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Funding the illegal warrantless wiretapping OR can the NSA get retention bonuses too?
As Emptywheel has been mucho busy with her typical sterling work liveblogging the AIG Congressional Hearing, she probably hasn’t had time today to check out the Senate’s "Report on Intelligence Oversight in the 110th Congress" via Secrecy News.
While there are oodles of goodies in here, I’m going to focus on one of the new (to me) puzzle-pieces regarding the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program (aka the Terrorist Surveillance Program – TSP).
From page 31 of the report:
2. Electronic surveillance
a. President’s surveillance program
As described in Section II of this report, consideration of measures to modernize the FISA and to address lawsuits brought against private carriers for alleged participation in the presidential electronic surveillance program that came to be known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program was a major focus of the Committee during the 110th Congress. Prior to the disclosures of December 2005, and the President’s subsequent acknowledgment that he had authorized a program outside of the FISA, information concerning the program had been limited by the Executive branch to very few members of Congress – the leadership of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the congressional intelligence committees plus senior members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a few other members of the congressional leadership…
(My Bold)
So prior to the December 2005 disclosures of the TSP, senior members of the Senate Defense Appropriation Subcommittee were briefed. This was still during the time that the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress (as well as the Executive branch), so the chair of this Senate subcommittee was Republican Ted Stevens (R-AK) and the ranking (minority) member was Democrat Daniel Inouye (D-HI), and I would tend to believe that at a minimum, these were the "senior members" briefed on the TSP.
Per Wiki:
The U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense is one of twelve subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. Military defense spending is the largest individual component of federal discretionary spending, making the Defense Subcommittee one of the more powerful Appropriations subcommittees…
…The subcommittee oversees overall funding for the Department of Defense, including the Army, Navy, Air Force. The subcommittee is also responsible for funding for the Central Intelligence Agency…
Why, you ask, did the Bush/Cheney Administration brief senior members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program?
And the answer is mightily simple: To fund it!
The National Security Agency, responsible for operating the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program, is part of the Department of Defense and gets funded through the auspices of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
As background, when the Executive branch obtains a FISA warrant (hah!) to wiretap, it then presents this warrant to the appropriate Telco/communications provider for implementation. This is not done for "free" by the Telco/communications provider, so they charge the government a fee for this service.
In the case of the Bush/Cheney Administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program, I believe that it was so enormous that the NSA needed specific and ongoing funding for it from the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in order to pay the accomodating Telco/communications providers.
We are not talking about a simple 5 minute job by some lone communications technician at the Telco/communications providers.
We are talking about a massive technical Telco/communications providers infrastructure project investment over the course of 8 (and counting) years.
In the Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit, EFF has a one-page summary showing both pictorially and in writing, just how this massive illegal warrantless wiretapping was technically accomplished. Other documents in the Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit describe not just the AT&T facilities at Folsom Street in San Francisco, but more than a dozen AT&T (and other Telco/communications providers) facilities located throughout the United States.
My SWAG on how this all works:
Via Narus STA 6400 "Semantic Traffic Analyzer" systems (as described by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein here), the NSA would hook up to the communications pipes at Telco/communications providers’ facilities throughout the United States and grab voice, data, email and other Internet traffic based on "trigger" keywords programmed into the Narus system. After capturing the "triggered" real-time information on the Narus systems, the captured traffic would then be routed over a dedicated secret network to NSA processing facilities.
The Narus system itself is not the "processor" of the captured information. Think of the Narus system as a "high-end" PC with a supercharged communications card capable of capturing and routing intercepted communications via certain "triggered" keywords, in real-time, on communications pipes that are handling 100s of millions of "conversations" per second.
The processing of this intercepted illegal warrantless wiretapping information would have to occur at the NSA. It is the biggest US government consumer of computing power, and it is this capability that would be required to process the masses of terabytes of information in order to "sniff out" suspects to pursue.
Additionally, only the NSA has the computing horsepower in order to both scan through hundreds of millions of communications per second to flag something in "real-time" for immediate action, as well as longer-term processing of "connectedness" or "community of interest" relationships (3 or more degrees of separation; i.e. the person who communicated to the person who communicated with you, and so on).
The spiderweb-like communications network across the United States to forward this information to the NSA processing facilities must, of necessity, be routed across a secret government network. No chance would have been taken to route this illegal warrantless wiretapped information across the public Internet simply because the strong and stark likelihood of "civilians" (including every kiddie hacker worth his/her Cheetos) hacking around and stumbling across the illegally intercepted information.
Hence, it is a foregone conclusion that one or more of the Telco/communications providers constructed this spiderweb-like communications network across the United States for the specific needs of the NSA, and were (and still are) funded to provide these facilities via that Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
It is likely that these Telco/communications providers made use of some of their "dark fiber" (as the saying goes in the networking world, dark fiber is fiber that has been laid, but is still a virgin *g*) and ensured that all connections were totally segregated from any part of the public Internet network and whose only endpoint destination was the NSA. Something like the "Quantico Circuit" as an earlier Emptywheel post described here.
So in closing, I have to ask:
Which is more important to you? The $165 million in retention bonuses paid to AIG fraudsters or the likely hundreds of millions of dollars already paid, and more ongoing such payments by your government to the Telco/communications providers for the past, present and future illegal warrantless wiretapping?
All major credit cards are welcome!
14 Comments
recommended
and dugg
Thanks MadDog.
Dugg, for whatever reason, on this one, I don’t have the option of recommending.
Re: the funding. You should think in terms of the low $billions instead…
17 articles of interest under the “wiretapping” tag at Freedom-to-Tinker :
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/tags/wiretapping
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.c…..ing?page=1
Read through from the oldest article to the newest and you will see that you have underestimated the scale of the funding that must have been (and currently is being) funneled through the government to the corporations for just the revealed portions of these projects alone.
