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    AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    Context of 'May 2004: AT&T Technician Familiar with NSA Wiretapping Operation Retires'

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    Late 2002-Early 2003: AT&T Constructs Secret Surveillance Facility in Main Operations Center



    An aerial view of the AT&T Easylink Service building in Bridgeton, Missouri, where the NSA allegedly has secret facilities. [Source: USGS via Microsoft]On behalf of the National Security Agency (NSA), AT&T constructs a secret, highly secured room in its network operations center in Bridgeton, Missouri, used to conduct secret government wiretapping operations. This is a larger and more elaborate “data mining” center than the one AT&T has constructed in San Francisco (see January 2003). Salon’s Kim Zetter will later write that the Bridgeton facility “had the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation,” including a sophisticated “mantrap” entrance using retinal and fingerprint scanners. Sometime in early 2003, AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009) discusses the Bridgeton facility with a senior AT&T manager, whom he will only identify as “Morgan.” The manager tells Klein that he considers the Bridgeton facility “creepy,” very secretive and with access restricted to only a few personnel. Morgan tells Klein that the secure room at Bridgeton features a logo on the door, which Klein will describe as “the eye-on-the-pyramid logo which is on the back of the dollar bill—and that got my attention because I knew that was for awhile the logo of the Total Awareness Program” (TIA-see Mid-January 2002, March 2002 and November 9, 2002). Klein notes that the logo “became such a laughingstock that they [the US government] withdrew it.” However, neither Klein nor Morgan find the NSA secure room at Bridgeton amusing. In June 2006, two AT&T workers will tell Zetter that the 100 or so employees who work in the room are “monitoring network traffic” for “a government agency,” later determined to be the NSA. Only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, which is secured with a biometric “mantrap” or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The few AT&T employees allowed into the room have undergone exhaustive security clearance procedures. “It was very hush-hush,” one of the AT&T workers will recall. “We were told there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were told: ‘Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they’re doing.’” (Neither of Zetter’s sources is Klein, who by the time Zetter’s article is published in 2006, will have made his concerns about the NSA and AT&T public.) The Bridgeton facility is the central “command center” for AT&T’s management of all routers and circuits carrying domestic and international Internet traffic. Hence, it is the ideal location for conducting surveillance or collecting data. AT&T controls about a third of all bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to and from homes and businesses throughout the US. The two employees, who both will leave AT&T to work with other telecommunications firms, will say they cannot be sure what kinds of activities actually take place within the secret room. The allegations follow those made by Klein, who after his retirement (see May 2004) will submit an affidavit stating his knowledge of other, similar facilities in San Francisco and other West Coast switching centers, whose construction and operations were overseen by the NSA (see January 16, 2004 and January 2003); the two AT&T employees say that the orders for the San Francisco facility came from Bridgeton. NSA expert Matthew Aid will say of the Bridgeton facility, “I’m not a betting man, but if I had to plunk $100 down, I’d say it’s safe that it’s NSA.” Aid will say the Bridgeton facility is most likely part of “what is obviously a much larger operation, or series of interrelated operations” combining foreign intelligence gathering with domestic eavesdropping and data collection. Former high-level NSA intelligence officer Russell Tice will say bluntly: “You’re talking about a backbone for computer communications, and that’s NSA.… Whatever is happening there with the security you’re talking about is a whole lot more closely held than what’s going on with the Klein case.” The kind of vetting that the Bridgeton AT&T employees underwent points to the NSA, both Aid and Tice will say; one of the two AT&T employees who will reveal the existence of the Bridgeton facility will add, “Although they work for AT&T, they’re actually doing a job for the government.” Aid will add that, while it is possible that the Bridgeton facility is actually a center for legal FBI operations, it is unlikely due to the stringent security safeguards in place: “The FBI, which is probably the least technical agency in the US government, doesn’t use mantraps. But virtually every area of the NSA’s buildings that contain sensitive operations require you to go through a mantrap with retinal and fingerprint scanners. All of the sensitive offices in NSA buildings have them.” The American Civil Liberties Union’s Jameel Jaffer will add that when the FBI wants information from a telecom such as AT&T, it would merely show up at the firm with a warrant and have a wiretap placed. And both the NSA and FBI can legally, with warrants, tap into communications data using existing technological infrastructure, without the need for such sophisticated surveillance and data-mining facilities as the ones in Bridgeton and San Francisco. Both AT&T and the NSA will refuse to comment on the facilities in Bridgeton, citing national security concerns. [Salon, 6/21/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 28-30]
    Entity Tags: Terrorist Surveillance Program, National Security Agency, Russell Tice, Matthew Aid, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kim Zetter, Mark Klein, AT&T, Jameel Jaffer, “Morgan” (senior AT&T manager), American Civil Liberties Union
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    Fall 2003: AT&T Technician Learns that NSA Using AT&T Equipment to Spy on Internet, Telephone Data Exchanges



    Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), working near the National Security Agency (NSA)‘s “secret room” in the firm’s Folsom Street, San Francisco facility (see October 2003), receives two documents pertaining to the equipment in that secret room. (In a 2007 interview with PBS, Klein will cite a third document as well, that he found lying on top of a router.) The two documents are entitled “SIMS Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure Issue 2, 01/12/03” and “SIMS Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure OSWF Training Issue 2 January 24, 2002.” “OSWF” stands for “On-Site Work Force.” As for “SIMS,” all Klein knows is that it is an acronym associated with the secret room. Reading over the documents, Klein realizes that they indicate the secret room contains a “splitter cabinet,” installed in February 2003 (see February 2003), containing “optical splitters” that “cut in” to signals sent through 16 “Peering Links” between AT&T and 16 other major carriers and Internet exchange points. He later recalls: “I brought them back to my desk, and when I started looking at it, I looked at it more, and I looked at it more, and finally it dawned on me sort of all at once, and I almost fell out of my chair, because this showed, first of all, what they had done, that they had taken working circuits, which had nothing to do with a splitter cabinet, and they had taken in particular what are called peering links which connect AT&T’s network with the other networks. It’s how you get the Internet, right? One network connects with another. So they took 16 high-speed peering links which go to places like Qwest [Communications] and Palo Alto Internet Exchange and places like that.… These circuits were working at one point, and the documents indicated in February 2003 they had cut into these circuits so that they could insert the splitter so that they can get the data flow from these circuits to go to the secret room. So this data flow meant that they were getting not only AT&T customers’ data flow; they were getting everybody else’s data flow, whoever else might happen to be communicating into the AT&T network from other networks. So it was turning out to be like a large chunk of the network, of the Internet.” The documents, he later says, name “the circuit IDs… the companies they belong to… [and] the cut date. And they were all in February [2003], when they were cut into the splitter” (see February 2003). The 16 carriers include ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange), Allegiance, Abovenet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet, and MAE West (the Metropolitan Area Exchange for AT&T’s Western region). In plain English, the splitter in the NSA room is duplicating the electronic data being sent through AT&T’s equipment, and sending the duplicated signals somewhere else, presumably to NSA computers for later processing. Klein is given the documents by a veteran AT&T technician who is preparing to retire. Klein, in a casual conversation with the colleague who gave him the documents, remarks, “It seems obvious to me, given that the secret room is next to the 4ESS (see January 2003), that they’re listening to phone calls.” Klein’s colleague shakes his head and says: “No, Internet.… I’ll show you.” (In 2007 Klein will learn from a telecommunications expert that since AT&T was transferring its long-distance telephone traffic onto Internet fiber cables, the splitter was most likely picking up both telephone and Internet traffic.) Klein’s colleague shows him the cabinet containing the splitters. Klein later tells a reporter: “[T]here were optical splitters, which basically were connected by fiber-optic cable down to the secret room on the sixth floor.… The analogy I can give you, which most people are familiar with is, say you get cable TV in your living room and then want to watch all the channels you get in the living room, you want to get all those same channels in your bedroom. So they install on the cable what they call a splitter, which splits off all the signals, duplicates of the same signals which go to the bedroom.… What the splitter does is make a duplicate copy of all the signals going across the fiber-optic cables.… We’re talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second, right? And it’s going into the router, and it’s coming back from the routers in that office. So what they do with the splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data, and those copies go down on the cable to the secret room.” Klein confirms from his colleague and from the documents that show the splitters are connected directly to the equipment in the secret room. [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 34-35]
    Entity Tags: Genuity, UUNET, XO, Allegiance, Abovenet, AT&T, ConXion, Sprint/Nextel, Telia, Palo Alto Internet Exchange, MAE West, Level 3, Global Crossing, Mark Klein, National Security Agency, C&W, PSINet, Qwest
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    Late 2003: AT&T Technician Learns of Secret NSA-Connected ‘Study Groups’, More Details about NSA Spying on Citizens’ Telecommunications



    Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), working at the company’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco one floor above the National Security Agency’s “secret room” monitoring the company’s Internet communications (see October 2003 and Fall 2003), is given a technical document to pass on to the secret room’s AT&T supervisor, a man Klein will identify only as “Ski” (see Summer 2002 and January 2003). Klein flips through the non-classified document, titled “Study Group 3 LGX/Splitter Wiring San Francisco Issue 1 12/10/02.” (LGX, Klein will later explain, refers to “Lucent LightGuide patch panels.”) He finds the document astonishing. It confirms, he will later write, “that the splitter cabinet in the 7th floor Internet room [his workstation] was directly connected to panels in the 6th floor secret room, which was referred to as the ‘SG3 Secure Room.’” Documents he has previously read (see Fall 2003) “made repeated references to the ‘Splitter,’ ‘Splitter Cabinet,’ or other descriptions which made it clear that the three documents were linked together.” Klein deduces that “SG3” stands for “Study Group 3,” an appellation he will write was chosen in “an apparent attempt to make a sinister operation look innocent.” And, since San Francisco is the site of the third study group, he deduces there must be at least two other study groups, presumably in different cities, “a fact,” he will write, “which was soon confirmed to me. I had a hand on only one small part of a giant octopus.” Klein pores more closely over the documents to try to learn exactly what AT&T and the NSA are doing, and soon finds a reference to a “Narus STA 6400.” He has no idea what this piece of equipment is, but he quickly learns that it is, as he will write, “a very sophisticated and specialized product that not only was perfectly suited for sorting through the data stream in real time looking for things, but… was already being marketed specifically to telecommunications and other companies for intelligence and police spying.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Klein, 2009, pp. 35-37] Later, Klein will describe the Narus STA 6400 as “not only designed for high-speed sifting through high-speed volumes of data, looking for something according to various program algorithms, something you’d think would be perfect for a spy agency.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]
    Entity Tags: National Security Agency, “Ski” (AT&T field support specialist), AT&T, Mark Klein
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    January 16, 2004: Senior AT&T Technician Writes Memo Outlining Specifics behind NSA’s Illegal Domestic Surveillance Program



    A sample page from Mark Klein’s AT&T documentation. [Source: Mark Klein / Seattle Times]Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), gravely concerned by the National Security Agency (NSA) spying operation going on in AT&T’s San Francisco facility (see October 2003) and now in possession of documents which prove the nature and scope of the telecommunications surveillance activities (see Fall 2003 and Late 2003), writes a memo summarizing his findings and conclusions. He appends eight pages of the unclassified documents he has in his possession, along with two photographs and some material from the Internet which documents the sophisticated surveillance equipment being used to gather data from AT&T’s electronic transmissions. The NSA and AT&T were, he later says, “basically sweeping up, vacuum-cleaning the Internet through all the data, sweeping it all into this secret room.… It’s the sort of thing that very intrusive, repressive governments would do, finding out about everybody’s personal data without a warrant. I knew right away that this was illegal and unconstitutional, and yet they were doing it.… I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days—your bank transactions, your email, everything—it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term ‘Orwellian.’ As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing.… So I was not only angry about it; I was also scared, because I knew this authorization came from very high up—not only high up in AT&T, but high up in the government. So I was in a bit of a quandary as to what to do about it, but I thought this should be halted.”
    Gathering 'the Entire Data Stream' - In his memo, Klein concludes that the NSA is using “splitter” equipment to copy “the entire data stream [emphasis in the original] and sent it to the [NSA’s] secret room for further analysis.” Klein writes that the splitters actually “split off a percentage of the light signal [from the fiber optic circuits] so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet… circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the ‘secret room.’ The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform—in fact, it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter—its only purpose is to enable a third party [the NSA] to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the Internet.” (Emphasis in the original.) In his book, Klein will explain that “each separate signal,” after being split, “contains all the information, nothing is lost, so in effect the entire data stream has been copied.” He will continue: “What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: email, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy.” Klein later explains to a reporter: “The signals that go across fiber optics are laser light signals. It’s light basically that runs through a fiber optic, which is a clear glass fiber, and it has to be at a certain level for the routers to see the light and interpret the data correctly. If the light gets too low, just as if you get a weak flashlight with bad batteries, at a certain point it doesn’t work. If the light level drops too low, the router starts dropping bits and getting errors, and eventually you get loss of signal, and it just doesn’t work at all.… The effect of the splitter is to reduce the strength of the signal, and that may or may not cause a problem, depending on how much the signal is reduced.” A telecommunications company would not, as a rule, use such a splitter on its backbone Internet traffic because of the risk of degraded signal quality. “You want to have as few connections on your main data lines as possible,” Klein will say, “because each connection reduces the signal strength, and a splitter is a connection, and if you can avoid that, all the better.”
    Inherently Illegal - Klein will explain that there is no way these activities are legal: “There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the Fourth Amendment, warrants have to be specific, ‘particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.’ It was also a blatant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA—see 1978], which calls for specific warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment. This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Wired News, 5/22/2006; PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 37, 119-133]
    The Narus STA 6400 - Klein discusses one key piece of equipment in the NSA’s secret room, the Narus STA 6400 (see Late 2003). Narus is a firm that routinely sells its equipment not only to telecom firms such as AT&T, “but also to police, military, and intelligence officials” (see November 13-14, 2003). Quoting an April 2000 article in Telecommunications magazine, Klein writes that the STA 6400 is a group of signal “traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.… These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP [Internet Service Provider] cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device.” Klein quotes a 1999 Narus press release that says its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology “captures comprehensive customer usage data… and transforms it into actionable information… [it] is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all Internet applications.” The Narus hardware allows the NSA “to look at the content of every data packet going by, not just the addressing information,” Klein will later write.
    A 'Dream Machine for a Police State' - Klein later writes of the Narus STA 6400: “It is the dream machine of a police state, one that even George Orwell could not imagine. Not only does it enable the government to see what millions of people are saying and doing every day, but it can build up a database which reveals the connections among social groups—who’s calling and emailing whom. Such a device can easily be turned against all dissident protest groups, and even the Democratic and Republican parties, with devastating effect. And it’s in the hands of the executive power, in total secrecy.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Wired News, 5/22/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 37-40] In support of the memo and an ensuing lawsuit against AT&T (see January 31, 2006), Klein will later write: “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA. And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of Internet communications of countless citizens.” [Wired News, 4/7/2006]
    Entity Tags: National Security Agency, Narus, Mark Klein, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, AT&T
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    April 19-20, 2004: Bush Claims All Surveillance Done with Court Warrants, Former AT&T Engineer Disputes Claim



