NSA

They Can See a ‘Stick of Butter from Space’ — The Billion Dollar Spy Agency You’ve Never Heard Of

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While most Americans would consider the CIA, and perhaps the NSA, household names, one U.S. spy agency — whose headquarters surpasses the U.S. Capitol in size — has managed to keep to the shadows while possessing cutting edge tools of the surveillance trade.

Called the  National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), even former President Barack Obama didn’t know of its existence when he first took office — despite that the agency employs some 15,400 people.

“So, what do you [do]?” Obama asked a customer at a Washington, D.C., Five Guys hamburgers in May 2009.

“I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,” he answered.

 “Outstanding,” then-president Obama asserted. “How long have you been doing that?”

“Six years.”

“So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial …” Obama asked, unable to recall the agency’s full name.

Timidly, the man replied, “Uh, we work with, uh, satellite imagery.”

“Obama appeared dumbfounded,” Foreign Policy’s James Bamford reports. “Eight years after that videotape aired, the NGA remains by far the most shadowy member of the Big Five spy agencies, which include the CIA and the National Security Agency.”

The NGA’s secretive identity belies the agency’s massive physical size and the scope of its surveillance activities, as Bamford continues,

“Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In 2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce, with 3,000 employees already in the city.

“The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is to analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has largely kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United States, according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been involved in domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the CIA and the NSA. However, there’s reason to believe that this will change under President Donald Trump.”

Originally tasked primarily with cartography — before a mammoth expansion, the spy arm had been called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency — until a name and mission switch in 2003 gave the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency its name, with the hyphen allowing a three-letter acronym so enamored by the government.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose fondness for imagery intelligence became known when he served as a general during World War II, created the National Photographic Interpretation Center shortly before leaving office — an agency also later absorbed by the NGA.

Now, the NGA works in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force to analyze the staggering amount of data collected through aerial surveillance abroad — mostly by unmanned aerial systems, such as drones with high-powered cameras.

According to at least one source, as of 2013, the NGA was integral in the analysis of surveillance data pertaining to Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Revelations on the depth and breadth of the Central Intelligence Agency’s domestic capabilities, long believed out of its territory, was exposed by Wikileaks Vault 7 recently to be on par with National Security Agency programs — so much so, analysts say it constitutes a duplicate Big Brother.

Data provided to the NGA by military officials has assisted in various U.S. operations in the Middle East by tracking vehicles believed responsible for planting improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and for monitoring hot spots for insurgent breakouts.

But the NGA hardly only keeps to support operations, as David Brown — author of the book, “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry” — explained,

“Before the trigger was pulled on NEPTUNE’S SPEAR, the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden, SEAL Team Six had access to a perfect replica of the Abbottabad compound where the terrorist mastermind was hiding. The details for the replica were gathered by the NGA, which used laser radar and imagery to construct a 3D rendering of the compound. How precise were its measurements and analysis? The NGA figured out how many people lived at the compound, their gender, and even their heights. But the NGA didn’t stop there: Its calculations also helped the pilots of the stealth Black Hawks know precisely where to land.”

With a combined budget request for 2017 of $70.3 billion, the National and Military Intelligence Programs — NGA falls under the latter — have seen a quickening of support from the authoritarian-leaning, pro-military Trump administration. This and additional factors — such as the astonishingly sophisticated equipment at the agency’s disposal — have ignited fears the NGA could be granted authority to bring its expert microscope into focus against the American people.

“While most of the technological capacities are classified, an anonymous NGA analyst told media the agency can determine the structure of buildings and objects from a distance, has some of the most sophisticated facial recognition software on the planet and uses sensors on satellites and drones that can see through thick clouds for ‘all-weather’ imagery analysis,” reports news.com.au.

Efforts to bolster NGA’s innovate staff pool ratcheted up on Thursday, as Business Wire reported,

“From navigating a U.S. aircraft to making national policy decisions, to responding to natural disasters: today’s U.S. armed forces rely on Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) to meet mission requirements. As the nation’s primary source of GEOINT for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) depends on the National Geospatial-Intelligence College (NGC) to produce top-tier talent to deliver intelligence with a decisive advantage. Today, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) announced that it has been awarded a five-year, $86 million contract by NGA-NGC to lead the Learning Management and Advancement Program (LMAP) that will provide high-quality learning solutions to equip a diverse workforce with the knowledge and skills necessary to meet current and future GEOINT mission requirements.”

