Debunk This: Israel Owns 90% of NSA and Its Infrastructure (at least)

by Guerilla Girl Ashley and Pete Santilli , The Pete Santilli Show & The Guerilla Media Network

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.

The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.

The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.

An agency presentation from 2011 – subtitled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit” – reveals the program collected an average of 194 million text messages a day in April of that year. In addition to storing the messages themselves, a further program known as “Prefer” conducted automated analysis on the untargeted communications.

An NSA presentation from 2011 on the agency’s Dishfire program to collect millions of text messages daily. Photograph: Guardian

The Prefer program uses automated text messages such as missed call alerts or texts sent with international roaming charges to extract information, which the agency describes as “content-derived metadata”, and explains that “such gems are not in current metadata stores and would enhance current analytics”.

On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

Newspaper: Snowden documents reveal surprising depth of NSA activities

Read more here: 

WASHINGTON — The New York Times published in its Sunday print edition a wide-ranging look at the contents of the leaked Snowden documents that I recommend you read. You can find the full story here.

WikiLeaks called the article a “spoiler” in a tweet this morning and accused the Times, with which it has a hate-hate relationship, of undercutting the work of its competitors by providing just a sentence or two on revelations that deserved far more exploration.

That is one way to look at the piece. I counted at least 15 items laid out in the article’s 5,000 words that deserved a separate headline, starting with the first two paragraphs where we learn that the NSA somehow pirated a list of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points ahead of a friendly meeting with Barack Obama in April.

To give you a taste of the story’s range: The NSA’s Dishfire database “stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case.” The Tracfin program “accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases.” SNACKS, which stands for Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, tries to figure out who reports to whom in an organization by analyzing texts. NSA gave information on the location of FARC guerrillas to the Colombian government. Its listening post in Texas helped thwart a plot against Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Mohammed. It tracked the visit to Kurdistan Province of Iran’s supreme leader so well that it recorded the advance team’s discussion of how to get an ambulance and a fire truck aboard other vehicles for the journey.

There’s more: NSA regularly sends people to an unnamed friendly country, in violation of a treaty, to visit the site from which eavesdropping of an unnamed location takes place. They are given cover identities, false business cards and warned to buy no souvenirs, lest it somehow leak out what’s going on. The whole enterprise is managed remotely from Fort Gordon, Ga. At Fort Gordon, which is located in Augusta, on the border with South Carolina, programmers have created a tool that emails an analyst whenever a target changes location, based on what cellphone tower his phone is in touch with.

Read more here

Fair Use Notice: This article contains some copyrighted material whose use has not been authorized by the copyright owners. We believe that this not-for-profit, educational, and/or criticism or commentary use on the Web constitutes a fair use of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Fair Use notwithstanding we will immediately comply with any copyright owner who wants their material removed or modified, wants us to link to their web site, or wants us to add their photo.

Timeline of NSA development

NSA After 9/11  

Black Chamber

• NSA’s predecessor was “Black Chamber” located in Manhattan’s east side following World War I (WWI) in 1919. During WWI the censorship organization provided communications to the Black Chamber so that it could look for intelligence-related information.
•  
• After WWI, censorship ended and privacy was again guaranteed by the Radio Communication Act 1912. The Radio Act of 1927 broadened the privacy stipulated in the 1912 act. The Black Chamber became less effective due to the lack of intercepts and was closed in 1927.

Signal Security Agency

• In World War II (WWII) the Signal Security Agency was formed to handle censorship and look for intelligence data.
•  
• After WWII, in August 1945, the Signal Security Agency got the three communications giants, RCA, Western Union, and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to provide communications transcripts in an effort called Operation Shamrock.

Formation of NSA
When the NSA was formed in 1952, it took over Operation Shamrock. In the mid-1970s, Operation Shamrock was discovered by the public, and NSA officials were threatened with jail time if they did not cease these activities.

Qwest also built a secure fiber network for NSA that linked listening posts in Europe and the Middle East to a transatlantic cable. Qwest’s fiber optic network was chosen by NSA because of its speed and security. NSA used this Qwest network to transmit encrypted messages between 175 U.S. listening posts and NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. NSA paid $430 million to Qwest for a ten-year communication contract in 1998. 

