Early in the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq, the National Security Agency was blindsided by enemy fighters’ frequent use of rudimentary wireless communications devices known as “high–powered cordless phones,” according to documents among 263 published today by The Intercept.
The documents, drawn from the agency’s internal news site, SIDtoday, and provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, date mostly to the latter half of 2003, and show the NSA was at the time rapidly expanding its internet monitoring. But even as its digital surveillance grew more sophisticated, the agency saw its targets increasingly adopting crude forms of communications like shortwave radio, SMS cellphone messaging and, most vexingly, high-powered cordless phones. The “poor man’s cell phones,” as the cordless devices were called, spread through Afghan borderlands and along Iraqi roadsides. Meanwhile, the NSA was scrambling to fill what one SIDtoday article referred to as an “intelligence gap” around the devices. The agency assembled more than 500 people at Fort Meade, including foreign intelligence partners and contractors, in order to understand, and plan how to crack into, a type of communication “increasing exponentially worldwide,” as an internal bulletin put it.
The NSA’s scramble to monitor cordless phones helps illustrate how the agency, despite its best efforts to predict the future, can end up blindsided. Just as the military after the Cold War continued to buy sophisticated weapons for use against conventional forces, leaving it poorly prepared for guerilla warfare, so too did the NSA’s state-of-the-art mass internet surveillance leave it unprepared for enemies in rural areas with crude radios.
The NSA documents about cordless phones are among many highlights from The Intercept’s second release of SIDtoday postings, made available for download starting today. As detailed in the roundup below, SIDtoday articles from the second half of 2003 also outline how the NSA obtained credit card information from the Secret Service, fed intelligence to the FBI, requested investigations of suspected leakers, spied on diplomats to advance the U.S. war in Iraq, exposed a purported terrorist computer as much less menacing than U.S. news media had reported, and cooperated extensively with the 9/11 Commission.
A SIDtoday article from the period also discloses that the NSA spied on non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, in order to collect information to feed into the U.S.’s extensive medical intelligence apparatus. Using this and other Snowden documents, Intercept reporter Jenna McLaughlin filed a story about the NSA’s “medical SIGINT” operation and other ways the U.S. collects so-called medical intelligence.
A new NSA data-collection center sits behind a neighborhood in Bluffdale, Utah in 2015.
Photo: George Frey/Getty Images
Millions of Ordinary People Caught In NSA Internet Taps
A July 2003 SIDtoday article by the “deputy director for data acquisition” noted how, amid a rapid growth in digital networking, the NSA increasingly found itself sifting through the communications of ordinary people. The article said that “our targets are moving from fixed narrowband transmissions to shared, re-routable, extremely wideband, multiplexed, multi-formatted transmissions.”
Lots of other people were jumping onto the internet as well so “our targets communications are increasingly buried by millions of non-target communications.”
Another article explained the successes of FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW – codenames for NSA’s partnerships with AT&T and Verizon to conduct unconstitutional surveillance of internet traffic passing through America’s largest telecom providers. These programs, part of NSA’s “upstream” collection, were later used to feed unimaginable amounts of surveillance data into XKEYSCORE to be processed and searched by analysts. In September 2003, FAIRVIEW, the AT&T surveillance program, captured “several trillion metadata records – of which more than 400 billion were selected for downstream processing or storage.” That same month, the program launched a new collection capability, allowing it to collect “more than one million emails a day.” (This document was published last year by the New York Times and ProPublica.)
As it monitored more and more internet traffic, the NSA also aimed to grow its own use of networks for collaboration. One SIDtoday article heralded a new tool called InfoWorkSpace, available to all Five Eyes intelligence agencies and boasting secure video and audio conferencing, text chat, whiteboards, and screen sharing —impressive, by 2003 standards. But using the cutting-edge the technology could be tricky. Three months after announcing InfoWorkSpace, SIDtoday reported that signals intelligence directors from each Five Eyes agency held their first virtual meeting using the system, but “GCHQ was unable to attend due to a computer failure.”
People who struggle to stay secure online can take comfort in the fact that even the digital spies at the NSA have trouble installing basic encryption, at least judging from two SIDtoday articles dating to July 2003. They described the NSA’s move to an internal online security system built around Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI. Such infrastructure comes into play every time you visit a website using the secure HTTPS protocol; it involves encryption keys that can be openly distributed in public as well as a system of certificates to help ensure the correct keys are distributed.
