From Echelon to JTRIG
Brief history of illegal CIA/NSA spying...
Slide from a Top Secret NSA presentation
/
Reprinted with permission from Fred Burks at WantToKnow.info
https://www.wanttoknow.info/g/one-party-state-us
/
A 1999 BBC article titled “Echelon Spy Network Revealed” began with the paragraph: “Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet. It sounds like science fiction, but it's true.” The network, known as Echelon, traces its roots all the way back to the John F. Kennedy presidency, and had been expanding ever since.[101] In 1992, the Director of the NSA described the goal of the program in simple terms: 'Global Access'.[102] The agenda for mass surveillance was institutionalized long before most Americans recognize.
Then there was George Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping. Began in 2001, the program allowed the NSA to monitor communications between United States citizens and those abroad without appropriate checks and balances.[103] Interestingly, the groundwork for warrantless wiretapping had actually been laid out by Bill Clinton.[104] During his presidency, he slowly expanded the reach of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the capability of the NSA to classify and withhold information about their activities. When the revelations about the program were made in 2006, they were controversial, but Congress repeatedly renewed the NSA's license without much of an uproar from the public.
By the 2008 election, citizens were growing weary of the spying program and Barack Obama capitalized on this sentiment. He vowed to end warrantless wiretapping and during his primary campaign he went as far as to say he would filibuster the extension of the FISA legislation, responsible for allowing the expanded spying capabilities.[105]
“When I'm president, one of the first things I'm going to do is call in my attorney general and say to him or her, I want you to review every executive order that was issued by George Bush, whether it relates to warrantless wiretaps or detaining people or reading e- mails, or whatever it is. I want you to go through every single one of them and if they are unconstitutional, if they're encroaching on civil liberties unnecessarily, we are going to overturn them. We're going to change them.” – Barack Obama, 2007[106]
He first broke this promise after winning the primary campaign, in July 2008, when he was one of 68 Senators who voted to renew the NSA capabilities.[107] Less than a year later, Barack Obama would vastly broaden the legal argument the Executive branch used to justify the spying, and exempted the Government from the possibility of being sued thanks to a liberal interpretation of a clause in the Patriot Act.[108]
"In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and – even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal – you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned," – Glenn Greenwald
On June 6th 2013, it was revealed that Barack Obama oversaw the largest infringement of the Fourth Amendment in the history of the United States with the construction of a veritable surveillance state, capable of tracking the movements and communications of every American citizen. We now know that the NSA and United Kingdom counterpart GHCQ:
• Collect the domestic meta-data of both parties in a phone-call.[109]
• Set up fake internet cafes to steal data.[110]
• Have intercepted the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders, including allies such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.[111]
• Can tap into the underwater fiber-optic cables that carry a majority of the world's internet traffic.[112]
• Track communications within media institutions such as Al Jazeera.[113]
• Have 'bugged' the United Nations headquarters.[114]
• Have set up a financial database to track international banking and credit card transactions.[115]
• Collect and store over 200 million domestic and foreign text messages each day.[116]
• Collect and have real-time access to browsing history, email, and social media activity. To gain access, an analyst simply needs to fill out an on-screen form with a broad justification for the search that is not reviewed by any court or NSA personnel.[117]
"I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".
– Edward Snowden
• Create maps of the social networks of United States citizens.118
• Have access to smartphone app data.[119]
• Use spies in embassies to collect data, often by setting up 'listening stations' on the roofs of buildings.[120]
• Use fake LinkedIn profiles and other doctored web pages to secretly install surveillance software in unwitting companies and individuals.[121]
• Track reservations at upscale hotels.[122]
• Have intercepted the talking-points of world leaders before meetings with Barack Obama.[123]
• Can crack encryption codes on cellphones.[124]
• Have implanted software on over 100,000 computers worldwide allowing them to hack data without internet connection, using radio waves.[125]
• Have access to computers through fake wireless connections.[126]
• Monitor communications in online games such as World of Warcraft.[127]
• Intercept shipping deliveries and install back-door devices allowing access.[128]
• Have direct access to the data centers of Google, Yahoo and other major companies.[129]
• Covertly and overtly infiltrate United States and foreign IT industries to weaken or gain access to encryption, often by collaborating with software companies and internet service providers themselves. They are also, according to an internal document, "responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry."[130]
• Use “honey traps”, luring targets into compromising positions using sex.[131]
• Share raw intelligence data with Israel. Only official U.S. communications are affected, and there are no legal limits on the use of the data from Israel.[132]
• Spy on porn habits of activists to discredit them.[133]
Possibly the most shocking revelation was made on February 24, 2014. Internal documents show that the NSA is attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with “extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.”[134] The documents revealed a top-secret unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Unit, or JTRIG.