That “one-page summary” I referenced (and forgot to link) is here.
And thanks all for the “recommends” and Diggs!
Great find, MadDog. I can only imagine the conversation as they tried to tell Toobz Stevens what they were doing, and his questions in response:
“You’re going to install a filter on the interent? What if it gets clogged?”
This would also explain why Inouye was one of the earliest and strongest Democratic supporters of retroactive immunity.
For some reason there’s no recommend icon for me to click on, but super piece MD.
Thank you, maddog. I’d bet that most Americans think, ‘well, that probably didn’t include me; I’ve never had anything to do with all that stuff.” Well, in my case that was wrongheaded thinking.
I first got internet service in early 2003. I had been tracking my family genealogy the hard way since retirement. I am of Celtic origin and the internet helped in my research a lot. In about 2005 I made connection with an intelligent, well connected person in Amsterdam who helped me a great deal in obtaining official records of my ancient European ancestors .
In about 2005 or 2006 my McAfee security system sounded the gong and gave the alert that an unauthorized IP address had tried to gain access to my system. I tracked that IP adddress to my local provider, then mapped the origin – guess where it originated? Yep, DOD, Washington, DC.
I doubt that any American lives a more benign existence than I. My surname is English and traces back to William The Conqueror in 1066. There was absolutely no reason for my government to be spying on any activity in which I have ever been involved. I was angry then, and still am! Don’t assume that because you live a comparatively bland life that you haven’t been spied on.
Whether your life is “bland” or not is irrelevant to them.
The point behind the descriptions of the splitters is that they scoop it all up. Scoop it up, store it… and data mine it for fun and profit at their leisure.
Yes. For fun and profit. Terrorism had jack all to do with the origination of this program.
What’s overlooked amid the cries of “We did it because of 9/11!” is the testimony showing that Bush must have instituted the project as soon as his ass hit the chair in the oval office. This gets ignored even after Ted Kennedy spelled it out on the Senate floor during the FISA debacle.
They tap it all, store it and mine it and may the deities of your choice help you when the mining process screws up regarding your personal data… because Obama has made it very clear that he is not going to lift a finger to stop it.
So true, zapkitty.
Indeed, he and Holder will block any effort to reveal this illegal practice by hiding behind ’state secrets and the national security’.
(have we all taken our somma pills for today?? /s)
Great post MadDog. Don’t forget though, that in addition to funding the hardware infrastructure, they also need to appropriate funds for software development and data analysis. There would have to be a permanent revenue stream to keep this all going. Thanks Congress!
On a tangentially-related note, I was struck by Wilkerson’s comment in his Washington Note article yesterday:
In other words data mining. Except in this case, rather than sifting through communications looking for nefarious schemes involving phone calls to pizza parlors, they were imprisoning and torturing people to see whether those pizza parlors would get them extra cheese. This is barbaric. And it shows what happens when you let people with a sci fi grasp of reality loose on the world. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.
I keep thinking that the illegal wiretapping program leads back to Fox reporter Carl Cameron’s four part report on the “alleged” infiltration of the Israeli based communication companies through a back door in their systems. Remember how quickly that report was taken off of Fox’s website.
###If communication systems that have access to 95% of all communications in the states have been compromised…how do you investigate going through normal and lawfully appropriate means if that technology and the normal legal means would alert those who are breaking the law?
Another article about how these systems were allegedly compromised
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ke…..leid=13506
September 26, 2008
Trojan Horse
How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the US Government’s Telecom System and Compromised National Security
by Christopher Ketcham
ince the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the US government. Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among US residents. The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime). “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable,” says a high level US intelligence officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. “How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” If the allegations are true, the electronic communications gathered up by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government. Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents for “public intelligence in the public interest,” tells me that “Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”
Excellent comment, Leen. Another good ref to the Israeli’s part in this wiretapping is Michael Rupert’s book, Crossing the Rubicon. (as I’m pretty sure that you know.)
While I’m not an expert, I doubt that a dedicated parallel network was necessary, as long as there was enough bandwidth on the public backbone to carry the traffic. The data could be transported through an encrypted virtual pipe easily enough. Even dedicated connections would just be a matter of setting up leased virtual circuits in switching centers. Nobody would have to build anything. Nobody would even physically connect any wires, in all likelihood, because dedicated physical connections have been a thing of the past for a decade, as near as I know. It’s all routing now. That fact is, in part I think, what made the scheme possible in the first place–as far as the non-technical public is concerned, it could pretty much hide in plain sight. It took people who knew their way around a telco central office to notice the few physically different things that shouldn’t have been there.
But the doesn’t mean that the scheme would have been cheap. The point of your article is well-taken.
In fact, I suspect that telco profiteering is one aspect of this scandal that hasn’t been looked at closely enough–and possibly another reason for using the now notoriously uncontrolled defence financing of the Bush years as the funding mechanism (rather than a more legally defensible domestic law-enforcement budget). How much of the volatility of telco and tech stocks in the last decade has been related to this illegal, sub rosa trafficking in private communications? How much of the telco immunity was aimed at protecting profits from forfeiture and civil claims and not at individuals from jail? And how much of the telecom industry’s once fierce dedication to system security and user privacy was eroded by this illicit profit motive? (Don’t scoff–I used to work in the industry and security was a real company value–after all, outraged telco workers had at least a little to do with revealing all this.) The Nacchio case has, at a minimum, shown that manipulating the award and denial of secret contracts was a big part of the way that the government got the telcos into line.