06.06.13
The biggest transfer of [telephone calls] in history …
Wants you to believe China cyberspying on the US constitutes the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
Famous last words.
Inconveniently, right when the President is ready to meet with the premier of China to discuss cyberespionage, the biggest spy on Americans is shown to be … four-star general Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, pictured above.
From the Guardian:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
From the Obama administration, yada-yada:
The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier.
Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government.
But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States”.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
Readers may or may not recall part of the campaign on cyberwar, cybersecurity and cyberespionage has involved visits by Verizon executives, as well as leaders of other US big businesses, for talks exhorting them to support instantaneous information sharing about what’s going on on their networks with the National Security Agency.
I wish I could say I regret that cyber-spying has embarrassingly blown up in the administration’s face, at exactly the worst time.
But I’m not.
Like the Stuxnet virus deployed into Iran, this is another item putting the US hype generated on cyberwar into the cold water of a real world perspective.
There is what the US government and the national security megaplex say others are doing to us. And then there is what they are actually doing to us.
Keith Alexander and the Shoeshine Cult of Cyberwar — from the archives.
Mike Ozanne said,
June 7, 2013 at 12:28 am
From the perspective of counter-terror intel, a process this vague and untargeted must throw up a huge number of resource burning false positives and illusory patterns. No wonder they missed the Boston Bombers.
Must yield a great deal of useful material about domestic political adveraries though…
George Smith said,
June 7, 2013 at 8:26 am
The false positive and missed plots would seem an obvious thing. Terrorism just isn’t that common in the US and its using digital automation as a remedy to the occasional flies. Technically, they would be able to sweep up all the on-line and credit card purchases of castor seeds as they happen or shortly after and, therefore, have had a database with the three latest perps in it. But the FBI seizes the computers and finds the information within hours after descending on a place. Dutschke, who bought on-line, was only identified after Paul Kevin Curtis’ lawyer fingered him. And whoever is responsible among the Richardsons. Anyway, I’ve mentioned before that Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI mentions the FBI getting access to national e-mail through a program called Stellar Wind, which probably used the NSA as the technical collection means. It sounded almost the same as PRISM to me.