NSA Whistleblower warned us last year...not many listened
Last December in an interview with Russia Today (video above), former NSA crypto-mathematician William Binney disclosed the extent to which he believed the US government was not only capable of, but actively engages in spying on internet data and web activity across the country. Binney said that the FBI has access to the emails of everyone in the US, holds a target list and monitors every email to and from those contained on the list.
If the interview was alarming in its suggestion then, it’s downright scary considering this evening’s report from the Washington Post and the Guardian that the US government has allegedly been mining data from eight of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. (The report mentions nine companies; one of them, YouTube, is part of Google.)
Here’s some of what Binney guessed at back in December:
The FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of everybody in the country.
…This can happen to anyone. If become a target for whatever reason, if they’re targeted by the government, the government can go in–or the FBI or other agencies of the government can go into that database and pull all that data they’ve collected over the years and reanalyze it all, retroactively analyze everything they’ve done. Over the last 10 years at least.
…It’s everybody.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nsa-whistleblower-guessed-exactly-going-235846912.html
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Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
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