Top secret report details FBI mass surveillance

[Octafish]

By Thomas Gaist
World Socialist Web Site, 14 January 2015

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been overseeing and co-directing mass surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) since at least 2008, a newly declassified document from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) shows.

The classified Top Secret report, “A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Activities Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008,” acquired by the New York Times this week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit submitted in 2012, found that the FBI has amassed large quantities of electronic communications data through its involvement in NSA surveillance operations run under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008.

The report is based on OIG interviews with some 45 FBI members and officials, as well as officials from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and lawyers from the DOJ’s National Security Division. OIG also examined “thousands of documents related to the FBI’s 702 activities.”

Beginning in 2008, the bureau received daily emailed reports listing new targets being added to the NSA’s mass spying programs. By 2009, the FBI was receiving a continuous feed of unprocessed data from the NSA “to analyze for its own purposes,” partly through accessing the NSA’s PRISM program, the report states. The FBI did not report its involvement in 702 data collection to Congress until 2012, the report found.

SNIP...

The endless redactions throughout the OIG document underscore the contempt of the US elite for even minimal forms of democratic accountability.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/14/fbis-j14.html

Gee. This is important news -- confirmation that the federal police force has near-complete access to what We the People have been assured repeatedly are private communications.

[grasswire]

1. why is there such duplication of data snatching, I wonder?

the cost is obscene

[Octafish]

2. Don't know, but I do know who to ask: Mr. Total Information Awarness...

Admiral Poindexter Took Total Information Awareness Program To Singapore

By: DSWright
FireDogLake, Thursday July 31, 2014 10:00 am

EXCERPT...

Though Poindexter’s service in the Bush Administration was relatively brief, it did leave an impression on one person, Peter Ho, the permanent Secretary of Defense for Singapore.

The two men met in Poindexter’s small office in Virginia, and on a whiteboard, Poindexter sketched out for Ho the core concepts of his imagined system, which Poindexter called Total Information Awareness (TIA). It would gather up all manner of electronic records — emails, phone logs, Internet searches, airline reservations, hotel bookings, credit card transactions, medical reports — and then, based on predetermined scenarios of possible terrorist plots, look for the digital “signatures” or footprints that would-be attackers might have left in the data space. The idea was to spot the bad guys in the planning stages and to alert law enforcement and intelligence officials to intervene.

Ho said he was impressed with Poindexter’s “sheer audacity” and went back to Singapore with a commitment to implement a version of TIA there. But it was not just Sinapore where Poindexter’s seemingly disgraced ideas would live on.

In late 2003, a group of U.S. lawmakers more sympathetic to Poindexter’s ideas arranged for his experiment to be broken into several discrete programs, all of which were given new, classified code names and placed under the supervision of the National Security Agency (NSA). Unbeknownst to almost all Americans at the time, the NSA was running a highly classified program of its own that actually was collecting Americans’ phone and Internet communications records and mining them for connections to terrorists. Elements of that program were described in classified documents disclosed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, sparking the most significant and contentious debate about security and privacy in America in more than four decades.

That’s right folks, TIA was never really shut down. Publicly condemned as an Orwellian unconstitutional invasion of people’s privacy? Yes. But actually stopped? Not really.

CONTINUED...

http://news.firedoglake.com/2014/07/31/admiral-poindexter-took-total-information-awareness-program-to-singapore/

Looking back, it may be these guys have had the "goods" on most everyone who mattered since Nov. 22, 1963. Now they're just working on getting all the goods on everybody.

[grasswire]

13. Orwell was an optimist, indeed.

Sigh.

[SidDithers]

3. wsws. LOL...

I miss Hannah Bell too.

Sid

[G_j]

4. surprise!

if the wsws reported water was wet, you'd have a problem with it

[Octafish]

12. Especially considering how New York Times does what CIA tells it to do.

Here's one "favor" New York Times has done for its friends at CIA: ignoring war criminals and traitors and stuff.

Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 14.58 EDT

EXCERPT...

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.

SNIP...

Even more amazing is the reaction of the newspaper's managing editor, Dean Baquet, to these revelations, as reported by Politico's Dylan Byers:

"New York Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet called POLITICO to explain the situation, but provided little clarity, saying he could not go into detail on the issue because it was an intelligence matter.

CONTINUED with LINKS...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia

I wonder if good DUers know what other important stories New York Times spiked as a "favor" to CIA and its controllers? These really demostrate what cursed interesting times are ours when one has to guess at the news because the government of the United States has corrupted the nation's "paper of record."

