A new exposé in Wired Magazine has revealed new details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed “Stellar Wind.” According to investigative reporter James Bamford, the NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital “pocket litter.”
In addition, the NSA has also created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. James Bamford writes the secret surveillance program “is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration,” but later killed by Congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns and public outcry.
Jim Bamford talking:
it’s going to be a million square feet. That’s gigantic. There’s only one data center in the country that’s larger, and it’s only slightly larger than that. And it’s going to cost $2 billion. It’s being built in this area on a military base outside of Salt Lake City in Bluffdale. As I said, they had to actually extend the boundary of the town so it would fit into it.
And the whole purpose of this is the centerpiece of this massive eavesdropping complex, this network that was created after 9/11. During the ’90s, the NSA had a disastrous decade, following the Cold War. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing. They missed the attack on the USS Cole. They missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa. And finally, they missed the 9/11 attacks. So NSA wanted to pretty much recreate itself as this massive eavesdropping organization that was, during the Cold War, focused on the Soviet Union, primarily, and to some degree, the Eastern Europe and China and Cuba, communist countries, and today it’s focused on anybody that could use a piece of communication, because the terrorists that they’re eventually after use the same kind of communications that everybody else does. So it has to focus on the worldwide network of communications, the same network that all of us use.
So you have this massive agency that’s collecting a tremendous amount of information every day by satellites, by tapping into undersea cables, by picking up microwave links and tapping of cell phones and data links on your computer, email links, and so forth. And then it has to store it someplace, and that’s why they built Bluffdale. And then that acts as, in essence, like a cloud, a digital cloud, so that agency employees, analysts from around the country at NSA headquarters and their listening posts in different parts of the U.S.—in Georgia, Texas, Hawaii and Colorado—can all access that information held in Bluffdale in that data center. And that’s pretty much a summary of what that data center is all about.
The NSA is much different from the CIA. First of all, it’s about three times the size. It costs far more. It’s tremendously more secret than the CIA. And what it does is very different. It’s focused on eavesdropping, on tapping into major communications links, on listening to what people around the world and, to some degree, in the United States say on telephones, email, communications. That’s really the high point of intelligence these days. Human intelligence is what the CIA does. It goes out and recruits spies, or it blows people up with drones. So, the actual collection—and human intelligence hasn’t really been very good historically. Most the intelligence that the U.S. gathers comes from NSA, is from tapping into communications. So that’s a very big difference between the two. And NSA is really the most powerful intelligence agency, not only in the U.S., but in the world today.
the other purpose, in addition to storing material, is it’s a—it plays a major role in the codebreaking aspects of NSA. NSA has several missions. One of them is intercepting communications. The other is breaking codes, because a lot of that information is encrypted. And the third function of NSA is making codes for the U.S., encrypting U.S. communications. So Bluffdale will play a major role in the breaking of codes because, for breaking codes, you really need two key ingredients. One is a very large—a place where you can store a very large amount of material, because the more material you have, when you’re going through it, using computers to go through it, what you’re looking for is patterns. And the more material that you have—the more data, the more telephone calls, the more email, the more encrypted data that you have—the more patterns that you’re likely to discover.
And the second thing you need is a very, very powerful computer, a very fast computer that can go through enormous amounts of information very fast looking for those patterns. And so, the NSA is now also building a very secret facility down in Tennessee at Oak Ridge, where during World War II the U.S., in great secrecy, developed the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. So now, instead of an atomic bomb, you have a massive computer that the NSA is working on to be the fastest computer in the world, with speeds that are just beyond most people’s comprehensions. And the reason for that is because they have to use these computers to do what they call “brute force” — in other words, take this data and just go through it as fast as possible just to look for these key patterns.
the NSA has constantly denied that they’re doing things, and then it turns out they are doing these things. They denied they were doing domestic eavesdropping back in the ’70s, and it turned out they had Operation SHAMROCK and Operation MINARET, and they’ve been reading every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for 30 years at that point, and also eavesdropping on antiwar veterans. That came out during the Church Committee report. More recently, a few years ago, President Bush said before camera that the United States is not eavesdropping on anybody without a warrant, and then it turns out that we had this exposure to all the warrantless eavesdropping in the New York Times article. And so, you have this constant denial and parsing of words in terms of what he’s saying.