Due to Qwest’s overbuilding of the commercial network, the Qwest debt was $26 billion with insufficient income to service it. In response, Nacchio began layoffs, but it wasn’t enough. By 2001, the stock price began a slide from $36 to $2 per share, with Nacchio selling off his portfolio while urging employees not to sell. Most long-time employees had their retirement savings in Qwest stock, and after the stock hit bottom, they were unable to retire for many more years. Eight years later, in 2009, the stock price had risen to only $5.

Echelon
This is the code name for an NSA eavesdropping program. This program primarily accessed satellite transmissions for 40 years using four geostationary satellites placed at four points above the equator. This information is shared, at least in part, with the other “Five Eyes” members:

• UK
• Canada
• New Zealand
• Australia

Satellite Intercepts Augmented by Fiber Optic Cable Taps
Due to the increase in internet communications and email, in which the satellite delay and limited bandwidth made high-speed, wide bandwidth fiber optics a more desirable transmission mode, satellite communications fell to one percent of all commercial communications. By 2000, 80 to 90 percent of international communications went by undersea cable instead of satellite transmissions.

Ten Cable Landing Stations On The East Coast, In Four Cities

• Tuckerton, New Jersey
• Manasquan, New Jersey
• Manahawkin, New Jersey
• Charleston, Rhode Island

These cable stations carry 80 percent of all international traffic. The Tuckerton, New Jersey site has an AT&T landing station that is one of the busiest in the world. It is the gateway for several undersea cables to Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. One of the cables is trans-Atlantic telephone 14 (TAT-14) with ten million circuits operating at 640 gigabits per second. It is a 9,000 mile loop to Europe and back. Middle East communications flow to and from the Europe landing station by microwave, landline, or satellite, and then back to TAT-14 by undersea cable.

The increased volume of communications due to the internet was supported by the following technologies:

• fiber optic cables
• wave division multiplexing (WDM)
• synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH).

Before fiber optics was available, when satellite delays of 1/4 to 1/2 second were undesirable, microwave transmission was used. To intercept microwave signals, NSA placed a Rhyolite signal intelligence (sigint) satellite into geostationary orbit near the horizon, in the path of the microwave signals.

NSA Data Collection
NSA intercepts data from the following sources:

• Phone calls
• Text messages
• Credit card receipts
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Twitter
• GPS tracking
• Cell phone geolocation
• Internet searches
• Amazon book purchases
• E-Z Pass toll records

Three V’s of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)

• Volume (how much traffic is on the line?)
• Velocity (how fast are messages being sent back and forth?)
• Variety (what types of messages are being sent? Internet, text messages, phone conversations, book purchases, etc.

SKYPE
It has been asserted that SKYPE, a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), bypasses telecom hubs and gateways, provides end-to-end encryption, and is said to be virtually unbuggable. EBay owns SKYPE. Dissidents around the world use SKYPE. However, dependency on SKYPE for secure communications has possible pitfalls.

Mexican Human Rights Violations
In 2006 the U.S. State Department reported that Mexico experienced the following human rights violations:

• unlawful killings by security forces
• kidnappings
• kidnappings by police
• torture
• arbitrary arrests and detentions
• corrupt judicial system
• censorship of journalists
• corruption at all levels of government
• trafficking in persons with government involvement
• child labor

It is believed that NSA intercepts helped discover and confirm these human rights violations.

Canadian CSE Intercept Locations

• Pennant Point, near Halifax, Nova Scotia (satellite and cable)
• Laurentides, Quebec
• Lake Cowichan, British Columbia
• Masset at the northern end of Graham Island off of British Columbia
• Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador (formerly, Newfoundland)

Telecom Intercept Outsourcing

• AT&T has a secret room in San Francisco that is staffed by Narus, a company, now owned by Boeing, that has ties to Israel’s intelligence service.
• Verizon built a secret room in Houston run by Verint, a company that has ties to Israel’s intelligence service.
• NSA provides watch lists to Telecoms who then give them to their contracting companies to enter into the computers.
• Contractor intercepts that match the watch lists are sent to the FBI in Sterling, Virginia which forwards them to NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Intercept Contractor Ties to Israel
Verint, Narus, Persay, and Checkpoint have ties to Israel’s intelligence service. Verint and Narus have tapped the entire American telecom system and much of the planet through their relationships with client countries.

Narus clients include:

• China
• Pakistan
• Egypt
• Saudi Arabia
• Libya

Persay
Persay, a spinoff of Verint, can provide a voice mining capability to identify speakers in voice intercepts. Persay is financed by Athlone Global Security which is located in NSA’s Chesapeake Innovation Center in Annapolis, Maryland.

