Even if you don’t read this post, watch the video below!

A report in the Washington Post has the headline: “NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists.”

Some of that growth is described:

In 2007, ground was broken for a $1 billion facility on 120 acres at Fort Gordon, where an NSA workforce of 4,000 collects and processes signals intelligence from the Middle East, according to the agency.

In Hawaii, the NSA outgrew its Schofield Barracks Army site years ago and opened a 250,000-square-foot, $358 million work space adjacent to it last year. The Wahiawa Annex is the last place that Snowden, then a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, worked before leaving with thousands of top-secret documents. The main job of the NSA’s Hawaii facility is to process signals intelligence from around the Pacific Rim.

In Texas, the agency has added facilities to its San Antonio-based operations. Its main site, at Lackland Air Force Base, processes signals intelligence from Central and South America. In Colorado, the NSA’s expanding facilities on Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora collect and process information about weapons systems around the globe.

Overseas, the NSA’s station at RAF Menwith Hill on the moors of Yorkshire is planned to grow by one-third, to an estimated 2,500 employees, according to studies undertaken by local activists. Although hidden from the main road, up close it is hard to miss the 33 bright-white radar domes that sprout on the deep green landscape. They are thought to collect signals intelligence from parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

I imagine the editors at the Post chose the photo of sheep grazing at Menwith Hill, golf ball domes in the background, with the idea that this bucolic image gives the NSA a more benign face.

The lie that the agency and its media lackeys want to promote is that the NSA is vital to our safety — a shepherd protecting its lambs — and that without its vast reach we would become much more vulnerable to terrorism.

One might imagine that after the Cold War and before 9/11, the NSA was slowly being moth-balled, yet nothing could be further from the truth as a British documentary broadcast in 1993 makes clear.

Even though the Channel 4 report below is now twenty years old, it reveals a wealth of information that remains extremely relevant today.

• For decades the NSA has been monitoring the communications of America’s allies;
• civilian communications were being monitored globally long before 9/11;
• intelligence gathering is performed to serve U.S. commercial interests;
• the NSA’s disregard for Constitutional protections extends as far as its monitoring the communications of members of Congress;
• major defense contractors have for decades been so deeply entwined in the NSA’s operations that it is hard to tell who is serving whom.

“The Hill,” Dispatches, Channel 4, aired on October 6, 1993:

The Washington Post reports: A controversial proposal to restrict how the National Security Agency collects Americans’ telephone records failed to advance in the House by a narrow margin Wednesday, a victory for the Obama administration, which has spent weeks defending the program.

Lawmakers voted 217 to 205 to defeat the proposal from an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative members. Those lawmakers had joined forces in response to revelations by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, that the agency has collected the phone records of millions of Americans — a practice that critics say goes beyond the kind of collection that has been authorized by Congress.

The plan, sponsored by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), would have restricted the collection of the records, known as metadata, only when there was a connection to relevant ongoing investigations. It also would have required that secret opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be made available to lawmakers and that the court publish summaries of each opinion for public review.

Conyers said the proposal “would curtail the ongoing dragnet collection and storage of the personal records of innocent Americans.”

There was little indication that a similar measure would have momentum in the Senate, and the Obama administration made clear that it would veto any such proposal. But the ability of Amash and Conyers to bring the measure to the House floor as an amendment to a Defense Department appropriations bill — and their ability to get more than 200 votes in their favor — was a testament to lawmakers’ growing concerns over the NSA’s bulk collection of data.

A “controversial proposal” supported by “an unlikely coalition” — the journalists who pump out this servile crap are an embarrassment to America.

How about instead noting the fact that even in a Congress which is itself enslaved to the god of national security, there were enough dissenters, that symbolically at least, both the NSA and the White House got a kick in the balls? I know, the Washington Post would not phrase it exactly that way, but the point is not that the amendment got defeated; it is that it almost passed.

