From Visa/MasterCard to UPC Bar Codes, Microchips and Beyond The True and Concealed Purpose of the Mark of the Beast
THE SNOWDEN FILE (Part 5)
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE
666 SINGULARITY PART 5: THE SNOWDEN FILE There is some controversy as to whether the statement "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" was really an original quote from Edmund Burke (1729 -1797) an Irish political philosopher, Whig politician and statesman who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism. However many believe this statement could never better be applied than to the case of Edward Snowden, a former systems administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell, inside a National Security Agency (NSA) outpost in Japan. In May 2013 Snowden dropped a bombshell in revealing the dirty secrets of the world’s leading security agencies. Controversy rages as to whether his actions were right or wrong.
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PROJECT ECHELON
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NSA LINKS TO YAHOO AND GOOGLE DATACENTERS
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NSA TRACKING CELLPHONE LOCATIONS WORLDWIDE
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BRITISH INTELLIGENCE DATA MINING
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE 1. PROJECT ECHELON Every hour of every day the largest intelligence agency on earth, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and its sister intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are eavesdropping on every one of your communications. Project Echelon records every phone call, fax, and email. It tracks all your Internet surfing. You might think this sounds too alarmist, or perhaps paranoid, or even like a plot for a high-tech thriller. But this is not fiction, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s reality. And because of Project Echelon, the last shred of privacy you thought you had is gone.
The largest intelligence-gathering facility within Echelon is located on the moors of North Yorkshire at a U.S. military base at Menwith Hill, United Kingdom. One longtime observer described it by saying, “The UK base…has its own independent electrical power station to ensure uninterrupted operations. Menwith Hill is probably the largest espionage station on the planet. Approximately two-thirds of its staff is American intelligence agents.… Thirty huge satellite reception radomes, code-named Moonpenny, looking like giant golf balls, sit somewhat conspicuously among the large flocks of English sheep within the security fences of the well-guarded base.”
The radomes contain collection dishes that gather the billions of daily radio signals intercepted from 120 Echelon geostationary satellites orbiting the earth. This is in addition to the massive number of intercepted messages flowing through huge undersea cables that carry the majority of the transatlantic and transpacific Internet and e-mail communications. In addition to recording and analyzing English-language communications, Echelon computers capture and translate conversations in more than seventy other languages in a continual search for terrorist and enemy-nation intelligence communications. Every day the 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE Echelon system monitors millions of messages. The world’s most sophisticated computers are hunting for clues to plans for terrorist attacks and other threats against the West. Menwith Hill’s station uses a multitude of secret electronic interception systems—including the Vortex, Magnum, and Orion spy satellite systems—to collect data from the supposedly secret communications of many nations and corporations. It monitors all communications from the European Union states, Russia, and the rest of Asia. Echelon collects virtually all electronic communications from European governments, corporations, and private individuals and intercepts all transatlantic communications to and from North America. Men-with Hill is under the control of the NSA, in cooperation with British intelligence, which shares the vast intelligence spoils. This remarkable spy station was built on property that carries the three main digital fiberoptic cables from Europe through the United Kingdom to America, each of which is simultaneously transmitting up to a hundred thousand calls. These vital communications cables go directly through the Menwith Hill building to enable the Echelon computers to download every communication without delaying any of the calls. Echelon uses a vast array of collection platforms. In addition to NSA satellites circling high above the globe, high-altitude military and NSA aircraft, naval vessels, a large fleet of mobile surveillance vans, and the tapping of undersea fiberoptic cables, Echelon uses numerous secret interception technologies that penetrate mobile or desktop computers as well as virtually all phone and radio communications. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, forced the United States and its Western allies to adopt an entirely new kind of counterterrorist warfare. New terror threats called for strategies and tactics to enable Western intelligence agencies to gather vast amounts of communication and financial data. The aim is to identify and destroy radical Islamic terror cells throughout the world. Tracking the movement of finances, weapons purchases, and other financial transactions is a vital part of the global struggle against terrorism. However, Echelon is a double-edged sword. It provides a massive amount of vital intelligence about the communications, plans, targets, and members of the most dedicated enemies of Western civilization. However, it also gathers and possesses a staggering amount of detailed information regarding the billions of daily communications of ordinary citizens and corporations. This intrusion into the affairs of private citizens and businesses poses a very real threat to our freedom. Since 9/11, there has been widespread agreement that the threat from Islamic terrorists requires democratic governments to use every available technology to monitor terrorist communications. However, this intelligence gathering could easily become the means of creating the most effective totalitarian state ever conceived. Few in the West doubt the seriousness of the threat posed by spies and radical Islam. However, will combating these threats also rob every one of us of our cherished freedom? In the twentieth century the United States and other Western democracies were faced with the rise of powerful dictators and both fascist and communist totalitarian governments in many parts of the world. Growing threats to national security demonstrated the need for the best intelligence capabilities to protect the West against tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and later Mao Zedong. Echelon was launched by the NSA following World War II. The global spy system was a top-secret AngloAmerican project designed to intercept and analyze virtually every message that was transmitted by any 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE means. Echelon is managed by five Western nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1948 these five countries entered into a secret agreement called UKUSA to spy on Russia and its Warsaw Pact allies during the cold war. The NSA handles communications coming out of Russia east of the Ural Mountains and most of North and South America. Australia’s facility covers Southeast Asia, including India and Indonesia, and the South Pacific islands. Israel is a key allied associate and provides detailed intelligence of secret military and terrorist activities within the Arab nations and Russia. Israel’s secret electronic surveillance facility is called Unit 8200 and is located in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv, known as Herzliya. Unit 8200 accumulates and analyzes the intelligence collected by a large number of interception satellite receiver stations throughout Israel, including Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights, Nahariyah on the border with Lebanon, Mitzpah Ramon in the southern Negev Desert, and a remote southern site on Dahlak Island in the Red Sea. The United Kingdom covers Eastern Europe and Russia, while New Zealand covers the Pacific nations. The member nations cooperate in such a way that none of them is spying on the communications of citizens, businesses, and officials from its own nation. By monitoring the private communications of other member nations, they avoid legal prohibitions against a democratic government’s spying on communications of its own citizens. This transparent violation of the law enables each country to technically deny that it illegally intercepts the electronic communications of its own citizens. Mike Frost, a former member of Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, told the Canadian press that the five cooperating nations of Echelon agree to spy on the others’ citizens and then send the data to the appropriate intelligence agency using encrypted computer transmissions. Frost wrote the book Spyworld to detail his past spying activities. He stated, “They circumvent their own legislation by asking the other countries to do it for them. We do it for them, they do it for us and then they can stand up in the House [of Commons] and say we do not target the communications of Canadian citizens.”