Within the NSA, nearly every employee was required to create their own PKI certificate, a process that was cumbersome and confusing. It involved 11 steps, including requiring employees to go to the nearest “kiosk room” for a machine to generate and print a password for them. “Just accept that this process might be a little confusing, a little frustrating, a little time-consuming,” an article consoled, “but just sit down, take a deep breath and do it! It really isn’t that bad!!!!”
Anther SIDtoday article announced SID’s new policy on “secure telecommuting,” for employees that needed to leave the Washington, D.C. area but wanted to continue their classified work. “Many of the skills resident among the workforce do not exactly grow on trees,” the author said, “and it is of critical importance that SID find a way to retain those skills.” All telecommuting must happen from a “suitable remote secure government facility” – working from home violates Defense Department policy, and “approval for telecommuting is given on a case-by-case basis.”
A U.S. Army soldier in Afghanistan watches a screen showing the detonation of an Improvised Explosive Device during a route-clearance mission in July 2010.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Simple, Rugged Technology Catches NSA Off Guard
Even as the NSA ramped up cutting-edge surveillance of the internet, it also grew its efforts to monitor the use of high-powered cordless phones, an unsophisticated wireless technology known as a “poor man’s cell phone,” as a September 2003 SIDtoday article put it. Such devices were common in remote areas with handsets that could range 50 miles from the radio base station.
The article said HPCPs were potentially in use by “Usama bin Laden and his associates. … Thousands of networks are operating along the [Afghanistan/Pakistan] border region, particularly in regions of known terrorist activity.”
But such devices represented an “intelligence gap” and their use by enemies could result in an analyst “missing some of your target’s communications.” Another SIDtoday article published at the same time said use of HPCPs was “increasing exponentially worldwide” and that the NSA still needed to work to “understand this technology,” in part to “provide force protection in Iraq.” In Iraq, high-powered cordless phone technology was frequently used to detonate roadside bombs, Wired reported in 2011.
In late 2003, NSA had so much to learn about HPCP technology that the agency hosted a top-secret “Worldwide HPCP Conference” at NSA’s campus. More than 500 people attended the event, including representatives from all Five Eyes spy agencies, all branches of the U.S. military, and private contractors. “Being able to collect [from] communication devices such as HPCP phones can literally spell the difference between life and death,” an assistant director for central intelligence said at the conference. “Life for us, death for would-be terrorists.”
The U.S. military eventually acquired a variety of devices capable of monitoring or locating HPCP communications, several of which were disclosed by The Intercept last year as part of the publication of secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of surveillance gear targeting wireless communications.
While it struggled with cordless phones, the NSA had more luck tapping into another primitive radio platform, the nearly 100-year-old technology known as high-frequency, or shortwave, radio. A SIDtoday article from July 2003 said that “the market for HF continues to grow. … HF requires no terrestrial or spaceborne infrastructure to communicate globally and is capable of surviving the effects of a nuclear blast.” The technology was also relatively cheap and the radios were “mobile, rugged, and require minimal manpower and training to operate” making them “ideal for use by terrorists and third-world military organizations.”
But those weren’t the NSA’s only targets using HF: Important participants in negotiations at the United Nations utilized shortwave, too. “As the United States was considering its options regarding a Security Council resolution on Iraq,” the July article explained, “intelligence derived from HF collection provided the position and voting intentions of several key players.”
Another simple communications medium the NSA found itself increasingly monitoring in 2003 was SMS, the text-messaging protocol built into even the most basic of cellphones. In the 18 months through July, SMS use spiked among Islamic extremists, according to an article in SIDtoday. “They believe that SMS is more secure than both voice calls and E-mail,” the piece stated. But the NSA was clearly able to access plenty of SMS messages, as the article described how the extremists used SMS “to arrange instant messaging or chat sessions … to warn of security problems, especially after raids… to coordinate financial transfers” and “to pass new E-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and passwords”
FBI file photos of the Lackawanna Six.
Photo: Ho/AFP/Getty Images
NSA Feeds Information To Domestic Law Enforcement
A series of 2003 SIDtoday articles described support to the NSA’s partners at various U.S. government agencies. The agency’s work is traditionally driven by these partners, which it frequently refers to as “customers.” As the examples below make clear, customers both request and supply information to the signals intelligence directorate, and some are kept at a further remove than others, whether for legal reasons or due to turf wars.