The Washington Post reports: Concerns about personal privacy are on the rise, with a big majority of Americans saying the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone and Internet data intrudes on citizens’ rights without clear improvements in U.S. security, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the NSA programs are infringing on some Americans’ privacy rights, and about half see those programs as encroaching on their own privacy. Most of those who see the programs as compromising privacy say the intrusions are unjustified.

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration has forcefully urged the defeat of a legislative measure to curb its wide-ranging collection of Americans’ phone records, setting up a showdown with the House of Representatives over domestic surveillance.

A statement from the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, late on Tuesday evening capped an extraordinary day of near-revolt on Capitol Hill concerning the secret National Security Agency surveillance programes revealed by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Guardian and Washington Post.

The White House urged House members to vote against a measure from Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, that would stop the NSA siphoning up the telephone records of millions of Americans without suspicion of a crime.

“This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process,” said the statement emailed from the White House late on Tuesday in anticipation of a House debate on the Amash measure scheduled for Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

So what does the White House do to promote an open deliberative process? Send in Gen Alexander to provide a classified briefing!

The New York Times reports: General Alexander’s hurried visit to Capitol Hill came as a leading Senate critic of the N.S.A.’s large-scale collection of data about Americans’ phone calls spoke out about expansive government surveillance. He declared that recent leaks about domestic spying by Mr. Snowden have created a “unique moment in our constitutional history” to reform what he said has become “an always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state.”

Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the leading Senate critic and a member of the Intelligence Committee, also hinted that the revelation that the government has been keeping records of every domestic phone call is not the only such extensive program. And he blasted national security officials in the Obama administration, saying they have “actively” misled the American public about domestic surveillance.

“As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority,” Mr. Wyden said. “Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.”

Geoffrey Robertson writes: As Edward Snowden sits in an airside hotel, awaiting confirmation of Russia’s offer of asylum, it is clear that he has already revealed enough to prove that European privacy protections are a delusion: under Prism and other programmes, the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ can, without much legal hindrance, scoop up any electronic communication whenever one of 70,000 “keywords” or “search terms” are mentioned. These revelations are of obvious public interest: even President Obama has conceded that they invite a necessary debate. But the US treats Snowden as a spy and has charged him under the Espionage Act, which has no public interest defence.

That is despite the fact that Snowden has exposed secret rulings from a secret US court, where pliant judges have turned down only 10 surveillance warrant requests between 2001 and 2012 (while granting 20,909) and have issued clandestine rulings which erode first amendment protection of freedom of speech and fourth amendment protection of privacy. Revelations about interception of European communications (many leaked through servers in the US) and the bugging of EU offices in Washington have infuriated officials in Brussels. In Germany, with its memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi, the protests are loudest, and opposition parties, gearing up for an election in September, want him to tell more.

So far Snowden has had three offers of asylum from Latin America, but to travel there means dangerous hours in the air. International law (and the Chicago Convention regulating air traffic) emphatically asserts freedom to traverse international airspace, but America tends to treat international law as binding on everyone except America (and Israel). Thus when Egypt did a deal with the Achille Lauro hijackers and sent them on a commercial flight to Tunis, US F-14 jets intercepted the plane in international airspace and forced it to land in Italy, where the hijackers were tried and jailed. President Mubarak condemned the action as “air piracy contrary to international law” and demanded an apology, to which Reagan replied: “Never.” The UK supported the action as designed to bring terrorists to trial.

In 1986 Israel forced down a Libyan commercial plane in the mistaken belief that PLO leaders were among its passengers, and the US vetoed UN security council condemnation. So there must be a real concern, particularly after Nato allies collaborated in forcing down the Bolivian president’s jet, that the US will intercept any plane believed to be carrying Snowden to asylum, either because he is tantamount to a terrorist (Vice-President Biden has described Julian Assange as a “hi-tech terrorist”) or simply because they want to put him on trial as a spy. [Continue reading…]

By Justin Elliott, ProPublica, July 23, 2013

The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. 

