via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar [...]]]> by Pratap Chaterjee

via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Close ties

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.

In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

* Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

by Bernard Chazelle

Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Bernard Chazelle

Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not already in federal custody, rest assured they soon will be. To add insult to injury, it might all be legal. A 29-year old Booz Allen employee, Edward Snowden, has risked his freedom to expose the mischief.

Not everyone was pleased. Ranting like a mad preacher, David Brooks called it a betrayal no fewer than ten times in one column. Wagging the mighty finger of pop psychology, the Times‘s self-anointed Mother Superior blamed Snowden’s betrayals on a life “unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society,” ie, untutored in the Brooksian view of authority as a call to blind worship. To others, the episode was a discomfiting reminder that the mantle of heroism can make cruel demands on those willing to put it on—especially the young. Snowden has forced open a much-needed debate, one that President Obama openly welcomes. And what better way to echo the sentiment than to have his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, lie under oath to preempt any such debate?

Not that Snowden’s revelation did more than turn suspicion into confirmation. Ordinary Americans might not have suspected the cosmic scope of the snoopery, but terrorists, a breed to whom suspicion comes naturally, surely did. Indeed, the Pentagon has made no secret of its plan to expand its Global Information Gridpast the “yottabyte” mark. How big is that? Think of a giant vacuum cleaner designed to hoover up the equivalent of one million DVDs for every human being on earth. Now ask yourself: why would anyone need so much storage if not for trawling every critter that swims the waterways of the Internet: emails, tweets, pics, vids, chats, etc? The NSA’s claim to be merely after your metadata (email addresses, phone numbers, durations, etc) is preposterous. Metadata alone could never use up more than one millionth of the storage capacity. The NSA has hopped on the Big-Data bandwagon or, as it were, the All-Data supertrain.

Any terrorist aware of the hazards of Big Data knows that spurious correlations increase faster than data size and so will pray that the NSA keeps a diary of all life forms on the planet. If you’re a needle hiding in a haystack, all you want is more hay, like, say, a yottabyte worth of it. Bad guys will love Big Data. Social activists not so much. If the next J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t fancy the cut of your jib, he’ll come after you, file servers blazing, with more details about your past than you’ll ever remember. No need to be unduly paranoid, though. The craven Chinese may have hacked into the Obama and Romney campaigns, but thank God no American president would ever break into the party headquarters of his rival. Thank God the FBI would never spread lies about a university administrator. Thank God it would never pressure a civil rights leader to commit suicide. Let’s not surrender to cynicism and imagine that anything like McCarthyism could ever happen in the United States. We don’t call it the land of the free for nothing.

But what’s freedom good for if you’re dead? Some say that global surveillance is the price to pay for staying alive. Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, credit Big Brother for the capture of Najibullah Zazi and David Headley, two genuine nasties. Alas, if that’s the best our two NSA cheerleaders have to offer, they might as well pack up their pom-poms and go home. A former British foreign office minister dispatched their boast as an illusion: Zazi’s name was caught by British Intelligence the old-fashioned way; likewise, the arrest of David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, came in the wake of a British tip-off of the conventional kind. Former NSA surveillance huncho, William Binney, characterizes the entire spying dragnet as useless. Acting on a Russian tip, the NSA did record phone calls of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston bombings, and we all know how effective that was. Almost as helpful as the interceptions of the phone calls that bin Laden’s chief of operations made right before 9/11. The only attacks the Feds seem good at preventing are those it instigates. All-time favorites include the sting operation that netted the crackerjack squad of terrorists whose first step to Armageddon was to order al-Qaeda boots from an FBI informant. (Who would want to meet the 72 virgins with the wrong shoes on?)

