ALEX JONES ESTABLISHMENT CONNECTIONS

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S OFT-REPEATED (AND NOW CHALLENGED) WATERBOARDING CLAIMS

by Cora Currier ProPublica, Sept. 17, 2012

For many years, Bush administration officials have said that the CIA waterboarded only three terror suspects. Despite nearly endless revelations and investigations about the U.S.'s treatment of detainees, there has never been evidence contradicting those claims. But that changed earlier this month.
Human Rights Watch recently released a report detailing the accounts of 14 Libyan men who claim they were detained and, in some cases, subject to harsh interrogations by the U.S. before being transferred back to Libyan prisons, where they also faced abuse.

One man, Mohammed Al-Shoreoiya, provided a detailed account of being waterboarded "many times" while in U.S. custody in an Afghan prison between 2003 and 2004. Another man described a similar form of water torture, conducted without a board.
None of the men's accounts could be confirmed, but as the New York Times noted, the detainees did not seek out Human Rights Watch, and their descriptions of their treatment, including waterboarding, are consistent with CIA procedural documents that have been made public.
The CIA first confirmed waterboarding in February 2008, when then-CIA director Michael Hayden told a Senate committee that "only three detainees" had been waterboarded — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. No one, he said, had been subjected to the process since 2003. That claim has been repeated by former President George W. Bush and top officials from his administration. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also noted that the military did not waterboard.
A spokesman for the CIA told ProPublica that "the Agency has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases in which detainees were subjected to the waterboarding technique under the program."
Here are top Bush administration officials stating, again and again, only three detainees were waterboarded [emphasis added]:
George W. Bush

Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded.
– November 2010, in his memoir, Decision Points.

President Bush also repeated the line in interviews that fall with the Times of London and Fox News.
Dick Cheney, former vice president

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists.
-- May 21, 2009: Dick Cheney, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

In 2009, Cheney made the same claim in another speech and in interviews with the Washington Times, CNN and CBS. In 2011, he mentioned it again in a speech at AEI.
Donald Rumsfeld, former defense secretary

[Michael Hayden] looked at all the evidence and concluded that a major fraction of the intelligence in our country on al Qaeda came from individuals, the three, only three people who were waterboarded... no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period. Three people were waterboarded by the CIA, away from Guantanamo and then later brought to Guantanamo.
-- May 3, 2011, in an interview with Fox News.

Rumsfeld repeated the line that year in interviews with CNN, CBS, the Associated Press, Charlie Rose and in a speech in February 2012.
Michael Hayden, former CIA director

Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees. It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was used on Abu Zubaydah, and it was used on Nashiri. The CIA has not used waterboarding for almost five years. We used it against these three high-value detainees because of the circumstances of the time.
–Feb. 5, 2008, in testimony to a Senate committee.

Hayden also reiterated the three-person figures in a memo circulated that month to CIA employees and on Meet the Press that March. He repeated it again in an interview with Newsweek in 2009.
John Yoo, former Justice Department official

Waterboarding we think is torture, but it happened to three people. The scale of magnitude is different....We've done it three times."
--June 1, 2008, in an interview with Esquire Magazine.

Yoo also said three people had been waterboarded in a June 2008 congressional hearing.
Karl Rove, senior adviser to Bush

[Coercive techniques] were used against some thirty hard-core terrorist detainees who had successfully resisted other forms of interrogation. Only three were waterboarded.
–March 2010, in his memoir, Courage and Consequences.

Michael Mukasey, former attorney general

The fact is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding — he was one of three people who were waterboarded — did disclose the name — the nickname actually, which was the name that this courier actually used — in the course of the questioning that took place after enhanced interrogation techniques.
--May 17, 2011, in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute.