Nice
Nice is an Israeli company that provides eavesdropping software. Like Verint and Narus, it keeps its client list secret. Clients include both governments and commercial companies. Nice software provides voice content analysis with the following:

• word spotting
• emotion detection
• talk pattern analysis

Israeli Spy Companies
The following Israeli spy companies provide intercept software, hardware, and consulting services to client countries:

• Verint
• Narus
• Persay
• Checkpoint
• Nice
• Elta Systems
• Tadiran
• Comverse Technology
• Natural Speech Communications (NSC)

Pen-Link
Pen-Link, a U.S. company in Lincoln, Nebraska, provides phone number analysis and Internet eavesdropping software. The CIA is a Pen-Link customer.

Five Eyes Intercepts
Each of the Five Eyes members had to work out secret agreements with its cable companies, including planning the following activities:

• build secret intercept rooms with fiber optic cable access
• cables had to be spliced to place the taps
• mirrored data had to be backhauled to the country’s analysis centers
• faster processing equipment had to be installed to accommodate the increase in intercepts

Special Collection Service (SCS)
In non-Five Eyes countries where no cooperation between the intelligence services, NSA, and the communications companies exists, NSA or one of its Five Eyes partners recruits an employee at a telecom to install a bug or tap a fiber optic cable. At times in the past, NSA has spent several hundred million dollars to get a cable tapped and then find that the take (the intercept data) was useless. The project of tapping a foreign fiber optic cable is accomplished by a covert organization, the Special Collection Service (SCS), which combines clandestine skills of the CIA with the technical capabilities of the NSA.

United States Signal Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18

• This top secret document said that calls with a U.S. Citizen on one end of the call cannot be monitored. This directive was approved by the Five Eyes until after 9/11 when all calls began to be monitored.
• Unless manually deleted, all conversations are stored on computers.
• The Fourth Amendment, FISA, and Executive Order 12,000 (1981), are translated into the provisions into simple language for NSA employees by U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18.

NSA Wiretap Process Investigation
In 1977 Attorney General Levi established a top secret task force of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors to investigate NSA wiretapping process. The final report was classified “top secret umbra/handle via comint channels only” and was excluded from declassification or from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

GCHQ Recruited Linguists Fluent in Various Languages

• Albanian
• Amharic
• other Albanian languages
• Arabic
• Azeri
• Baluchi
• Basque
• Bengali
• Brahui
• Bulgarian
• Chechen
• Chinese
• Dari
• Georgian
• Greek
• Gujerati
• Hindi
• Indonesian
• Japanese
• Kashmiri
• Kazakh
• Korean
• Krudish-Sorani
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Mirpuri
• Nepali
• Papiamento
• Pashto
• Patois/Creoles
• Persian
• Polish
• Potohari
• Punjabi
• Romanian
• Serb-Croat
• Shona
• Somali
• Swahili
• Tamil
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Uzbek
• Vietnamese

MI5
MI5 is U.K.’s security service, much like the U.S.’s FBI. It uses GCHQ intercepts to monitor 200 domestic extremist groups and 2,000 individuals.

Total Information Awareness (TIA)
This is a project to collect data from public, private, and government databases, both domestic and foreign, including

• bookstore visits
• online purchases
• gas station usage
• web searches
• web sites visited
• parking receipts
• credit card purchases
• magazine subscriptions
• prescriptions filled
• emails sent and received
• bank transactions
• trips booked
• events attended
• stock transactions
• bank transactions
• foreign military secrets
• foreign diplomatic secrets
• events attended
• all other collectible information

TIA is designed to vacuum everyone’s digital trail and feed it into super computers that run algorithms against it to determine possible terrorist activity.

• Research for this $200 million project was done by Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Hicks Associates, Cornell University, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley.
• In 2002 retired admiral John Poindexter was selected to run this Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)-funded program. Subsequent to this assignment, as a result of the Iran Contra affair, Poindexter had received five felony counts for lying to Congress, destroying official documents, and obstructing justice.
• In August 2002 Poindexter resigned from the project following a New York Times column written by William Safire that leaked information regarding this project.
• In 2003 Congress forced DARPA to cease funding the project.
• TIA was transferred from DARPA to NSA which took it black.

