A Brief History Of Domestic Spying
The current scandal coming out of Washington is not new. Our nation has moved steadily toward becoming a total surveillance society over the last 15 years. While Reagan-era laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were intended to monitor agents and proxies of hostile foreign governments like the Soviet Union, or other foreign nationals; this law provides checks and balances that have been discarded by the last three administrations.
Starting with the Clinton administration in the early 1990’s, we have seen a progressive discarding of the due process restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering, which has now reached the point where the federal government has finally admitted that it is tracking virtually every phone call, email, fax, text message, in the country.
Electronic surveillance began during the cold war era with a joint project known as ECHELON. It was so secret that its existence was not confirmed until the 1990’s when other forms of surveillance were discovered. ECHELON essentially was a mutual surveillance pact between the USA, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Our spy agencies, barred by law from spying on its own citizens, circumvented the law by spying on other countries’ telecommunications and then shared that information with our partners in ECHELON.
They in turn spied on Americans and turned over the raw data to the NSA. Wiretapping of domestic calls by the federal government began in earnest with the passage of CALEA, also known as the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. While this program is still tied up in court due to lawsuits by educators and librarians, it did give impetus to the Clinton administration’s abortive attempt to place spyware into every phone made in the USA. Known as key escrow, the ill-conceived CLIPPER CHIP was intended to give the government a backdoor into all encrypted domestic phone use. MAGIC LANTERN is a form of spyware known as policeware, which functions as a trojan program on a targeted individual’s computer. It logs keystrokes and then surreptitiously sends packets of the captured keystrokes over the internet to the FBI for analysis. Magic Lantern was first reported in a column by Bob Sullivan of MSNBC.
Unlike previous keystroke logger programs used by the FBI, Magic Lantern can reportedly be installed remotely, via an e-mail attachment or by exploiting common operating system vulnerabilities . It has been variously described as a virus and a Trojan horse. It is not known how the program might store or communicate the recorded keystrokes.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the FBI released a series of unclassified documents relating to CARNIVORE. Sullivan's confidential source said that redacted portions of that document mention Cyber Knight , . . . a database that sorts and matches data gathered using various Carnivore-like methods from email, chat rooms, instant messages, and Internet phone calls. It also matches files with captured encryption keys.
Spokesmen for the FBI soon confirmed the existence of a program called Magic Lantern, denied that it had been deployed, and declined to comment further. DCS 1000 and OMNIVORE are variations on CARNIVORE. OMNIVORE is an “enhanced” version that “sniffs” the Internet and scans all communications for ECHELON-style trigger words. TIA is the “Total Information Awareness” program developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, creators of the Internet). Originally run by convicted felon and Iran-Contra conspirator Adm. John Poindexter, the Information Awareness Office was immediately exposed by online privacy activists. Ominously, the project logo featured a Masonicstyle pyramid with the “all seeing eye” casting its gaze upon the world in Orwellian fashion (see below).
The TIA website was subsequently removed from the Internet by the IAO in a belated attempt to quell public furor over such a widespread and warrantless surveillance of the public.
TIPS was developed in 2002 in an attempt to get fearful post-9/11 Americans to spy on one another. It came under intense scrutiny in July of 2002 when the Washington Post alleged in an editorial that the program was vaguely defined.
The program's website implied that US workers who had access to private citizens' homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, would be reporting on what was in people's homes if it was deemed suspicious.
Operation TIPS was accused of doing an end run around the United States Constitution. The original wording of the website was subsequently changed. President Bush's Attorney General, John Ashcroft, denied that private residences would be surveilled by private citizens operating as government spies.
Mr. Ashcroft nonetheless defended the program, equivocating on whether the reports by citizens on fellow citizens would be maintained in government databases. While saying that the information would not be in a central database as part of Operation TIPS, he maintained that the information would still be kept in databases by various police agencies.
The databases were an explicit concern of civil liberties groups (on both the left and the right) who felt that such databases could include false information about citizens with no way for those citizens to know that such information was compiled about them, nor any way for them to correct the information, nor any way for them to confront their accusers.
MATRIX is the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. Although some privacy advocates said the program is dead due to lack of funding, the criminal misuse and mis-allocation of US funds in Iraq make it possible for the NSA to easily re-fund this program covertly.
FBI Surveillance Capability More Extensive Than Once Thought
By: JBS Staff
October 1, 2007
Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation have provided disturbing details about the extent of the FBI’s ability to monitor the communications of American citizens. According to Wired News reporter Ryan Singel, “The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Known as “DCSNet,” for Digital Collection System Network, it closely connects FBI wiretapping installations with the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. According to Wired, “It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected. It’s a ‘comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems,’ says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.”
According to the Wired report, the FBI’s private network is run by telecommunications company Sprint Nextel. How powerful is this surveillance network? According to Wired: “The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone’s location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.”
Patriot Act Under Fire
By: JBS Staff
October 1, 2007
The USA Patriot Act has come under fire in U.S. District Court from Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York. The case related to National Security Letters which, according to Wired News, were used under the Patriot Act “to issue 143,074 requests for phone and internet records from 2003 to 2005,” and which, “as a recent Inspector General report showed … led to abuses and sloppiness.” Judge Marrero found that strict secrecy rules imposed on recipients of National Security Letters (NSLs) “amounted to prior restraint on speech and allowed the FBI to pick and choose which persons would be gagged, based on whether the feds believed the target might speak critically of the government.”
In his ruling, Judge Marrero also warned: “The NSL … poses profound concerns to our society, not the least of which, as reported by the OIG, is the potential for abuse [in] its employment. Through the use of NSLs, the government can unmask the identity of internet users engaged in anonymous speech in online discussions. It can obtain an itemized list of all the emails sent and received by the target of the NSL, and it can then seek information on individuals communicating with that person. It may even be able to discover the websites an individual has visited and queries submitted to search engines.”