Jose Rodriguez Jr., former director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA

In fact, only three detainees: Mohammed, Zubaydah and one other were ever waterboarded, the last one more than nine years ago.
-- May 10, 2012: Jose Rodriguez Jr., in an op-ed on CNN.com

Rodriguez also mentioned the figure in interviews this spring with Fox News and the New Yorker.
Bill Harlow, who co-authored Rodriguez' book on interrogations, said that Rodriguez stands by his statement. "These procedures were not done without extensive documentation and authorization, as part of an officially approved program, and all the documentation there shows three individuals," Harlow said.
The other officials we've cited did not respond to requests for comment.
President Obama came into office proclaiming a ban on torture, stating that waterboarding was unequivocally a form of torture, and making the infamous "torture memos" public. But the administration has said no one would be prosecuted for waterboarding or other interrogation methods previously sanctioned by the government, and announced last month it would close the last two investigations into CIA abuse.
A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the government ever investigated the Libyan cases. Laura Pitter, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, said that none of the men she interviewed said they had been contacted by U.S. investigators about their detention.
The CIA spokesman said that he could not comment on specific allegations, but that "the Department of Justice has exhaustively reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees in the post-9/11 period — including allegations involving unauthorized interrogation techniques — and it declined prosecution in every case."
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-bush-administrations-oft-repeated-and-now-challenged-waterboarding-clai

ARMY WANTS TINY SUICIDAL DRONE TO KILL FROM SIX MILES AWAY

By Spencer Ackerman September 10, 2012

Thought the Army’s Raven drone was tiny? The Army now wants a new drone, called the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System, that’s weighs just just 5 pounds. And unlike the Raven, the so-called LMAMS will be armed and dangerous. Photo: U.S. Army

Killer drones just keep getting smaller. The Army wants to know how prepared its defense-industry partners are to build what it calls a “Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System.” It’s for when the Army needs someone dead from up to six miles away in 30 minutes or less.
How small will the new mini-drone be? The Army’s less concerned about size than it is about the drone’s weight, according to a recent pre-solicitation for businesses potentially interested in building the thing. The whole system — drone, warhead and launch device — has to weigh under five pounds. An operator should be able to carry the future Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System, already given the acronym LMAMS in a backpack and be able to set it up to fly within two minutes.
The envisioned LMAMS, a “loitering precision guided munition” is designed for quick missions to take out specific targets, and the Army’s had its eye on something like it for years. Its small size means it can’t carry a lot of fuel. As first reported by (subscription only) InsideDefense, the Army needs it to stay aloft for a half hour at most. But during that half hour, the Army expects it to fly up to six miles to smash into a target, either directed by a human controller or pre-programmed through GPS. Whether it speeds to a target fairly distant from where an Army unit is set up or loiters over one until it gets a clear shot, it’s another step toward making drone strikes inconspicuous.
The Army wants it ready for use by 2016 at the latest. But it may not take that long — since the Army’s already got something similar to LMAMS.

There are basically three models for shrinking the drone war. One is to build a tiny munition, so as to weaponize existing small spy drones, like the Raven or the Puma. Raytheon’s doing that with its Small Tactical Munition, a two-foot bomb that weighs about 10 to 15 pounds. A second is to take the existing functionality and physical specs of existing killer drones and scale it down, as with California company Arcturus’ eponymous 17-foot armed spy plane. The third is to mash up drones and missiles, so a controller remotely pilots a tiny missile and guides it on a one-way mission to a target. That’s what AeroVironment’s much-hyped Switchblade does.
LMAMS is more like the Switchblade than the other two. It’s not designed for more than one use. “Once a target is selected by the operator in the terminal phase of an engagement,” the pre-solicitation reads, “no further operator input shall be required.” Accordingly, its spy tools are minimal: The Army just needs the soldier operating it from a distance to receive real-time video of the LMAMS’ flight path. And like the Switchblade, since the drone/missile hybrid is small, it ought to cause minimal collateral damage: The Army needs LMAMS to have an “extremely low probability” of killing someone 10 meters from its bomb’s impact.
In fact, the LMAMS sounds so similar to the Switchblade that the Army’s flirting with redundancy. The only major discrepancy between what the Army wants for LMAMS and what the Switchblade does is that the Switchblade’s loiter time tops out at 10 minutes, which is too short for the “unprecedented engagement of enemy combatants” that LMAMS envisions. (The Switchblade can also fly a span of six miles.) Still, the Army has sunk nearly $10 million into Switchblade since last September, and an AeroVironment vice president told InsideDefense, “Switchblade would be the Aerovironment solution that applies to this.”
Still, the missions that the Army wants the LMAMS to complete are fairly specific. It should be used for discrete targets: “personnel and personnel in moving light-duty vehicles, while minimizing collateral damage,” the pre-solicitation reads. So when Army units — small ones, since the Army wants LMAMS “organic to the small unit level” — spot a specific combatant or suspicious vehicle, a soldier is supposed to launch the LMAMS and direct it at the target, and only the target. Its limited flight range, loiter time and camera power restricts its use as an overhead spy tool for scouting those targets. Given the drawdown in Afghanistan, chances are the “small units” who’d operate the LMAMS will be special-operations teams, unless another ground war breaks out unexpectedly.
The LMAMS is just the latest development in miniaturizing drones. The Air Force’s “micro-aviary” is at work building small aircraft modeled on insects and tiny birds, the better for spying without attracting notice. LMAMS doesn’t care so much about watching an adversary for any prolonged period — when it finds one, though, the Army wants it killed, and quickly.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/suicidal-drone-6-miles-away/