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

I reached out to the NSA press office seeking more information but got no response.

It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery.

“It’s just baffling,” says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This is an agency that’s charged with monitoring millions of communications globally and they can’t even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request.”

Federal agencies’ public records offices are often underfunded, according to Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at University of Maryland and a longtime observer of FOIA issues.

But, Daglish says, “If anybody is going to have the money to engage in evaluation of digital information, it’s the NSA for heaven’s sake.”

For more on the NSA, read our story on the agency’s tapping of Internet cables, our fact-check on claims about the NSA and Sept. 11, and our timeline of surveillance law.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The string of revelations about America’s surveillance apparatus by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has cast a spotlight on the growing number of American companies involved in electronic spycraft.

It hasn’t visibly damped enthusiasm among Silicon Valley investors and military contractors looking for ways to get into a business many see as one of the few growth areas left as U.S. military spending contracts.

Some of the country’s most influential venture capitalists and former spy chiefs are investing in companies now providing the government with the sweeping electronic spy system and evolving cyberwarfare programs exposed by Mr. Snowden.

More than 80 companies work with the NSA on cybersecurity and surveillance, according to a recent report in the German magazine Der Spiegel that was based on top secret documents provided by Mr. Snowden. They include firms like the one that employed Mr. Snowden as an infrastructure analyst in Hawaii, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., as well as scores of new players.

Last year, venture capitalists pumped about $700 million into security startups, almost a 10th of the estimated market, according to Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner Inc., the U.S. information technology research company. [Continue reading…]

USA Today reports: Republicans in the House of Representatives are seizing the chance to stop the National Security Agency from spying on Americans by using the power of the purse – the $598 billion defense spending bill.

The House of Representatives is expected to begin debate on the bill Tuesday and hold a series of votes on 100 amendments, including two that could put key Obama Administration programs at the mercy of House lawmakers.

One amendment sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., would defund the NSA’s bulk phone metadata collection program.

“In order for funds to be used by the NSA, the court order would have to have a statement limiting the collection of records to [the] records that pertain to a person under investigation,” Amash explained during a House Rules Committee meeting Monday.

The Huffington Post reports: The National Security Agency kicked its lobbying into high gear after an amendment from Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican from Michigan, was ruled in order and will get a vote sometime this week.

NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander scheduled a last-minute, members-only briefing in response to the amendment, according to an invitation distributed to members of Congress this morning and forwarded to HuffPost. “In advance of anticipated action on amendments to the DoD Appropriations bill, Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of the House Intelligence Committee invites your Member to attend a question and answer session with General Keith B. Alexander of the National Security Agency,” reads the invitation.

The invitation warned members that they could not share what they learned with their constituents or others. “The briefing will be held at the Top Secret/SCI level and will be strictly Members-Only,” reads the invite.

NBC News: Former CIA contractor and self-declared leaker Edward Snowden hopes to end his month-long stay in a Moscow airport and move to the city’s downtown by Wednesday, his Russian lawyer told Reuters on Monday.

Attorney Anatoly Kucherena told the news agency that Snowden felt it was too dangerous to leave Russia for Latin America because of U.S. efforts to bring him home to face charges for allegedly leaking classified details about American intelligence gathering efforts.

“He should get this certificate (allowing him to leave the airport) shortly,” Kucherena, who helped Snowden apply for temporary asylum in Russia, told Reuters.

Kucherena said Snowden’s bid to obtain temporary asylum in the country may take as long as three months to process. But, based on the initial response to the request, he can pass through customs and exit the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport where he has been staying for nearly one month.

Snowden has also not ruled out Russian citizenship, according to his lawyer.

Slate: On Monday, the Washington Post published a story focusing on how massively the NSA has grown since the 9/11 attacks. Buried within it, there was a small but striking detail: By September 2004, the NSA had developed a technique that was dubbed “The Find” by special operations officers. The technique, the Post reports, was used in Iraq and “enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off.” This helped identify “thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq,” according to members of the special operations unit interviewed by the Post.