NSA and the Secret Service
An August 2003 SIDtoday article described the NSA’s relationship with the U.S. Secret Service, including the NSA’s work gathering signals intelligence to help protect the president and other executive branch members when they travel abroad.
In return, the article said, the Secret Service provided the agency access to, and a copy of, its financial crimes division database of credit card information, giving NSA analysts “the ability to do real-time, on-line pulls and determine if a particular credit card was issued by a foreign bank.”
NSA and the FBI
One SIDtoday article seemed to exaggerate the NSA’s role in identifying a group of Yemeni American men who eventually pleaded guilty to providing material support for al Qaeda, a group known as the Buffalo Six or Lackawanna Six. The newsletter says information from the NSA was used to identify members of the group, although this version of events contradicts other reports.
The initial lead in the case, which included the names of the men eventually arrested, has repeatedly been attributed to an anonymous tip to the FBI from a member of the local Muslim community. Additional evidence allegedly came from the interrogation of a jihadist at Guantánamo Bay, after which updates on the investigation became a regular part of President George W. Bush’s daily intelligence brief, the New York Times reported.
The SIDtoday article said the arrest of the Buffalo Six stemmed from a partnership between the FBI and an NSA signals-intelligence cell focused on counterterrorism. The two parties worked together to develop new communications sources from which to extract intelligence, a process referred to as “SIGDEV.” “The Cell has further expanded its existing SIGDEV partnerships throughout the community to help locate specific terrorist targets,” the article stated. “This increased collaboration resulted in the arrests of six individuals in Buffalo, New York — [signals intelligence] reporting provided key leads and valuable information which enabled FBI analysts to identify the terrorist cell and advance their investigative efforts.”
Although the FBI seems to have identified the six men prior to any wiretapping, contrary to the SIDtoday article, federal authorities did reportedly begin monitoring the communications of the Lackawanna men using a FISA warrant after the Guantánamo interrogation and after White House interest in the case. A cryptic email referring to a “big meal” led them to interrogate the member of the Lackawanna Six who eventually confessed that the men had trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Times has said.
NSA Helps Coast Guard Find $197 Million in Cocaine
The NSA’s signals intelligence directorate began supplying intelligence to the U.S. Coast Guard starting in approximately 1989, according to the directorate’s “Coast Guard Account Manager.” An August 2003 SIDtoday article by the manager said the Coast Guard used signals intelligence in “domestic and law enforcement missions,” including for missions related to “counterterrorism, alien smuggling, counternarcotics, maritime tracking of vessels and/or high-interest cargos and international civilian maritime activities.” For example, in June 2003, SID helped the Coast Guard and British intelligence agency GCHQ track a cargo ship off the Venezuelan coast. After it was seized by the UK vessel HMS Iron Duke, it was found to contain “3,930 kilos of pure cocaine with a New York City street value of $196,500,000.”
NSA and the CIA
SIDtoday articles from 2003 detailed the changing relationship between the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency. In a July post, NSA Signals Intelligence Director Richard Quirk described a new policy that, he wrote, “defines how we will provide NSA-collected, unminimized SIGINT to CIA for them to use in direct support of certain aspects of their mission.” Generally speaking, unminimized SIGINT is signals intelligence that may include the communications of American citizens and permanent residents, including inadvertently acquired communications not relevant to the authorized purposes of the collection.
An article from the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, declassified in 2014 as a result of a lawsuit from a former CIA employee, described a joint “Counterproliferation Fusion Cell,” located at CIA headquarters in Virginia but headed by an NSA officer, to “help focus SIGINT collection and reporting on high-priority proliferation targets.” A November 2003 SIDtoday article shed further light on this cell, saying that the team was focused on the nuclear proliferation network led by A. Q. Khan in Pakistan and was also intended to become the center for reporting on the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Intelligence for Air Force “Space Campaign Planning”
The NSA also was providing the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska with “intelligence on space control and surveillance operations, information operations, computer network operations, and space campaign planning,” according to another SIDtoday article. The command, whose traditional mission is to monitor missile deployments in Russia, China, and other countries, had recently expanded to also play a role in the global war on terrorism at the time the article was published, in August 2003.
Photo: Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image
NSA Official Suggests Bypassing Elected Officials for Military
In addition to sharing information within the U.S. government, the NSA also provides extensive signals intelligence to its allies.