    At a speech in Hershey, Pennsylvania, supporting the USA Patriot Act (see October 26, 2001), President Bush tells listeners that all US surveillance efforts are done with warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court: “For years, law enforcement used so-called roving wire taps to investigate organized crime. You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order—and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.… See, with court approval, we have long used roving wire taps to lock up monsters—mobsters. Now [with the Patriot Act in effect] we have a chance to lock up monsters, terrorist monsters.” [White House, 4/19/2004] The next day, Bush makes a similar claim during another pro-Patriot Act speech in Buffalo. He tells listeners: “[T]here are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution. But a roving wiretap means—it was primarily used for drug lords. A guy, a pretty intelligence drug lord would have a phone, and in old days they could just get a tap on that phone. So guess what he’d do? He’d get him another phone, particularly with the advent of the cell phones. And so he’d start changing cell phones, which made it hard for our DEA types to listen, to run down these guys polluting our streets. And that changed, the law changed on—roving wiretaps were available for chasing down drug lords. They weren’t available for chasing down terrorists, see? And that didn’t make any sense in the post-9/11 era. If we couldn’t use a tool that we’re using against mobsters on terrorists, something needed to happen. The Patriot Act changed that. So with court order, law enforcement officials can now use what’s called roving wiretaps, which will prevent a terrorist from switching cell phones in order to get a message out to one of his buddies.” [White House, 4/20/2004] Former AT&T senior technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), who helped install the equipment used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and his firm to intercept foreign and domestic Internet communications (see January 16, 2004), will later say that Bush’s insistence that the administration gets court orders before wiretapping communications is false. AT&T, on behalf of the NSA, was monitoring “billions of messages a second,” Klein will write, all without court orders. [Klein, 2009, pp. 47-48] Klein will call Bush’s description of the surveillance program “disingenuous,” and continue: “They present it as about phone calls. They’re just watching a few bad people who make phone calls to al-Qaeda and the Middle East, and you notice they don’t talk about the Internet hardly at all. That part of it hasn’t been revealed, because if they did, Americans would realize it’s not just a few people; it’s everybody, because the data they’re handing over is not selected out. When you run fiber optics through a splitter and you send all that data to a secret room, there’s no selecting going on there at all.… They have no way of sifting it out unless they look through it later. Now they can claim, ‘Oh, we are right as rain; we’re only doing the legal thing and selecting out a few people that we’re legally entitled to,’ but that’s only after they get all the data. The analogy I use: If the government claims: ‘Well, when you do your taxes, why don’t you just write me a blank check and we’ll fill in the amount? Don’t worry. We’ll do it legal. We’ll fill in the right amount,’ would you do that? Nobody would trust the government by writing a blank check to them. It’s the same thing with the data we’re giving them.… [T]he Fourth Amendment specifically bans general warrants. It calls for specific warrants in which the things to be seized and the persons to be seized are specifically named. There’s a reason for that. It’s to protect against arbitrary government power. And what they’ve done is to trample over the Fourth Amendment by basically instituting a general warrant on the Internet.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]
    Entity Tags: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Mark Klein, National Security Agency, George W. Bush
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    May 2004: AT&T Technician Familiar with NSA Wiretapping Operation Retires



    Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009) accepts a buyout package from his firm and retires. Klein, disheartened by the illegal AT&T/NSA wiretapping operation he has documented (see January 16, 2004), decides to keep the documents he has collected over the years (see Fall 2003 and Late 2003), the “hard proof” of the operation, he will later write, “in case there was some change in the political winds that would enable me to come forward and expose… the crimes which I knew were being committed.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 44]
    Entity Tags: Mark Klein, AT&T
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    June 9, 2005: Bush Again Claims All Surveillance Done with Court Warrants, Former AT&T Engineer Disputes Claim



    In a Columbus, Ohio, speech praising the USA Patriot Act (see October 26, 2001), President Bush claims that when US government agencies wiretap anyone’s phones or email communications, they do so with a court order. Bush says: “Before the Patriot Act, agents could use wiretaps to investigate a person committing mail fraud, but not to investigate a foreign terrorist. The Patriot Act corrected all these pointless double standards—and America is safer as a result. One tool that has been especially important to law enforcement is called a roving wiretap. Roving wiretaps allow investigators to follow suspects who frequently change their means of communications. These wiretaps must be approved by a judge, and they have been used for years to catch drug dealers and other criminals. Yet, before the Patriot Act, agents investigating terrorists had to get a separate authorization for each phone they wanted to tap. That means terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone. The Patriot Act fixed the problem by allowing terrorism investigators to use the same wiretaps that were already being using against drug kingpins and mob bosses. The theory here is straightforward: If we have good tools to fight street crime and fraud, law enforcement should have the same tools to fight terrorism.” [White House, 6/9/2005] Bush made almost identical claims a year ago (see April 19-20, 2004). The same day as Bush makes his speech, the White House issues a fact sheet making the same claims (see June 9, 2005). Former AT&T senior technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), who helped install the equipment used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and his firm to intercept foreign and domestic Internet communications (see January 16, 2004), will later say that Bush’s insistence that the administration gets court orders before wiretapping communications is false. AT&T, on behalf of the NSA, was monitoring “billions of messages a second,” Klein will write, all without court orders. [Klein, 2009, pp. 47-48]
    Entity Tags: Mark Klein, George W. Bush, National Security Agency, USA Patriot Act
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    December 10, 2005: Bush Says US Obtains Court Warrants before Mounting Surveillance Efforts; Former AT&T Technician Disputes Claim



    In his weekly radio address, President Bush claims that the US always obtains court warrants before launching electronic surveillance efforts. “The Patriot Act is helping America defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all our people,” he says. “The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Under the act, law enforcement officers need a federal judge’s permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist’s phone or search his property. Congress also oversees our use of the Patriot Act. Attorney General Gonzales delivers regular reports on the Patriot Act to the House and the Senate.” [White House, 12/10/2005] Bush has made similar claims in the recent past (see April 19-20, 2004, June 9, 2005, and April 19-20, 2004). Former AT&T senior technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), who helped install the equipment used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and his firm to intercept foreign and domestic Internet communications (see January 16, 2004), will later say that Bush’s insistence that the administration gets court orders before wiretapping communications is false. AT&T, on behalf of the NSA, was monitoring “billions of messages a second,” Klein will write, all without court orders. [Klein, 2009, pp. 47-48]
    Entity Tags: Mark Klein, AT&T, George W. Bush, USA Patriot Act, National Security Agency
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    December 15-31, 2005: Former AT&T Technician Decides to Become ‘Whistleblower’ on Illegal Government Surveillance Program



    Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) is gladdened to see the New York Times’s reports on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program (see December 15, 2005 and December 24, 2005). Klein has known since 2002 that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been using AT&T facilities to illegally eavesdrop on American citizens’ telephone and Internet communications (see Late 2002, January 2003, October 2003, Fall 2003, Late 2003, Late 2003, and January 16, 2004). He has considered going public with his knowledge, but has so far refrained because, he will later explain, “[t]he atmosphere was still kind of scary.” He will later say of the Times report, “They seemed to be talking mainly about phone calls, but anyway, it was revealed that there was an illegal spying program going on, and I thought, ‘Ah, this would probably blow the whole thing,’ and I thought it would all come out, and I don’t need to do anything.” However, Klein is horrified to see the government’s response. He will say: “[W]hat came out was the government turned around and went on the offensive against anybody who would dare to criticize them.… They’re issuing threats: Anyone who has a security clearance and spills any beans here is in for prosecution. That was deliberately said by them several times on TV to intimidate anybody in, say, the NSA who knew the truth, intimidate them so they would not come forward. So that silenced anybody in the intelligence community” (see December 17, 2005, December 19, 2005, December 21, 2005, December 30, 2005, and January 25-26, 2006). In his 2009 book Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It, Klein will write that the Justice Department’s December 2005 investigation into the leak of classified information that led to the Times reports (see December 30, 2005) “was obviously intended to silence Congress, the media, and any potential whistleblowers inside the NSA who might have been tempted to come forward. The administration was manipulating the secrecy oath which people had taken to get security clearances, turning it into a weapon to silence anyone who had knowledge of wrongdoing.” Klein decides that he must come forward. He never received a security clearance, so he cannot be threatened with legal action over violating such clearance. He will explain: “All I had and still have are some company documents and some knowledge of some illicit NSA installation at AT&T’s network. And if anybody—say, Congress—was willing to follow the trail, I can give them all the names they want, and they can go up the hierarchy of AT&T all the way up to Dave Dorman, who was the president back then, and they can go even higher, and they can find out who is responsible for this, and they can ask them under oath and subpoena what the heck is going on here, if they had the will to do it.” Klein later admits to some hesitation and trepidation at undertaking such an effort, and will cite the “McCarthyite” atmosphere he says the government has created in which “dissidents become the target of a lynch mob searching for ‘terrorists.’” But, he will write, he believes the Times stories are “a political indication of a shift at the top of government, a split of some kind which could provide an opening.… Maybe they would publish my material, I thought, and that would provide some protection.” By December 31, Klein writes a preface to his memo from almost two years before (see January 16, 2004 and December 31, 2005). [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 52-53]
    Entity Tags: New York Times, AT&T, Bush administration (43), National Security Agency, US Department of Justice, Mark Klein
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    December 31, 2005: Retired AT&T Technician Prepares to Become NSA ‘Whistleblower’



    Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), angered by the Bush administration’s counterattack against government and media members who have helped to expose its warrantless wiretapping operation (see December 15-31, 2005), decides to go public with a memo he wrote about his own knowledge of the collusion between AT&T and the National Security Agency (NSA) in eavesdropping on American citizens’ communications (see January 16, 2004). He updates the memo with a brief preface, selects eight pages of the 121 pages of AT&T documentation he possesses which he believes gives a good overview of the NSA’s surveillance equipment installation, and includes the two photographs he has taken of the NSA’s “secret room” at the AT&T facility in San Francisco and the Internet research he has done on the Narus STA 6400 equipment the NSA is using to sort the communications being captured and recorded (see Late 2003). Instead of entrusting his newly refurbished memo to the Internet, he uses the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) security protocol for anticipated dissemination, burns the data onto a CD, and begins searching online for civil liberties groups that might be interested in his work. [Wired News, 5/17/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 53-55]
    Entity Tags: AT&T, National Security Agency, Mark Klein
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    Early January 2006: Retired AT&T Technician Joins Civil Liberties Group in Documenting Evidence of Government Surveillance Program



    Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), angered by the Bush administration’s counterattack against government and media members who have helped to expose its warrantless wiretapping operation (see December 15-31, 2005) and having prepared evidence to prove his knowledge of AT&T’s complicity with the NSA in setting in motion that operation (see December 31, 2005), begins searching for a civil liberties group that might be interested in his work. He quickly determines that two organizations, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), might be his best choices. Reluctant to use the telephone for fear of surveillance, he visits the EPIC offices, where he gives a lawyer a copy of the CD containing his evidence, printouts, and a disk copy of his PGP privacy key for public dissemination. He will later say that the lawyer on site is “polite” but shows little interest. When two weeks go by without any contact from EPIC, he journeys to San Francisco to the EFF offices with his documentation in hand. The reception at EFF is far different from the polite disinterest evidenced at EPIC. Executive director Shari Steele escorts him to speak with senior attorneys Kevin Bankston and Lee Tien. The EFF staffers tell Klein that their organization is already preparing a lawsuit against AT&T for illegally providing its customers’ telephone records to the government (see January 31, 2006), and his evidence will be very useful in the suit. Klein later writes, “I felt a sense of relief, that I had found the right place: a group that wanted to take on this fight.” EFF’s initial lawsuit does not include Klein’s material, but the organization will use it in the court proceedings. [Klein, 2009, pp. 55-56]
    Entity Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation, AT&T, Bush administration (43), Electronic Privacy Information Center, Kevin Bankston, Shari Steele, Lee Tien, Mark Klein
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    January 30, 2006: Washington Post: NSA Building ‘Massive’ Data Warehouse in Colorado, Key Element in Agency’s Domestic Surveillance Program



    Washington Post reporter William Arkin reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) is “building a new warning hub and data warehouse” in Aurora, Colorado, just outside of Denver, on the grounds of Buckley Air Force Base. The agency is transferring many key personnel from its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters to Aurora. Arkin calls the new NSA facility, named the Aerospace Data Facility (ADF), “massive,” and says he believes it is the hub of the NSA’s data mining operation (see January 16, 2004). According to Government Executive magazine, the NSA’s new data storage facility “will be able to hold the electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days.” While the NSA explains that the new facility is a cost-cutting measure and part of the agency’s post-9/11 decentralization—“This strategy better aligns support to national decision makers and combatant commanders,” an NSA spokesman tells one reporter—Arkin says that the “NSA is aligning its growing domestic eavesdropping operations—what the administration calls ‘terrorist warning’ in its current PR campaign—with military homeland defense organizations, as well as the CIA’s new domestic operations [in] Colorado.… Colorado is now the American epicenter for national domestic spying.” Arkin notes that previous news reports have said that the CIA is planning to move much of its domestic National Resources Division to Aurora as well. He also notes that Colorado is the home of the US military’s Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military arm responsible for homeland defense. The move also allows the NSA to better coordinate its efforts with private contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman Mission Systems, and Raytheon, all of which have presences in Colorado. Arkin names all three firms as partners with the NSA in building the ADF. Former senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) will later write, “Over months and years, the database would be huge, ready for data mining whenever the government wants to go after someone.” [Washington Post, 1/31/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 40-41]
    Entity Tags: National Security Agency, Aerospace Data Facility, Government Executive Magazine, Mark Klein, Northrup Grumman Mission Systems, William Arkin, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon, US Northern Command
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    February 5, 2006: NSA, Bush Administration Claim Number of Citizens Affected by Surveillance Infinitesimal, Others Disagree



    A Washington Post article repeats assertions by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Bush administration that even if the NSA is automatically intercepting and storing millions of domestic phone calls and emails (see January 16, 2004), such computerized surveillance does not legally “count” unless it is examined—i.e. read or listened to—by human analysts. As the Post reports, NSA rules state that “‘acquisition’ of content does not take place until a conversation is interrupted and processed ‘into an intelligible form intended for human inspection.’” The Post article says that “nearly all” of the intercepted “overseas” communications from American citizens have been “dismissed” by intelligence officers who found nothing of interest in them. The Post observes: “Fewer than 10 US citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.” And, according to the Post’s “knowledgeable sources,” no more than 5,000 Americans have had their conversations recorded or their emails examined by intelligence analysts. According to Bush administration officials, the Post reports, “[s]urveillance takes place in several stages… the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, emails, and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears. Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, ‘wash out’ most of the leads within days or weeks.” People who have helped develop the computer analysis technology say that “it is a triumph for artificial intelligence if a fraction of one percent of the computer-flagged conversations guide human analysts to meaningful leads.”
    Controversy over Legality, Usefulness of Surveillance - National security lawyers say that the high proportion of false leads and innocent bystanders being wiretapped contravenes the “reasonable” search provisions of the Fourth Amendment. One government official says the success rate should be closer to 50 percent—one out of every two persons surveilled—and not less than one percent. “Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official says, “knew they could never meet that standard—that’s why they didn’t go through” the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Bush officials refuse to say whether the NSA is discarding the more than 99 percent of communications that it intercepts and deems useless for further analysis. Jeff Jonas, an IBM scientist who invented a data-mining system now in use by both private and governmental entities, says that the kind of pattern-matching data analysis used by the NSA in its surveillance program is neither useful nor accurate. Those analysis techniques that “look at people’s behavior to predict terrorist intent,” he says, “are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that’s necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines.” Psychology professor James W. Pennebaker disagrees. “Frankly, we’ll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time,” he says, “but one percent is far better than one in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions.” [Washington Post, 2/5/2006]
    Former AT&T Technician: AT&T, NSA Violating Fourth Amendment - Former AT&T senior technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) will later take a different view of the issue. In 2009, he will write: “[T]he illegal act happens at the point of seizure by the government, i.e. the splitter—not later, whether or not a medium is involved (see January 16, 2004). That is the whole part of the Fourth Amendment, which demands the government get a warrant to show ‘probable cause’ for seizing things, whatever the government does with it afterwards. What they do later is unknown, and at any rate, their word on anything has proven to be an exercise in prevarication.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 48-49]
    Entity Tags: Jeff Jonas, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Bush administration (43), James W. Pennebaker, Mark Klein, National Security Agency, Washington Post
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    March 29, 2006: Expert Witness Says NSA Would Have Placed Signal ‘Splitters’ Differently if It Only Intended to Monitor International Communications