Despite our best efforts to create new terrorists by vaporizing their children with our drones, they still remain a rare breed. Matthew Yglesias estimates the number of lives saved annually by airport security measures as approximately zero. Saving zero lives does not come cheap, mind you. Body scanning alone has cost the US taxpayer billions of dollars. No sooner was he done running Homeland Security than Michael Chertoff cashed in the big bucks at Rapiscan Systems by leading thecheers for full-body scans. This revolving-door pathology afflicting the Beltway can appear paradoxical. Ever wondered why the NSA outsources work that falls squarely within its core competencies? No surprise if the agency contracts out its catering, plumbing, and lawn mowing, but… information technology? The NSA employs thousands of IT experts, from seasoned sysadmins to world-class cryptographers. Whatever Snowden did for the agency as a Booz Allen employee, the NSA could do it in-house more cheaply. So why doesn’t it? The answer to this $75-billion question is money, gobs of it floating right under the nose of public servants cruelly kept by law from getting a piece of the action. The revolving door is there to release the tension. It is a legal mechanism for funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into a handful of private wallets. Contractors serve stints in government for the same reasons thieves case a bank before robbing it. There they learn to operate the moola pipeline and keep it flowing into the right pockets.

Booz Allen Hamilton revolves doors better than most. The aforementioned spook-in-chief, James Clapper, is a proud alum. One of his predecessors as National Intelligence director, Mike McConnell, is now vice-chairman of the company. Former CIA director, James Woolsey, was a Booz Allen VP. The company is majority-owned by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant with long ties to the Bush family. Carlyle has syphoned a cool $2 billion from Booz Allen, which itself derives 98% of its revenues from the US taxpayer. This is crony capitalism at its finest. Being perhaps a bit too obvious, the scheme requires a bevy of propagandists to hide the true motives behind a veil of fear. To point out that lightning outkills terrorism will earn you a stern reminder that “we must kill them over there so they don’t kill us over here.” The propagandists keep at the ready a whole Ptolemaic jumble of rhetorical epicycles with at its center the winning slogan: “Be scared, be very scared!” And thus, with Monty-Pythonesque clarity, can Tom Friedman urge us to surrender our privacy now so a new terrorist attack does not force us to surrender it later.

Politicans play along with this charade for fear of being seen as soft on terrorism, some of them hoping that one day they too will hitch a ride on the gravy train. President Obama gives the spooks a blank check to buy himself an insurance policy: a means to deflect the blame if and when terror strikes. Don’t count on any pushback from the mainstream media. Terrorism makes good copy and, like a four-leaf clover, gets hyped in proportion to its rarity. Thriving on its incestuous relationship with power, the corporate media has blinded itself to the very idea of a conflict of interest. When someone hinted at a sweet deal between Chertoff and Rapiscan on Hardball, a “shocked, shocked” Chris Matthews called it slander.

No one disputes the need to keep secret tabs on terrorists and monitor their communications. What’s at issue is the existence of a cyber-panopticon handing over all details of everyone’s private life to government agencies with no meaningful oversight. The current outrage over the NSA is rightly focused on its Orwellian angle. Yet to sate the vengeful hunger of latter-day J. Edgar Hoovers doesn’t alone explain the rise of the Surveillance State. An important driver is the dominant social engineering project of our time: the upward redistribution of wealth to the one percent. In the case at hand, the project was given a boost by the co-occurrence of two trends: the commodification of Big-Data technology and the post-9/11 resurgence of American paranoia. When your enemy hates you for your freedoms, don’t you want a supersized Big Brother by your side? But here’s the twist: the attendant growth in defense spending ran smack against the neoliberal push for smaller government. The solution? The rise of a bloated industry of overpaid private contractors feeding off the public trough. Bravo, one percent, the maneuver was brilliant!

As his antsy critics swarm out to smear him, Edward Snowden faces a bleak future. He didn’t just expose the powerful: he humiliated them. For that unforgivable sin, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called Snowden a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” (As a hack cross-dressing as a journalist, he would know.) House Speaker John Boehner labeled the young whistleblower a traitor. Were he to be extradited to the US, Snowden would face a long prison sentence. Perhaps President Obama will indulge his forgotten love of whistleblowers and pardon him as penance for letting the DOJ prosecute more whistleblowers than all of his predecessors combined. Perhaps he will bestow the medal of freedom upon Glenn Greenwald for shining light on government scandals. Perhaps the NSA will turn its Fort Meade headquarters into a soup kitchen…

– Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is currently on sabbatical at the College de France in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of the book, “The Discrepancy Method,” an investigation into the power of randomness in computing, his current research focuses on “natural algorithms” and the algorithmic complexity of living matter. He has written extensively about politics and music.