A SWARM OF NANO QUADROTORS-CRAZY MUST WATCH HD

Of course when they start using these to shoot protestors, the corporate propaganda media will find a way to blame the innocent protestors. Reminds me of that old song 'The future's so fucked, I gotta wear shades'. What other methods of oppression will these suckers be used for & what will they be like in twenty years?
Share your thoughts in the comment box below.

WORLD WAR III IS COMING SOON AND HERE'S WHY!?

THIS CAR RUNS ON WATER! YOUR GOVERNMENT LIES!

HONG KONG CITIZENS PROTEST AGAINST GOVERNMENT BRAINWASHING WHILE AMERICAN CITIZENS EMBRACE COMMUNIST IDEALS

(NaturalNews) Do citizens of Hong Kong have a better understanding of what it means to be free than millions of Americans do these days? Given many of the changes to our society - and what more and more of us seem to be willing to put up with - the answer is yes.

Here's a case in point.

Recently, officials in Hong Kong backed off plans to force students there to take Chinese patriotism classes after a week of protests in the one-time British colony that were ignited over fears of pro-Beijing "brainwashing," the Associated Press reported.

The leader of the semi-autonomous city, Leung Chun-ying, said it will be up to schools to decide for themselves whether they want to hold the classes, which were on pace to become a mandatory part of curriculum in 2015 after a three-year voluntary period.

Anger and resentment over the classes have been mounting for months, the Post reported, stoked by fears that the classes were part of a plan by authorities in Beijing to indoctrinate the city's younger residents into unflinchingly supporting China's Communist Party, though Leung and other senior officials denied that.

'The China Model

China, you may recall, regained control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997 after more than 100 years of colonial rule. As part of the agreement, Hong Kong was allowed to retain a large amount of autonomy, a separate legal system and civil liberties not enjoyed in the rest of China, like freedom of speech.

Leung's change of heart came after a week of protests by thousands of people who massed in front of government headquarters to coincide with the beginning of a new school year. Organizers say as many as 120,000 people showed up to protest, but police put the number closer to 36,000, according to local news reports.

The decision came just a day before city legislature elections, in which voters were allowed for the first time to choose more than half the seats. Mounting opposition to the indoctrination plan was being seen as potentially undermining support for pro-Beijing candidates.

Protesters said they were concerned that the new subject matter was a thinly veiled attempt by the Chinese government to inculcate young people with nationalist education courses like those used in schools all over China to build support for the Asian giant's communist government.

Such fears only increased after a pro-Beijing education group published material earlier this year championing the virtues of one-party rule. Government officials stressed that the pamphlet, titled, "The China Model," was not a part of the mandated teaching materials.

The course curriculum guidelines called for instructing students about the accomplishments of Chinese political leaders, along with the contributions they've made to society and the difficulties and challenges they continue to face. Students would also learn how to "speak cautiously," practice self-discipline and to get along well with others in a responsible, rational and respective manner.

Good ole' American democracy - In Hong Kong?

The controversy is just the latest sign of growing discomfort with mainland China's attempts at exerting more influence over the city. Residents of Hong Kong have also been miffed about stymied democratic development and a rise in the number of wealthy mainland residents gobbling up property and driving up prices.

Contrast this growing democracy movement with what is happening in the United States.

Increasingly, Americans seem more willing to embrace the Communist China ideals of government owning and running industry (GM, large banks), criminalization of public protests (if your point of view differs from the powers that be), the proliferation of police checkpoints, nullification of the Bill of Rights, efforts to disarm citizens or make it harder to protect yourself, and in the case of one man in Oregon, criminalizing ownership of rainwater.