So, what I would like to do—I quote from a number of people in the article that are whistleblowers. They worked at NSA. They worked there many years. One of my key whistleblowers was the senior technical person on the largest eavesdropping operation in NSA. He was a very senior NSA official. He was in charge of basically automating the entire world eavesdropping network for NSA. So—and one of the other people is a intercept operator that was actually listening to these calls, listening to journalists calling from overseas and talking to their wives and having intimate conversations. And she tells about how these people were having these conversations, and she felt very guilty listening to them. These people came forward and said, you know, this shouldn’t be happening. Bill Binney, the senior official I interviewed, had been with NSA for 40 years almost, and he left, saying that what they’re doing is unconstitutional.
What I’d like to see is, why don’t we have a panel, for the first time in history, of some of these people and have them before Congress, sitting there telling their story to Congress, instead of to me, and then have NSA respond to them? I mean, this is the American public who we’re talking about whose phone calls we’re talking about, so—and email and data searches and all that. So I think it’s about time that the Congress get involved, instead of asking questions from a newspaper or from a magazine article, and start actually questioning these people on the record in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and to whom they’re doing it—you know, to whom they’re doing it.
Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, who was here in the United States eavesdropping on the Palestine Hotel, which was later bombed. She said she saw a piece of paper that showed that the Palestine Hotel was going to be bombed and went to her superiors and said, “You’re bombing the hotel where I am listening to the people inside, and I can tell you that they are journalists.” Jim Bamford, you quote Adrienne in your piece, as well, in your piece in Wired Magazine called “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center
retired Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, who was here in the United States eavesdropping on the Palestine Hotel, which was later bombed. She said she saw a piece of paper that showed that the Palestine Hotel was going to be bombed and went to her superiors and said, “You’re bombing the hotel where I am listening to the people inside, and I can tell you that they are journalists.”
I first interviewed Adrienne for my book, The Shadow Factory, a number of years ago. And she’s extremely credible. And these are people, just like Bill Binney, that aren’t speaking to me confidentially; they’re speaking to me on the record, and they’re risking jail, basically, to tell the country what’s going on. So these people have a great deal of courage and a great deal of credibility, and that’s why I think that the NSA owes them and owes the country a duty to come out and say what they’re doing. I mean, this is a democracy, as your program often says, and I think the public should really have at least a fair insight into what the government is doing with their communications.
the NSA was always very hurting for linguistic capabilities, especially in the lead-up to 9/11, so they had very few people that spoke [Pashto] or Dari, the languages in Afghanistan. They had very much an insufficient number of people who spoke Arabic. And Adrienne Kinne was telling me how they had an instructor down in Georgia, where she was working for NSA, trying to teach rudimentary [Pashto], I think it was, to some of the people, but they—it was very hard for them to pick it up. So, there’s 7,000 languages in the world. And NSA is—that’s one of the very difficult things NSA has. It’s trying to understand what people are saying. Picking up the information, intercepting it, is far less difficult than understanding what they’re saying.
I wrote another book called A Pretext for War about how we got into the Iraq War. And I’ve been hearing this fear mongering, fear mongering, fear mongering forever. We’re spending enormous amounts of money on NSA to pick up communications. And even though they lost all these—they had all these failures during the 1990s, you know, failure after failure—the World Trade Center One and World Trade Center Two, the attack on the Cole, the East African embassies bombings—and even after they started all this rebuilding and more and more money, they still missed the person flying over on the Christmas Day flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. They missed the person in Times Square. So, you know, all this eavesdropping we’re doing and all this money we’re spending, I don’t see an awful lot of value coming out of that. But I do hear tremendous amounts of fear mongering, that sort of nonstop fear mongering from the people that are pushing this agenda.