[Octafish]

7. Seeing how Corporate McPravda does what a good lapdog should do, me too.

Know your BFEE: CARLYLE Group 'bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits'



Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Wouldn't it be great to live in a democracy, a republic built on equal justice for all? That way, traitors, warmongers and banksters would be in jail instead of printing money and killing innocent people all day and all night.

[Unknown Beatle]

9. If only...

Have you noticed recently the blatant melding of dems and repubs? It's been happening for decades and not quite as obvious, but now, they just don't give a shit if it's transparent as hell. It's a purple party now.

They're still trying hard to pull the wool over our eyes, but once we see clearly, nothing can blind us.

[starroute]

5. NSA surveillance is also implicated in the "Silk Road" case

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/14/the-most-important-trial-in-america.html?via=newsletter&source=CSMorning

One of the potentially most important and far-reaching trials in recent memory has just begun without much fanfare. And if you care about due process, Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches, the limits of government surveillance, and Internet freedom, you should pay attention.

Ross Ulbricht, 29, stands accused by the federal government of being “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the pseudonymous proprietor of the notorious website Silk Road. Launched in 2011 and shuttered in 2013, Silk Road was known as the Amazon or eBay of the “darknet,” an anonymous, Bitcoin-enabled marketplace where “buying drugs online became safe, easy, and boring. . . .

There remain serious questions, too, about whether the feds illegally availed themselves of NSA information about the server’s location and then faked a “parallel construction” trail of evidence that they present in court. The NSA is not supposed to be tracking the information of citizens within the United States, of course, and it’s not supposed to be lending its capabilities to domestic law enforcement, either. But as Bruce Schneier writes, it’s well-known that the NSA funnels information to the FBI and DEA “under the condition that they lie about it in court.”

[Octafish]

10. Gee. That used to be against the law, what the government is doing.

From the above at TDB:

That’s an increasingly and appallingly widespread sentiment even in post-Snowden America, where we still have cops and pundits who insist that only people with something to hide worry about the end of privacy. As Harvey Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, could tell you, in today’s America, we’re all guilty of multiple crimes even before we get up in the morning.

Which is what we talked about way back a short time.

Smoking Gun: DEA Manuals Show Feds Use NSA Spy Data, Train Cops to Construct False Chains of Evidence

Trainers justify parallel construction on national security and PR grounds: "Americans don't like it"

by Shawn Musgrave
Muckrock, February 3, 2014

Drug Enforcement Administration training documents released to MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella show how the agency constructs two chains of evidence to hide surveillance programs from defense teams, prosecutors, and a public wary of domestic intelligence practices.

In training materials, the department even encourages a willful ignorance by field agents to minimize the risk of making intelligence practices public.

The DEA practices mirror a common dilemma among domestic law enforcement agencies: Analysts have access to unprecedented streams of classified information that might prove useful to investigators, but entering classified evidence in court risks disclosing those sensitive surveillance methods to the world, which could either end up halting the program due to public outcry or undermining their usefulness through greater awareness.

An undated slide deck released by the DEA to fleshes out the issue more graphically: When military and intelligence agencies “find Bin Laden's satellite phone and then pin point his location, they don't have to go to a court to get permission to put a missile up his nose." Law enforcement agencies, on the other hand, “must be able to take our information to court and prove to a jury that our bad guy did the bad things we say he did.”

CONTINUED...

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-parallel-construction-guides/

Hannah Arendt warned us what this all means, back when there were a lot of people who learned what GESTAPO was before Hogan's Heroes.

Via Chris Hedges:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Thanks for the heads up, starroute! And to think I often wonder how they got Don Siegelman in prison.

[Trillo]

6. Yes, very important news.

I perceive little difference between this and naked pictures as a result of police body cameras in hospitals or from SWAT storming a house and waking up naked people from their bedtime slumber. What is so difficult to understand is the hypocrisy of the secrecy. If we are going to have a transparent society, then the elites and their control structures need to be transparent as well -- otherwise we have a totalitarian state with little (good) hope for the future.

Transparency was one of President Obama's promises. So, we citizens are now transparent to our leaders, and have been for some time. Why aren't they at least as transparent to us?

It's certainly a new world we're in, not the one we were taught about in compulsory education, almost the exact opposite.

But it's nice that gay folks can finally be out of the closet and get married if that's what they want.

[ND-Dem]

8. K&R

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. That's OK. The FBI is as trustworthy as the CIA, NSA, and Mafia.

[hifiguy]

14. Kick.

Disgusting, but not surprising in the least.

[Matariki]

15. More than half of it data from those stupid quizzes found on Facebook

Which Game of Thrones character are you?

[Jesus Malverde]

16. bump...nt