Hong Kong residents are right to distrust the motives of China's one-party rulers. If only more Americans were as scrutinizing.

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.seattlepi.com

http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.naturalnews.com/037196_Hong_Kong_government_brainwashing_public_education.html

PRO-ISRAELI GROUP CALLS PRO-AMERICAN VETERANS GROUP EXTREMIST!

The ADL, a non-government  Zionist agent organization embedded in the USA posing as a philanthropic group, calls Veterans Today out as Extremists

Veterans Today responds and calls ADL a “threat to U.S. citizenry everywhere”

by Debbie Menon  Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Congratulations, Veterans Today, Gordon Duff, Alan Hart, Alan Sabrosky, and Kevin Barrett … you have arrived!   That you have been singled out for approbation and condemnation means that you are doing the right thing, and doing a good job of it. Abe is running scared!
Hats off to you!
You are now in the privileged company of true American patriots as Alison Weir, Executive Director of If Americans Knew website, Former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop  Desmond Tutu, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and Professor William Robinson among others who have likewise been bestowed the ‘fake antisemite’ label by his highness Abe Foxman!
Someday such ‘fake anti-Semitism’ labels will be worn with pride and honor, and be honored by all of those who see them.

Someday you will be honored on the White House Lawn for ‘your courage and service to the Nation.’ “That day is not too far off.”

While “Hate” sounds like something that all decent people would condemn, one man’s hate may be another man’s righteous indignation. Zionists, for example, tend to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, ( to borrow a phrase from our veteran journalist and reporter Alan Hart) with anti-Semitism, and, therefore, as something that could be considered a “hate crime”.
“But are Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt engaged in hate propaganda by documenting the harmful influence of the Israel lobby over US foreign policy? Or is former US President Jimmy Carter  a “bigot” for comparing the Israeli occupation of Palestine to apartheid South Africa? Are the survivors of the USS Liberty who refuse to remain silent about Israel’s deliberate attack on their ship merely motivated by hatred of Jews?
Is Professor Norman Finkelstein a “self-hating Jew” for exposing the holocaust Industry’s corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket? And is UN special rapporteur Richard Falk also “self-hating” for likening Israel’s actions against the besieged Gazans to what the Nazis did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?”
My point is, at what point does this become a violation of their NGO charter, treasonous, or require registry as a Foreign Agent?
The fact that they themselves have taken this literally innocuous term and turned it into a defamatory and insulting epithet, however inappropriately they apply it,  inasmuch as almost all of the critics at which the term is applied were not criticizing Semites or Semitism at all, could well prove to be their own ironic self-undoing.
Especially, since most of the targets as mentioned above, at whom they have directed this defamatory attack were not talking or writing about racist, cultural or religious events or people anyway, but historical political events and activities such as committing criminal acts of aggression by bombing civilians and children in their homes, knocking down or demolishing big buildings without proper City Permits, and conducting Bank Fraud schemes, etc. and various other crimes as defined by law…. a lot of which was written by many of these very same people to protect their own interests.
Abe Foxman and his ADL may be big, and they probably have sufficient money and legal staff to handle five simultaneous lawsuits in as many different jurisdictions and states without any great difficulty or expense, but if if something like this were to catch on in the US Legal profession, it could grow into another Industry, just like the Holocaust Industry… the “Sue the ADL Industry.”  It could balloon or suddenly go critical and erupt into massive proportions, big and expensive enough to deprive them of one of their favorite and most effective weapons. Any lawyers willing to do it?
Lawsuits for defamation and libel have long been the ADL’s most intimidating threat and damaging weapons in the ADL arsenal.  They are weapons which the ADL understands, and perhaps the only ones which can penetrate the ADL defenses and do real good.
Are there any plaintiffs out there brave enough to file?  Are there any Lawyers out there with sufficient courage to take the cases?
If so, take a bat and step up to the plate… it is hardball, but it is an open game and it is about time.
In the hands of willing prosecutors this defamatory and an insulting epithet might easily be defined as “hate speech,” in violation of recent Hate Speech Laws written and sponsored by the ADL.
How’dja like those apples for chickens coming home to roost?
Of course, the ADL is among the last of Israeli associated organizations who would want to see knowledgeable witnesses testifying under oath in a court of torts, investigating an incident which a plaintiff has the legal right to open, investigate and lay bare  the truth about what he is charged with having said.  This would hardly make Abe very popular back home in the Promised Land.
I think Abe is a worried man, and perhaps he will have some more even bigger and deeper piles of doo doo to worry about.
Here is the ADL press release, worth reading:
Read his accusations carefully… he is detailing the construction of the holocaust Industry, as Norman Finkelstein has described it.

