Greenwald Apparently Has Some Technical Details of NSA Intercept Operations but Won’t Publish Them
June 9th, 2013If Greenwald has this, others must as well.
It’ll have to be pretty good to top Klein’s revelations from 2007.
Via: Twitter:
@buffalopundit @green_footballs The highly detailed NSA technical materials on how they eavesdrop, that I have & am not publishing.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 8, 2013
Boundless Informant
June 9th, 2013Via: Guardian:
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure.”
An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: “The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country.”
Under the heading “Sample use cases”, the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: “How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country.”
A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA “global heat map” seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide.
Mass Shooting Half Hour After President Obama’s Motorcade Passed Through Area
June 8th, 2013Via: New York Daily News:
A berserk black-clad gunman carrying an AR-15 assault weapon went on bloody rampage in Santa Monica on Friday, shooting eight people — six fatally — before cops gunned him down near a college library.
The violence erupted about noon during an apparent domestic dispute at a modest, single-story home in the California beachfront community. Neighbors reported hearing multiple gunshots coming from the house and saw smoke pouring from the windows.
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The midday shootings took place about half an hour after President Obama’s motorcade passed through the area. The Secret Service said the rampage did not affect the President’s fundraising visit to Los Angeles, but his limousine was re-routed as a precaution.
GCHQ Also Accesses PRISM
June 7th, 2013It’s probably not just the U.S. and Britain. See Five Eyes, which also includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Via: Guardian:
The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.
The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.
The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.
In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, insisted it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously”.
The details of GCHQ’s use of Prism are set out in documents prepared for senior analysts working at America’s National Security Agency, the biggest eavesdropping organisation in the world.
Dated April this year, the papers describe the remarkable scope of a previously undisclosed “snooping” operation which gave the NSA and the FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world’s biggest internet companies. The group includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.
NSA Whistle-Blower: “Now We Are All Persons of Interest”
June 7th, 2013Via: Salon:
For Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s expansive post-9/11 surveillance programs in 2006, the latest revelation of blanket surveillance is simply “déjà vu.”
Drake, who was indicted under the Espionage Act and faced life in prison before federal charges against him were eventually dropped, told Salon Thursday that news that the NSA had a top secret order to retain millions of Americans’ phone records daily came as “no surprise.”
“Since 9/11, with the help of a series of enabling legislation, this sort of surveillance has become routine and institutionalized,” he said. “That order is extraordinary in showing how routine this is,” noted Drake — referring to the top secret government order obtained by the Guardian, in which telecom giant Verizon is commanded “on a daily basis” to provide the NSA with “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad, or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract to Build Alternative to Panama Canal
June 7th, 2013Via: Guardian:
Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications.
The president of the country’s national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing’s growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The name of the company and other details have yet to be released, but the opposition congressman Luis Callejas said the government planned to grant a 100-year lease to the Chinese operator.
The national assembly will debate two bills on the project, including an outline for an environmental impact assessment, on Friday.
Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, said recently that the new channel would be built through the waters of Lake Nicaragua.
The new route will be a higher-capacity alternative to the 99-year-old Panama Canal, which is currently being widened at the cost of $5.2bn.
San Onofre nuclear Power Plant Closing Down
June 7th, 2013Via: CBS:
The troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California is closing, after an epic 16-month battle over whether the twin reactors could be safely returned to service, officials announced Friday.
Operator Southern California Edison said in a statement it will retire the twin reactors because uncertainty about the future of the plant, which was facing a tangle of regulatory hurdles and investigations.
The plant “has served this region for over 40 years,” Ted Craver, chairman of SCE parent Edison International said in a statement. “But we have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if (the plant) might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs.”
The plant between San Diego and Los Angeles hasn’t produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.
NSA Building $860 Million Data Center in Maryland
June 7th, 2013Via: Data Center Knowledge:
As its current data collection makes headlines, the National Security Agency is continuing to expand its data storage and processing capabilities. The agency recently broke ground on an $860 million data center at Fort Meade, Maryland that will span more than 600,000 square feet, including 70,000 square feet of technical space.
Last month the NSA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building the High Performance Computing Center-2, an NSA-run facility that will be located on base at Fort Meade, which is home to much of the agency’s existing data center operations. The data center will be supported by 60 megawatts of power capacity, and will use both air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment.
The NSA is already building a massive data center in Utah, investing up to $1.5 billion in a project that will feature up to 1 million square feet of facilities.
The construction at Fort Meade will see investment of $400 million in fiscal 2013 and $431 million in fiscal 2014. Up to 6,000 workers will be involved in the construction and development phase, the NSA said.
NSA Is Wired Into Top Internet Companies’ Servers, Including Google and Facebook
June 7th, 2013*snore*
Why is the media losing its mind over this now? Thanks to Mark Klein, we learned way back in 2007 that NSA was getting everything.
Update: And Now… Customer Records from the Three Major Phone Networks, Emails, Web searches, and Credit-Card Transactions
Via: Wall Street Journal:
The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.
The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.
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Via: Wired:
As if news of the National Security Agency collecting phone records on millions of Americans wasn’t enough, a new report reveals that the NSA and FBI are directly tapped into central servers at nine U.S. internet firms, in order to provide constant monitoring of audio, video, photos, emails and documents as well as connection logs.
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Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
Original: Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge
Robo-Raven
June 6th, 2013Via: Military.com:
A robotic bird created by Army and University of Maryland researchers is tricking real flocks — and hawks — midair, making it a potential unsuspecting future war agent.
Robo-Raven glides, soars and flaps like a real bird. Complete individual wing control allows for extreme aerobatics that no other mechanical bird has ever been able to perform, Army Research Laboratory researchers claim. But its ability to hide in plain sight and light weight is what excites researchers most.
“It already attracts attention from birds in the area which tends to hide its presence,” said John Gerdes, a mechanical engineer with the Vehicle Technology Directorate at APG.
Seagulls, songbirds and sometimes crows tend to try to fly in a formation near the bird during testing, but birds of prey, like falcons and hawks take a much more aggressive approach toward test flights.
“Generally we don’t see them coming,” Gerdes said. “They will dive and attack by hitting the bird from above with their talons, then they typically fly away.”
With the aggressive maneuvers they are working on, the perch and stare mission could be possible, and when combined with solar cell wings that the University of Maryland is working on, researchers could land and charge the Robo-Raven then resume a mission.
Robo-Raven is much quieter than the helicopter or propeller, so it could get much closer to an adversary without revealing its presence. It’s made out of carbon fiber, 3D-printed lightweight thermalresistant plastic, Mylar foil and foam. The geometrically complex figure is shorter than two feet and weighs less than a can of soda.
Programmed wing motion helps Robo-Raven’s wings maintain optimal velocity during the flap cycle to achieve the right balance at takeoff.
