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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

This article will take a few minutes but it directly affects everty person on 
this list.  I have not seen one mention on CNN, NYT, Wash. Post, or any of 
the other so-called 'reputable' MSM.

 This quote iis from the article below

 "Bamford ends The Shadow Factory by quoting Senator Frank Church, the first 
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during the original hearings 
on the NSA in the 1970s.

 “If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity 
that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to 
impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the 
most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no 
matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to 
know. Such is the capability of this technology,” said Church "


_____________________________________________________________________

12/3/2008        [21] 

> News 

The panopticon economy 

The NSA’s new data-mining facility is one component of a growing local 
surveillance industry  Greg M. Schwartz It looks innocent enough, but no 
loitering, please: The NSA’s Texas Cryptology Center, under construction at 
410 and West Military.  
 
By Greg M. Schwartz

Surrounded by barbwire fencing, the anonymous yet massive building on West 
Military Drive near San Antonio’s Loop 410 freeway looms mysteriously with no 
identifying signs of any kind. Surveillance is tight, with security cameras 
surrounding the under-construction building. Readers are advised not to take 
any photos unless you care to be detained for at least a 45-minute 
interrogation by the National Security Agency, as this reporter was.

There’s a strangely blurry line during such an interrogation. After viewing 
the five photos I’d taken of the NSA’s new Texas Cryptology Center, the NSA 
officer asked if I would delete them. When I asked if he was ordering me to 
do so, he said no; he was asking as a personal favor. I declined and was 
eventually released. 

America’s top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and 
is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters — oddly positioned 
directly across the street from a 24-hour Walmart — where billions of 
electronic communications will be sifted in the agency’s mission to identify 
terrorist threats.

“No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its 
secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, 
Texas,” writes author James Bamford in the Shadow Factory, his third book 
about the NSA. “Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 
470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. 
Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the 
new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the 
world.”

Bamford’s book focuses on the NSA’s transformation since 9/11, with the 
impetus for the new facility being a direct ramification of those attacks. At 
the time, the NSA had only about 7 percent of its facilities outside the 
Washington D.C./Baltimore area. But the realization that additional attacks 
could virtually wipe out the agency catalyzed a regional expansion. [See 
“Secret Agency Man,” November 5, 2008.]

The new facility is a potential boon to the local economy since it’s 
reportedly going to employ around 1,500 people, but questions remain about 
whether there will be adequate oversight to prevent civil-rights violations 
like Uncle Sam’s recent notorious warrantless wiretapping program. The NSA 
would suggest the facility’s ability to sort through surveillance data is one 
of America’s top defenses against terrorist threats, but the NSA’s presence 
comes with concerns that abuse of its secretive power could see the agency 
become akin to the “Thought Police” of 1984, George Orwell’s classic novel 
depicting the nightmare of a total surveillance society — and all for 
nothing. Even as the facility is completed, a new government-backed report 
has concluded that data surveillance is an ineffective method for identifying 
potential terrorists or preventing attacks.

So just what will be going on inside the NSA’s new San Antonio facility? 
Bamford describes former NSA Director Mike Hayden’s goals for the data-mining 
center as knowing “exactly what Americans were doing day by day, hour by 
hour, and second by second. He wanted to know where they shopped, what they 
bought, what movies they saw, what books they read, the toll booths they went 
through, the plane tickets they purchased, the hotels they stayed in… In 
other words, Total Information Awareness, the same Orwellian concept that 
John Poindexter had tried to develop while working for the Pentagon’s 
[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency].”

Bamford details how Hayden, now head of the CIA, had originally leaned toward 
being overprotective of civil rights, not wanting to see the NSA revisit the 
scandal-ridden era of the 1970s and the violations of “Project Shamrock.” But 
9/11 altered Hayden’s philosophical direction 180 degrees. The Total 
Information Awareness project supposedly died when the plan was exposed, 
Poindexter resigned, and Congress cut off further funding. But Bamford and 
others have reported that the project simply migrated to the NSA, “an agency 
with a far better track record than DARPA for keeping secrets.” 