Echelon’s global electronic eavesdropping covers virtually every telephone call, fax transmission, and email message. The intercepted communications are compiled and analyzed by banks of NSA supercomputers at Fort Meade, Maryland. The billions of intercepted communications are searched for keywords identified by the five-member intelligence agencies in Echelon dictionaries. This worldwide intelligence vacuum cleaner is constantly sifting through billions of simultaneous phone calls and e-mail messages in search of any use of thousands of keywords, key telephone numbers, passwords, and voiceprints of targeted individuals, whether terrorists, spies, or criminals. While most of the West’s other surveillance systems are focused on enemy nations’ military developments, plans, weapons, and capabilities, Echelon is unique in that its primary espionage focus involves non-military civilian targets. Echelon uses the most advanced spy satellites, illegal wiretaps, and the fastest supercomputers to analyze and record billions of global communications annually. Targets include all local, cellular, and long distance phone calls, fax and telex transmissions, Internet communications—including Web surfing, newsgroups, chat rooms, and e-mail—and all global radio traffic. The Echelon system design involves the careful positioning of communications interception stations throughout the world to collect downlinked satellite, microwave, cellular, and ground-based fiberoptic communications traffic. Echelon intercepts data from the series of twenty international telecommunications satellites (Intel-sats) that circle the globe above the equator. 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE
The surveillance system has three separate but essential functions: interception, analysis, and reporting. The interception function includes a global communications monitoring system. The analysis function of Echelon is completed at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, by enormous numbers of supercomputers and thousands of intelligence analysts. The reporting function involves a system of daily information passed to the various intelligence agencies and the leaders of the Western nations. Echelon communications intercepts are processed using NSA’s computer analysis, including voice recognition, translations from more than seventy languages, artificial intelligence neural networks, and optical character recognition (OCR) programs. The computer programs search for keywords and phrases listed by each of the five member nations’ intelligence agencies. Intercepted communications are recorded and transcribed for future analysis. At Echelon’s Menwith Hill site in Britain, a sophisticated voicerecognition program called Voicecast can identify and target any individual voice pattern among six billion humans throughout the globe. (Each voice is as unique as a person’s fingerprints, DNA, or iris scan.) This means that every subsequent telephone call involving that person’s voice can be captured and transcribed by the agency for future analysis. Useful information is forwarded to the national intelligence agency that originally requested the intercept. The vast majority of Echelon intercepts are innocent messages that contain no key names, words, addresses, or phone numbers. The millions of useless messages are erased by Echelon computers and are never analyzed by a human operator. The governments’ justification for maintaining Echelon’s universal surveillance program is that Western society must be protected against the so-called Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, sexual predators, and organized crime. However, the phenomenally intrusive surveillance technologies could easily be used by government authorities in the future as a tool of totalitarian police control against ordinary citizens. Simon Davies, director of Privacy International and fellow at the London School of Economics, warned, “History demonstrates that information in the hands of Authority will inevitably be used for unintended and often malevolent purposes.” An abbreviated list of keywords used by Echelon to search for possibly relevant material is given below. This list, which was provided by several individuals in the intelligence community, gives examples of the topics an intelligence agency may consider worthy of a follow-up investigation. The real list of keywords from the Echelon Dictionary Oratory program would involve many thousands of possibilities, constantly updated by each of the five allied agencies.
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, nuclear, ambush, IRS, BATF, hostages, munitions, weapons, TNT, presidential motorcade, grenades, rockets, fuses, mortars, incendiary device, security forces, infiltration, assault team, evasion, detection, mission, body armor, timing devices, booby traps, silencers, Uzi, AK-47, napalm, Air Force One, special forces, terrorism, National Information Infrastructure, hackers, encryption, espionage, FBI, Secret Service, White House, Infowar, FINCEN, RCMP, GRU, SAS, Echelon, Spetznaz, Psyops, TELINT, Bletchley Park, clandestine, NSO, security, sniper, Electronic Surveillance, al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, counterterrorism, interception, Gamma, keyhole, SEAL Merlin, white noise, top secret, TRW, counterintelligence, industrial espionage, Minox, Rand Corporation, Wackenhutt, Scud, SecDef, SWAT, Fort Meade, NORAD, Delta Force, SEAL, Black-Ops, Area 51, TEMPEST, Pine Gap, Menwith, Sayeret Mat’Kal, Sayeret Golani, Delta, GRU, GSS, Crypto AG. Within seconds of a phone call being made anywhere in the world, a suspected or confirmed terrorist, organized crime figure, or spy can be identified by Echelon based on his or her voiceprint. The caller can be quickly identified and the call terminated. The FBI and NSA can override the signal from the suspect’s phone and keep the connection open even after the suspect hangs up. They can then use a simulated computer voice impersonating the suspect on the substituted call. The call can be redirected using the simulated voice to create chaos within the terror group or criminal organization. When a suspect caller is identified, his or her location can be determined within thirty yards. Don’t believe what you see in action movies, where the criminal hangs up the phone in less than thirty seconds and thereby foils the ability of the FBI or NSA to trace his call. New intercept technology needs only seconds to determine a caller’s phone number and location. At this point you might be wondering if such a draconian surveillance system really is possible. And if it is, would our government actually use it to spy on its