person:james bamford

New York Review of Books : AUGUST 15, 2013

Eavesdropping on America. (August 2013)

They Know Much More Than You Think

James Bamford is the author of three books on the NSA, including The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

They Know Much More Than You Think by James Bamford | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/?pagination=false

... according to the draft of a top secret NSA inspector general’s report leaked by Snowden, (...) approximately one third of all international telephone calls in the world enter, leave, or transit the United States. “Most international telephone calls are routed through a small number of switches or ‘chokepoints’ in the international telephone switching system en route to their final destination,” says the report. “The United States is a major crossroads for international switched telephone traffic.” At the same time, according to the 2009 report, virtually all Internet communications in the world pass through the US. For example, the report notes that during 2002, less than one percent of worldwide Internet bandwidth—i.e., the international link between the Internet and computers—“was between two regions that did not include the United States.”

Interview with NSA expert James Bamford | Bookmarks | an SFGate.com blog
▻http://blog.sfgate.com/bookmarks/2013/07/01/interview-with-nsa-expert-james-bamford

Q: Privacy concerns aside, one of the problems with collecting all this data, you have written, is that “the NSA is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood.” What does the NSA need to do to make practical use of this data?

A: The problem is the bigger you build the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle. Thus, despite all this collection, the NSA missed the Boston bombing, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. And most, if not all, of the “successes” they point to could have been discovered using much less invasive surveillance. Thus, they should collect less hay and give analysts better training in ways to find needles.

Q: In “The Shadow Factory,” you quote the late Sen. Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said the NSA’s data collection “could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, 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.” What do you make of Church’s comments today?

A: He was enormously prescient and we should have heeded his warning.

Un ancien employé de la #NSA compare la situation politique actuelle aux #États_Unis avec celle de l’Allemagne juste avant la prise du pouvoir par Hitler.
La transformation des États Unis dans une dictature à part entière serait imminente.

Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers | The Nation
▻http://www.thenation.com/article/173521/obamas-crackdown-whistleblowers

By using the NSA to spy on American citizens, Binney told me, the United States has created a police state with few parallels in history: “It’s better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had.” He compared the situation to the Weimar Republic, a brief period of liberal democracy that preceded the Nazi takeover of Germany. “We’re just waiting to turn the key,” he said.

Est-ce vraiment inquiétant ?

James Bamford, the world’s foremost authority on the NSA, said Americans should take Binney seriously. “Remember, he was the equivalent of a general because of his rank” at the NSA, he said. “In terms of going public with their names and faces,” the NSA Four rank as the most important whistleblowers in NSA history, he added. “Obviously, I think they’re very credible.” Because of their experience in some of the NSA’s most secret programs, the NSA Four are “indispensable” to understanding the agency’s unconstitutional operations, said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU. “NSA is an extraordinarily powerful agency with sophisticated technology that is poorly understood by many experts. It operates behind a veil of secrecy that is penetrated only occasionally by whistleblowers like these.”

D’après l’article les gouvernements depuis l’administration Bush auraient vendu la quasi totalité des activités sécuritaires étatsuniennes à des entreprises privées tellement corrompues que la défense américaine serait maintenant entre les mains de bandits qui imposeraient leurs lois à l’ensemble de la politique du pays.

#nazisme #allemagne #machtergreifung #oups

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | James Bamford | Wired.com
►http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Superbe enquête autour de la construction d’un nouveau #datacenter de la #NSA ; quelques extraits qui montrent que #Echelon est définitivement derrière nous :

the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there.

The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.”

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.”

“We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.

“Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”
That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.”

#DPI #surveillance #internet #etats-unis #cdp