It is not explained in the report exactly how this technique worked. But to spy on phones when they are turned off, agencies would usually have to infect the handset with a Trojan that would force it to continue emitting a signal if the phone is in standby mode, unless the battery is removed. In most cases, when you turn your phone off — even if you do not remove the battery — it will stop communicating with nearby cell towers and can be traced only to the location it was in when it was powered down.

In 2006, it was reported that the FBI had deployed spyware to infect suspects’ mobile phones and record data even when they were turned off. The NSA may have resorted to a similar method in Iraq, albeit on a much larger scale by infecting thousands of users at one time. Though difficult, the mass targeting of populations with Trojan spyware is possible — and not unheard of. [Continue reading…]

In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, former NSA chief Michael Hayden was asked:

Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?

Gen. Hayden: He’s certainly not a hero. The word traitor has a very narrowly defined legal meaning that he may not in the end quite meet. I personally think Snowden is a very troubled, narcissistic young man who has done a very, very bad thing.

I don’t think Snowden spied for the money, and he probably did not spy for the power. He seems to have revealed this information because of his ideological embrace of transparency as a virtue.

It is a little like the Boston bombers. The issue is at what point does Islamic fundamentalism flip-over and become a genuine national security threat? Likewise, at what point does a cultural tendency towards transparency flip-over to become a deep threat inside your system? They are similar issues. [Continue reading…]

These spooks — and retired spooks — are shameless propagandists!

If there’s one legitimate reason to associate Snowden with the Boston bombers it is that the bombings themselves perfectly illustrated that the NSA’s mass surveillance program as the means find that proverbial needle in a haystack, doesn’t work.

But instead of acknowledge that fact, Hayden just wants to get Snowden and bombers into the same breath and thereby promote the idea that President Obama seems to favor: that whistleblowers should be viewed as terrorists.

McClatchy reports: Congress is growing increasingly wary of controversial National Security Agency domestic surveillance programs, a concern likely to erupt during legislative debate _ and perhaps prod legislative action _ as early as next week.

Skepticism has been slowly building since last month’s disclosures that the super-secret NSA conducted programs that collected Americans’ telephone data. Dozens of lawmakers are introducing measures to make those programs less secret, and there’s talk of denying funding and refusing to continue authority for the snooping.

The anxiety is a sharp contrast to June’s wait-and-see attitude after Edward Snowden, a government contract worker, leaked highly classified data to the media. The Guardian newspaper of Britain reported one program involved cellphone records. The Guardian, along with The Washington Post, also said another program allowed the government access to the online activity of users at nine Internet companies.

Obama administration officials quickly provided briefings about the programs, and they continue to have strong defenders at the Capitol. “People at the NSA in particular have heard a constant public drumbeat about a laundry list of nefarious things they are alleged to be doing to spy on Americans _ all of them wrong,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said last month. “The misperceptions have been great, yet they keep their heads down and keep working every day to keep us safe.”

Most in Congress remain reluctant to tinker with any program that could compromise security, but lawmakers are growing frustrated. “I think the administration and the NSA has had six weeks to answer questions and haven’t done a good job at it. They’ve been given their chances, but they have not taken those chances,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash. [Continue reading…]

Sounding like a logic-defying Zen master, NSA chief Keith Alexander this week claimed: “You need a haystack to find a needle.” I pity any foreign journalist who took on the challenge of attempting to translate that into an intelligible statement.

Alexander’s staff, on the other hand, seem less inclined to speak in riddles — though just as eager to portray the operations of a police state in terms more appropriate for a kindergarten.

Anyone who might have previously been wondering whether the NSA is really watching everyone, should no longer be in any doubt — once they’ve grasped the humans-like-rabbits metaphor that we each stand a certain number of “hops” apart.

