Did you catch the interview with two former NSA whistleblowers on Thursday’s PBS News Hour (“NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst“).
PBS originally said the segment would air on Tuesday, July 23, but that didn’t happen, according to a post on the FAIR blog last week.
The NSA segment was finally broadcast on Thursday, and there were some zingers.
RUSSELL TICE, former National Security Agency analyst: The United States were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of senior military people and industrial types.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is the early 2000s.
RUSSELL TICE: This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito’s targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?
WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn’t aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually — there wasn’t anybody who wasn’t a part of this collection of information.
So, virtually, you could target anybody in this country you wanted.
Tice, the former NSA analyst, said he has been in contact with old colleagues at the NSA and, based on what he was told, believes “they are collecting everything, contents word for word, everything of every domestic communication in this country.”
Tice has been out telling this story for a while. Here’s a sample from back in June, with lots of links to additional background.
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“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
Although I can’t stand the needless and warrantless NSA spying on Americans, what really bothers me is that they have a blank check and untold zillions of taxpayer dollars to do it.
Chris is right. We are underwriting our own invasion(s) of privacy while the poor starve and the college kids pay exorbitant loan interest.
But wait! If we don’t spend untold zillions of taxpayer dollars we wont be “safe” from “terrorists”.
While it is necessary and appropriate to question and challenge government surveillance, it is naive and foolish to even suggest that we face no real threats from terrorists who would gleefully destroy your home and family given a free hand to do so.
How do we stop this!
There is a bit of irony in this revelation about how our right to privacy is being compromised when many people have no concern revealing much of their lives on social media like Facebook.
So, so true. Never did buy into that fakebook stuff- never will.
If the whistleblowers allegations about government spying on its own are correct, and I am sure they are, the first danger of NSA’s “library” is employing the spy gear to keep each other “in line,” commit political blackmail and, eventually, much worse. These whistleblowers have no reason to lie about such specific abuses. Unchecked power leads to this. The kind that lots of the people lusting for office secretly drool over.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in the security of information systems to look at the history of unlawful entry into criminal information systems. There have been some interesting cases involving NYPD breaches.
So, my question is, if everything is recorded – or should we say “preserved” – how can its security ever be assured? Easy answer, it cannot. So, as long as the risk is there, nothing resembling confidentiality can exist. Perhaps especially well known people or those who are a thorn in the intelligence communities flesh? Like journalists, whistleblowers or activists? Is there really anything even close to attorney-client privilege under certain circumstances the spies might be interested in for personal or employment related reasons? What about HIPAA and your confidential medical history? What about confidential hotlines, tiplines? What about confidential sources of journalists? The fact is, nothing confidential in an electronic communication can provide a reasonable expectation of current or future privacy? What about clergy and church member? How about all the embarrasing conversations you have ever had that you are so grateful are “in the past?” If everything is preserved, and it is time to smell the coffee here, every legal and moral basis for confidentiality and privacy is at risk. IF, that is, you dare come into certain spotlights. Eventually, of course, this will evolve to punish anyone who gets “out of line.” Paranoid? Maybe, but what does history teach us about unchecked and unaccountable power?
Go rent the movie “The Lives of Others” to look at what commonly happened in East Germany not so long ago, as an example. And that was such a small scale compared to this.
I don’t wear a tin foil hat. I just believe in the constitution.
Jerry is absolutely right. “Knowledge is Power,” “All Power Tends to Corrupt; Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely,” AND “Total Information Awareness” creates amazing power over the “Lives of Others.”
I do not trust myself with unfettered access to the private communications of others, their diaries, their hard drives, their emails. You know, the stuff we used to think was covered by the constitutional term, “personal effects.”
Charles makes a mistake when he gets distracted by the “irony” of SOME people disclosing so much private information on Facebook. Very few people put on FB the kinds of confidential information we put into our emails, phone conversations, text messages and our hard drives.
And while I DO worry about the collection of my personal life by “private” entities, I expect their highest ambition would be to sell me products, not use personal information to destroy me because of my political beliefs.
The current technology allows and, despite the lies which have been told by government officials and their hacks in the media, it appears the government HAS been using the powers the new technology has provided them.
When the technology of surveillance combines with the incentives provided by the imperatives of “security,” or the need to undermine “dissidents,” whistleblowers and troublemakers, the realm of effective freedom WILL contract dramatically and expectations of privacy, and FREEDOM, will contract as well.
Just as torture is easy to justify through hypotheticals, so too with empowering the surveillance state. Yes, I want effective counter-terrorist measures to be in place. But I also want safeguards against excessive power being concentrated which will enable them to crush political dissidents.
Trusting the internal security forces to “police” themselves, in secret and without independent review, is a formula for a police state. No one who has studied the pendulum swing of government repression in this countries history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Pinkerton attacks on organized labor to the Palmer Raids to the rise of McCarthyism, to the COINTELPRO aimed at the civil rights and anti-war movement, to the Hoover and Nixon enemies lists, cannot be comfortable with these developments.