• Extremism 911 conspiracy theories report

It is an old story.  One which they know very well, for they wrote the script.
All Abe is doing here is accusing Veterans Today and the “anti-Semitic establishment” of doing with 9-11 the very same thing which they did with the Nazi German internment of Jews and other anti-Nazi minorities in slave labor camps to support the Nazi Military-Industrial Industry.
To cut a long story short, let us examine just one case he makes against veteran journalist and reporter Alan Hart.

First Listen to Alan Hart Break his Silence About 9/11 on the Kevin Barrett Show

Note carefully below how Foxman’s  choice of words describing Alan Hart is completely true, based upon fact, yet somehow, he seems to diminish him and discredit him as a has been, presumably a fool, probably a liar, and definitely an anti-Jewish bigot.

Alan Hart -- veteran journalist and reporter

Foxman asserts : “Some have gone further. For example, Alan Hart, once a mainstream reporter (IOW, a has been ?) for the BBC and the Independent Television Network alleged (he is not accusing Alan of actually saying it, but only alleging it, which sounds like the same thing, but is definitely not the same thing) in an May 2010 Internet radio interview with Kevin Barrett that Israel and the Mossad were behind the 9/11 attacks.

Note, that he has said Alan has said, or alleged that “Israel and Mossad were behind the 9-11 attacks,” a plain and simple, non bigoted statement about state terrorism or a war crime. A legitimate charge or accusation, considering the preponderance of evidence which raises the question and points that way.

Foxman says, After pre-emptively trying to dismiss charges of anti-Semitism, Hart asserts: “I tell you what I honestly believe. I think it started out as an all-Muslim operation, but I think it would have been very quickly penetrated by Mossad agents. My guess is at an early point they said to the bad guys at the CIA, ‘Hey this operation is running. What do we do?” And the Zionists and the neo-cons said, ‘Let’s use it.”

On the face of it, this seems to be a fairly straight forward and legitimate accusation of an act of war or criminal activity conducted or perpetrated by a State Agency. A legitimate accusation, given the evidence as mentioned above. Now, we shall see what Abe accuses Alan of ‘meaning” by this?

Hart’s interview has appeared on YouTube and other places on the Internet. His video is just one of thousands online blaming Jews or Israel for 9/11, he says.

Although he does not directly accuse Alan of “blaming Jews” for anything, which Alan has not done, he cites the ” thousands of others,” whomever they may be who may have done so, in such a manner that the reader will without critical thinking toss Alan in and condemn him with all of those unnamed, unenumerated “thousands of others.”  By, “thousands of others,” he is probably using the same enumberation techniques by which he and his friends have come up with 6.000,000 million Jewish “holocaust victims.”

These videos have been seen by tens of thousands of people and continue to gain currency among those who wish to demonize Israel and the Jews, he continues.

They may have indeed have been seen by “…tens of thousands of people….,” I surely hope so….  and, Alan’s accusations may well be describe as an “attempt to demonize, blame or condemn the State of Israel… but what evidence does he cite to attribute such condemnation or accusation to Jews in general which, Alan has surely not done, and he presumes to interpret the dreams or wishes of those “thousands of people….?  It is he who makes this seemingly ineluctable connection, not Alan.”
This is an excellent example of good writing to deceive, or accuse one of character, cultural, racist or religious bigotry where none exists and none was intended.
They definitely know how to use language. That is good, not so subtle, persuasive writing, propaganda at its best.
Hart and Duff should sue ADL and Abe Foxman, also. A lawsuit, or score of lawsuits against the ADL and any Zionist entities would be a helluva lot more effective than all of the words in the world, which are, after all, just words.  They are useless unless they inspire actions.
I reiterate, Money and Law are the tools and the weapons of the Zionists, It is high time to engage them with weaponry with which they are not only familiar, but weaponry which can penetrate their weak defenses and do the whole world a good deal of real good for a change, pun intended.
Read their rejoinders below:

• Alan Hart: 9/11: Open letter & challenge to ADL’s Abe Foxman
• Gordon Duff: We Will Not Be Silenced!

