Bush Goes Private to Spy on You

[seafan]

Bush Goes Private to Spy on You

By Tim Shorrock, CorpWatch
December 6, 2007

A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the United States one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors, including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.

The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other key agencies is used within the United States during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting national security.

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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the supersecret National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations where the NSA's signals and the NGA's imagery are processed and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be confined to foreign countries and battlefields.

The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S. intelligence operations had not been updated for the global "war on terror," turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va., one of the largest contractors in the spy business. ..... The NAO is "an idea whose time has arrived," Charles Allen, a top U.S. intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007 after it broke the news of the NAO's creation. Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, email and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved.

And would it surprise anyone if we learned that ALL US communications are first routed out of the country, then rerouted back into the US as "originating from overseas" to bypass that little hurdle?


Thanks, Congress. You have succeeded in enabling George W. Bush to the wholesale theft of our civil and privacy rights, and the right to be secure in our persons, homes, papers and effects.

You know, http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am4.html">Amendment 4 of the US Constitution?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Those of you who have continued to vote to expand George W. Bush's powers against the people of this country will forever bear the stains of a traitor to our Constitution.

[seafan]

1. The Bush Administration is "....laying the bricks one at a time for a police state."

Alternet

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The plan for the NAO builds on a domestic security infrastructure that has been in place for at least seven years. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA was granted new powers to monitor domestic communications without obtaining warrants from a secret foreign intelligence court established by Congress in 1978 (that warrantless program ended in January 2007 but was allowed to continue, with some changes, under legislation passed by Congress in August 2007).

Moreover, intelligence and reconnaissance agencies that were historically confined to spying on foreign countries have been used extensively on the home front since 2001. ..... In addition to the powerful mapping and signals tools provided by the NGA and the NSA, domestic agencies will also have access to measures and signatures intelligence (MASINT) managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal spying agency used by the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(MASINT is a highly classified form of intelligence that uses infrared sensors and other technologies to "sniff" the atmosphere for certain chemicals and electromagnetic activity, and "see" beneath bridges and forest canopies.

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All told the U.S. intelligence agencies spend some 70 percent of their estimated $60 billion annual budget on contracts with private companies, according to documents this reporter obtained in June 2007 from the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). ..... The plans to increase domestic spying are estimated to be worth billions of dollars in new business for the intelligence contractors. The market potential was on display in October at GEOINT 2007, the annual conference sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a nonprofit organization funded by the largest contractors for the NGA. During the conference, which took place in October at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio, many companies were displaying spying and surveillance tools that had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq and were now being rebranded for potential domestic use.

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A brochure for the Global Analysis unit distributed at GEOINT 2007 explains BAE's role and, in the process, underscores the degree of outsourcing in U.S. intelligence. ..... The brochure may look and sound like typical corporate public relations. But amid BAE's spy talk were two phrases strategically placed by the company to alert intelligence officials that BAE has an active presence inside the United States. The tip-off words were "federal, state and local agencies," "law enforcement officials" and "homeland security." By including them, BAE was broadcasting that it is not simply a contractor for agencies involved in foreign intelligence but has an active presence as a supplier to domestic security agencies, a category that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI, as well as local and state police forces stretching from Maine to Hawaii.

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(In an intriguing aside, one Boeing intelligence brochure lists among its "specialized organizations" Jeppesen Government and Military Services. According to a 2006 account by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, Jeppesen provided logistical and navigational assistance, including flight plans and clearance to fly over other countries, to the CIA for its "extraordinary rendition" program.)..... For U.S. citizens, however, the combination of NGA imagery and NSA signals intelligence in a domestic situation could threaten important constitutional safeguards against unwarranted searches and seizures. Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has likened the NAO plan to "Big Brother in the Sky." The Bush administration, she told the Washington Post, is "laying the bricks one at a time for a police state."

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