own citizens? In public statements both U.S. and British officials continue to deny that Project Echelon exists. In April 1999 the American Civil Liberties Union contacted members of Congress about the dangers of Echelon. When the official NSA spokeswoman was asked about the existence of Echelon, she replied, “We don’t confirm or deny the existence of Echelon.” After decades of U.S. government denials of Echelon, overwhelming documentation now exists to prove that the shadowy surveillance system does indeed exist. An article in the Guardian declared, “For years it has been the subject of bitter controversy, its existence repeatedly claimed but never officially acknowledged. At last, the leaked draft of a report… by the European parliament removes any lingering doubt: Echelon, a shadowy, US-led worldwide electronic spying network, is a reality.” And as far back as December 19, 1999, BBC News reported that Australian intelligence officials admitted that the Echelon system does actually exist. Bill Blick, Australia’s inspector general of intelligence and security, confirmed to the BBC that Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is that country’s component of the five-nation Echelon network. “As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as DSD collect those communications in the interests of their national security,” Blick stated. Further, he admitted that the intercepted communications are shared with allies such as Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE Journalist Nicky Hager conducted interviews with agents and technicians working with New Zealand’s General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). They described a vast network of Echelon communication interception stations throughout the world. And in 1991 a retired British intelligence officer who had worked for Echelon spoke anonymously in a documentary to the UK producers of Granada Television’s World in Action. The officer confirmed the existence of the worldwide surveillance program. He admitted that all the data was passed through an analysis computer program called Dictionary, which examined billions of messages weekly for any messages of interest. Mike Frost, a former Canadian operative, explained how the intelligence agencies’ “embassy collection” operations used their nations’ embassy buildings in various foreign capitals to act as interception stations for Echelon. Embassy buildings are ideal intelligence collection sites because they are usually situated near the target government’s major ministries, normally at the center of the target nation’s microwave communications networks. Frost claimed that after secretly transporting sophisticated satellite receivers and processors inside diplomatic pouches into their own embassy, NSA spies would set up their radio and microwave reception dishes on the roofs of the embassy, often disguised as air conditioning and heating pipes. Echelon was built during the cold war, when the spread of nuclear weapons forced both East and West to face the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon. Today the threat of attack has multiplied, with terror groups and rogue nations greatly expanding the list of enemies. As the cost to produce biological, chemical, and atomic “dirty bomb” weapons continues to drop, the number of terrorist groups—radical Islamic and others—is rising. While we hate the thought of intelligence agencies monitoring all our private and corporate communications, we are forced to admit that Western governments need to do all they can to guard against the growing threat of terrorist attacks. It is essential that our intelligence agencies use the best communications interception equipment available to detect plans for enemy attacks. Yet history records that almost every technological advance has been abused by political, military, and police authorities. The first use of technology by authority tends to be in the area of communications control, security, and policing. However, history also reveals that almost every new technology is eventually used by ordinary citizens for free and private communication and political freedom. One example is the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the mid-1400s. Initially it was monopolized under exclusive license by the political authorities of that day. However, citizens were soon using presses to print political pamphlets and Bibles. Bibles were immediately translated from the original languages into English, French, and German to enable Christians to read the Word of God in their own languages for the first time in a thousand years. This facilitated the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the greatest advance in political liberty and religious freedom in history. Likewise, advances in computer technology and the Internet present both enormous opportunities and terrible dangers to our political and religious freedoms. The lesson of history, as declared by England’s Lord Acton more than a century ago, is that “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A balanced historical appraisal of the growth of political, military, and social control shows that we have reached a truly unprecedented time. No leader in the past has ever held such potential political and police power as the Echelon system provides to the intelligence and security agencies of the governments of the West. With the major Western powers examining every
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE electronic communication, we need to realize that our liberty and freedom stand in the greatest jeopardy of all time. The record shows a pattern in which intelligence, defense, and law enforcement agencies find ways to evade the legal constraints enacted by the U.S. Congress or Canadian Parliament to protect our privacy and civil liberties. Following the end of the cold war, military defense groups and intelligence agencies sought new missions to justify their budgets. Often surveillance technologies are shifted to civilian applications and away from their former role in national defense against enemy nations. Christopher Simpson, who has written four books on national security issues, described the sheer volume of data that is collected from the private communications of ordinary citizens each month: We’re talking tens of millions of volumes if it was printed out on pages.… As we move into this interconnected electronic world, you’ve got Big Brothers, and you’ve got Little Brothers.… Little Brothers are companies like supermarkets and Internet companies that keep an eye on you. And you’ve got Big Brother that keeps an eye on you. The Biggest Brother of all is the Echelon system.
