AND ROUTER CONFIGURATIONS NOC SYSTEMS SECURITY --------------------------------- This is a security incident report regarding the Internet (a public wire) traffic of Salomon Brothers, which is monitored for security/compliance. NOTE: THESE INCIDENTS HAVE NOT STOPPED DESPITE REPEATED SISS REPORTS! This report should be taken as a complaint that insufficient procedures have been put in place to ensure current and new Salomon personnel are made aware of the security issues of Internet transmissions for network device configuration files. Suggest wide-spread distribution of a memo concerning the problem. Perhaps place "no-Internet-transmission" comments in all network config files. Standard warning issued to all new networkers. Three transmissions of live passwords to three different Salomon routers have been sent in cleartext over the Internet by Rock Transves nnn-nnnn of Internet Client Services: SENDER DATE ROUTER LINE PASSWORD Rock Transves 6/27/96 09:37 bc7f7w40 [global] bs345way [and again on] 6/26/96 16:10 con 0 bs345way aux 0 bs345way vty 0 qwerty0 Rock Transves 6/18/96 11:27 ard7w35 [global] z23c4v5b trangobw1 [global] bs345way con 0 bs345way ALL OF THESE ROUTERS *AND* ALL ROUTERS USING THE SAME PASSWORDS MUST HAVE THEIR PASSWORDS CHANGED. [snip] ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* SECURITY INCIDENT REPORT, 7/3/96 OASYS SOURCE CODE: 38,696 PROPRIETARY LINES -------------------------------- This is a security incident report regarding the Internet (a public wire) traffic of Salomon Brothers, which is monitored for security/compliance. On Jul 3 1996, sara xxxxxxxxx of XXX-NJ emailed over the unprotected Internet 38,696 lines of OASYS C++ code to vendor RogueWave for tech support This code was clearly marked: " This SOFTWARE is proprietary and confidential to \n" " SALOMON BROTHERS INC. and may not be duplicated, \n" " disclosed to third parties or used for any purpose \n" " not expressly authorized by Salomon Brothers Inc.. \n" " Any unauthorized use duplication or disclosure is \n" " prohibited by law and will result in prosecution. \n"; SISS sincerely hopes noone was positioned to monitor this Internet traffic, because they would have picked up the full transfer. ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* There are plenty of alternatives to a) sending our proprietary code over the unprotected Internet b) disclosing our code to a third party The answer to a) is: don't do it. Get MD/SOO permission to use a courier. The answer to b) is: o Isolated the bug(s) to the smallest amount necessary to reproduce the error. According to the previous email traffic between these two people, there were two compile-time bugs. The programmer can be faulted for not using two orders of magnitude fewer lines for demonstrating the error. A small fragment of code can be emailed. o If the problem is compile-time, email the relevant C/C++ preprocessor output snippet. The comments by the programmer in the email transfer state THE CODE DOESN'T COMPILE ANYWAY. o Have the vendor deliver a "debug" version of their product. That would be a good use for email. Sun Microsystems does that with a C++ product for us, their customer. Email the results back. o Have the vendor visit to troubleshoot. o Requested a login via SecureID and Salomon's netblazer, supporting 28.8 PPP (TCP/IP for windowing connectivity) for the vendor. Let them transfer in any tools they need to troubleshoot. Short-term access. o If it is truly necessary to transfer a large amount of code, such as Informix working to convert a large Sybase app, then take the time to write a shell script that (using say 'sed') scrambles the names of environment variables, and be sure to hand-ruin any proprietary algorithms. Why is transfer of Salomon proprietary source to a vendor's site the last step to try? Because Salomon loses control over the code. In the Informix /Sybase case, the vendor Informix requested (and received) another copy of the code "because I lost the previous copy". Two emails between the pair are enclosed. [snip] ********************************* :Size: 846077, Dated: Jul 3 17:52 :Sender: sara@sbixxx [sara xxxxxxxxxx XXX-NJ] :Recipient: xxxxxxx@roguewave.com [Dennis xxxxxxx] :Subject: Re: (Fwd) Re: (Fwd) rw... **** UUencoding, Filename='rw4.tar.Z' Hi Dennis, The last patch didn't help, here's some other code that will also trigger the bug. This code doesn't compile for other reasons but we need to get the Rougeview issue resolved. Could you ask xxxx to look this over? Thanks, sara :begin 600 rw4.tar.Z ********************************* # of lines filename ----- -------- 54 4x.env 139 LocalRules 344 LoginDlg.cc 65 LoginDlg.h 221 MacroRules 87 Makefile 619 OASYSMain.cc 175 