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s pretty incredible that in the United States an enormous lobby exists to distort the Second Amendment to make people believe that citizens should have unfettered access to enormous firepower, but there is nothing similar to guard the right to privacy. And when someone comes along and reveals the massive extent to which the United States government is spying on private communication between ordinary citizens, the debate becomes about “national security.”

There are, to be sure, good reasons why any government must keep things secret, and why there are laws to punish those who break the confidence the government places in them when it trusts them with classified information. But even the most elementary definition of notions like liberty and democracy demands that such secrecy be restricted to absolute necessity. The PRISM program and the revelations Edward Snowden made about it don’t begin to meet that standard. And the responses from not only US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper but also President Barack Obama are extremely chilling.

Explaining why the program was classified, Clapper said, “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection.” Put bluntly, that’s just nonsense. How many of us, before the revelations about PRISM, believed all of our electronic communications, including the telephone, were impervious to government spying? The only thing Edward Snowden revealed was the existence of the program. Does anyone seriously believe that al-Qaeda thought they could just send emails around the world with no risk of discovery by the US government? Please.

As Obama said, “There’s a reason these programs are classified.” That’s true, but it is not because of the false choice the President laid out that US citizens “can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” No one is asking for that. Obama’s statement is meant to frighten us with the threat of terrorism into sacrificing more of our freedom. It speaks volumes that the PRISM program, though started by George W. Bush, has expanded exponentially under Obama. It says even more that the author of the Patriot Act (which first expanded the government’s power using the excuse of fighting terrorism after the 9/11 attacks), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner Jr., a Republican, considers the program “an abuse” of the draconian law he wrote.

No, PRISM was not classified for security reasons, as the information it uncovered could be argued to have been. It was kept secret because US citizens would be angered by the breadth of the surveillance of their electronic communications. Again, many already assumed this was going on, though PRISM’s scope probably surprised them too. But the acquiescence of the internet corporations who own the servers being monitored — all the big ones, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, et al — is going to have a chilling effect on internet traffic and internet commerce. That is one reason it was kept secret. The other is that the Bush and Obama Administrations were concerned that if the breadth of the surveillance was known, the people of the United States just might object.

Can there be a clearer violation of the Constitution? Not only does PRISM directly violate the Fourth Amendment in as blatant a manner as could be conceived, it was intentionally hidden only to make sure the will of the people could not enter the conversation. Yet the streets are not filled with US citizens demanding accountability. This says a great deal about the post-9/11 US, and just how much freedom we are now willing to sacrifice for a “war on terror” that has availed us nothing.

But the issue speaks to much more than just the rights of US citizens to privacy. Almost all of the restrictions that are in place and even the more ephemeral ones that Obama and Clapper claim to be in place act only to protect some measure of US privacy. According to the leaked PowerPoint presentation on PRISM (which, it should be noted, no one has claimed is falsified), the program uses search terms to find out which of the trillions of pieces of data it has intercepted are “foreign.” That it has only a 51% level of certainty is troublesome for Americans, but the implication that every single person on the planet outside of US citizens is fair game should trouble us even more.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal basis for this program, such spying on citizens of other countries can proceed virtually unencumbered. In olden times, before the internet, the limitations of access and prohibitive cost served as barriers to wanton surveillance. It simply was too much trouble and too costly to spy on random citizens of other countries.

But now, with a global data network, where every bit of information passes through numerous servers and where US corporations that own many of the biggest servers do a lot of their business globally as well, those restrictions are absent. Yet nothing in US law changes the playing field with the new technology.

Voices of outrage have already been heard in Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand and other US allies. But the main focus of the surveillance, of course, is countries like Pakistan and Iran. But what have we said to the citizens of those countries? That’s a question we might consider the next time we start thinking “they hate us for our freedoms,” which we in the US are sacrificing because of our own fear, rather than wondering if we are not enraging “them” with our hubris.

The scandal has been prominent, and the media fallout severe. Yet the US moves along with business as usual. The US government has violated the Constitution in the most egregious way, and we have established ourselves as a state that considers it perfectly acceptable to spy on everyone else, without any control or semblance of probable cause. You wonder what it would take to bring US citizens into the streets en masse. We could, perhaps, learn something from the Turks.