The U.S. National Security Council proposed in July 1998 that American intelligence agencies should constantly monitor the computer networks of banks, telecommunications corporations, transportation companies, and non-military government operations in an attempt to protect vital communications data networks. Only one month later the Justice Department proposed legislation to grant the FBI the legal authority to place encryption-breaking devices and secret surveillance software programs in citizens’ computers, in their homes and in their offices, during criminal investigations. The Echelon system has known all about you for many years. Now you know something about Echelon. The only hope for this surveillance technology remaining a servant of democratic government and its citizens and not becoming a dictatorial master is to ensure there is a system of continual, powerful presidential and congressional oversight to watch the watchers. It is my hope that the growing revelations from media around the world about the capabilities and dangers associated with the vital and powerful Project Echelon will encourage our government’s representatives to demand democratic accountability of these necessary but also inherently dangerous surveillance technologies. More than three quarters of a century ago, Louis Brandeis, a well-respected Supreme Court justice, warned against the danger to our freedom from the increasing capabilities of the government to monitor the communications and private lives of average citizens. In 1928, during a case involving police wiretapping, Brandeis wrote a profound dissenting opinion describing the fundamental right of each citizen to privacy in his thoughts and private papers. He wrote against the government’s abuse of the citizen’s Fifth Amendment right-that of not being forced to give testimony or evidence against oneself—as well as the Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure. When the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were adopted, “the form that evil had theretofore taken” had been necessarily simple. Force and violence were then the only means known to man by which a government could directly effect self-incrimination. It could compel the individual to testify—a compulsion effected, if need be, by torture. It could secure possession of his papers and other articles incident to his private life—a seizure effected, if need be, by breaking and entry. Protection against such invasion of “the sanctities of a man’s home and the privacies of life” was provided in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments by specific language. Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, 6 S.Ct. 524, 29 L.Ed. 746. But “time works changes, 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE brings into existence new conditions and purposes.” Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. Moreover, “in the application of a Constitution, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been, but of what may be.” The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions. “That places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer” was said by James Otis of much lesser intrusions than these. To Lord Camden a far slighter intrusion seemed “subversive of all the comforts of society.” Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security? Brandeis expressed well-founded concerns about the potential dangers to our constitutional rights posed by the government’s invasion of an individual’s privacy. Brandeis would be astonished to know that all democratic governments routinely perform around-the-clock surveillance and record the data in massive databases. Every citizen is monitored, based on the slim chance that he or she may now, or at some point in the future, become a legitimate target of the police or a national intelligence agency. Brandeis also warned us to be most on guard against the growing threats to our freedom and privacy when government authorities attempt to justify their intrusive surveillance activities for seemingly beneficial reasons: Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. In the past, students of the Bible’s prophecies have wondered how John’s prediction in the book of Revelation regarding the Antichrist’s global monitoring of all citizens could ever be fulfilled literally. Until the last decade it was impossible for any government, even Nazi Germany or communist Russia and China, to provide continuous monitoring of every citizen, no matter how many informers or secret police agents were employed. But today, citizens of Western democracies are under closer surveillance than anyone who lived in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The development of the Echelon surveillance system and the parallel systems used by Russia, China, and the European Union show very clearly how it will be possible for a future world dictator, the Antichrist, to exercise total surveillance and control over the world’s population. The only hope for continued freedom and liberty will be found in the certain promise of the Word of God that Jesus Christ will return as prophesied to liberate humanity from the satanic oppression of the Antichrist.