The NSA’s closest foreign collaborators are known as “Second Party” partners or the “Five Eyes:” spy agencies from the world’s English-speaking nations, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. According to one SIDtoday article, the term “Five Eyes” was derived from the classification marking, “US/UK/CAN/AUS/NZ EYES ONLY.”
In Australia’s small capital city of Canberra, there was an office known as the Special U.S. Liaison Office Canberra with, as of October 2003, a staff of 16 Americans, according to a SIDtoday article. The office served as the hub for the NSA’s relationship with Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) (today known as the Australian Signals Directorate, or ASD), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).
The article, first described in a 2014 New York Times story, outlined an NSA-DSD training effort: “NSA integrees mentor both cryptomathematicians and engineers while tackling the encrypted Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) network used by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, a goal mentioned in the DSD Director’s business plan.”
To help share NSA surveillance data between Second Party allies while keeping collection sources secret, NSA’s data acquisition team established the TICKETWINDOW information-sharing project in 1999. Initial coverage in SIDtoday did not make clear precisely what sort of system TICKETWINDOW was or what sort of technology powered it.
The NSA’s Third Party relationships differ from its Second Party relationships in that information sharing is confined to particular missions and, even within those missions, only certain types of information are shared, according to a SIDtoday article by Charlie Meals, the deputy director of the NSA signals intelligence directorate.
In the article, Meals made the case for ramping up NSA’s Third Party partnerships: “If we can’t deal with the civilian authorities in a certain country, can we establish a military-to-military agreement? Can we deal with countries that aren’t necessarily our close allies when it’s mutually advantageous to do so? … Let’s look into it!”
Another SIDtoday article described Third Party information sharing agreements with Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Jordan, saying that those partners were second only to certain European allies in the extent of sharing. It said the NSA shared information with Turkey and Japan on terrorism and with South Korea and Jordan on Iraq.
Computer Crack Exposes Sketchy Intelligence
A September 2003 SIDtoday article threw cold water on an October 2002 Time Magazine story. The Time story reported that photos of American trains were found on a hard drive recovered during a raid of a purported al Qaeda cell by Kuwaiti authorities. The article also said that the photos, along with statements of senior al Qaeda operatives under CIA and FBI interrogation, led counterterrorism officials to worry that terrorists might have been planning an attack against U.S. railroads. The NSA’s “SIGINT Forensics Lab,” which extracts data from seized computing devices, sometimes getting past encryption in the process, examined the photos and concluded that they were “taken from a 1980’s commercially produced clip art CD.”
NSA Staff Compare Sources To Traitors, Hunt Media Leaks
In the summer of 2003, in San Antonio, Texas, Jim Miklaszewski, Pentagon correspondent for NBC News, spoke to a class full of senior executives in the intelligence community about newsgathering. According to SIDtoday, Miklaszewski received some antagonistic questioning on the subject of leaks; one student even compared journalists to spies, asking how he “differentiated reporter recruitment of U.S. intelligence sources from recruitment of foreign Humint sources when the US sources are committing a felony by ‘leaking information’ to reporters who are accessories after the fact.”
Weeks later, SIDtoday published a two-part series of articles on media leaks – or “cryptologic insecurities,” as the NSA referred to them. The first article listed several examples of “damaging media leaks” from reports from CBS News and other media organizations and the “unfortunate consequences” of them, claiming that in two cases al Qaeda heightened its security and changed its tactics. Some leaks resulted in NSA requesting an FBI investigation.
The second article in the series briefly described the steps taken when a new leak is discovered, including potentially opening a Department of Justice investigation.
But “media leaks are rarely prosecuted,” the article said, often because “they are hard to prove, but in some cases officials are reluctant to prosecute for fear that the case will attract even more attention than the original disclosure.”
U.S. Army soldiers sweep into a house during an cordon-and-search operation in Fallujah, Iraq in October 2003.
Photo: Scott Nelson/Getty Images
Unexpected Iraq Insurgency Rallies NSA
As in the early part of 2003, summarized in The Intercept’s last SIDtoday roundup, the NSA found itself in the last half of the year on a wartime footing in Iraq as fighting there failed to die down as anticipated. In Baghdad, NSA signals intelligence provided “the majority of intelligence briefed to Ambassador [Paul] Bremer and the senior staff” of the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to an agency staffer deployed to the former presidential palace and writing in SIDtoday. NSA staff was also on the ground in support of special operations teams hunting “High Value Targets” and “Special Collection Service” teams.