Some of our writers have specifically addressed this topic a year ago, in two special series, titled: Zionism Unmasked and Anti-Semitism, what is it ?
I present below links to concise, penetrating and illuminating articles in the two series:
ZIONISM UNMASKED

• ALAN HART: Zionism Unmasked – A fairy tale that’s become a terrifying nightmare
• JEFF GATES : Zionism Unmasked — End of Zionism = Peace
• MAIDHC Ó CATHAIL: Zionism Unmasked — Chutzpah, thy name is Zionism
• ALAN SABROSKY: Zionism Unmasked — The Dark Face Of Jewish Nationalism
  
• PAUL BALLES : Perspectives on Zionism

ANTI-SEMITISM, WHAT IS IT ?

• Alan Hart, Anti-Semitism Zionist Myth vs Truth and Reality
• Jeff Gates, Anti-semitism – What is it ?
• Maidhc O’ Cathail, Anti-semitism – Zionism’s Indepensible Alibi
• Alan Sabrosky, The Complicated Faces of Anti-semitism
• Paul Balles, Anti-semitic the label that stops criticism
• Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ Charge Losing Its Edge – Debbie Menon  

WAKE UP AMERICA YOUR NATION IS HIJACKED!

• 9/11 and the Orwellian Redefinition of “Conspiracy Theory” – Paul Craig Roberts
• 9/11: A Conspiracy Beyond Theory — Paul Balles
• Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake — Alan Sabrosky        
• Riposte Against Zionism: Go Tell It To The People — Alan Sabrosky        
• Dutch Demolition Expert Danny Jowenko Dies In Car Crash — Debbie Menon

I doubt that any change will ever be made in the United States, as long as the situation in Washington with regard to the stranglehold over the US President’s office, the US Congress, and every influential institution in the United States  by the Israel Lobbys, AIPAC, ADL and the Zionist owned mainstream media is allowed to persist without any formidable resistance from the citizenry.
To sum this up, I quote Gordon Duff, Senior Editor at Veterans Today from one of his recent opinion pieces:

“…What can we assume from this? Is, in fact, the President of the United States no longer Commander in Chief ? Did our government hand itself over to “shadow” rule with Bush or did it happen earlier, after President Reagan’s dementia made him unable to manage the cabal that surrounded him? How long have we been operating under no Constitution at all?”

This is the view point of the office of the US President and Commander-in-Chief, as seen by most veterans he knows and speaks to, observes Duff.
These are the things which Abe Foxman and his people do not want American veterans to discuss with currently serving men and women of the US armed forces.
“This is what Gordon Duff’ and his website Veterans Today is all about”.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/09/08/pro-israeli-group-calls-pro-american-veterans-group-extremists/

NOBODY SEEMS TO FIND IT WEIRD MITT ROMNEY USED TO DRESS UP LIKE A POLICE OFFICER AND PULL PEOPLE OVER FOR FUN

By Ned Hepburn

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night counting sheep and thinking about the day I often wonder about: 1) ponies and 2) the fact that a bigger deal hasn’t been made about the fact Mitt Romney used to dress up like a police officer in college and pull people over. For fun.
College is a time in many Americans’ lives when they do stupid shit like smoke too much pot, drink a lot, or have a lot of sex. That’s considered pretty “de rigueur” in college; these are kinks you work out of your system. You then leave said institution to go through the modern world paying your taxes and doing the right thing.
But the GOP presidential candidate had a different gig: instead of drinking and smoking like the rest of America (he claims to have had “one sip” of beer and one drag of a cigarette his entire life, a number we don’t dispute), he would remain perfectly sober and put on a police uniform and pull people over.
According to TV producer Robin Madden, a former friend of Romney during his time at Stanford:

“He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler. We thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty creepy.’ And after that, we didn’t have much interaction with him.”