The NSA remembers the Alamo
The NSA was waffling on selection of a home for its new facility when the 
City of San Antonio sent a mission to NSA headquarters in January 2007 to 
lobby for it, part of a continuing effort to woo the agency. On January 18, 
Microsoft announced its selection of San Antonio for a new data center. The 
NSA followed suit three months later. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff was 
part of the effort to entice the NSA to choose San Antonio. He says talks 
centered on economic factors and what the city could do to facilitate the 
NSA’s plans.

“They’re pretty tight on what they do; they don’t share that information with 
you,” says Wolff. “I hope that the administration will be addressing 
[civil-rights violations], and I hope they’re correcting those concerns.”

Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio 
for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has 
its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the 
national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft 
would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages 
of “having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data 
centers.” The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft’s data 
center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain 
access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant, but merely a 
fiber-optic cable.

“What the Microsoft people will have will be just storage of a lot of the 
email that is being sent. They keep this email — I don’t know why — and there 
should be some legislation saying how long it should be kept,” said Bamford 
in a phone interview last week. “The post office doesn’t keep copies of our 
letters when we mail letters; why should the telecom companies or the 
internet providers keep copies of our email? It doesn’t make sense to me. But 
there’s no legislation. So they need a place to store it, and that’s where 
they’re storing all this stuff.” 

(Microsoft did not return a call for comment before press deadline.)

The new NSA facility boosts the agency’s already formidable presence in South 
Texas, where they have 2,000 employees on the Medina Annex of the Lackland 
Air Force Base — mostly Signals Intelligence, or Sigint, specialists, who use 
cutting-edge technology to intercept anything from faxes to emails and 
satellite communications.

NSA’s new facility also gives the agency easy access to UTSA’s Institute for 
Cyber Security and the school’s Center for Infrastructure Assurance and 
Security. The ICS was founded in 2007 with a $3.5-million grant from the 
Texas Emerging Technology Fund to continue efforts to protect American 
communities against cyber-attacks, with the CIAS — a think tank launched in 
2001 — being rolled into the ICS. All of this led U.S. Representative Ciro 
Rodriguez (D-San Antonio) to declare San Antonio “the center of 
cybersecurity, in the country and the world.”

ICS Founding Executive Director Ravi Sandhu acknowledges some synergy between 
the NSA presence in San Antonio and UTSA’s cybersecurity work.

“Cybersecurity in the public domain has largely been about defense, but 
there’s certainly an attack component to it. To some degree, the U.S. 
Department of Defense and intelligence agencies are now starting to talk 
about the attack component in the public domain,” says Sandhu.

Sandhu says UTSA’s cybersecurity students are recruited by many of San 
Antonio’s local employers and doesn’t doubt that NSA is one of them. 
“Recruiting is one end … but it’s an attractive thing for NSA employees 
[too]. They can further their education — they can do degrees part-time, they 
can do advanced degrees … so there are advantages beyond direct recruitment 
of NSA students.” 

Does automated data mining even work?
While the opening of the NSA’s massive new data center heightens existing 
civil-rights concerns, a new report from the National Research Council 
questions whether such data-mining is even effective. Sponsored by the 
Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation and 
released in October of this year, the report suggests that pattern-based 
data-mining is not even a viable way to identify terrorists.

The 352-page study —“Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against 
Terrorists” — concludes that identification of terrorists through automated 
data-mining “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of 
technology development efforts.” It also says inevitable false positives will 
result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being erroneously 
flagged as suspects. 

“Actions such as arrest, search, or denial of rights should never be taken 
solely on the basis of an automated data-mining result,” says the report. The 
question, then, is how rigorously will human analysts vet such information 
before alleged leads are pursued, and who has oversight of the process?