The following information regarding TIA is from an article in the February 2012 issue of Wired magazine, page 78, by James Bamford.
Operation Stellar Wind
To support its TIA effort, in 2012 NSA was building a large, $2 billion data warehouse at Camp Williams, a National Guard training site in Bluffdale, Utah. The warehouse is to be called “Utah Data Center” to be used to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store intercepts from domestic and foreign sources, and was to be operational by September 2013.

In the mid-1970s, due to its involvement in Watergate and the spying on antiwar protesters, the NSA budget was scaled back and Congress prohibited NSA from collecting information on US citizens, effectively crippling the organization, causing it to fall short of the goal of recognizing future attacks:

• first World Trade Center bombing
• detonation of US Embassys in East Africa
• attack on the USS Cole in Yemen
• destruction of the World Trade Center on 9 September 2001
• attempted attack by the Shoe Bomber
• attempted attack by the Underwear Bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009
• attempted car bombing of Times Square, New York in 2010

Data Volume
According to Cisco, the volume of data to be collected at the Utah Data Center will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 was 5 exabytes. In 2011, more than 2 billion of the world’s 7 billion people were connected to the Internet. IDC, a market research firm, estimated that there will be 2.7 billion Internet users by 2015.

In the secret rooms, NSA taps into US communication networks to record all transmissions, domestic and international, including voice, data, email, Internet searches, etc. When completed, captured data will be sent to the Utah Data Center from the following sites:

• NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
• NSA Texas at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
• NSA Hawaii, Oahu
• Domestic NSA listening posts
• Overseas listening posts
• Satellite communications captured by the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Air Force Base, Aurora, Colorado

NSA also collects the domestic and international billing records from the telecoms. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in its database in its Florham Park, New Jersey complex.

Processing the Collected Data
To process the huge amount of data that is in the Georgia repository and will be contained in the Utah facility, NSA runs remotely-controlled software provided by Boeing subsidiary Narus from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. This software looks for

• who called whom in the US and around the world
• target addresses
• locations
• countries
• phone numbers
• names on watch-lists (approximately a million people)
• keywords and key phrases

Encryption

A “brute-force,” trial and error method of breaking 128 bit encryption could require 340 undecillion (340 x 10 to the 36 power) attempts.

To break open encrypted files, in 2004, NSA began building a secret super-computer facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, called the “High Productivity Computing Systems” program, in partnership with the Department of Energy (DOE). The high-speed computers would be part of the DOE’s “Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility” to be shared by multiple agencies. There are two tracks for the program:

• one project is an unclassified computer for public scientific work.
• the other computer project is classified, to be used by NSA for code-breaking. NSA would take encrypted messages from the Utah Data Center and use algorithms in their classified super computers to break the code. The NSA side of the house is called the “Multiprogram Research Facility” (or Building S300), a $41 million, five-story structure, completed in 2006.

super Computer Project Results as of early 2012:

• Unclassified computer
  • Cray XT4 upgraded to a warehouse-size XT5, called Jaguar, running at 1.75 petaflops (1,750,000,000,000,000 or 1.75×10 to the 15 power floating point operations per second), the world’s fastest computer in 2009.
  • By late 2011, the unclassified XT5 had been upgraded to run at 2.33 petaflops, and was the third fastest in the world.
  • By 2013, Cray expects the unclassified XT5 will be upgraded to the XT6, named “Titan,” running at between 10 and 20 petaflops.
• NSA’s top-secret computer
  • It is even faster than the Cray XT5 due to a “breakthrough”, and modified specifically for cryptanalysis. Its speed has not been publicized.
  • Cray has a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a massively parallel supercomputer for NSA, called “Cascade,” a prototype of which was expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
  • The NSA computer in Oak Ridge will use about 200 megawatts, enough electricity to operate 200,000 homes.
  • Cooling the computer will require 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, about the same amount of cooling used to cool the two World Trade Center towers.
• Japan’s “K Computer” runs at 10.51 petaflops.
• China’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer runs at 2.57 petaflops.

End of information from the TIA article in the February 2012 issue of Wired magazine, page 78, by James Bamford.

NSA Staffing

• 1990: 20,000
• 2000: 15,000 (due to downsizing because Congress didn’t consider that intercepts were valuable).
• 2004: 18,000

Eavesdropping Kits
Eavesdropping kits that fit into a suitcase were developed for use in the Middle East to track low-frequency radio transmissions.