Bamford points out for Foreign Policy the Trump administration intimated a significant expansion of spying on mosques and Islamic centers, while others admonish said surveillance could put Black Lives Matter and other protest groups in the NGA’s silent crosshairs.

Of distinct concern for privacy advocates are drones with uncanny zooming capabilities — features used against U.S. citizens before. Bamford continues,

“In 2016, unbeknownst to many city officials, police in Baltimore began conducting persistent aerial surveillance using a system developed for military use in Iraq. Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky drones have become. Among them is ARGUS-IS, the world’s highest-resolution camera with 1.8 billion pixels. Invisible from the ground at nearly four miles in the air, it uses a technology known as ‘persistent stare’ — the equivalent of 100 Predator drones peering down at a medium-size city at once — to track everything that moves.

“With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a time, it would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously observe and follow all outdoor human activity, night and day. It can zoom in on an object as small as a stick of butter on a plate and store up to 1 million terabytes of data a day. That capacity would allow analysts to look back in time over days, weeks, or months. Technology is in the works to enable drones to remain aloft for years at a time.”

With cutting edge technology, a rapid enlargement underway, and billions in budgetary funds at the ready, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is the cloaked, mute sibling of the nefarious Intelligence Community — but it’s time to pull the protective shell off this potential ticking time bomb before reining it in becomes an impossibility.

Source:http://thefreethoughtproject.com

 

Academics should not remain silent on hacking : Nature News & Comment

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Academics should not remain silent on hacking

The revelation that US and British spy agencies have undermined a commonly used encryption code should alarm researchers, says Charles Arthur.

Secrecy doesn’t come naturally to journalists, but sometimes it is thrust upon us. Earlier this year, there was a room in The Guardian‘s offices in London that nobody could enter alone. On a table outside by a security guard was a tidy collection of phones and other devices; nothing electronic was allowed. Inside were a coffee maker, a shredder, some paper and a few computers. All were brand new; none had ever been connected to the Internet. None ran Microsoft Windows. All were encrypted; each required two passwords, held by different people.

This is where the biggest news stories of this year lived — away from the Internet. This was where The Guardian analysed the ‘Snowden files’ (classified documents released to the press by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden). These revealed, among other things, that the NSA and the United Kingdom’s GCHQ were running enormous efforts to crack encrypted communications online, and that they had worked to undermine the strength of encryption standards such as that used — and recommended — by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (The computers sadly are no more — smashed in The Guardian basement on the orders of the British government.)

NIST’s standard for random numbers used for cryptography, published in 2006, had been weakened by the NSA. Companies such as banks and financial institutions that rely on encryption to guarantee customer privacy depend on this standard. The nature of the subversions sounds abstruse: the random-number generator, the ‘Dual EC DRBG‘ standard, had been hacked by the NSA so that its output would not be as random as it should have been. That might not sound like much, but if you are trying to break an encrypted message, the knowledge that it is hundreds or thousands of times weaker than advertised is a great encouragement.

It was, to be frank, a big deal. In the world’s universities, computer scientists and mathematicians spend their careers trying to develop secure systems, and yet here was evidence of a systematic — and successful — attempt to undermine that work. Executives at companies such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft, which discovered that their internal networks were being tapped and their systems infiltrated, were furious. But a few isolated shouts of protest aside, the academic community has largely been silent.

That’s disappointing. Academia is where we expect to hear the free flow of ideas and opinions. Yet it has been the commercial companies that have made the most noise — because the revelations threaten trust in their businesses. Don’t academics also see the threat to open expression, and to the flow of dissident ideas from countries where people might fear that their communications are being tapped and, even if encrypted, cracked?

“Academics in cryptography and security should make themselves a promise: ‘we won’t get fooled again.’”

Some get it. Ross Anderson, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, has been highly critical and outspoken. When I spoke to him in September, soon after the NIST revelation, he called it “a wake-up call for a lot of people” and added: “This has been a 9/11 moment for the community, and it’s great that some people are beginning to wake up.”

Kenneth White, principal scientist at health-information company Social & Scientific Systems in Silver Spring, Maryland, says: “Just a year ago, such a story would have been derogated by most of my colleagues as unwarranted suspicion at best and outright paranoia at worst. But here we are.”

Anderson has an explanation for the muted response: he says that a number of British university departments have been quietly coerced by the GCHQ. The intelligence-gathering agency has a substantial budget, and ropes in academics by offering access to funds that ensures their silence on sensitive matters, Anderson says. (If that sounds like paranoia, then see above.)