In another story during Mitt’s high school days in Michigan, Mitt would pretend to pull his friends over while they were on dates.
Given the current climate of “being outraged over everything” it’s surprising, then, that nobody thinks it weird that the potential future president used to dress up like a police office and scare the shit out of people? I mean, yeah, I could see that shit flying in Michigan (because God hates Michigan and there is nothing to do there), but the behavior continued when he was in college in California during the late ’60s? Go to a reading. Go see a band. Don’t dress up like a police officer and pretend to pull people over FOR FUN.
This coupled with the fact that he personally goes around California beaches busting people for smoking pot paints Romney as a scary, weird guy with an authority complex. Here’s to hoping he loses in November.
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/185728/nobody-seems-to-find-it-weird-mitt-romney-used-to-dress-up-like-a-police-officer-and-pull-people-over-for-fun/?fb_comment_id=fbc_10151067168880027_24939915_10151188859215027#f372bd59e4

PENTAGON LISTS SIXTY SIX COUNTRIES AS ELIGIBLE TO BUY US DRONES

By Doug Palmer and Jim Wolf WASHINGTON | Wed Sep 5, 2012
(Reuters) - As many as 66 countries would be eligible to buy U.S. drones under new Defense Department guidelines but Congress and the State Department, which have a final say, have not yet opened the spigots for exports, a senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday.
The 66 countries were listed in a Defense Department policy worked out last year to clear the way for wider overseas sales of unmanned aerial systems, as the Pentagon calls such drones, said Richard Genaille, deputy director of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. He did not name them.
"We don't really have a comprehensive U.S. government policy" on such exports, he told an industry conference called ComDef 2012. "It hasn't moved quite as fast as we would like, but we're not giving up."
Northrop Grumman Corp chief executive Wes Bush on Wednesday praised the Obama administration for what he described as significant moves to boost arms exports, but voiced frustration at delays in codifying them in a new export policy.
"I wish we were further along in getting that done. It's slow, it's painful, but we're doing the right things to move in that direction," Bush told Reuters.
U.S. arms makers are looking abroad to help offset Pentagon spending cuts spurred by U.S. deficit-reduction requirements.
Northrop Grumman's ability to boost its overseas arms sales, which now account for less than 10 percent of its overall revenues, hinges largely on streamlined export controls, Bush said.
U.S. defense and high-technology exporters have long complained about the complex web of regulations governing exports of weapons and "dual-use" goods that have both civilian and military applications. They believe the rules disadvantage them versus foreign competitors.
GLOBAL HAWK PLANES
Of particular concern to Northrop Grumman are restrictions on exports such as the company's high-altitude Global Hawk surveillance planes.
The administration last year began informally consulting Congress on plans to sell Global Hawk to South Korea before withdrawing the proposed sale for reasons that have not been publicly disclosed.
Japan, Singapore and Australia also have shown interest in acquiring the aircraft, a Northrop Grumman spokeswoman told Reuters last year.
Bush said that failure to allow such exports could spark a repeat of the 1990s, when strict curbs on U.S. commercial satellite sales prompted other countries to develop rival hardware and software. Those efforts eventually eroded the market share of U.S. satellite producers from more than 70 percent to just around 25 percent.
"The consequences of the decisions that were made in the early '90s were devastating for the US industrial base, and ultimately did nothing to enhance security, and in fact, were detrimental to our security," he said.
EXPORT CONTROLS
The Obama administration, over the objections of some Republicans in Congress, is aiming to create a single list of items subject to export controls overseen by a single licensing agency, instead of the two separate lists now administered by the State Department and the Commerce Department.
Jim Hursch, director of the Defense Department's Defense Technology Security Administration, speaking at the ComDef event, said the administration was well into the overhaul but still had significant work to do.
Government agencies, as interim steps toward creating the single unified list, have worked their way through the 21 categories of the U.S. Munitions List administered by the State Department to see what items can be moved to the Commerce Department's Commercial List, Hursch said.
"We'll see what happens in November and what the victors of that election want to do to move forward on that," Hursch said.
Beth McCormick, deputy assistant secretary for defense trade and regional security, said she hoped the reforms would continue whether President Barack Obama is reelected on November 6 or Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
"Regardless of what happens in November, we should continue this work and bring it closure," McCormick said.
The Obama administration has already put proposed revisions to nine categories of the munitions lists out for public comment and faces some hard decisions moving ahead.
"There are some categories that by their basic nature are very, very difficult," including one that encompasses both night-vision technology and fire control, she said.
In deciding what items to move to the commercial list, "we obviously have to think about the type of technology that we use on the battlefield, where obviously the control of the night has been something that's been very, very important to us," McCormick said.
Kevin Wolf, assistant secretary of Commerce for export administration, said moving an item from the munitions list to the commercial list did not mean it was "decontrolled."
It does give the U.S. government more flexibility in allowing exports to close allies, while maintaining a strict arms embargo on other countries such as China, he said.
(Reporting By Doug Palmer; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/06/us-aircraft-usa-northrop-grumman-idUSBRE88500B20120906