Special Collection Programs
These programs are designed to enhance communication intercepts:

• Operation Shamrock
• Operation Minaret
• Operation [name of operation is currently secret]. It was launched 6 October 2001.
• Highlander, a top secret program, eavesdropped on Inmarsat satellite communications in the Middle East.

Do Not Fly List
After 9/11, the Do Not Fly List ballooned from about 20 people to more than 40,000. Many of these were generated by NSA’s warrantless call scanning.

NSA Language Analysts

• Arabic and Farsi linguists were activated after 9/11. Some military reservists, who had learned Arabic at an 18 month course offered at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey in California, were assigned to the 345th Military Intelligence Battalion in Georgia.
• Targets of NSA Georgia included communications from North Africa to most of the Middle East, including Israel.
• Linguist subgroups analyzed communications in Syria, the Levantine Mission (Lebanon and Jordan), North Africa Mission (Egypt, Sudan, and Algeria), and the Iraqi mission.
• In the late 1990s, NSA Georgia employed 1200 personnel. Following 9/11, that number doubled to more than 2400. Linguist contractors such as Titan supplied several dozen linguists. In addition, advertisements were placed in several newspapers.
• By late 2004, conditions in Georgia were crowded and technicians worked in hallways and temporary trailers. The 201st Military Intelligence Battalion specialized in signals intelligence (sigint).
• NSA analysts target satellite, cell phone, internet, and undersea cable communications.
• Languages intercepted include Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, and Chinese. If an intercept was in an uncommon language, NSA Georgia would call NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland to request a linguist who could translate it.
• The location of a call could be triangulated to get the location of the phones. Eventually, the system was able to collect specific phone numbers at each end of a conversation.

NSA Operational Centers

• By early 2001, there was no state-run enemy, and NSA was looking for a mission and downsizing by one third.
• After 9/11 the NSA budget ballooned as the agency began to upgrade its systems. The upgrade focus was on migrating away from various foreign intercept stations to analytical teams using supercomputers at the four secret eavesdropping locations in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, and Hawaii.
• Three of the four operational centers target separate areas of the globe. The fourth facility downloads satellite data and transmits it to the other three intercept sites.
• The results of these eavesdropping activities are reduced to the important messages and the key information is forwarded to military commanders and other recipients around the world, including members of Five Eyes.
• By the time the 2004 Iraqi war began, the intercept system was very efficient.

Fort Meade, Maryland

• The NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland has a reflective glass exterior. Behind the glass is copper shielding to prevent electromagnetic radiation from getting out of the building. The code name for this shielding is Tempest. The windows in the building have thin copper wires running through them. To prevent lasers from picking up voice from vibrations in the glass, music is played between the glass panes.
• After 9/11 the NSA budget ballooned as the agency began to upgrade its systems. The upgrade focus was on migrating away from various foreign intercept stations to analytical teams using supercomputers at the four secret eavesdropping locations in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, and Hawaii.
• Three of the four operational centers target separate areas of the globe. The fourth facility downloads satellite data and transmits it to the other three intercept sites.
• The results of these eavesdropping activities are reduced to the important messages and the key information is forwarded to military commanders and other recipients around the world, including members of Five Eyes.
• By the time the 2004 Iraqi war began, the intercept system was very efficient.

Remote Satellite Intercepts
The remote satellite intercept facility at Cam Doha, Kuwait is located in the spot beam of Inmarsat satellite I-3 F1, launched in 1996 to cover the Middle East and Indian Ocean. The intercept antenna is a mobile array known as a Trojan Remote Receiver-38 (TRR-38). It was staffed by a manager and five intercept experts who intercept both sides of conversations and put them together before relaying these intercepted conversations, called “cuts,” in near-real-time to NSA Georgia for analysis.

At the end of the cold war in 1990, NSA closed many listening posts around the world and replaced them with smaller, remotely operated facilities. The intercept operators and analysts were moved back to the U.S. and consolidated in the four large operational centers. The reason that NSA had to decentralize their analysis function away from Fort Meade, Maryland is because the massive computers needed to provide intercept and analysis support require more power than the grid can supply at one, centralized location. NSA was unable to unable to install two new super computers in the Tordella building in Fort Meade, Maryland because Baltimore Gas and Electric Company could not supply enough power to the site. The Tordella building currently uses the equivalent of half the power that the city of Annapolis, Maryland consumes. The building has an 8,000 ton chilled water plant to keep the computers cool. The four decentralized NSA computer and analysis centers are:

• Georgia – eavesdrops on the Middle East and North Africa. Ground was broken for this NSA analysis facility in northern Georgia, near Leburda, on 26 March 2007. It cost more than $1 billion and is scheduled to be completed in 2012. The construction project is code named Sweet Tea. When completed, the Georgia facility will employ 4,000 workers. It will be second in size only to NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters. A new computer system to be installed at this site is being developed by IBM and the C4 Systems Division of General Dynamics. The secure computer system is known as the Sectera Edge and will be able to handle top secret voice communications and email. It will be able to handle web access at the secret level and below. For example, the computer system will search for key words spoken on telephones and when it gets a “hit,” it will transfer the conversation to an analyst who will determine the nature of the conversation and decide if authorities should be alerted. In a phone conversation in early 2009, a person on one end of the line began a verbal diatribe against the President. Approximately ten minutes later, he said someone was at the door and he would have to hang up and call back. When he called back, about five minutes later, he said a strange thing had happened. When he answered the door, a police woman was at the door. She asked to step into the person’s apartment, and he allowed her to enter. She quickly looked around the rooms and then departed. The person called back and related this event to the person he called. After that, the person he called changed the subject each time the caller began a diatribe against the President. This facility in Georgia is designed to filter millions of domestic and international phone conversations and emails each hour. This facility will have the world’s largest collection of supercomputers.
• Texas – eavesdrops on Central and South America and the Caribbean from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. To hold large quantities of data, NSA built a massive data warehouse in San Antonio, with 470,000 square feet of space, costing $130 million. The data warehouse stores conversations of persons on a watch list which contains names of people, foreign and domestic, who are believed to pose a threat to the United States. The watch list once contained 20 names. It now has 500,000 names.
• Colorado – the Denver Security Operations Center (DSOC) on Buckley Air Force Base will be expanded. Four radomes receive intercepts from eavesdropping satellites. One system is a microwave only system called Vortex or Mercury. A multi-frequency system is called Magnum or Orion. A system consists of a satellite, a radome receiver, and associated electronics and infrastructure. The two geostationary satellites are so large that each one had to be launched by the powerful Titan IV booster. The take from these two satellites is analyzed by the Aerospace Data Facility (ADF).
• Hawaii – eavesdrops on Asia and the Pacific. It is about 15 miles from Honolulu on the island of Oahu. On 30 August 2007 ground was broken for a new NSA eavesdropping facility in Wahiawa. The site is the former location of the “Elephant Cage,” a large, circular antenna for eavesdropping on the Pacific.
• California – Satellite intercepts are prioritized 1 through 9, as follows:
  • Terrorists = 1. After 9/11, terrorists nearly eliminated their use of satellite phones.
  • Non-governmental organizations (NGO), which include the Red Cross and businesses, are prioritized 5 through 7.
  • Journalists = 7.
  • Intercepts with no linguist to translate them = 8.
  • Unidentified intercepts = 9.
• Originally, intercept analysts did not listen to Americans because it was illegal by the Fourth Amendment. After 9/11, the Patriot Act removed all intercept constraints. (See Communications Satellites).

Microsoft and NSA
On 30 July 2007, Microsoft broke ground in San Antonio, Texas for a large complex that will handles 280 million Hotmail customers and 8 billion email messages per day. Microsoft says that this center is where the Internet lives. The center went live in 2008. It is a mirror image of the Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington. The facility will have tens of thousands of servers. In the event of a power failure, batteries will automatically provide power for 18 seconds between the power loss and when the backup generators come up to speed to take over. The new center is located in a former Sony chip manufacturing plant. It is believed that secret agreements between NSA and Microsoft have been made to send all communications that flow through this facility to NSA.