    Expert witness J. Scott Marcus, in an analysis submitted on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T (see January 31, 2006), notes that if the NSA had wanted to intercept only international electronic communications in its surveillance operations facilited by AT&T (see January 16, 2004), it would have placed “splitters” only at entry points such as ocean cable-head stations rather than in AT&T offices (see October 2003) in locations such as Atlanta and San Francisco (see Late 2003), where they would inevitably pick up huge amounts of domestic communications. Marcus, a former AT&T employee who held a top secret clearance when he was a consultant for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), writes: “The majority of international IP [Internet Protocol] traffic enters the United States at a limited number of locations, many of them in the areas of northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, New York, and (for Latin America) south Florida. This deployment, however, is neither modest nor limited, and it apparently involves considerably more locations that would be required to catch the majority of international traffic.” (Emphasis in original.) Marcus continues: “I conclude that the designers of the SG3 Configuration (see Late 2003) made no attempt, in terms of the location or position of the fiber split, to exclude data sources primarily comprised of domestic data.… Once the data has been diverted, there is nothing in the data that reliably and unambiguously distinguishes whether the destination is domestic or foreign.” Marcus estimates that the NSA has 15 to 20 sites in AT&T facilities around the country, and says, “a substantial fraction, probably well over half, of AT&T’s purely domestic traffic was diverted.” Former senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) will later write, “Though Marcus refrained from drawing the obvious conclusion, the facts strongly suggest that this entire apparatus was designed for domestic spying.” (Emphasis in original). [Klein, 2009, pp. 49-50, 71] Klein will also write that Marcus’s expertise “was at a much higher level than mine.” Klein will later write that he is pleased that Marcus’s statement validates and supports his own documentation and conclusions. [Klein, 2009, pp. 71]
    Entity Tags: National Security Agency, AT&T, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mark Klein, J. Scott Marcus
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    February 3, 2009: Experts: NSA Would Have Chosen Different AT&T Facility for Data Surveillance Had Its Interest Not Been in Domestic Communications



    PBS’s Nova series broadcasts “The Spy Factory,” an examination of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. The program is crafted by author and national security expert James Bamford with PBS producer Scott Willis. One portion of the broadcast shows a representation of the enormous data flow of Internet communications entering the US from Asia at Morro Bay, California, and then goes to a small AT&T facility in San Luis Obispo. “If you want to tap into international communications, it seems like the perfect place is San Luis Obispo,” Bamford narrates. “That’s where 80 percent of all communications from Asia enters the United States.” However, the NSA taps into the AT&T datastream much farther north, in AT&T’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco (see October 2003 and Late 2003). According to former AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), the NSA would have far more access to domestic communications by tapping into the dataflow at the San Francisco facility. He will later write, “This fact belies the government’s claims that they’re only looking at international communications.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 50-51; PBS, 2/3/2009]
    Entity Tags: Mark Klein, AT&T, James Bamford, Public Broadcasting System, National Security Agency, Scott Willis
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties


    July 7, 2009: Former AT&T Technician Publishes Book Exposing NSA, AT&T Actions in Eavesdropping on Americans’ Electronic Communications



    The cover of Mark Klein’s ‘Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It.’ [Source: BookSurge / aLibris (.com)]Former AT&T technician Mark Klein self-publishes his book, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It. In his acknowledgements, Klein writes that he chose to self-publish (through BookSurge, a pay-to-publish venue) because “[t]he big publishers never called me,” and the single small publishing house that offered to publish his book added “an unacceptable requirement to cut core material.” Klein based his book on his experiences as an AT&T engineer at the telecom giant’s San Francisco facility, where he primarily worked with AT&T’s Internet service. In 2002 and 2003, Klein witnessed the construction of of a “secret room,” a facility within the facility that was used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to gather billions of email, telephone, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), and text messages, most of which were sent by ordinary Americans. The NSA did its electronic surveillance, Klein writes, secretly and without court warrants. Klein describes himself as “wiring up the Big Brother machine,” and was so concerned about the potential illegality and constitutional violations of the NSA’s actions (with AT&T’s active complicity) that he retained a number of non-classified documents proving the extent of the communications “vacuuming” being done. Klein later used those documents to warn a number of reporters, Congressional members, and judges of what he considered a horrific breach of Americans’ right to privacy. [Klein, 2009, pp. 9-11, 21-24, 33, 35, 38, 40] In 2007, Klein described his job with the firm as “basically to keep the systems going. I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up.” He explained why he chose to become a “whistleblower:” “Because I remember the last time this happened.… I did my share of anti-war marches when that was an active thing back in the ‘60s, and I remember the violations and traffic transgressions that the government pulled back then for a war that turned out to be wrong, and a lot of innocent people got killed over it. And I’m seeing all this happening again, only worse. When the [NSA] got caught in the ‘70s doing domestic spying, it was a big scandal, and that’s why Congress passed the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law, as you know, to supposedly take care of that (see 1978). So I remember all that. And the only way any law is worth anything is if there’s a memory so that people can say: ‘Wait a minute. This happened before.’ And you’ve got to step forward and say: ‘I remember this. This is the same bad thing happening again, and there should be a halt to it.’ And I’m a little bit of that institutional memory in the country; that’s all.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]
    Entity Tags: National Security Agency, AT&T, BookSurge, Mark Klein
    Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties

  2. #2

    Re: AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    Your new Facebook ‘friend’ may be the FBI
    Agents are logging on to exchange messages with suspects, and more

    WASHINGTON — The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

    U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.

    Think you know who's behind that "friend" request? Think again. Your new "friend" just might be the FBI.

    The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target's friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

    Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects' alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, obtained the Justice Department document when it sued the agency and five others in federal court. The 33-page document underscores the importance of social networking sites to U.S. authorities. The foundation said it would publish the document on its Web site on Tuesday.

    With agents going undercover, state and local police coordinate their online activities with the Secret Service, FBI and other federal agencies in a strategy known as "deconfliction" to keep out of each other's way.
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    "You could really mess up someone's investigation because you're investigating the same person and maybe doing things that are counterproductive to what another agency is doing," said Detective Frank Dannahey of the Rocky Hill, Conn., Police Department, a veteran of dozens of undercover cases.

    A decade ago, agents kept watch over AOL and MSN chat rooms to nab sexual predators. But those text-only chat services are old-school compared with today's social media, which contain mountains of personal data, photographs, videos and audio clips — a potential treasure trove of evidence for cases of violent crime, financial fraud and much more.

    The Justice Department document, part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials, describes the value of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other services to government investigators. It does not describe in detail the boundaries for using them.

