National Security Agency (NSA) sources have reported the following to WMR:
The NSA has conducted a targeted but massive surveillance operation against certain journalists who have routinely exposed NSA's illegal domestic communication surveillance program, code named STELLAR WIND.
NSA has, for some time, kept tabs on journalists who wrote about the communication spying agency. In its embryonic stage, the journalist surveillance system, originally code-named FIRSTFRUITS, was basically a clipping service that provided NSA and CIA analysts with copies of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles that mentioned one or both of the two agencies....
Shortly after the Barbaric inside Job of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, visited NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland with a list of individuals he wanted NSA to spy on and provide Cheney's office with transcripts of phone calls and e-mails. From that visit, STELLAR WIND was developed as an illegal surveillance system targeting journalists, members of Congress, and other "persons of interest" for the White House....and its most Infamous White House Murder INC, under Dick CHENEY and Elliott Abrams which will spring into action first in Lebanon, January 24th 2002, targeting an enormously popular Christian Politician Mr. Elie HOBEIKA [ God avenge his blood]...this was the most cowardly extra-judicial assassination conducted directly under orders from the White House in DC and its sordid West Wing under CHENEY, the barbaric monster who spearheaded and supervised 9/11 wall to wall.....
In March 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled STELLAR WIND illegal but the next day he became critically ill with pancreatitis. When White House chief of staff Andrew Card and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales visited Ashcroft in his hospital room to demand he sign off on the program, Ashcroft deferred to his deputy James Comey and FBI director Robert Mueller who both refused to authorize the program. George W. Bush overruled Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller and continued to authorize STELLAR WIND. President Obama/CIA has continued to authorize STELLAR WIND, and the odious White House Murder INC, in the Levant and Worldwide, according to NSA sources....
Although STELLAR WIND continues to generally target journalists who write about intelligence and national security matters, NSA has concentrated its efforts on three journalists, in particular. They are New York Times' reporter and author of State of War James Risen, journalist and author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets James Bamford, and WMR editor Wayne Madsen. Risen continues to fight a grand jury subpoena to testify about his sources on Operation Merlin, a CIA program to deliver flawed nuclear design technology to Iran... Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling has been indicted and charged under the Espionage Act for revealing details of the program. Risen's subpoena was quashed by Judge Louise Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, but the Obama administration has appealed the decision to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia and oral arguments in the case are scheduled for next month.
NSA sources report: Wayne Madsen's e-mails and phone conversations back to 2000 are in the possession of the NSA....LOL.... The phone calls range from those with his mother to those with government sources. All passwords to social networking websites, banks, phone companies, credit card companies, and his website, WayneMadsenReport, are held by the NSA. The data includes the list of his subscribers to WayneMadsenReport, as well.....LOL.....so, NSA knows EVERYTHING about the extra-judicial assassinations in Lebanon by the most Infamous White House Murder INC, targeting Mr. Elie Hobeika and many others in Lebanon since January 24th 2002..., this makes NSA complicit in the machinations, assassinations and political murder in the Levant since 2002, right after the inside Job of 9/11.......LOL.
The same level of detailed data is maintained on Risen and Bamford.
Personal observation: It is very clear that a number of individuals who contacted this editor over the past several years to pass on information were stymied at the last minute from maintaining contact. These individuals were willing to provide information on: the movement and temporary "loss" of nuclear weapons from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana in 2007 coupled with the murder of Air Force special operation Captain John Frueh in Washington state; documents proving Canadian military involvement in torture of detainees in Afghanistan; information on the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor being a "false flag" attack; evidence that there were no human remains found at the crash site of United flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and evidence showing that Harvard virologist Dr. Don Wiley, who was investigating the initial anthrax attacks, was murdered in Memphis in November 2001.
In all these cases, individuals who contacted this editor and were willing to provide information ceased contact after their initial phone calls, letters, and email...., except for the detailed information provided in full on the assassination of Mr. Elie HOBEIKA by the despicable White House Murder INC, which continues to this day, unabated and undeterred by the machinations of the KILLERS in Washington DC, Paris, Damascus and the cowardly Tel AVIV punks.....[ they ALL know themselves very very well ...]
NSA also maintains mail covers on addresses of certain individuals in the event that contact is made via the U.S. Postal Service or private companies such as FedEx or DHL.