Intelligence Collection Types
Sigint

• This is the acronym for Signals Intelligence. It refers to the collection of communication transmissions from satellite, cellular, cable, microwave, and other sources.
• Sigint collection can be made by a remote ground facility receiver, an airborne listening post, a satellite receiver, and by many other means.
• Unencrypted, uncompressed messages in English are the easiest to analyze.
• Modern military communications can be encrypted and sent in burst mode where the communication is highly compressed so that it sounds like a single “beep.” NSA and CIA must uncompress the signal, unencrypt it, translate it if it is in a foreign language, analyze it, and then, depending on the content, transfer it to the entity that needs that information.
• Electronic emissions from business machines can sometimes be sensed. For example, when each letter of certain-types of printers is activated to type the letter, a small, electronic pulse is emitted that can be picked up by a sensitive receiver. Each letter emits a slightly different pulse enabling a receiver to “read” the data as it is being printed. This phenomenon was first identified with electric typewriters and later, impact-type computer printers. To prevent electronic impulses from leaving its buildings, NSA windows are double-paned with wires embedded in at least one of the panes to prevent electronic signals from leaving the building.
• One terrorist suspected to be the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole destroyer carried six satellite phones, each with multiple memory cards so that he could change the phone number of a phone in order to not be identified on a terrorist phone number list. NSA had determined a few of his phone numbers. The system had an alarm that would sound when if a call from one of those numbers was intercepted. Using GPS coordinates, his location was found. On November 3, 2002, NSA alerted the CIA and its Drone Command Center directed a Predator Unpiloted Air Vehicle (UAV) to the location where it was commanded to shoot a Hellfire missile at a car where the terrorist was riding, an event widely reported by the media.
• See Eavesdropping Kits, Special Collection Programs, and Remote Satellite Intercepts.

Humint

• This is the acronym for Human Intelligence. Generally, it refers to persons on the ground in a foreign country who collect intelligence information and pass it on to NSA and/or CIA.
• Domestic humint is provided by the FBI.

Elint
This is the acronym for Electronic Intelligence. Elint is gathered by radio and radar receivers, ground-based or by aircraft. Aircraft collection is usually accomplished by an aircraft that flies close to the border of the target country to get that country to turn on (light up) its search and tracking radars. The receivers in the plane collect frequency data, transmitter locations, time transmitters were turned on, sequence of various sites going active, etc. This information is used by the military to eliminate these transmitters so that in the event of a conflict, they can be eliminated, effectively “blinding” that country. These methods were used in the 2004 Iraq War to enable targeting radar sites just prior to the air attack.

There are also electronic means of voice collection, as follows:

• Wired person – When it is obtained by a person wearing a recording device, that person is said to be “wired.” An agent may be wired with a listening device or a device may be clandestinely planted in a target’s luggage, clothing, watch, or jewelry.
• Bug Device – Voice intelligence can also be collected by a “bug” installed in a key location that either stores conversations internally or broadcasts them to a remote receiver, either in real-time or at a specified time. Depending on the sophistication of the bug, the data can be encrypted and/or compressed and sent in burst mode.
• Laser Reflection – Conversations can also be collected by beaming a laser at the outside surface of window to pick up voices in that room. When a person speaks, vibrations of his voice cause the glass to vibrate. A laser can sense these vibrations and electronic equipment can translate the vibrations into sound, much the way a traditional entertainment system speaker reproduced sound. To thwart laser listening from the outside of its buildings, NSA designates internal rooms that do not have windows to be used for classified conversations. In addition, outer windows are slanted slightly upward to reflect into space any laser beams that might be aimed at them.

National Command Authority (NCA)
The NCA consists of two persons: the President and the Secretary of Defense.

Communications Satellites

• Inmarsat – This satellite, I-3 F1, was launched in 1996 to cover the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
• Thuraya – This Arab communication satellite, built by Boeing and launched in October 2000, is owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Encryption
Many satellite communications use encryption greater than 256 bits which takes longer to unencrypt, even using super computers.

Software Intercepted Call Analysis Tools

• PatternTracker
• Call Chaining Analysis – this is the process of locating of intercepted callers at both ends of a conversation using a software program called PatternTracker written by i2, Inc. in McLean, Virginia.
• Agility
• AMHS
• Anchory
• ArcView
• FastScope
• HighTime
• HomBase
• IntelLink
• Octave
• Document Management Center
• DishFire
• Crest
• Anwale
• Coastline
• Snacks
• Cadence
• Gamut
• Mainway
• Marina
• Oasis
• PuzzleCube
• Surrey
• Tuningfork
• Xkeyscore
• Unified Tasking Tool
• Address Database – This database is known as “externals” which contains addresses of intercepted calls. The database consists of:
  • Externals Data Global Exploitation (EDGE) database
  • External Notation List
  • Communications Externals Data Repository and Integration Center

Viper
At the beginning of the Iraqi occupation, NSA set up a large antenna farm in the Green Zone, a program code-named Viper, to target cell phones in Baghdad and the surrounding area. Intercepts were collected in one of NSA’s four buildings. The intercepts were then transmitted to NSA offices in the Green Zone and NSA Georgia.