Following National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis’s revelation that the agency conducts surveillance as many as “three hops” away from a suspected terrorist, Sean Gallagher digs into the numbers:

A great deal of research has been done into the interconnectedness of people in the Internet age. Social scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists have explored the “small world” phenomenon with studies and experiments for over 50 years, and their findings show that the “small world” keeps getting smaller as technology advances. In 1979, chair and founder of MIT’s political science department Ithiel de Sola Pool and the University of Michigan’s Manfred Kochen published a paper titled “Contacts and Influence,” which draws on a decade of research into social networks. De Sola Pool and Kochen posited that “in a country the size of the United States, if acquaintanceship were random and the mean acquaintance volume were 1,000, the mean length of minimum chain between pairs of persons would be well under two intermediaries.”

In other words, if the average person in the US has contact with and is acquainted with 1,000 others (through brief interactions, such as an e-mail or a phone call, or through stronger associations), then we’re at most two hops from anyone else in the US. Ergo, if any one person in the US is one hop from a terrorist, chances are good that you are three hops away.

The actual degrees of separation between people may be somewhat larger because the population of the US has grown significantly since 1979; our interconnectedness with the world at large has grown as well, widening the potential links between people. Live in a major metropolitan center in the US and you’re bound to be two degrees of separation away from someone in a country that’s of interest to the NSA. For example: I have been a regular customer of restaurants owned by Baltimore’s Karzai family, which is headed by a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai—two hops. I’m also, according to LinkedIn, two degrees of separation away from President Obama. Am I a good guy or a bad guy?

The Internet has blown the level of interconnectedness though the proverbial roof—we now have e-mail, social media, and instant message interactions with people we’ll never meet in real life and in places we’ll never go. A 2007 study by Carnegie Mellon University machine learning researcher Jure Leskovec and Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz found that the average number of hops between any two arbitrary Microsoft Messenger users, based on interaction, was 6.6. And a study of Twitter feeds published in 2011 found the average degree of separation between random Twitter users to be only 3.43.

So even if the NSA limited its surveillance activities—and by “surveillance” I mean active probing of the content of communications of an individual—to people within two hops of suspected terrorists, that’s a sizable population. Three ratchets it up to hundreds of millions or potentially billions of people, especially when the definition of a hop is based on relationships so casual we could create them by accidentally clicking on a link in a spam e-mail. So far, we know that there have been about 20,000 requests for FISA warrants to surveil domestic targets since 2001, but if those warrants covered three hops from the suspects at the center of the requests—depending on how tightly or loosely the NSA defines a relationship—three hops could encompass as much as 50 percent of the Internet-using population of the world. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, and its domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), used a spying program of the American National Security Agency (NSA). This is evident in secret documents from the US intelligence service that have been seen by SPIEGEL journalists. The documents show that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was equipped with a program called XKeyScore intended to “expand their ability to support NSA as we jointly prosecute CT (counterterrorism) targets.” The BND is tasked with instructing the domestic intelligence agency on how to use the program, the documents say.

According to an internal NSA presentation from 2008, the program is a productive espionage tool. Starting with the metadata — or information about which data connections were made and when — it is able, for instance, to retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine, the documents show. In addition, the system is able to receive a “full take” of all unfiltered data over a period of several days — including, at least in part, the content of communications.

This is relevant from a German perspective, because the documents show that of the up to 500 million data connections from Germany accessed monthly by the NSA, a major part is collected with XKeyScore (for instance, around 180 million in December 2012). The BND and BfV, when contacted by SPIEGEL, would not discuss the espionage tool. The NSA, as well, declined to comment, referring instead to the words of US President Barack Obama during his visit to Berlin and saying there was nothing to add.