NSA worked with the telecommunications industry in U.S. to eavesdrop on American citizens. two of the companies that were heavily involved, one of them was Narus. It was a company that has been since bought by Boeing. It was a company formed in Israel by Israelis, and then it ran its company from California. But the NSA—or, I guess it was AT&T that basically hired them. And they—or NSA, maybe the two of them working together. But the bottom line was, Narus provided the equipment that NSA was using in the AT&T facilities. AT&T had this big switch in San Francisco. And it would be using this Narus equipment that would take the information from the wires coming in, the cables coming in, and then route it to NSA, the information that NSA wanted. So it used this company called Narus. And again, it’s a company that had been formed overseas, and you really have to start wondering when you have companies that were formed in foreign countries, and they’re giving such intimate access to U.S. telecommunications, especially very secret U.S. work.
The other company was Verint, and they do a lot of the monitoring for Verizon. And Verint also was formed in Israel by Israelis. And it turns out that the chairman and founder of the company ended up being a fugitive now from the United States, wanted on multiple counts of fraud and theft and so forth. He’s hiding out in Namibia in Africa now. And then two other members of the general counsel and another senior executive from the parent company, Comverse, was also arrested and charged in the theft and pleaded guilty. So you have the problem of—these companies that are actually doing the very sensitive work of monitoring everybody’s communications, you have real questions about them, let alone the people that the NSA is targeting.
I’ve been writing about the NSA for 30 years, so I’ve had concerns about that from time to time. In 1982, as you mentioned, I didn’t come close to trial, because they never—I was never arrested or prosecuted or anything, but I was threatened twice by the Justice Department to return documents that they said were classified. But these were documents that had been released to me by the attorney general under the Carter administration, Attorney General Civiletti. And so, I never returned the documents, because they were unclassified when they were given to me. And what the Reagan administration did was reclassify them as top secret and then order that I give them back. But we found a passage in the executive order on secrecy that said once a document has been declassified, it can’t be reclassified. So then Reagan changed the executive order to say that it could be reclassified, but that couldn’t apply to my case because of the principle of ex post facto. So that was fairly dramatic, where they were threatening me during the writing of The Puzzle Palace.
But, you know, ironically, the second book I had on NSA after that, Body of Secrets, they had a book signing for me at NSA. And I interviewed, you know, the director in his office and had tours of the agency and all that other—everything else. But then, when I discovered that NSA was doing all this illegal warrantless eavesdropping, I wrote the third book, which was The Shadow Factory, showing how NSA got involved in all this illegal activity after they had basically given it up for many years, ever since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was created in—around 1978. So, you know, I’ve had sort of a love-hate relationship with NSA over the years. But I—so, sometimes I’ll compliment them if they do something good, and other times I’ll criticize them, as I do in this article, for things that I don’t think they’re doing very good.
President Obama, for example, when all the furor broke out over the warrantless eavesdropping during the Bush administration, came out and said that he was totally against that, he was going to vote against changing the law to allow that kind of thing and also to vote against giving immunity to the telecom companies. The telecom companies could have been charged with a crime for violating everybody’s privacy. But then, when he—when push came to shove and it came time to vote, he didn’t. He voted opposite to what he said, and he voted for the legislation, sort of creating this warrantless eavesdropping change to the law that he was—said he was previously against, which basically legalized what the Bush administration had been doing in their warrantless eavesdropping. And he also voted against—or he voted in favor of giving immunity to the telecom companies, which is again opposite of what he said previously.
And now he’s, you know, the president here last three years, while they’ve been building this enormous—or at least completing this enormous infrastructure, and they hadn’t even started this when he became president, the large data center in Bluffdale. So I don’t really see an awful lot of difference between the two in terms of what’s going on with NSA. If anything, it’s gotten much larger under Obama than it was under Bush.
Discussion with James Bamford.
James Bamford, investigative reporter who has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades. His latest article for Wired Magazine is titled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).” Since his reporting helped expose the NSA’s existence in the 1980s, he has authored of a series of books on the agency including, most recently, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.
– source democracynow.org