Computer Speeds

• 1971 – CDC 7600 broke the megaflop barrier (1 million floating point operations in one second).
• 1976 – Cray-1 was built in Cray Research plant in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. NSA bought the Cray-1 and a second Cray-1.
• 1986 – Cray-2 broke the gigaflop limit.
• 1997 – Intel’s ASCI Red broke the teraflop limit (one trillion flops per second – 1,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second).
• 1998 – Cray went broke and was purchased by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI).
• 1999 – NSA funded SGI’s Cray SV2 program to develop a new super computer. This followed the realization by NSA that massively parallel computers may not be as efficient as super computers. The peak speed of the Cray SV2 is expected to be in the tens of teraflops (more than ten trillion floating point operations per second).
• 2000 – SGI gave up on the Cray SV2 project and sold Cray Research to Seattle-based Tera Computer. The Cray SV2 became the Cray X1 with 4,096 processors. In a sense, computers had come full circle, back to massively parallel processors.
• 2001 – NSA provided specifications for Black Widow, a large Cray computer consisting of 16 black cabinets with a splash of red.
• 2003 – NSA paid $17.5 million for the Black Widow computer which could run at hundreds of teraflops (trillions of flops) per second (perhaps 2×10 to the 14 power – 200,000,000,000,000 – floating point operations per second). The Black Widow was also known as a Cray XT5h and has 32,000 processors. It was installed at NSA Fort Meade in 2008.
• 2008 – A military super computer, Roadrunner, broke the petaflop limit (1×10 to the 15 power flops per second). Roadrunner was built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. As of 2008, NSA had a Roadrunner on order. The computer uses 3 megawatts of power, about as much as a large shopping mall. Roadrunner does 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
• 2010 – NSA expects the Cray X-3, also known as Cascade, to break the petaflop barrier – more than one quadrillion calculations per second. The computer will cost more than $250 million.
• 2018 – NSA says that by 2018 it will need a computer that will run at exaflop speed (one quintillion calculations per second). To build this computer for NSA and the Department of Energy (DOE), a new computer research center was established in 2008, known as the institute for advanced Architecture run by Sandia Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Tennessee. Such a computer might require 100 megawatts of power, the output of an entire power plant. One challenge is to reduce the power requirements of such a computer.

Processing Speeds

• Kiloflop (1,000 or 1×10 to the 3 power)
• Megaflop (1,000,000 or 1×10 to the 6 power)
• Gigaflop (1,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 9 power)
• Teraflop (1,000,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 12 power)
• Petaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 15 power)
• Exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 18 power)
• Zettaflop (billion trillion – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 21 power)
• Yottaflop (trillion trillion) – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1×10 to the 24 power)
• Undecillion (1×10 to the 36 power)
• no words have been invented to describe speeds beyond Undecillion.

Flophouse
The “Flophouse” is NSA’s Computer Facility.

Telecom Hubs with PacketScope Taps

• AT&T: Bridgeton, Missouri
• Qwest: Denver, Colorado
• Sprint: St. Louis, Missouri
• Vonage: Norway

National Security Agency Advisory Board (NSAAB)
This board consists of top company executives who study certain NSA programs and make recommendations based on their experience and knowledge.

NSA Dictionaries
NSA dictionaries consist of phone numbers, names addresses, words, and phrases. These dictionaries are used to match intercept information in the search for intelligence relating to illegal activities and terrorism.

The Pete Santilli Show broadcasts live on The Guerilla Media Network.  Please join us on the Guerilla Media Network broadcasting your favorite talk shows, political art and news 24/7.  

If you would like to express your opinions or concerns on the air during the live broadcast of The Pete Santilli Show, please call (218) 862-9829

Be sure to tune in to the Pete Santilli Show daily at 10am-2pm PST / 12pm-4pm CST / 1pm-5pm EST.  Pete & his co-host Susannah Cole broadcast daily for 3 hours to discuss breaking news headlines, and interview some of our nation’s most interesting patriots & controversial guests.

Please “LIKE”, share and recommend this story..

We welcome your comments in our Facebook comment thread!

Fair Use Notice: This article contains some copyrighted material whose use has not been authorized by the copyright owners. We believe that this not-for-profit, educational, and/or criticism or commentary use on the Web constitutes a fair use of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Fair Use notwithstanding we will immediately comply with any copyright owner who wants their material removed or modified, wants us to link to their web site, or wants us to add their photo