The NSA, Has Fiction Become Fact?

"I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watching what's happening, and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide.' The public needs to decide whether these programs or policies are right or wrong," - Edward Snowden

These words spoken by the now infamous whistle blower Edward Snowden regarding his leaks from the NSA have caused tremendous scrutiny over the course of the past eight months. So much so that President Obama devoted an entire speech regarding the National Security Agency on January 17th. The agency, which has been in existance since 1952 is tasked with the global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals in U.S. territories. The NSA is also responsible for the protection of U.S. government communications and information systems and as part of the growing practice of mass surveillance in the United States, the NSA collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens.

Back in June it was revealed via The Washington Post that "the NSA has direct access via the PRISM program to the servers of some of the biggest U.S. tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. The Guardian later reveals how large tech companies have worked closely with the NSA to help them circumvent encryption and other privacy controls, and how the agency pays for many of these companies' compliance costs."

  A few days later slides published by The Guardian a few days lated revealed the existence of Boundless Informant, "an NSA tool that provides "near real-time" statistics on the agency's spying capabilities and is broken down by country." The power point showed that the NSA collected almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence on U.S. citizens in February 2013 alone. Later the same month The Guardian published Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents which outlined the NSA's procedures for minimizing its collection of domestic communications. Some of the most startling revelations in the files is that the NSA can store domestic communications containing: foreign intelligence information; evidence of a crime; threats of serious harm to life or property; or any information that could aid the agency's electronic surveillance, which includes encrypted communications.

Futher concerning information was revealed when Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald delivered the keynote lecture of the "Socialism 2013" conference in Chicago. Greenwald discussed how "a brand new technology allows the National Security Agency to direct, re-direct, into its own depositories 1 billion cell phone calls every single day."

In July The Washington Post wrote on the NSA program called Upstream. The program that collects information from the fiber optic cables that carry most Internet and phone traffic.

In August a network of 500 servers scattered across the globe that collect "nearly everything a user does on the Internet" and store it in databases searchable by name, email, IP address, region and language was released by The Guardian. In the same month a change was made to data minimization rules that could potentially allow the NSA to view American citizens' data without a warrant under section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendment Act. To further explain Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said, "Once Americans' communications are collected, a gap in the law ... allows the government to potentially go through these communications and conduct warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans."

The Washington Post published two documents revealing how the NSA violated U.S. laws and its own internal regulations 2,776 times between March 2011 and March 2012. Most of these violations were accidents or technical errors, but others were less benign. It was also revealed that the NSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year paying private companies for access to large fiber optic communications backbones - part of the agency's Corporate Partner Access Project. Shortly there after the National Security Agency declassified three secret court opinions showing that within just one of its surveillance programs it scooped up as many as 56,000 emails annually over the span of three years, by Americans not connected to terrorism.

In September a collaboration among The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica revealed "the NSA has cracked methods of encryption used by millions of people every day for things such as secure email, e-commerce, financial transactions and more." German news source Der Spiegel revealed that although narrowly targeted, "the NSA has the ability to tap into data - including emails, contacts, notes and physical location - from all the major smart phones on the market."

At the end of September, a response was issued to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in which the NSA's Office of the Inspector General released details of the 12 "substantiated instances" of "intentional and willful" misuse of NSA surveillance authority since January 2003. Most involved so-called "love intelligence" - LOVEINT, in agency parlance - where agents spied on current or former love interests.
The New York Times reported that the NSA uses Americans' data — including phone and email metadata, as well as information from social media and financial transactions — " to create maps of targets' social connections but according to an agency spokesperson, "this data is only used when there is "a foreign intelligence justification." A few days later, The Guardian showed that the NSA used its massive databases to store metadata - including web searches, email activity and browsing histories on millions of web users for up to a year - whether or not those individuals are agency targets.

In October a series of articles published by The Guardian revealed the NSA and GCHQ's attempts to compromise the TOR network - "a web browser that allows users to conceal their identities." The report also showed that "intelligence agencies used a vulnerability in an older version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser to implant surveillance software on some TOR users' computers when they visited specific websites." The Washington Post published documents revealing the NSA collected over 250 million email inbox views and contact lists a year from online services like Yahoo, Gmail and Facebook. According to their report, it collects the data in bulk from massive fiber optic cables that carry most of the world's telephone and Internet traffic and because the NSA carries this surveillance out outside the United States, it falls outside the jurisdiction of many laws meant to protect the privacy of American citizens.

In November The New York Times published an article which featured excerpts from an internal agency document from 2012 stating, "the NSA wants to expand its already broad legal authority. It also plans to "influence the global commercial encryption market" through partnerships with tech firms and its own spies within private tech companies. Its end goal, according to the document, is accessing data from "anyone, anytime, anywhere" it needs."

 Back in December a major collaboration among The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica was published and revealed the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI and GCHQ had been monitoring online games played by millions of people worldwide. Games like World of Warcraft, XBox Live and Second Life were infiltrated using bulk data collection and human spies posing as ordinary players.

A few days prior to the President's speech The Washington Post revealed how the NSA gains access to computer systems around the world by implanting them with malware and custom hardware which includes hardware that allows the agency to remotely access computers that are not connected to an outside network.

During the January 17th speech, President Obama defended the programs saying, " What I did not do is stop these programs wholesale, not only because I felt that they made us more secure, but also because nothing in that initial review and nothing that I have learned since, indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.”

With all of the the information that has been revealed since June is "..nothing in that initial review and nothing that I have learned since, indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens." a fair and just statement? Is it right that we are all guilty until proven innocent? Is it really to protect us or are we all just reenacting various scenarios from the 1998 film Enemy of the State where, among other things, "the U.S. Congress moves to pass new legislation that dramatically expands the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies.."  The definition of an enemy of the state is, "a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Describing individuals in this way is sometimes a manifestation of political repression."

They always say life immitates art.

Follow Brittnye Webb-Earl on Twitter @BeeNoelle

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Monday, February 3, 2014