I have not been able to confirm his claims, but what are the alternatives? One is that the academics are simply too busy going back over their own work looking to see if they agree with the claimed weaknesses. The other is that they simply don’t care enough.

For those who do care, White and Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have embarked on an ambitious effort to clean up the mess — one that needs help.

They have created a non-profit organization called OpenAudit.org, which aims to recruit experts to provide technical assistance for security projects in the public interest, especially open-source security software. A similar effort initiated by White and Green is checking the open-source software called TrueCrypt, which is widely used to lock down hard drives during foreign travel (see go.nature.com/nsvdjh).

Concerns over the security of the NIST Dual EC DRBG standard were raised in 2007, but too few academics spoke out then. The events of 2013 must make them rethink. Cryptography rarely reaches the headlines, but now it has done so for all the wrong reasons. For 2014, academics working in cryptography and security should make themselves a promise: ‘We won’t get fooled again.’ And most of all, ‘We won’t go down quietly.’

NSA chief says data disrupted ‘dozens’ of plots.

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The US electronic spying chief has said massive surveillance programmes newly revealed by an ex-intelligence worker had disrupted dozens of terror plots.

nsa

In a US Senate hearing, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Keith Alexander defended the internet and telephone data snooping programmes.

Also, US Secretary of State John Kerry said they showed a “delicate but vital balance” between privacy and security.

The programmes were revealed in newspaper accounts last week.

Meanwhile, the leaker has pledged to fight extradition to the US.

Edward Snowden fled his home in Hawaii for Hong Kong shortly before reports of the top secret programmes were published by the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers last week.

The 29-year-old former CIA and NSA contract worker has admitted giving the newspapers information about NSA programmes that seize vast quantities of data on telephone calls and internet communications from US internet and telephone companies.

US officials have confirmed the programmes exist, with President Barack Obama saying they were closely overseen by Congress and the courts.

Who is Edward Snowden?

snowdon

  • Age 29, grew up in North Carolina
  • Joined army reserves in 2004, discharged four months later, says the Guardian
  • First job at National Security Agency was as security guard
  • Worked on IT security at the CIA
  • Left CIA in 2009 for contract work at NSA for various firms including Booz Allen
  • Called himself Verax, Latin for “speaking the truth”, in exchanges with the Washington Post

‘Americans will die’

European leaders have expressed concerns over the scale of the programmes and have demanded to know whether the rights of EU citizens had been infringed.

Meanwhile, in a news conference alongside UK Foreign Secretary William Hague in Washington DC, Mr Kerry also said the programmes had “prevented some pretty terrible events.”

“With respect to privacy, freedom and the Constitution, I think over time this will withstand scrutiny and people will understand it,” he said.

Intelligence officials have insisted agents do not listen in on Americans’ telephone conversations. And they maintain the internet communications surveillance programme, reportedly code-named Prism, targeted only non-Americans located outside of the US.

Meanwhile, they have defended the programmes as vital national security tools.

“It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent,” Gen Alexander said on Wednesday at a hearing of the US Senate intelligence committee.

Gen Alexander said intelligence officials were “trying to be transparent” about the programmes and would brief the Senate intelligence committee behind closed doors before any other information became public.

But the NSA chief said some details would remain classified “because if we tell the terrorists every way that we’re going to track them, they will get through and Americans will die”.

He added that he would rather be criticised by people who believed he was hiding something “than jeopardise the security of this country”.

Review the process

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, asked whether it was true or false that the NSA could, as Mr Snowden has claimed, “tap into virtually any American’s phone calls or emails” including the US president’s.

“False,” Gen Alexander responded. “I know of no way to do that.”

But Gen Alexander said the agency needed to investigate how Mr Snowden, a relatively low-ranking contract employee, had been able to obtain and leak such sensitive information.

The processes “absolutely need to be looked at”, he told lawmakers.

“In the IT arena, in the cyber arena, some of these folks have tremendous skills to operate networks.”

Some members of Congress have acknowledged they had been unaware of the scope of the programmes, having skipped previous intelligence briefings.

“I think Congress has really found itself a little bit asleep at the wheel,” Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat, said.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who warned about the programmes last year, has accused Director of National Intelligence James Clapper of misleading a Senate committee in March when he denied that the NSA collected data on millions of Americans.

Republican Congressman Justin Amash has called for Mr Clapper to resign, saying Congress could not make informed decisions “when the head of the intelligence community wilfully makes false statements”.

Source: BBC