Two of the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in an effort to discredit a target, and to use social sciences such as psychology to manipulate online discourse and activism in order to generate a desirable outcome. The unit posts false information on the internet and falsely attributes it to someone else, pretend to be a 'victim' of a target they want to discredit, and posts negative information on various forums. In some instances, to discredit a target, JTRIG sends out 'false flag' emails to family and friends.
One slide describes the methods to discredit a company: Leak confidential information to the press, post negative information on forums, interfere with business deals and ruin business relationships.
The use of psychological techniques to fracture activist groups and to 'game' online discourse is very interesting. One document describes creating tension in a group by exploiting personal power, pre-existing cleavages and minor ideological differences. In online discourse, another document describes how to use 'mirroring' of language cues, expressions and emotions, and the adjustment of speech, patterns and language to manipulate opinion.
Consider the words of former NSA employee turned whistleblower Russ Tice:
“They went after – and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things – they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the ... judicial.
But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. Heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court. I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials.
They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House – their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after ... U.S. companies that that do international business. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs ... like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups.
Don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, [that] my particular thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that’s how I found out about this... I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.
Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated ... with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.” – Russ Tice, NSA Whistleblower[135]
On March 5, 2014, it was revealed that the CIA, with the knowledge of Barack Obama, spied on members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the group tasked with overseeing clandestine agency activities and preventing abuses.[136] The implications are complete subversion of oversight on domestic spying. Collectively, the evidence of the burgeoning security state under Barack Obama reveals a global information grid with real time access that targets both domestic citizens and lawmakers in addition to foreign people and governments.
/
References:
101 Duncan Campbell, Investigative Journalist, “Echelon: World under watch, an introduction,” June 29, 2000
102 National Security Archives hosted document, “Farewell from Vice Admiral William O. Studeman to NSA Employees, April 8, 1992.”
103 Washington Post, “Bush Administration's Warrantless Wiretapping Program,” February 11, 2008
104 The history of Warrantless Wiretapping is laid out thoroughly at the Daily Kos Wikipedia. Each event on their timeline has a link to a primary document or an accurate source.
105 CNN, “Obama's surveillance vote spurs blogging backlash,” July 11, 2008
106 CNN, “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” June 10, 2013
107 New York Times, “Obama's wiretapping stand enrages many supporters,” June 2, 2008
108 RawStory, “Obama Administration Quietly expands the Bush Administration's Legal Defense of Wiretapping,” April 7, 2009
109 The Guardian, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” June 6, 2013
110 The Guardian, “GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits,” June 17, 2013
111 The Guardian, “NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts,” October 25, 2013
112 The Guardian, “GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications,” June 21, 2013
113 Der Spiegel, “Snowden Document: NSA Spied On Al Jazeera Communications,” August 31, 2013
114 Reuters, “U.S. spy agency bugged U.N. headquarters: Germany's Spiegel,” August 25, 2013
115 Der Spiegel, “'Follow the Money': NSA Spies on International Payments,” September 15, 2013
116 BBC, “Report: NSA 'collected 200m texts per day',” January 17, 2014
117 The Guardian, “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet',” July 31, 2013
118 New York Times,”N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens,” September 28, 2013
119 Der Spiegel, “iSpy: How the NSA Accesses Smartphone Data,” September 9, 2013
120 Der Spiegel, “Photo Gallery: Spies in the Embassy,” October 27, 2013
121 The Independent, “GCHQ used 'Quantum Insert' technique to set up fake LinkedIn pages and spy on mobile phone giants,” November 10, 2013
122 Der Spiegel, "'Royal Concierge': GCHQ Monitors Diplomats' Hotel Bookings," November 17, 2013
123 New York Times, “No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.,” November 2, 2013
124 Washington Post, “By cracking cellphone code, NSA has capacity for decoding private conversations,” December 13, 2013
125 New York Times, “N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers,” January 15, 2014
126 ArsTechnica, “Your USB cable, the spy: Inside the NSA’s catalog of surveillance magic,” December 31, 2013
127 New York Times, “Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games,” December 9, 2013
128 Der Spiegel, “Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit,” December 29, 2013
129 Washington Post, “NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say,” October 30, 2013.
130 The Guardian, “Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security,” September 6, 2013
131 NBC, “Snowden Docs: British Spies Used Sex and 'Dirty Tricks',” February 7, 2014
132 The Guardian, “NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel,” September 11, 2013
133 Huffington Post, “Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers',” November 26, 2013
134 The Intercept, “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations,” February 24, 2014
135 Russ Tice's interview available here. Partial transcript available here.
136 The Guardian, “Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims,” March 5, 2014
/
246Hunter1sN0wThePrey359
Illegal then how can they be caught and how can they be brought to trial and what attorney looks into it? And what is the government doing about it? I could do some help.
HOW DO WE FIGHT THEM ?