Although “major hostilities” in Iraq officially ended on May 1, as SIDtoday put it, echoing the official administration position, and the U.S.’s “post-war reconstruction” had begun, a fierce insurgency was brewing. On August 6, the NSA signals intelligence director, Richard Quirk, put the “Iraq Issue Management Team” back in action, saying in SIDtoday that:
“Conditions in Iraq remain extremely dangerous. … It is essential that Signals Intelligence resurrect the support and level of effort that were so pronounced when bombs were falling.”
By mid-September, a dedicated group of 40 analysts at Fort Meade was formed as the “Iraq Terrorism Development Center” to perform target discovery against attacks by terrorists and former regime members.
In October, the United Nations Security Council was considering a draft, U.S.-authored resolution providing international participation and financial backing for military forces in Iraq and the reconstruction of the country. The stakes were high, and, as a SID national intelligence officer wrote in SIDtoday, Germany and France continued to “express their displeasure” and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan did not want to put U.N. personnel at risk unless the organization was in charge of reconstruction.
But on October 16, the resolution passed unanimously and “was at heart a triumph of SIGINT support” according to a SIDtoday article co-authored by the NSA’s representative to the U.S. Mission to the U.N.
“NSA played a key role in keeping U.S. policy makers in New York and Washington abreast (or ahead) of the many twists and turns in the marathon negotiations,” the SIDtoday article stated. “Reporting from across SID … provided a window into the planning and intentions of the principal players on the Council – and may have even provided … the key information needed to ensure the unanimous vote.”
Top photo: A helicopter view of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland earlier this year.
If I don’t comment on every SIDtoday release it doesn’t mean I’m not reading and always looking forward to more. You’re still about 5 years away from transition to the Obama administration, and some no doubt interesting insights how little politics changes anything for empire’s Big Brother, except to expand it.
Thank you Micah, Margot and The Intercept!
the agency saw its targets increasingly adopting crude forms of communications like shortwave radio, […] and, most vexingly, high-powered cordless phones.
It sounds like the TLA is making up excuses to mask its incompetence. Do they actually expect the people they spy on to neatly route all their communications into the Beltway?
Shortwave is standard equipment for the military, and they are equipped to deal with it. So does this and other TLAs. Weren’t they hunting East-block agents and forces for 40+ years? Shortwave was also used by the Mujahideen during the Soviet war, so it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise.
I wondered about what was meant by “high-powered cordless phones”, and after browsing the stuff linked above I came to the conclusion that must simply be referring to analog land-mobile radios with phone patches, optionally with trunking, or slightly more elaborate versions, such as rural radio telephones.
If anything, this should be VASTLY easier to monitor, provided you have equipment on the ground (or in the air). The number of simultaneous users in any given area is bound to be low, like it was in early (~1950-1985) car telephone systems with their abysmal spectral efficiency. A base station would need a minimum of engineering to achieve the quoted 50 mile range. You’re talking about an antenna on a hill with a tower and a hut. And this can by no means a “poor-man’s mobile phone”. The owners of the stations are probably legit for the most cases.
The article said that “our targets are moving from fixed narrowband transmissions to shared, re-routable, extremely wideband, multiplexed, multi-formatted transmissions.”
Is there actually any content in that statement, or is it only hollow techno-babble thrown to dazzle and obfuscate?
A WLAN router already meets the definition. Do they mean people using Skype at an internet café?
It sounds like those regular calls by LEAs in the media invoking some novel and exotic threat (Triads, Russian Mafia, cyberhackers, whatever), which invariably conclude with “we need more people+money+powers”…
The other side of this story is the defense contractors who are intertwined with the NSA and profited greatly off the Iraq invasion, for example SAIC:
SAIC played a huge role in the entire invade-and-occupy strategy:
In particular, they helped coordinate the bogus claims about Iraqi WMDs:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/03/spyagency200703/
So, why was Iraq invaded? It comes down to: 1) a cash cow for defense contractors, 2) an oil prize for fossil fuel corporations, and 3) a military base for neocon empire-builders to launch attacks on Syria and Iran.