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE 2. NSA LINKS TO YAHOO AND GOOGLE DATACENTERS The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot. According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.
The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants. The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process. The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies. 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE In a statement, the NSA said it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.” “NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons — minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination,”
In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping” and has not provided the government with access to its systems. “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” he said.
A Yahoo spokeswoman said, “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”
Under PRISM, the NSA gathers huge volumes of online communications records by legally compelling U.S. technology companies, including Yahoo and Google, to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. That program, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in Britain, is authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner. Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply and the FISC has no jurisdiction. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333, which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies. John Schindler, a former NSA chief analyst and frequent defender who teaches at the Naval War College, said it is obvious why the agency would prefer to avoid restrictions where it can. “Look, NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole,” he said. “It’s fair to say the rules are less restrictive under Executive Order 12333 than they are under FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In a statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied that it was using executive authority to “get around the limitations” imposed by FISA. The operation to infiltrate data links exploits a fundamental weakness in systems architecture. To guard against data loss and system slowdowns, Google and Yahoo maintain fortresslike data centers across four 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE continents and connect them with thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable. Data move seamlessly around these globe-spanning “cloud” networks, which represent billions of dollars of investment. For the data centers to operate effectively, they synchronize large volumes of information about account holders. Yahoo’s internal network, for example, sometimes transmits entire e-mail archives — years of messages and attachments — from one data center to another.
Tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds allows the NSA to intercept communications in real time and to take “a retrospective look at target activity,” according to one internal NSA document. To obtain free access to data- center traffic, the NSA had to circumvent gold-standard security measures. Google “goes to great lengths to protect the data and intellectual property in these centers,” according to one of the company’s blog posts, with tightly audited access controls, heat-sensitive cameras, round-theclock guards and biometric verification of identities. Google and Yahoo also pay for premium data links, designed to be faster, more reliable and more secure. In recent years, both of them are said to have boughtor leased thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables for their own exclusive use. They had reason to think, insiders said, that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes. In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” however, a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!” The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE victory over Google security. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said. For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a “buffer” that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds. Then the data are sent through a series of filters to “select” information the NSA wants and “defeat” what it does not. PowerPoint slides about the Google cloud, for example, show that the NSA tries to filter out all data from the company’s “Web crawler,” which indexes Internet pages. According to the briefing documents, prepared by participants in the MUSCULAR project, collection from inside Yahoo and Google has produced important intelligence leads against hostile foreign governments that are specified in the documents. Because digital communications and cloud storage do not usually adhere to national boundaries, MUSCULAR and a previously disclosed NSA operation to collect Internet address books have amassed content and metadata on a previously unknown scale from U.S. citizens and residents. Those operations have gone undebated in public or in Congress because their existence was classified. The Google and Yahoo operations call attention to an asymmetry in U.S. surveillance law. Although Congress has lifted some restrictions on NSA domestic surveillance on grounds that purely foreign communications sometimes pass over U.S. switches and cables, it has not added restrictions overseas, where American communications or data stores now cross over foreign switches. “Thirty-five years ago, different countries had their own telecommunications infrastructure, so the division between foreign and domestic collection was clear,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the intelligence panel, said in an interview. “Today there’s a global communications infrastructure, so there’s a greater risk of collecting on Americans when the NSA collects overseas.” It is not clear how much data from Americans is collected and how much of that is retained. One weekly report on MUSCULAR says the British operators of the site allow the NSA to contribute 100,000 “selectors,” or search terms. That is more than twice the number in use in the PRISM program, but even 100,000 cannot easily account for the millions of records that are said to be sent to Fort Meade each day. In 2011, when the FISC learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams — on a much smaller scale — from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under FISA and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE 3. NSA TRACKING CELLPHONE LOCATIONS WORLDWIDE The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.” In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them. U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets. 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.” The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect. Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text. CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces. “One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.” The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection. The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity. The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara Mikulski (Md.) — have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for “a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.” NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate. “It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure. An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures. According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators. A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.” STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location. The agency’s access to carriers’ networks appears to be vast. “Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “This ‘flat’ trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency — hostile or friendly — can get ‘one stop shopping’ to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.” Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit cites two U.S.-based carriers to illustrate the challenge of correlating the travels of phone users on different mobile networks. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus. The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile. Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny.