AL-QAEDA FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT?

Published: 07 July, 2011, 01:04

Terrorists are urging insurgents to take advantage of US gun laws.

(31.0Mb) embed video

TAGS: Arms, Conflict, Crime, Military, Scandal, Accident, Terrorism, USA, Culture

Following a recent al-Qaeda issued video in which terrorists are instructed about “how easy” it is to obtain guns in America, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is asking his citizens to complain to Congress about lax legislation.
“Close the loopholes that let terrorists buy guns,” reads a message in Bloomberg’s campaign, which rebroadcasts in part the al-Qaeda video and cautions America that rules need to be changed before another tragedy occurs.
RT’s Adam vs. The Man host Adam Kokesh says that making people afraid won’t help the debate over gun rights in the States. “You shouldn’t be afraid that someone is taking advantage of you for being disarmed, but that there is a massive government effort to keep people disarmed,” he says.
Kokesh debates RT host Lauren Lyster, who is in favor of more stringent gun laws. Kokesh, however, thinks that civilian firearm use isn’t really a problem. “When civilians use firearms, they are much less likely to fire arm. They are much more likely to be used to prevent crimes,” he says. Kokesh adds that, “in this country you are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.”
Lyster asks, though, if owning a gun might give authorities a reason to shoot. She recalls the case of a former Military member residing in Arizona that was surprised by a SWAT team earlier this year. He allegedly had a gun when they stormed into his house, and, though he rightfully owned it, opened fire. “Granted, perhaps he is allowed to do that by law,” says Lyster, “but if he wasn’t pointing an AR-15 at the police when they banged down his door, do you think he’d be alive?'' 
“I think one of the arguments is you need to be able to protect yourself, but in this case, having a gun — is that what contributed to him being killed?”
Do gun rights backfire on people, she asks? “No, I think you can look at a freak case and always make that argument,” responds Kokesh, who says that taking away the Marine’s Second Amendment right wouldn’t solve anything. Rather, it would take the police to reevaluate their policies.
Does Bloomberg’s message scare Kokesh? He says he is affected by any tragedy in America that is caused by guns that doesn’t have to happen. “There is a potential for tragedy that this al-Qaeda video points out,” he says, but adds that the logical fallacy behind this would be the equivalent of outlawing air so that terrorists wouldn’t be able to breathe.
http://rt.com/usa/news/al-qaeda-amendment-gun-kokesh/

THE NSA IS BUILDING THE COUNTRY’S BIGGEST SPY CENTER (WATCH WHAT YOU SAY)

By James Bamford Email Author 03.15.12

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including 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.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It 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. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

UTAH DATA CENTER

When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.

1 Visitor control center

A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.

2 Administration

Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.

3 Data halls

Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.

4 Backup generators and fuel tanks

Can power the center for at least three days.

5 Water storage and pumping

Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.

6 Chiller plant

About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.

7 Power substation

An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.

8 Security

Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan

A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.
A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”
For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.
Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10²⁴ bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

The NSA’S SPY NETWORK

Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.

1 Geostationary satellites

Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.

2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado

Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.

3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia

Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.

4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio

Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.

5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu

Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.

6 Domestic listening posts

The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.

7 Overseas listening posts

According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.

8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah

At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”
The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)
After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.
Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.

But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.
Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”
When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.
There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (10³⁶).
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.
The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (10¹⁵) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.
In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.
Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.
At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.
Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.
The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”

The NSA believes it’s on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.
But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.
But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (10²¹) and yottaflop.
These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.
James Bamford (washwriter@gmail.com) is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/