“Part of the problem is … jurisdiction over national-security issues is very 
divided in Congress. You have the Homeland Security committee, the Justice 
committee, but, of course, you also have some basic issues — government 
oversight, appropriations,” says Professor Fred Cate, the NRC committee 
member who wrote most of the report and who serves as director of Indiana 
University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. “So I think in some 
ways one of the issues is the need for a more streamlined oversight system so 
that somebody takes responsibility for it.”

Cate says the migration of the TIA project to the NSA is part of the problem. 

“Because so many different agencies are involved and because there are no 
consistent oversight mechanisms, it’s very hard [to monitor]. And Congress 
created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and then it didn’t 
like the way it created it initially, so then it recreated it with more 
powers, but it never confirmed any members to it,” says Cate. “So for the 
past year, there’s been nobody in that critical position. So I think one 
immediate step for Congress and the new president will be to nominate members 
and get them confirmed.”

The lack of clearly delineated oversight remains a vital yet unsolved issue. 
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Virginia), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence 
Committee, would appear to be the Congressman with the most power to pursue 
such oversight.

“Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but now it’s mostly 
the security, industrial complex; it’s these people that build all the 
hardware and software for Homeland Security and Intelligence and all that,” 
says Bamford. “As far as I can see, nobody has a handle on how many 
contractors are out there, what they’re doing, how much money’s going to 
them, how much is useful, how much is wasted money.”

Cate says the NRC committee is not necessarily opposed to data-mining in 
principal, but is concerned about how it’s carried out. “The question is can 
you do it and make it work so that you don’t intrude unnecessarily into 
privacy and so that you reach reliable conclusions.”

Bamford writes in the Shadow Factory of how the NSA’s Georgia listening post 
has eavesdropped on Americans during the Iraq War, including journalists, 
without a warrant or any indication of terrorism. He also reports on NSA 
eavesdropping on undecided members of the United Nations Security Council in 
the run-up to the vote on the Iraq War resolution, with the Bush regime 
seeking information with which to twist the arms of voting countries. The 
spying was only revealed due to British Parliament whistleblower Claire 
Short, who admitted she’d read secret transcripts of UN Secretary-General 
Kofi Annan’s confidential conversations.

“The UN people have been aware of [NSA eavesdropping] for a long time, but 
there’s not much they can do about it,” says Bamford.

A common response to concerns about data surveillance is that those who keep 
their noses clean have nothing to worry about. But the reach of the NSA’s 
surveillance net combined with lack of oversight and the political paranoia 
escalated by the 9/11 attacks means that almost anyone could wind up on the 
terrorist watch list.

“The principal end product of all that data and all that processing is a list 
of names — the watch list — of people, both American and foreign, thought to 
pose a danger to the country,” writes Bamford. “Once containing just twenty 
names, today it is made up of an astonishing half a million — and it grows 
rapidly every day. Most on the list are neither terrorists nor a danger to 
the country, and many are there simply by mistake.” 

Bamford reports that consequences of being on the list could include having 
an application for a Small Business Administration loan turned down; having a 
child’s application to one of the military academies rejected; or, because 
the names are shared with foreign governments, being turned away after 
landing in Europe for a vacation or business trip. All without ever being 
told why.

A senior intelligence official concerned about the situation told Bamford 
“the system is a disaster,” adding that the list at the National 
Counterterrorism Center isn’t even compatible with the NSA and CIA systems.

“They could be snooping on just about anything right now and not be 
accountable and be able to hold their hands up and go, ‘Our system doesn’t 
track that,’ when in many cases the system does, but the code is so 
convoluted you could never know it,” says the official.

Bamford also reports on Uncle Sam’s skyrocketing use of “national security 
letters” for obtaining personal information. The NSLs, which do not require 
probable cause or court approval, jumped from 8,500 in 2000 to 143,074 
between 2003 and 2005, according to a 2007 Justice Department inspector 
general’s report. Under the revised version of the 1994 Communications 
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, it’s not only a crime for any company to 
refuse to cooperate, it’s also become a crime for company officials to even 
disclose their cooperation.