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE 4. BRITISH INTELLIGENCE DATA MINING Major telecom companies have been assisting the UK intelligence agency GCHQ by granting access to all the traffic passing through their fiber-optic cables – and by developing Trojan software, leaked papers obtained by German media reveal. The classified slides obtained by German news agencies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and NDR list global telecommunication operators among the collaborators of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The documents are said to have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The 2009-dated GCHQ slides reportedly provide the names of the following companies, along with their agency’s internal aliases: American provider Verizon Business (code name: “Dacron”), British majors BT (“Remedy”) and Vodafone Cable (“Gerontic”), as well as Global Crossing (“Pinnage”), Level 3 (“Little”), Viatel (“Vitreous”) and Interoute (“Streetcar”). The listed telecom giants have allegedly been passing on details of phone calls, emails and Facebook entries to the agency in line with the GCHQ’s operation Tempora. Snowden earlier revealed that Tempora was part of the UK’s data collection programs dubbed ‘Mastering the Internet’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation.’ The seven providers named in the reports own tens of thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic networks, including the high-capacity undersea cables, and literally form the backbone of the internet’s infrastructure. According to a Guardian intelligence source cited in June, all such firms had “no choice” but to engage in spying, compelled by the GCHQ warrants. Until now, the companies’ names had been strictly kept secret by the agency for fear of “high-level political fallout” and major market losses. But the fresh leaks also claim to be showing another side of the secret deal, with telecom majors allegedly receiving rewards for developing the spying software for GCHQ on their own. Such software could come in a form of Trojan viruses installed on targeted computers, the reports say, stating that the companies’ involvement in data collection is much larger and more complicated than previously thought. The reports also list network attacks and deliberate disinformation as the tactics employed by the UK’s intelligence agency in their task for ‘dominating’ the internet. So far, all but one of the providers listed in the report failed to directly confirm or deny the claims, some saying they comply with the law of the countries they operate in. German market leader Level 3 denied providing access to its communication networks to “any foreign government,” according to SZ. But the news agency then speculated that the company could still serve as a hub for outside data transfer, as in 2011 it acquired the Global Crossing, inheriting its foreign networks – and, possibly, agreements. The sensitive revelations about GCHQ’s so-called ‘intercept partners’ come as a follow up of the recent Snowden leak saying that the British agency has received at least $150 million from its American counterpart NSA for the “dirty work” of massive intelligence gathering. The fugitive whistleblower has repeatedly said that the massive surveillance was “not just a US problem,” and that the UK also “has a huge dog in this fight” – GCHQ, which makes it “worse than the US.” 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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666 SINGULARITY PART 5 – THE SNOWDEN FILE
The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate. One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibreoptic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months. GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects. This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets. The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history". "It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US." Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA's intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith." By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK's position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic. The data collected provides a powerful tool in the hands of the security agencies, enabling them to sift for evidence of serious crime. According to the source, it has allowed them to discover new techniques used by terrorists to avoid security checks and to identify terrorists planning atrocities. It has also been used against child exploitation networks and in the field of cyberdefence. 666 SINGULARITY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2014, All rights reserved
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