    "It doesn't really discuss any mechanisms for accountability or ensuring that government agents use those tools responsibly," said Marcia Hoffman, a senior attorney with the civil liberties foundation.

    The group sued in Washington to force the government to disclose its policies for using social networking sites in investigations, data collection and surveillance.

    Covert investigations on social-networking services are legal and governed by internal rules, according to Justice Department officials. But they would not say what those rules are.

    The Justice Department document raises a legal question about a social-media bullying case in which U.S. prosecutors charged a Missouri woman with computer fraud for creating a fake MySpace account — effectively the same activity that undercover agents are doing, although for different purposes.

    The woman, Lori Drew, helped create an account for a fictitious teen boy on MySpace and sent flirtatious messages to a 13-year-old neighborhood girl in his name. The girl hanged herself in October 2006, in a St. Louis suburb, after she received a message saying the world would be better without her.

    A jury in California, where MySpace has its servers, convicted Drew of three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization because she was accused of violating MySpace's rules against creating fake accounts. But last year a judge overturned the verdicts, citing the vagueness of the law.

    "If agents violate terms of service, is that 'otherwise illegal activity'?" the document asks. It doesn't provide an answer.

    Facebook's rules, for example, specify that users "will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission." Twitter's rules prohibit its users from sending deceptive or false information. MySpace requires that information for accounts be "truthful and accurate."

    A former U.S. cybersecurity prosecutor, Marc Zwillinger, said investigators should be able to go undercover in the online world the same way they do in the real world, even if such conduct is barred by a company's rules. But there have to be limits, he said.
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    In the face-to-face world, agents can't impersonate a suspect's spouse, child, parent or best friend. But online, behind the guise of a social-networking account, they can.

    "This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships," said Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace.

    Undercover operations aren't necessary if the suspect is reckless. Federal authorities nabbed a man wanted on bank fraud charges after he started posting Facebook updates about the fun he was having in Mexico.

    Maxi Sopo, a native of Cameroon living in the Seattle area, apparently slipped across the border into Mexico in a rented car last year after learning that federal agents were investigating the alleged scheme. The agents initially could find no trace of him on social media sites, and they were unable to pin down his exact location in Mexico. But they kept checking and eventually found Sopo on Facebook.

    While Sopo's online profile was private, his list of friends was not. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Scoville began going through the list and was able to learn where Sopo was living. Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September. He is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

    The Justice document describes how Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have interacted with federal investigators: Facebook is "often cooperative with emergency requests," the government said. MySpace preserves information about its users indefinitely and even stores data from deleted accounts for one year. But Twitter's lawyers tell prosecutors they need a warrant or subpoena before the company turns over customer information, the document says.

    "Will not preserve data without legal process," the document says under the heading, "Getting Info From Twitter ... the bad news."

    Twitter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

    The chief security officer for MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, said MySpace doesn't want to be the company that stands in the way of an investigation.

    "That said, we also want to make sure that our users' privacy is protected and any data that's disclosed is done under proper legal process," Nigam said.

    MySpace requires a search warrant for private messages less than six months old, according to the company.

    Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the company has put together a handbook to help law enforcement officials understand "the proper ways to request information from Facebook to aid investigations."
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    The Justice document includes sections about its own lawyers. For government attorneys taking cases to trial, social networks are a "valuable source of info on defense witnesses," they said. "Knowledge is power. ... Research all witnesses on social networking sites."

    But the government warned prosecutors to advise their own witnesses not to discuss cases on social media sites and to "think carefully about what they post."

    It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as "friends" on these services.

    "Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination," the government said.

  3. #3

    Re: AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    the most secretive agency in the world, Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) or signals intelligence agency

    Signals Intelligence - NSA/CSS - National Security Agency Signals Intelligence - NSA/CSS

    Covert Operations of the U.S. National Security Agency

  4. #4

    Re: AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    Facebook And It's Connections To The C.I.A. And D.A.R.P.A. by Brian S Staveley

    01/19/2012

    Facebook was setup by the C.I.A. Try telling that to most people and they laugh at it. People seem to think its a coincidence that Facebook seems to be so intrusive over and over again. Privacy policies that would make anyone scratch their head. I'm not going to beat around the bush with this blog post. Facebook was setup by the C.I.A. as a data mining project to collect as much information on as many people as they could. Not only that but it also has very strong ties to D.A.R.P.A. . The purpose of this data mining project that became Facebook was to find out a boat load of things on people. Where they are going. What they are doing. What airline are they using Who do they associate with What type of books or movies have you been reading. How you feel about things politically. The list goes on and on. Before I elaborate let me say that my prior statement about Facebook being setup by the C.I.A. isn't a theory or a hunch. If you simply follow the money its quite easy to see what is going on. Before we follow this money trail, just think about this.

    If Facebook was setup by the C.I.A. (and it was) its a pretty brilliant plan. Never before have the people they want to watch actually given up so much information VOLUNTARILY! The C.I.A. doesn't even have to dig for most of it. People put it right out there. Think about how descriptive some people's status updates are. They tell you where they are going, who they are with sometimes, what they like. All these things. Did you know that once Facebook has you tagged in ONE PHOTO they have you identified anytime an image of you is uploaded whether it is tagged, labeled, or anything else to ID it? Facebook runs facial recognition on all photos and can even ID you by running it on some really low resolution shots, and its done for free! Does that sound like something a website would do for free? There are some much more intrusive things Facebook does to track you and every site you visit that you probably don't know about. All this without visiting Facebook or even needing to be a member!! After I tell you about the money trail and the start of Facebook we will get into more of these privacy issues and there are a lot. The facial recognition is just the tip of the iceberg. Before we do all that let's have a quick history lesson, the way I do history. With the ACTUAL TRUTH. The movie "The Social Network" was a big hit. It was supposedly all about the start of Facebook from a college dorm room to a multi billion dollar corporation in Palo Alto California. They left out some very interesting things that you all should know. That movie in itself was not about entertainment. It was propaganda to fortify the Facebook lie. Let us go back to the year 2003.

    2003 is the year before Facebook officially launched outside of just the dorms at Harvard University. It launched in early 2004. Now in the movie and in the I guess what you could call the "official story" Mark Zuckerberg gets a 500,000 dollar investment from Peter Thiel some big shot exec out on the west coast. With this 500,000 investment Peter Thiel became some thing like a 7-8% owner of Facebook. So for Thiel obviously seeing as Facebook is valued at over 30 billion dollars he made quite the sound investment. This was a huge deal to Mark Zuckerberg. Now he had all the startup money he would need and then some. 500,000 dollars is a lot more than he needs to start a website, buy some servers, and hire some programmers, and it was supposed to be. It was Peter Thiel buying his way into the company. He had to pay something. Now supposedly in the process they screwed one of the other friends of Mark, gave him a tiny percentage and took his name of the mast head. Which they made a big deal about and we will talk about why. Peter Thiel made a huge investment and he wanted his name displayed on the site as one of the owners and rightfully so. Eduardo Saverin made a big stink because his name was taken off. So you see its kind of a big deal. Remember this for later. So they take the money and relocate to California. Facebook takes off so fast. This was in Early 2004. This all happened within a couple of months of Mark launching the site. So they were building it in 2003 in their dorm room and it launched in the beginning of 2004 . This 500,000 investment would also be in early 2004.That's how they got the money to move out to California. Well you know what would have been a lot better than a 500,000 dollar investment? How about a 12.7 million dollar investment? How about a 12.7 million dollar investment from Uncle Sam? Funny how we didn't hear about this one huh? That's 25 times greater of an investment than the one the make a big deal about in the movie.

    This huge investment of $12.7 million came from James Breyer who is closely associated with a venture capital company called InQtel established by the CIA in 1999 and he served on the board of BBN. InQtel deals in information technology and intelligence most notably “nurturing data mining technologies”.

