"NSA paying companies for access to communications networks" --WAPO

[marions ghost]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-paying-us-companies-for-access-to-communications-networks/2013/08/29/5641a4b6-10c2-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html

Washington Post charts on the Black Budget:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/

NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks
By Craig Timberg and Barton Gellman, Published: August 29

The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

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“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”
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Previous news reports have made clear that companies frequently seek such payments, but never before has their overall scale been disclosed. (more at link)

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This is a companion article to this one:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101672401

[orpupilofnature57]

1. All that MIC coin to spread around, Thugs of the 1% .

[Pholus]

2. Corporate welfare or bribe to gain complicity in an illegal action.

Either characterization makes it plain -- this surveillance is inherently undemocratic in nature and nowhere near the value its proponents claim.

Kind of reminds me of "the coalition of the willing" in that they were willing once you paid enough.

[leveymg]

3. I surmised in 2007 that this has been the case for a long time.

The 1995 CALEA law that made it mandatory for the telephone companies to install digital interception equipment set aside $100 million for that purpose. That money is long gone. Paying the telcos and ISPs and other data providers is the federal government's way of bring the private sector onboard with mass surveillance.

[Jerry442]

4. Karl Marx said...

"The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope."

Amazing. Communism is dead, and yet we're making the rope and paying for it ourselves, and now we are going to hang ourselves with it.

"You can't make this stuff up." -- (not) Karl Marx.

[bobthedrummer]

5. K&R + some not so random related links for consideration

Last edited Tue Sep 10, 2013, 04:00 PM - Edit history (1)

Avril D. Haines, a White House lawyer with a BS in Physics replaced the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans last month.
Avril D. Haines Wikipedia entry (you can always use your trusted search engines filtered through the various privatized intelligence community systems)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avril_Haines

More about Fusion Centers (ACLU)
http://www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fusion-centers

ASIS home
http://www.asisonline.org

InfraGard home
http://www.infragard.net

[marions ghost]

7. Thanks for those links

The ACLU has an interesting page on those "Fusion Centers"--an excerpt:

----

"We found that while fusion centers vary widely in what they do, but five overarching problems with these domestic intelligence operations put Americans' privacy and civil liberties at risk:

Ambiguous Lines of Authority. In a multi-jurisdictional environment it is unclear what rules apply, and which agency is ultimately responsible for the activities of the fusion center participants.
Private Sector Participation. Some fusion centers incorporate private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, potentially undermining privacy laws designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans, and increasing the risk of a data breach.
Military Participation.Some fusion centers include military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.
Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage wholesale data collection and data manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are characterized by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.

We urged policymakers to examine this emerging network of fusion centers closely and, at a minimum, to put rigorous safeguards in place to ensure that they would not become the means for a new era of police intelligence abuses. There were 40 fusion centers when the report was published. Six months later there were 58 fusion centers and a growing number of news reports illustrating the problems we identified, so in July 2008 we published a follow-up report. Today there are at least 77 fusion centers across the country receiving federal funding.

Since these ACLU reports were published, a number of troubling intelligence products produced by fusion centers have leaked to the public:

A Texas fusion center released an intelligence bulletin that described a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department and hip hop bands to spread Sharia law in the U.S.

The same month, but on the other side of the political spectrum, a Missouri Fusion Center released a report on "the modern militia movement" that claimed militia members are "usually supporters" of third-party presidential candidates like Ron Paul and Bob Barr.

In March 2008 the Virginia Fusion Center issued a terrorism threat assessment that described the state's universities and colleges as "nodes for radicalization" and characterized the "diversity" surrounding a Virginia military base and the state's "historically black" colleges as possible threats.

A DHS analyst at a Wisconsin fusion center prepared a report about protesters on both sides of the abortion debate, despite the fact that no violence was expected.

These bulletins, which are widely distributed, would be laughable except that they come with the imprimatur of a federally backed intelligence operation, and they encourage law enforcement officers to monitor the activities of political activists and racial and religious minorities.

[bobthedrummer]

10. Thanks for starting this thread-here's some more links as we wait for the CinC's speech

How the NSA Accesses Smartphone Data by Marcel Rosenbach, Laura Poitras and Holger Stark (9-9-13 Der Spiegel Online pdf via cryptome.org)
http://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-smartphones-en.pdf

The Snowden Affair (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 436 posted 9-4-13)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB436

[Blue_Tires]

6. Finally...This was the other shoe I was expecting to drop...

[marions ghost]

8. "The Black Budget" is no longer a vague secret

Thank you Ed Snowden.

Four main spending categories:

Top secret spending can be divided into four main categories: data collection, data analysis, management, facilities and support and data processing and exploitation.

The CIA and NRO are heavy on data collection while the NSA and NGP focus on data processing and exploitation as well as auxiliary functions like management, facilities and support.

-------

I hope people heard the shoe dropping...it's all about being data mined and spied on at our own expense.

Will Americans really put up with this?

[Blue_Tires]

9. Of course the million-dollar question no one wants to discuss (DU included) is

what is to be done about it??

[marions ghost]

11. People are overwhelmed

--most know it's wrong but have no idea what to do about it. Anyone can see that surveillance is over-budgeted and out of control. For some people it seems to be too entrenched, too late to turn it around. They just give up.

Others have good ideas about what to do--but how do we get that to happen? A majority of the American people are at odds with the US government on this. I think the problem at DU is that everybody knows we can have all the discussions and ideas we want, but getting action is another thing altogether.

You & I know we have no option but to reject this monstrous level of surveillance of US citizens and others around the world.