Since this isn’t a theme that the U.S. public would support, the Bush Administration coordinated with the corporate media (owned by the same Wall Street outfits that profit off the defense and fossil fuel industries) to cook up a soup of lies about Saddam’s links to 9/11 and WMD programs.
It looks to me like they were stymied by guerilla war techniques. Their phones werent advanced very much for that era, and only a really bad actor would take things to social media. I am so glad I have so far managed to stay away from terrorists on places like twitter. It is way too easy to find yourself linked to the wrong people.
It is no wonder places like NSA grapple with the problem of bad and incomplete intelligence. If all they have is a hammer, they see everything as a board and nails.
Though now I kind of want to try to find a laptop from 2003 and an old startac. Or one of those nifty terrist phones. Or maybe that stuff just stymied them thirteen years ago. Blah.
I need a break from the net. All of society probably does, for that matter. I can usually tell when I get too pissed off at the world and my posts veer offtopic.
maybe they should stop calling it “intelligence”. All i see is Dumbness Officers.
Figures. If money is no object, I think people who have old clip art pictures of choo choo trains are … hard to stop. *h/t TIME mag.
Wrt the UN Security Council resolution:
<blockquote<But on October 16, the resolution passed unanimously and “was at heart a triumph of SIGINT support” according to a SIDtoday article co-authored by the NSA’s representative to the U.S. Mission to the U.N.
Otoh, to the extent many of the nations on the Security Council at that time were opposed to the Iraq war [sic], some vehemently (see Syria for example), that UN SC resolution was hardly a ‘triumph’ for U.S. foreign policy. .. more like an effort to make a really bad situation, better. As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it at the time … the council placed the interest of the Iraqi people “above all other considerations.”
*appreciate the work Margot and Micah
It still cracks me up that the five eyes are English speaking countries.
For all their “intelligence”, learning another language was just out of the question.
The low tech technology causing them issues is also funny.
It’s hard not to imagine them fumbling around the way I do every time I get a new cell phone.
Oh, I almost forgot.
That effort targeting the vital national security battleground of Papua New Guinea!
That one makes me miss Jon Stewart.
BTW, Micah-
I was hoping we’d hear from you regarding the DNC hack.
I just saw a headline “Almost certain Russia was involved”.
What do you think about Snowden’s comment that the NSA would have been aware of that long ago?
And, how hard would it be for someone else to intentionally leave a trail of breadcrumbs pointing to Russia as misdirection, for political or economic reasons, or as an ass-covering tactic?
I mean, if I was a hacker in some allied country, at the NSA or DIA, or just in my moms basement somewhere, that’s what I would have done.
No matter what, the NSA will never crack 2 tin cans and a mile of dental floss.
Message in a bottle: look for the “smoke signals”
*the Intelligence indicates where there’s a will, there’s a way ~
Learn “nine eyes”, “fourteen eyes” … they DO collaborate more widely.
I think the language issue isn’t that they can’t understand one another, but that when they are looking to censor and control content, they handle each language separately to take out all competition.
I’m aware of the other groupings, but the coincidence factor among the “most trusted” still jumps out.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if the language used when collaborating with other countries was also English.
It still cracks me up that the five eyes are English speaking countries.
For all their “intelligence”, learning another language was just out of the question.
Learning French is already a challenge for the brethren just outside Ottawa.
Is there any information related to the NSA’s ability to hack end-points?
E.g assuming proper OPSEC, can windows pc’s be used safely or doesn’t hacking said device require user interaction? (backdoor)
Right now we can only speculate as to whether ‘backdoors’ exist and whether cumbersome OPSEC will actually make a difference. So I’m hoping there’s some yet to be released info on that
Why was there so much resistance to the neocolonial occupation of Iraq by the United States under Paul Bremer? The 100 orders, the Iraq oil law, the refusal to hold elections. . . why did the insurgency explode in the first place?
https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_archive.html
Who was behind this debacle? The neocon Republicans who have now joined forces with Hillary Clinton who has an equally ambitious pro-war agenda.
I think maybe it’s time to start putting “occupation” in quotes.
As Gen. Shinsecki pointed out, 400,000 troops would have been an occupation.
Our “occupation” amounted to minimal control over a fraction of Iraq.
Great excerpt btw.