    So Zuckerberg actually got an investment over 25x greater than the 500,000 dollar investment and there is no mention of it anywhere! Remember we talked about how much pride these guys took in having their names on the mast head. It makes sense. You put in all that money to help someone get a project off the ground you deserve some recognition.

    James Breyer's name is not mentioned anywhere. Now remember Thiel put in 500,000 and got 7% of the company. So what would almost 13 million get you? Well if my math is right it, if you used the same scale as Thiel it would be over 140% of the company. Something doesn't add up here huh? Starting to think the Thiel investment is complete BS. Either way that is certainetly not the important point. The point is they only mention Thiel and not the guy who threw in over 25 x more money. Almost 13 million put on a college kid's dreams? Sounds kinda far fetched doesn't it? Why soooooo much money? That is enough to statup a 1000 social networks! Now why would he want to invest that much? Well look at where he is coming from. He sits on the board of a C.I.A. front company that specialized in using the internet to data mine and find out what people are doing. Where they are going. Who they are with. etc,etc,etc.... What's that sound like to you?

    Then there is the D.A.R.P.A. connection. A brief summary on D.A.R.P.A. for those that don't know. They invented the internet. They are under the dept of defense. They are actually working on liquid metal robots like in Terminator 2. These are the types of things they do. They would be the most cutting edge inventors for the government and military. Super high tech stuff. Things we can't even imagine exist, they play with every day. D.A.R.P.A. is tied into all this as well.

    The D.A.R.P.A. connection:

    Dr. Anita Jones former Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. While with D.A.R.P.A. her responsibilities included serving as an adviser to the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Jones was also served on the board of directors for InQtel and is now employed by BBN. This is the same board James Breyer sits on. He is also employed by BBN

    D.A.R.P.A. runs the Information Awareness Office whose task it is to collect data on as many people as possible. Their website is full of references to the war on terror, terrorism and terrorist. The IAO claims its programs are for identifying and responding to threats of terrorism. Facebook is an extension of the IOA

    I.A.O.’s Mission Statement:

    Information Awareness Office is to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government.

    Including but not limited to: internet activity, credit card purchase history, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, drivers license, utility bills, tax returns and any other available data.

    Hmmmm. What website does this sound like??? Facebook has become the world largest database on people. That is admitted. But do you see how simple this is. Let's sum it up from the truth side of things. In the year 2003 James Breyer is working on a project with Anita Jones and one other Fellow for DARPA where they are trying to find a way to use the internet to get as much information on people as possible. Things like....Where they are going. What they are doing. What airline are they using Who do they associate with What type of books or movies have you been reading. How you feel about things politically. What makes you angry. Where you vacation. They even wanted to track things like internet activity, credit card purchase history, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, drivers license, utility bills, tax returns and any other available data. now granted all those things aren't on Facebook YET but a few more of them are than you think. What do you think happens when you use Facebook to log into a site cuz its easier than remembering all your log ins? Before you answer, remember who's behind it.

    So in 2003 these people under DARPA & the C.I.A. are working on this project and they just happen to throw a college kid 12.7 million dollars because they like his passion?? LMAO! Nope heres the truth and they knew you wouldn't believe that! That's why Breyer and his 12.7 million are never mentioned. You've never heard of him or any corporation he represents having any stake in Facebook. They tell you Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world valued over 30 billion dollars. Maybe. Its possible and I won't stick on this point to long but I doubt it. It's a CIA Project! Maybe, Maybe in the begining it was really started as his and his buddies idea and Breyer and his cohorts bought it off them right before it went viral and they (CIA,DARPA) told them to take a hike and the CIA been running it since, but i think it was probably just the IAO project from the start and Zuckerberg is just part of the story. He's probably well payed but not in the billions. The purpose of Information Awareness Office was to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government. That's exactly what Facebook does and much more. The People running the IAO gave facebook 25x more startup money than the guy they glorify in the movie. I think it's safe to say Facebook is CIA. Facebook is D.A.R.P.A which falls under the Dept. Of Defense. This is clear as day when you follow the money. 13 million to start a website? Look who it came from and the timing of their data mining project. This is the data mining project. Isn't it so clever? Think about it. People are dying to actually give them information. So now that you know, if it really bothers you just stay off Facebook right? Wrong! There are some serious privacy issues that should concern ANYONE using the web.



    Facebook has gotten so big that every site nowadays has Facebook buttons on it. Share buttons under all the articles. Like buttons on the page right? I mean it's everywhere. Do you remember how quick it caught on? You know Myspace was a lil bit younger of a crowd generally but it was huge at one point with over 100 million users before Facebook was even born and there weren't myspace share things everywhere like there are Facebook. Myspace wasn't CIA or DEPT Of Defense run. Well as far as I know. Almost any website you go to now has facebook like buttons on it. Well they do that because they know Facebook is really popular and website have tailored to their customers and visitors needs. People want to share so if you don't have these buttons they might use another site. Even I have Facebook and every other type of share option on my websites. Do you know that ANY WEBSITE that has one of these Facebook buttons on their site, just one that Facebook then uses that and tracks what website you exit to??!! This is ANY SITE with a Facebook button. So if I go to ESPN and read an article and there are Facebook buttons on that site, Facebook is going to know where I go next! It is going to actually be able to place a cookie or whatever it is on me and see where my IP address goes next!! Now first off obviously if your going to something personal like a porn site or a gambling site or whatever it is you do you don't want the world knowing, FACEBOOK KNOWS!!! Now not only that it works like links in a chain. When you leave ESPN lets say and go to Joe Smoe's Cleaning site and there are no share options chances are next site you go to isn't another Joe Smoe's type of site. The next site because Facebook is soooo big now will most likely have at the very least one of these buttons and BOOM you are being tracked again!!! You do NOT NEED TO CLICK ANY OF THE FACEBOOK BUTTONS for this to occur! Not only that you do not need to be a Facebook member! Facebook has almost taken over the web. Its Facebook vs Google Right?? Ya right. Thats one of those false sneses of choice. Sure you can choose. NSA(Google) or CIA(Facebook) Facebook is so big some companies like say a car company, I see it a lot with them, they plug their Facebook page on their commercials and not their own site. They made Facebook so cool and popular that people not even in on it are unwillingly opening back doors for the government to track their website's visitors when they leave.

    Now you know why Facebook is so embedded everywhere. Now think about everything I said and then look at the new timeline. See how intense the tracking is? That's a C.I.A. job my friends!

    Now Facebook is actually giving Politico access to your private, yes PRIVATE messages, statuses and links. I posted the story a few days ago and here is a small excerpt from it.

    Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

    Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

    How does this make you feel? You think they wouldn't ever go back on your timeline and use something you said on Facebook against you legally??? I wouldn't bet on it.

    You know D.A.R.P.A. invented the internet. One of the reasons I believe they did it was to track our every thoughts. Think about it. You would think technically speaking they were not capable of tracking all your thoughts but they made this internet thing. Think about how much thought is expressed online. With people that use the computer a lot like I do you could say way more than half my thoughts are tracked. Many of those they might call anti government even though we both know its just anti tyrannical government with me.Think of how clever they are. They invent this thing to track our thoughts. We are giving into it right now! I'm expressing all this through their thought filters and you are letting them know what you like to read about. Pretty f'ed up when you think about it like that isn't?

    They always plan years and years ahead. They are so clever just think again about Facebook. They are literally sucking data right outta people's brains. You have people that post way too much personal stuff and they love it. You have people like me that probably express myself a lot more than most would feel safe doing. Facebook was a well thought out plan and it is basically running the world wide web. Any site with a FB button tracks where you go next. Think about all the privacy issues. Have you ever taken the time to read their privacy policies? Pretty intrusive and honestly quite absurd. Facebook is run by the CIA. Its the biggest data mining operation in the world and somehow they made that cool.