A final point, so far, virtually everything Snowden has told us has been shown to be accurate, whereas almost everything his critics have said has been shown to be either false or highly exaggerated. Ed Snowden has done his fellow Americans–at least those of us who believe in freedom–a helluva service. And not just Americans, but people around the world.
No wonder Obama and most of the rightwing, are so angry and want to kill him or throw him into a deep, very dark dungeon for the rest of his life. The truth MUST be silenced!
Well said Kolea.
I wonder how many hackers are trying to get into the NSA databases.
From now on, every American who is turned down for a job, denied a promotion, admission to a university, or even a credit card, will have to wonder whether any information that was once collected by the NSA, FBI, DEA, SOD or some govt contractor was used or played a part in making a decision that could possibly affect the rest of a person’s life. Even if those agencies were ordered to stop collecting data on the scale they are doing today, we could never trust them to properly destroy the information they have already collected because they have denied it ever existed in the first instance.
Since this data is available, is it also discoverable?
This is all starting to sound like a high-tech institutionalization of J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid extortion system.
REST OF THE ICEBERG
Is the NSA Conducting Electronic Warfare On Americans?
Jonas Holmes
May 19, 2006
Russ Tice, former NSA intelligence officer and current Whistleblower, was to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. Apparently the testimony, Mr. Tice wanted to give, makes General Hayden?s phone surveillance program look like very small potatoes. Mr. Tice?s testimony is expected to reveal further illegal activity overseen by General Michael Hayden which even loyal and patriotic NSA employees view as unlawful.
I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It?s pretty hard to believe,? Tice said. ?I hope that they?ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn?t exist right now.? According to Mr. Tice, what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg.
What in the world could Russ Tice be talking about?! To figure it out let us take a look at Russ Tice?s work at the NSA.
According to the Washington Times and numerous other sources, Mr. Tice worked on special access programs related to electronic intelligence gathering while working for the NSA and DIA, where he took part in space systems communications, non-communications signals, electronic warfare, satellite control, telemetry, sensors, and special capability systems.
Special Access Programs or SAPs refer to Black Budgets or Black Operations. Black means that they are covert and hidden from everyone except the participants. Feasibly there would be no arena with a greater potential for abuse and misuse than Special Access Programs. Even now Congress and the Justice Department are being denied the ability to investigate these programs because they don?t have ?clearance?. To put it in CNN?s Jack Cafferty?s words a top secret government agency, the NSA, the largest of its kind in the world, is denying oversight or investigation by the American people because investigators lack clearance. To add a layer of irony to the Black Ops cake this travesty is occurring in America, the supposed bastion of Freedom and Democracy, which we are currently trying to export to Iraq.
It just gets scarier. The Black Ops that Mr. Tice was involved in related to electronic intelligence gathering via space systems communications, non-communications signals, electronic warfare, satellite control, telemetry, sensors, and special capability systems. For greater insight as to the impact of these programs readers should review decades old FOIA authenticated programs such as MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, COINTELPRO and ARTICHOKE. Radar based Telemetry involves the ability to see through walls without thermal imaging. Electronic Warfare is even scarier if we take a look at the science.
NSA Signals Intelligence Use of EMF Brain Stimulation
NSA Signals Intelligence uses EMF Brain Stimulation for Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) and Electronic Brain Link (EBL). EMF Brain Stimulation has been in development since the MKUltra program of the early 1950’s, which included neurological research into “radiation” (non-ionizing EMF) and bioelectric research and development. The resulting secret technology is categorized at the National Security Archives as “Radiation Intelligence,” defined as “information from unintentionally emanated electromagnetic waves in the environment, not including radioactivity or nuclear detonation.”
Signals Intelligence implemented and kept this technology secret in the same manner as other electronic warfare programs of the U.S. government. The NSA monitors available information about this technology and withholds scientific research from the public. There are also international intelligence agency agreements to keep this technology secret.
The NSA has proprietary electronic equipment that analyzes electrical activity in humans from a distance. NSA computer-generated brain mapping can continuously monitor all the electrical activity in the brain continuously. The NSA records and decodes individual brain maps (of hundreds of thousands of persons) for national security purposes. EMF Brain Stimulation is also secretly used by the military for Brain-to-computer link. (In military fighter aircraft, for example.)
For electronic surveillance purposes electrical activity in the speech center of the brain can be translated into the subject’s verbal thoughts. RNM can send encoded signals to the brain’s auditory cortex thus allowing audio communication direct to the brain (bypassing the ears). NSA operatives can use this to covertly debilitate subjects by simulating auditory hallucinations characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia.
Without any contact with the subject, Remote Neural Monitoring can map out electrical activity from the visual cortex of a subject’s brain and show images from the subject’s brain on a video monitor. NSA operatives see what the surveillance subject’s eyes are seeing. Visual memory can also be seen. RNM can send images direct to the visual cortex. bypassing the eyes and optic nerves. NSA operatives can use this to surreptitiously put images in a surveillance subject’s brain while they are in R.E.M. sleep for brain-programming purposes.