OASYSMain.h 79 SubApp.cc 51 SubApp.h 54 gui_main.cc 33 gui_main.h 42 lib_inc 647 sbOfLogin.cc 113 sbOfLogin.h 0 sun4_4 22 version.txt 0 lib_inc/*.h 128 lib_inc/AccountBalance.h 22 lib_inc/AccountBalanceTest.h 59 lib_inc/AccrlInptTb.h 86 lib_inc/ArrClasT.h [snip of 247 lines] 38696 total ********** end excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** Another major category of security incidents are what I've named: o Dumb-and-Dumber ********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** > Date: Thu, 23 May 96 11:52:04 EDT > From: me > To: vivian [Salomon lawyer to whom I reported] > Subject: Snarf: Two Redhots May 21/22 1996 > Cc: mon_c > > Vivian, > > Redhot #1) > > : ********************************* > : Filename: May_21_96/dfAA12846 Size: 59853, Dated: May 21 07:08 > : From: someone@sbixxx (Lara M.) > : Recipient: nnnnnn.nnn@CompuServe.COM > : Subject: Re: Can You? > : ********************************* > > Lara M. sent 1900 lines of C++ source to ex-SBI consultant Roger Rogers, > at his request. (One of numerous instances of SBI people doing such). > > The full transmission is enclosed. > > * Name : ReconGen.cc > * Name : ReconGen::ReconGen() > * Name : LogError > * Name : processQuery > * Name : writeGenFile > * Name : openGeneratedFile > * Name : StartUp > * Name : ReconTool.cc > * Name : ReconTool::ReconTool() > * Name : loadConfig > * Name : getData > * Name : getMultiData > * Name : LogError > * Name : readTableNames > * Name : constructSqlStatement > * Name : processQuery > * Name : storeColumnData - gets various column attributes > * Name : lookupInTableB > * Name : printReportRow > * Name : printEndOfReport > * Name : clearDownRows > * Name : openReportFile > * Name : StartUp > > > Redhot #2) > > : ********************************* > : Filename: May_22_96/dfAA16598 Size: 11786, Dated: May 22 16:07 > : Sender: someone@sbixxx (someone someone) > : Recipient: someone@bfm.com > : Subject: prepay.c > : ********************************* > > > static char *rcsid="$Id: prepay.c,v 1.29 1996/03/26 13:42:30 kautilya"; > /* Copyright M-) 1995 by Salomon Brothers Inc. All rights reserved. > ** Unpublished. > ** This software is proprietary and confidential to Salomon Brothers Inc > ** and may not be duplicated, disclosed to third parties, or used for > ** any purpose not expressly authorized by Salomon Brothers Inc. > ** Any unauthorized use, duplication, or disclosure is prohibited by law > ** and will result in prosecution. */ > > About 500 lines of C source outbound. Full source is enclosed. > > > > Last line in this email is marked as such, there are no attachments. > Thanks, > ---guy > > [snip] > > Roger, > > Let me know if this is what you want, otherwise I'll try again ! > > Lara > > [snip] > Lara, > > I've been hoping for those progs but they hadn't arrived. Can you > check my email address? > > This will be mega brownie points for me to get it working so fast. > > Thanks, > Roger The first one is where an ex-worker ("Dumb") asks a current employee for something proprietary, in this case written by the ex-co-worker, and the current employee ("Dumber") gives it to them. It happened again and again and again at all sites I've monitored. They fired her. One of the more unusual Dumb-and-Dumber incidents was when a new hiree who was quite happy with her new job - told all her friends in email - then sent an email "Subject: For your eyes only" into dttus.com, with an Excel spreadsheet attached. It contained detailed compensation numbers for an entire trading desk. Technically it wasn't a Dumb-and-Dumber, more like a Dumber-to-Luckless, because the recipient didn't request it. Anyway, they fired her. And Deloitte & Touche fired the recipient!!! I guess they hold their people to very high standards: if you receive something proprietary of another company's, you'd better report it to management yourself. No, Deloitte & Touche didn't spot the transfer. We had to ask for our email "back". ********** end excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** It just never stopped. Here are three examples from category: o Working on another job while within the firm ********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' ********** ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* This report concerns Internet public wire traffic of XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX. Internet traffic is monitored for security and compliance purposes. ---------------------------------- Security Incident Report 10/25/96 Raymond Brock: working on another job while within XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX ---------------------------------- On Fri Oct 25 Raymond Brock sent out an email regarding "a demo" that triggered a secondary search of his traffic. The results show he is working on a project outside XXXXXX, with the aid of XXXXXX systems. This report consists of: #1 - detailed summary of findings #2 - Brock's resume #3 - email between Brock and his partners #4 - sorted-unique list of sites/URLs visited #5 - one full days WWW log Prepared by me on 10/28/96. ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* [snip] > Back in April, Raymond Brock mailed out his resume, stating > these accomplishments for XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX: > > o front-end trading system > o portfolio system daily processing > o developed interfaces to monitor and feed trade system > [snip] > Now, according to his email, he is doing a project that includes > features along those lines. The demo is coming up soon: > [snip, next: HTML transferred out did this:] > > PERSONAL BROKER SYSTEM (1=cash, 2=margin, 3=short) > ORDER ENTRY CONTROL (BUY, COVER SHORT, SELL, SELL SHORT) > TRADE HISTORY > : Statistics for your account are > : Liquidity Value > : Equity Percentage > : Balance after Trade > : Market Value > : Equity > : Cash Available > : Margin > : Total > : Short [final snip] ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* This report concerns Internet public wire traffic of XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX. Internet traffic is monitored for security and compliance purposes. ---------------------------------- Security Incident Report 10/29/96 Joseph Busy: working on another job while within XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX ---------------------------------- Aggregate email from Joseph Busy shows he is very involved in running a business on the side. At the least, he is directing the efforts of others who work in his other company via his XXXXXX email. Among the shots he is calling for: o Find out where our money is: report XXX to the BBB and Chamber of Commerce and Dunn and Bradstreet as past due 120 days on $200. o Collect money from the real estate company o Firm up a meeting for the investment bankers o Make sure all bids are out o Make sure distributor list is up to date and credit lines and terms are verified. o Where's the money from the Navy? o Find out costs for health insurance for the company (Ongoing). o Test program and relay any changes to [a company] o Finish systems matrix pricing o Get pricing on ISDN lines for Fishkill and Bayside It seems like this could possibly be distracting him from being "all he could be" at XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX. Mr. Busy requests the others to "check your email every few hours", and "do not leave before you talk to me". The email recipient is a Fred XXXXXXX, who works at PEI, "Tel: (718) nnn-nnnn, Fax: (718) nnn-nnnn". Another referenced person, "Gary", has the skills/job for making brochures. Gary has an email name of "xxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxxx" at ISP ATT. He receives a copy of Mr. Busy's email via Fred, might work at PEI too. They also have a database programmer, possibly Fred. Enclosed trailing are the actual emails. Prepared by me on 10/30/96. ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* ******************************************************************************* [final snip] :Date: Mon, 6 May 96 18:02:24 EDT :From: me :To: tmig@sbi :Subject: Bob Brain report :Cc: This is a report on the Internet traffic of Bob Brain. The Internet is a public wire, which Salomon is obligated to monitor for security/compliance reasons. Mr. Brain showed up on radar when he transferred out over 12,000 lines of source code which was extensively maintained by more than one Salomon person, to Merrill Lynch. His individual traffic (public Internet) was then pulled from backups. This is the summary report of what has been found. Prepared by me, 5/6/96. ##### ####### # # ####### ####### # # ####### ##### # # # # ## # # # ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### # # # # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # # # ## # # # ##### ####### # # # ####### # # # ##### #1 - Executive summary #2 - Brain admits he screws [SBI] around all the time #3 - His internal and external business activities #4 - The SYBASE-MODE source code transfers #5 - Why the source isn't PD even though he's labelled it PD. #6 - InterNic Registry Information for XXX.com and XXXX.com #7 - One days WWW traffic snapshot from his personal WS poison. #8 - A Day in the Life: a full days traffic, excluding tons of XXX-support email #9 - Misc traffic # # # # # ## ####### # # # # # Executive summary ####### # # # # # # ##### These are the activities of Bob Brain that are forbidden: o Transmitted out a