    I'll close this out with something I was going to save for another blog but lets throw it all out there. We talk of these clever inventions with incredible foresight that predict people's reactions years ahead of time. I'm talking about them (D.A.R.P.A., CIA) inventing the internet, Facebook and the other invention I know they had a part in, the smart phone.

    Your smartphone is awesome! It doesn't even really matter which one. They all function like computers, have apps, HAVE FACEBOOK. They have nice cameras and even video camera, GPS, and on and on right? Why do you think they are so cool? Just like they wanted to track your thoughts so they were so clever they created the internet. They wanted to track you!! Simply track you, GPS style!! Would you EVER agree to carry around a personal GPS for the government to track you? No of course you wouldn't! So they build them into the phones and make the phones so freakin cool you can't leave home with out it can you??? I know I can't. Then what do you know. Look at the stories that came out this year. I've talked about these a lot on my radio shows. It comes out that first the IPHONE then shortly after The Droid were both SECRETLY LOGGING YOUR LOCATION EVEN WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOUR GPS WAS OFF!!!!!! This was not an accident. these manufacturers left back doors open for governments from the start. See what I am saying? They were made so cool with all these apps and everything else so you would ALWAYS carry one. Then they can ALWAYS track whoever they want, whenever they want. No warrant, no hassle. Don't you wonder with all the advances in technology as the years go by how did the cell phone batteries get so much WORSE???? LOL. They didn't. they are being drained because yuor phone is secretly running GPS or at least sending reports every few minutes!

    As if all this wasn't bad enough it was then found out that all different phones from all the major carriers in the United States were actually running KEY LOGGING SOFTWARE on the phones! A key logger is a computer program that logs every key you press. Everything you type. Every password. Everything you look at. EVERYTHING you do. You think this is all a coincidence? I am done with coincidences.

    Here is a link to the video and a few articles I posted a few months back showing you the keylogging software running and logging every key pressed on the phone in the video.
    11-30-11 Carrier Iq Keylogging EVERYTHING you press on your smartphone!! Iphone, Droid, Evo, etc - The Last American Radio Broadcast
    This isn't limited to one carrier or manufacturer. It's popping up everywhere. I can't think of a bigger invasion of privacy. EVERYTHING. Every text, everything you type, every person's picture you look at. All tracked and logged. Privacy is dead. Free speech is next.

    After I finished this one of my fellow researchers in my Real News Online Facebook Group posted the logo for the IAO. You're gonna love this one. Look at the pic at the bottom.

    SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: About a month after posting this a new article was put out by Lifehacker that actually shows you how to STOP Facebook from tracking you via these other sites! It's a really good article. Here is a link to it. Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here's How to Stop It

    Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed it please share it!!

    Thanks everyone,
    Brian S Staveley. The Real News Online.com The Real News Online.com - Home
    The Last American Radio Broadcast The Last American Radio Broadcast - The Last American Broadcast
    Last edited by airdog07; January 6th, 2016 at 10:37 PM.

  5. #5

    Re: AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    Top-secret court order reveals NSA's daily data collection on millions of Americans

    the US National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of unwitting individuals via a secret court order issued in April obtained by The Guardian newspaper, which has posted it online.

    Unlike warrants that have been issued to collect the information of suspects targetted by intelligence agencies, the newly disclosed top secret order requires Verizon, one of the largest telecom agencies in the US, to provide both the FBI and the NSA information on all telephone calls made through its systems, both domestically and to foreign countries.

    According to a copy of the order, Verizon is required to disclose the numbers of both parties during a call, as well as location, call duration, and other unique data on an "ongoing, daily basis.” Meaning that, regardless of whether an individual is suspected of or linked to any crime, the data of all Verizon customers is currently being delivered in bulk to the intelligence agency.

    As to the authority claimed by the government via this order, that is specifically cited to fall under the “business records” provision of the PATRIOT Act of 2001, which was granted a four-year extension by President Obama in May of 2011.

    It remains unclear as to whether the order, which spans a three-month period, represents a single instance, or is indicative of recurring cases of Verizon and other telephony providers being ordered to disclose all their clients' call records.

    The order itself, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, prohibits Verizon from alerting its customers of the FBI’s request for their records.
    The Obama administration confirmed that it is collecting massive numbers of telephone records from at least one carrier, but said that it is only recording data such as telephone numbers or call lengths, not subscribers' identities or the content of their calls.

    Verizon has declined a request for comment by RT.

    Though the agencies have yet to respond to the publication of the secret order, justification for the thus far unprecedented, warrantless request made to Verizon in April would fall under the interpretation of such “business records.” The latter applies to a wide-ranging amount of electronic “metadata,” though not the actual content of texts and voice calls.

    The order seems likely to be associated with the NSA’s longstanding collection program over telephone, Internet and email data, which was secretly authorized by former president Bush in 2001, though not disclosed publicly until a 2006 USA Today report. That particular authorization applied to multiple carriers: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, and was intended to allow US intelligence services “to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity."

    Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the libertarian Cato Institute who spoke to The Guardian believes that the newly disclosed court order undermines the legal definition of reasonable suspicion.

    "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretense of constraint or particularized suspicion," said Sanchez.

    We will probably soon be finding out that such “daily data collections” are not limited to just Verison.



    Top-secret court order reveals NSA's daily data collection on millions of Americans ? RT USA
    Last edited by airdog07; June 7th, 2013 at 02:42 AM.

  6. #6

    Re: AT&T NSA, FACEBOOK CIA, FBI.

    Dianne Feinstein Says NSA Phone Records Surveillance Has Thwarted Terrorism, 'But That's Classified'

    Posted: 06/06/2013 8:52 pm EDT | Updated: 06/06/2013 8:58 pm EDT

    WASHINGTON -- Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Thursday the National Security Agency program collecting domestic phone records has prevented terrorism. But she and other senators briefed on the program refused to delve into details about how it is used.

    Feinstein spoke to reporters after the Intelligence Committee held a "highly classified" briefing on the vast NSA program, which Feinstein said had been put together "quickly" after The Guardian's report on its existence.

    Asked whether the program had thwarted any attacks, Feinstein said, "It has, but that's classified." She added that "there is a report" about how the program has been used, but didn't elaborate.

    Senior officials from the NSA, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice were all present to explain the surveillance program to 27 senators.

    "Members who briefed made comments they were astonished. They didn't know this was happening," Feinstein said.

    Feinstein and other senators, however, refused to go into details about what the NSA does with phone records after it has collected them. NBC News reported Thursday that the program extends to every phone call in the country, not just those made through Verizon.

    Feinstein said she would not discuss concerns that her fellow senators may have raised during the meeting, because "this took place in a classified briefing, and we don't talk about the substance of it."

    "I try not to comment on the results of a program or its effectiveness," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. "I don't want to be the one that ever compromises any ongoing procedures." Rubio added that "programs like this have great utility."

    "Programs like this are very sensitive exactly for the reasons why people are outraged by what they've heard, because you're trying to balance the privacy expectations that Americans have with the obligation the federal government has to provide for our national security," Rubio said.

    Rubio would not comment on Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) statement that the NSA program was an "assault on the Constitution." Both Republicans are are potential 2016 presidential contenders.

    The secrecy around such massive surveillance programs has for years spurred critics, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to ask the NSA to release the secret court orders permitting their use. He has suggested that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about surveillance programs like the NSA's phone records collection when Americans are in the dark about details.

    Speaking after the meeting on Thursday, Wyden seemed frustrated that he wasn't able to discuss the program's specifics. He would not comment on how he thought the NSA's phone records collection could be improved.

    "That's thoroughly classified," Wyden said.

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