Furthermore, the documents show that the cooperation of the German intelligence agencies with the NSA has recently intensified. Reference is made to the “eagerness and desire” of BND head Gerhard Schindler. “The BND has been working to influence the German government to relax interpretation of the privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing,” the NSA noted in January. Over the course of 2012, German partners had shown a “willingness to take risks and to pursue new opportunities for cooperation with the US.” [Continue reading…]

Pete Ashdown, CEO of an internet service provider in Utah, received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers: The first thing I do when I get a law enforcement request is look for a court signature on it. Then I pass it to my attorneys and say, “Is this legitimate? Does this qualify as a warrant?” If it does, then we will respond to it. We are very up front that we respond to warrants.

If it isn’t, then the attorneys write back: “We don’t believe it is in jurisdiction or is constitutional. We are happy to respond if you do get an FBI request in jurisdiction or you get a court order to do so.”

The FISA request was a tricky one, because it was a warrant through the FISA court — whether you believe that is legitimate or not. I have a hard time with secret courts. I ran it past my attorney and asked, “Is there anyway we can fight this?” and he said “No. It is legitimate.”

It was also different [from other warrants] because it was for monitoring. They wanted to come in and put in equipment on my network to monitor a single customer. The customer they were monitoring was a particular website that was very benign. It seems ridiculous to me. It was beyond absurd. It wasn’t like a guns and ammo website. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian’s disclosure in June of the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa).

The announcement flowed, the statement said, from the decision to declassify aspects of the metadata grab “in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program”. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The top lawyer for the US director of national intelligence suggested Friday that the intelligence community would consider changes to its controversial bulk surveillance of telephone records.

The apparent openness to modifying the surveillance efforts comes after a week of increasing criticism on Capitol Hill by Republican and Democratic legislators.

Robert S Litt, speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Friday, strongly defended the legality and propriety of the National Security Agency collecting telephone records on millions of Americans prior to specific national-security investigations.

“It is, however, not the only way that we could regulate intelligence collection,” Litt said. “We’re currently working to declassify more information about our activities to inform that discussion,” particularly concerning the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration is refusing to say whether it will seek to renew a court order that permits the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records on millions of Verizon customers when it expires at the end of this week.

Officials declined to discuss what action they intend to take about the order at the center of the current surveillance scandal, which formally expires at 5pm Friday.

The looming expiration of the order, issued by the secretive Fisa court, provides an early test of Barack Obama’s claim to welcome debate over “how to strike this balance” between liberty and security. Beyond the question of the phone records collection, the court order authorizing it is a state secret.

On Thursday, the administration would not answer a question first posed by the Guardian six days ago about its intentions to continue, modify or discontinue the Verizon bulk-collection order. The White House referred queries to the Justice Department. “We have no announcement at this time,” said Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon. The NSA and office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to questions. [Continue reading…]

BuzzFeed reports: The National Security Agency’s massive Utah Data Center, designed for communications storage and processing is already up and running, despite agency claims the center won’t open until September. Opening the facility — the largest of its kind in history — is the key final step that will allow the agency to collect and store massive amounts of data on United States citizens. The NSA has numerous other data centers, but the Utah facility will be the central repository, enabling data collection on an unprecedented scale.

And according to Russ Tice, a former NSA intelligence analyst who still maintains close ties with numerous colleagues at the agency, it’s not just metadata — which has been a key distinction in the administration’s defense of its intelligence gathering programs. The agency, according to Tice, is currently able to collect the full contents of digital communications. That includes the contents of emails, text messages, Skype communications, and phone calls, as well as financial information, health records, legal documents, and travel documents. This comports with statements given this week by a former senior intelligence official, claiming that NSA Director Keith Alexander’s ethos was to “collect it all, tag it, store it … And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

The NSA’s ability to collect and store such vast quantities of information is difficult to grasp. But so is the enormous footprint of the data center in Bluffdale, Utah, 25 miles south of Salt Lake City. The facility, which cost the government $2 billion, covers 1 million square feet, 100,000 of which is purely for computer servers and storage hardware. According to James Bamford’s Wired magazine article published last year, “The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)” [Continue reading…]