top secret america

[sublight]

I am still slogging through it... Sadly, I haven't seen anything aerospace related.....

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

 

[XP67_Moonbat]

I wouldn't mind working for the said "secret government". Who do I contact? I've had a clearance before. I can keep my mouth shut. And I'd gladly do it again.

 

[sublight]

I wouldn't mind working for the said "secret government". Who do I contact? I've had a clearance before. I can keep my mouth shut. And I'd gladly do it again.

If you look at the numbers they are talking about, various agencies have been hiring at an exponential rate....

 

[sublight]

This might be interesting:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/functions/air-and-space-ops/

 

[lancer21]

Jesus i stopped reading after 13 pages ...mind-boggling!

One thing jumping in my eyes ...so they're reading my emails and listening to my phone huh ? *** twats...

 

[Orionblamblam]

One thing jumping in my eyes ...so they're reading my emails and listening to my phone huh ?

Have been since the Clinton administration. "Carnivore" was the name of the program, I believe.

 

[quellish]

One thing jumping in my eyes ...so they're reading my emails and listening to my phone huh ?

Have been since the Clinton administration. "Carnivore" was the name of the program, I believe.

*Listening* to your phone requires a warrant. Tracking what number calls what numbers does not.

They've also been listening to your thoughts, and telling you to buy more manufactured goods.

 

[bobbymike]

If they are wasting their time trying to decode or ascertain secret messages within the complete banality and idiocy of 99% of Facebook entries we are in trouble.

 

[Orionblamblam]

*Listening* to your phone requires a warrant. Tracking what number calls what numbers does not.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Carnivore/20000728_eff_house_carnivore.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
"The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links."

As I understand it, the software reads your email and/or listens to your phone calls, and keeps on the lookout for keywords. In theory it's not supposed to keep records of regular messages, just when it finds something interesting.

It would clearly be illegal for a *human* to tap your phone and listen in without a warrant. But a robot? Apparently not.

 

[sublight]

One thing jumping in my eyes ...so they're reading my emails and listening to my phone huh ?

Have been since the Clinton administration. "Carnivore" was the name of the program, I believe.

*Listening* to your phone requires a warrant. Tracking what number calls what numbers does not.

They've also been listening to your thoughts, and telling you to buy more manufactured goods.

No warrant. No problem.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05EEDE1630F935A25751C1A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

 

[The Artist]

*Listening* to your phone requires a warrant. Tracking what number calls what numbers does not.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Carnivore/20000728_eff_house_carnivore.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
"The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links."

As I understand it, the software reads your email and/or listens to your phone calls, and keeps on the lookout for keywords. In theory it's not supposed to keep records of regular messages, just when it finds something interesting.

It would clearly be illegal for a *human* to tap your phone and listen in without a warrant. But a robot? Apparently not.

I remember the talk about ECHELON and Carnivore. Some of the talk back then was that the U.S. and England had an arrangement to work around the laws - U.S. operators monitored the U.K. communications and they monitored ours. One of the other stories had it that (as Scott commented) everything was monitored electronically and flags were placed if certain trigger words were detected. As an aside. The people on the Stargate SG-1 newsgroup at the time joked that the discussion of certain episodes of the series must have cost this operation a lot in overtime pay.

I also remember that there were a few lame attempts at crashing the system by calling for everybody to send floods of messages containing every word that they could imagine being a trigger word.

 

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Ok, a silly question: what use are trigger words? Don't the very people you want to identify use code words?

 

[The Artist]

That's not a silly question. 'Trigger words' was the term used in the discussions I read back then. You are right that some people would use codes but some of the discussion had it that this was being used to watch for home grown terrorist activity as well as for catching other illegal activities. Now. I should make it clear that the discussions I'm talking about were not on forums like this one but on science fiction and art oriented newsgroups. I only brought this up to point out how the concepts of ECHELON and Carnivore were received by other groups back then.

 

[Orionblamblam]

You are right that some people would use codes ...

Which might make the system work *better.* Let's face it: lots of people are going to use words like "bomb" or "jihad" or "attack" in normal conversations. But if the FBI/CIA/NSA are doing their jobs and have at least a few people on the inside, code *phrases* will pop up with much reduced regularity. "John has a long moustache" or "The chair is against the wall" or "Nancy Pelosi is a wonderful human being" are just the sort of code phrases that are gramatically correct but are really unlikely to ever be uttered in normal conversation, and thus if such phrases are known to be terrorist codes, if they suddenly appear, the system should pick up on that and take note.

Depending on how smart the system is, messages in gibberish or actually encrypted would be read and understood to be gibberish or actual code, and would be flagged.

 

[quellish]

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Carnivore/20000728_eff_house_carnivore.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
"The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links."

As I understand it, the software reads your email and/or listens to your phone calls, and keeps on the lookout for keywords. In theory it's not supposed to keep records of regular messages, just when it finds something interesting.

It would clearly be illegal for a *human* to tap your phone and listen in without a warrant. But a robot? Apparently not.

James Bamford's books are a very good treatment of this subject in the open literature. GW's national security archive also has quite a bit of material on it, but it's not exactly easy to digest.
What you're describing is a foreign collection system. Under US law, pre-Patriot Act, that could suck up UBL's comms no problemo. Well, unless he was inside the US, or talking to a US citizen. In that case, a FISA warrant would be needed to record the content of the conversation. The fact that he called a US person's number would not require a warrant to record, that was covered under existing pen register legislation, however as a practice NSA would discard all information about the US person's side of things.
Post-Patriot act that has changed a little, and it's a lot easier to get a FISA warrant. At least one of the "warrantless wiretapping" programs in the press was legal and did not require FISA warrants as it was traffic analysis, not recording the content of the call. Again, covered under existing laws regarding pen registers (somewhere I have references for that).
CARNIVORE, though, did require a warrant, and was a law enforcement tool rather than counterintelligence. It was also one of the worst pieces of software/hardware you could imagine. Crashing that thing was as easy as clicking on the toolbar.

Again though, Bamford's books on the subject are highly recommended.

http://books.google.com/books?ei=GlxFTPSiJYbEsAOSsf3fAg&ct=result&id=IU7HZ_G8whQC&dq=james+bamford&q=US+persons#search_anchor

 

[saintkatanalegacy]

hmmm... for some reason the Russia Today website is banned by some ISP's in UK...