What it seems to me the two authors are remiss in providing for us here is some reminder, in general magnitudes, of the annual co$t to the American tax-paying public of this witches’ brew consisting of no more than a load of onions and small potatoes — and this not even to reckon in here the vast amount of money and other resources used to build and equip the NSA junk-food kitchen in the first place. Sure sounds to me like the whole operation is a joke for all that it has to show and boast of, and this while the US as a nation goes fast down the fucking tubes in having invested so hugely and so absurdly in such colossal military & ‘intelligence’ futilities. What on earth might Edward Snowden have to say on this, for godsakes?
Are there no more exciting revelations to come? How much of Snowden’s trove is released? This is all trivial, and puts no one against the wall. Unfortunately this site isn’t so much anti-establishment as eccentric, most of the time – and as sticking it to The Man is my personal confirmation bias I protest loudly!!!
Nowhere to hide? Well, who’s hiding the rest of the Snowden material? Couldn’t you be a little more… Assangey? Just a little?
Can somebody point to the OMG I can’t believe they are doing that part? I get that there are too many of them and that intelligence isn’t always reliable and all that… but none of the newsletter summaries seemed beyond what I’d expect intelligence folk to be doing.
charliethreeee. The whole Iraq War is a war crime. Its justifications were fabricated so that the US could put troops into a Middle Eastern nation for a variety of reasons, none of them to do with “Al Qaeda” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. They allowed the US to gain a strategic position next to Iran. To test weapons and strategies and technologies. To create a insurgency force to infiltrate Syria and cause regime change there. To challenge the developing Russian bloc of allies and discredit Russian weaponry. To further their efforts to take control of the world’s oil pricing mechanism. And most importantly, to continue the global drive of US imperialism. Lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are invaluable in any theatre of war it puts itself into and the US, with its “War on Terrorism” has made any regime in any country a target. Take Syria for example, the initial aim there was to counter ISIS, but it is now apparent that ISIS were armed and encouraged by the US to destabilise Assad’s regime. The US is now openly calling for Assad’s regime to be toppled and is suggesting that their Russian allies be bombed. So the OMG for me happened a long time ago. The US is circumventing normal protocols on waging a war – it is avoiding declaring war on specific nations, instead going in a a “saviour” to put down “terrorists” and “axis of evil regimes”, it is acting as the aggressor, and by declaring certain parties “terrorists” it also can target non-military civilians that are normally off-limits, and shrug off colateral casualties and other war crimes.
It is developing strategies to spy on, track and target for assassination people through their communications devices and using the pretense of “terrorism” to do this with all digital communications that pass through their systems or which they can hijack, for the WHOLE WORLD. They are getting to see how these controls might be circumvented using improvisation of the technology to hand and this can be easily interpretted as a rehearsal for a wider attack initially on Iran, but then anywhere in the world. This seems highly likely given the rhetoric coming from Clinton’s camp. Saying it is “ok to bomb Russians and Iranians” in Syria, particularly with the Russians being represented previously as “allies”, is effectively saying it is ok to start WW3.
In fact, there is NOT ONE SINGLE PART OF THIS THAT DOES NOT MAKE ME GO OMG.
Is that OMG enough for you or are you either a partisan KKKlintonite warmonger or just dead from the neck up?
OMG?
2000 USA Presidential election bloodless coup.
911 false flag attack.
Nothing since has surprised me.
This message sent using PGP encrypted Winlink Express on IC M710.
“Is that OMG enough for you or are you either a partisan KKKlintonite warmonger or just dead from the neck up?”
So let me get this straight. You are pissed because you think I am KKK and that I justify most government actions?
Your anger is fascinating. You go on that long rant and cite all kinds of bad things that make you go OMG… Your anger is fascinating because all I am saying is poor government behavior no longer surprises me.
So you are different and it still shocks you. How does that slight difference in personality justify all those bad assumptions you typed about me?
I will never grow tired of saying this: being liberal does not inherently make you a better person. Liberals still make logical fallacy, liberals can be prejudice and make shit decisions also.
I expect no apology because liberals can be assholes also.
NSA: “Can we deal with countries that aren’t necessarily our close allies when it’s mutually advantageous to do so?”
Sure can! The secret agencies based in Pakistan, Israel and Saudi Arabia all pitched in with the CIA to produce the attacks on 09/11/2001.
The U.S. Army Security Agency, the U.S. Army’s signals intelligence branch from 1945 to 1976, had a civilian clothes embassy detachment in Baghdad in the 1960’s.