“There was a lot of pressure by the FBI in ’94 to have CALEA enacted … but 
the Clinton Administration was in favor of doing all that,” says Bamford.

The question for us then becomes who, if anyone, is watching the watchdogs? 
One organization devoted to such duty is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 
a San Francisco-based non-profit whose mission is to protect electronic civil 
liberties. Reducing the use of NSLs to gag and acquire data from online 
service providers is one of the planks in EFF’s proposed privacy agenda for 
the new Obama administration. 

“The issue here is that when people are gagged, you can’t talk about it and 
[people] don’t know what kind of abuses there are,” says EFF media-relations 
coordinator Rebecca Jeschke. The EFF privacy agenda also includes repealing 
or repairing the FISA Amendments Act, reforming the Electronic Communications 
Privacy Act, and reform of the State Secrets Privilege, the latter which has 
been used by the Bush regime to shield its electronic surveillance activity 
from judicial review.

The EFF filed a lawsuit against the NSA in September on behalf of AT&T 
customers who were victims of warrantless wiretapping, with defendants 
including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and NSA Director Keith 
Alexander. The EFF also filed suit against AT&T — until this summer 
headquartered in San Antonio, the telecom giant still maintains a sizable 
presence here — for participating in the illegal surveillance program, and is 
challenging the FISA Amendments Act passed by Congress in July — which gave 
retroactive immunity to the telecom companies — as being unconstitutional. 

“Where I disagreed was the immunity to telecommunications entities … and 
that’s why I couldn’t support something that provided for the immunity 
provision,” says U.S. Representative Charlie Gonzalez (D-San Antonio) of the 
FISA Amendments Act. “We had something that we thought in the House was good, 
and then the Senate did their own thing. But I was never happy with the 
inclusion of the blanket-immunity provision to telecommunications entities, 
because I thought it relieved them of a responsibility and duty that they owe 
as corporate citizens.”

Gonzalez added that he thinks “there’s still tremendous shortcomings in the 
law when it comes to making sure that you don’t have abuses of the authority 
of eavesdropping.” 

The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., a public 
interest research group whose mission is similar to EFF’s, is suing the 
Department of Justice for access to documents authored by government lawyers 
regarding President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. These opinions, 
prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, provided the legal rationale for 
Uncle Sam to wiretap American citizens in the United States without court 
approval. On October 31, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to provide for 
independent judicial inspection of documents relating to the program. 

The latest news in Uncle Sam’s ongoing surveillance scandal happens to come 
from the FBI’s involvement with the NSA. The Washington Times reported in 
November that Supervisory Special Agent Bassem Youssef, who oversees the 
FBI’s role in the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, says the FBI 
engaged in unlawful acts while carrying out that surveillance. Youssef, who 
now fears career retaliation for stepping up as a whisteblower, is due to 
testify with the Justice Department.

Whether or not the new Obama administration will enact any demonstrable 
change in the personnel and policies that created the civil-rights violations 
of recent years remains a question mark.

“Everything I’ve seen so far with Obama has not been focused on change. It’s 
been focused on bringing back the old Clinton Administration or continuing 
the same,” says Bamford, noting the President-elect’s decisions to nominate 
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and keep Robert Gates as Secretary of 
Defense. Bamford mentions Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold as someone he feels 
would fight for greater accountability.

“That’s a person I would like to see rewarded for making the right decision, 
instead of people being rewarded for making the wrong decisions,” says 
Bamford of Feingold’s record in voting against the revised FISA Amendments 
Act and being the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. 

Bamford ends The Shadow Factory by quoting Senator Frank Church, the first 
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during the original hearings 
on the NSA in the 1970s. “If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the 
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the 
government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way 
to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in 
resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within 
the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this 
technology,” said Church more than three decades ago.

That technology now sees its latest evolution occurring at the shadowy 
building on San Antonio’s West Military Drive. •