Individual citizens occasionally targeted for surveillance by independently operating NSA personnel
NSA personnel can control the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals in the U.S. by using the NSA’s domestic intelligence network and cover businesses. The operations independently run by them can sometimes go beyond the bounds of law. Long-term control and sabotage of tens of thousands of unwitting citizens by NSA operatives is likely to happen. NSA Domint has the ability to covertly assassinate U.S. citizens or run covert psychological control operations to cause subjects to be diagnosed with ill mental health.
National Security Agency Signals Intelligence Electronic Brain Link Technology
NSA SigInt can remotely detect, identify and monitor a person’s bioelectric fields.
The NSA’s Signals Intelligence has the proprietary ability to remotely and non-invasively monitor information in the human brain by digitally decoding the evoked potentials in the 30-50 hz,.5 milliwatt electro-magnetic emissions from the brain.
Neuronal activity in the brain creates a shifting electrical pattern that has a shifting magnetic flux. This magnetic flux puts out a constant 30-50 hz, .5 milliwatt electromagnetic (EMF) wave. Contained in the electromagnetic emission from the brain are spikes and patterns called “evoked potentials.”
Every thought, reaction, motor command, auditory event, and visual image in the brain has a corresponding “evoked potential” or set of “evoked potentials.” The EMF emission from the brain can be decoded into the current thoughts, images and sounds in the subject’s brain.
NSA SigInt uses EMF-transmitted Brain Stimulation as a communications system to transmit information (as well as nervous system messages) to intelligence agents and also to transmit to the brains of covert operations subjects (on a non-perceptible level).
EMF Brain Stimulation works by sending a complexly coded and pulsed electromagnetic signal to trigger evoked potentials (events) in the brain, thereby forming sound and visual images in the brain’s neural circuits. EMF Brain Stimulation can also change a person’s brain-states and affect motor control.
Two-way Electronic Brain-Link is done by remotely monitoring neural audio-visual information while transmitting sound to the auditory cortex (bypassing the ears) and transmitting faint images to the visual cortex (bypassing the optic nerves and eyes, the images appear as floating 2-D screens in the brain).
Two-Way Electronic Brain Link has become the ultimate communications system for CIA/NSA personnel. Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM, remotely monitoring bioelectric information in the human brain) has become the ultimate surveillance system. It is used by a limited number of agents in the U.S. Intelligence Community.
RNM requires decoding the resonance frequency of each specific brain area. That frequency is then modulated in order to impose information in That specific brain area. The frequency to which the various brain areas respond varies from 3 Hz to 50 Hz. Only NSA Signals Intelligence modulates signals in this frequency band.
An example of EMF Brain Stimulation:
Brain Area
Bioelectric ResonanceFrequency
Information InducedThrough Modulation
Motor Control Cortex
10 HZ
Motor Impulse Co-ordination
Auditory Cortex
15 HZ
Sound which bypasses the ears
Visual Cortex
25 HZ
Images in the brain, bypassing the eyes
Somatosensory Cortex
09 HZ
Phantom Touch Sense
Thought Center
20 HZ
Imposed Subconscious Thoughts
This modulated information can be put into the brain at varying intensities from subliminal to perceptible.
Each person’s brain has a unique set of bioelectric resonance/entrainment frequencies. Sending audio information to a person’s brain at the frequency of another person’s auditory cortex would result in that audio information not being perceived.
Additionally, A 1994 congressional hearing reported that ?nearly half a million Americans were subjected to some kind of cold war era tests,? often without being informed and without their consent. In addition, experimentation law is well grounded in constitutional and international law. It is an under-reported fact that two major reports on human rights and torture in the U.S. recently listed illegal radiation experiments. Many more facts are documented below. Therefore, human research subject protections should be a high priority and are just as significant as current issues of torture and illegal wiretapping.
It is time for America to wake up. It is time for America to protect its Whistleblowers who are our last line of defense against dictatorship and despotism. It is time for America to take responsibility for oversight of its tax dollars and elect leaders who will assume such responsibility now. Yes, the war on terrorism is important. It is even more important and fearful if the terrorism is from within and unknowingly funded by hard working American citizens. There is no ?Special Access Program? beyond the oversight of political leaders elected by the people and for the people. If these political leaders jeopardize national security then that shall be handled in a court of law. But to tell America, to tell the American people, to tell the political leaders elected by the American people that America does not deserve to know what happening in the NSA?s dark, black rooms, with billions of dollars, behind closed doors, when we know that privilege has already been abused; that is the true definition of terrorism. That is the true definition of Communism and a Police State, no oversight. So fellow Americans, you may hem and haw in the face of truth but know that one day you will realize that your country has been usurped from the very principles upon which it was founded.
Godspeed, Russ Tice, the Patriots are with you.
SOURCES
http://www.dailykos.com/
http://www.osiis.blogspot.com
http://www.iahf.com/nsa/20010214.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_access_program
Congress Daily
http://www.emhdf.com/nsact1947.html
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/12/more-unlawful-activity/
Washington Times
http://www.mindjustice.org/humprot2-06.htm
On top of that companies like RINCHEM have access to the DOD / NSA technology for personal use.
Why does the DOD allow companies like Rinchem Inc to use DOD / NSA technology to torment US citizens?