FIRSTFRUITS, which is now known by a different cover name, contains, in addition to articles, complete transcripts of phone calls, e-mails, faxes, and letters, in addition to the numbers and names of all individuals who have been in contact with targeted journalists. In addition to the three high priority targets -- Risen, Bamford, and Madsen -- other journalists who are a subject of the NSA warrantless surveillance include Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane of The New York Times, Siobhan Gorman, formerly of The Baltimore Sun and now with The Wall Street Journal, and Seymour Hersh with The New Yorker....who was also provided with full details by the sole source on the cowardly assassination of Mr. Elie HOBEIKA as well....and continues to do so...
So far, the Obama administration has brought Espionage Act charges against six individuals for contact with the media. They are charged with providing classified information to journalists and "aiding the enemy."
However, the Justice Department may take an even more draconian turn. This editor has heard from NSA insiders that there is a willingness by some quarters to charge two of the three key targeted journalists under the Espionage Act. Since Bamford and Madsen both once worked at NSA and both signed non-disclosure agreements -- Bamford in the 1960s and Madsen in the mid-1980s -- there has been talk of indicting them also for violations of the Espionage Act, along with their sources in the intelligence community....LOL, we will defend both those wonderful guys, and others... with more disclosures on the assassinations by the most infamous White House Murder INC, for years to come, come hell or high water, rest assured... [ message to NSA, CIA, OSP, SCS, NRO, NIS, Air Force intelligence, FBI, DIA, and others...we will never be deterred by your despicable savagery....] or your cowardly infamous White House Murder INC, and its insane acts of savagery in Lebanon January 24th 2002......
The CIA has been at this game for a long time and is expert at undercutting the opposition and using dirty cut-outs like Asef SHAWKAT and Lebanon's deep CIA state... in the infamous White House Murder INC, and the string of assassinations in Lebanon and Syria.... without anyone knowing what is taking place even with phony tribunals like STL....full of CIA/MOSSAD lackeys... Only the White House Murder INC, can approve contracting out for any portion of the dirty covert INTEL operations, ugly assassinations and low intensity conflicts in Lebanon, Syria, the middle east and beyond....? Grab them by the shorthairs so to speak?
http://newhk.blogspot.com/2011/01/obama-perpetuates-utter-lies-between.html
http://newhk.blogspot.com/2011/01/components-of-white-house-murder-incs.html
Sources in the U.S. intelligence community report that the National Security Agency (NSA) is establishing a major Internet surveillance facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that is dedicated to decrypting encoded communications, including file transfers, over the Internet and within private networks such as those used by banks, foreign governments, and multinational corporations...
The new multi-structure NSA facility is called the Multiprogram Research Facility and will work in tandem with the massive NSA data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah on acreage that is part of the Camp Williams Utah National Guard base. The Utah center will store massive amounts of intercepted data and the Oak Ridge facility will rely on new generation supercomputers to decode encrypted data stored at the Bluffdale facility and that which is captured in real time from NSA's worldwide signals intelligence systems....and the spead out SCS facilities all over the Globe....
The Oak Ridge center will also complement the NSA's High Performance Computing Center at Fort Meade, currently under construction and scheduled for completion in 2015. It is rumored that the building at Fort Meade will contain the world's fastest computer, the speed of which will be measured in Exa-FLOPs. A FLOP means Floating point Operations per Second and exa means a 1 followed by 19 zeros.
WMR was first alerted to the Oak Ridge facility when NSA began transferring personnel from its Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters to Oak Ridge.... The NSA has, for the past decade, been spreading out its functions to facilities around the country, including at regional facilities at Fort Gordon, Georgia (NSA Georgia); San Antonio, Texas (NSA Texas); and Kunia, Hawaii (NSA Hawaii).....LOL.......?? The Utah and Tennessee facilities represent a further expansion of NSA's "Big Brother" surveillance network to additional regions of the United States....
And with the new NSA facility at Oak Ridge comes the expansion of the Obama administration's already-massive counter-intelligence (anti-whistle blowing) operations into Tennessee. The FBI field office in Knoxville, working with NSA's Q Group, have been active in ensuring that NSA employees and contractors refrain from discussing the new Oak Ridge center with uncleared individuals, including members of the media....
HK
Senator Church’s Prophetic Warnings....
Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” into the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:
“Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“
Now, the NSA is building a $2 billion dollar facility in Utah which will use the world’s most powerful supercomputer to monitor virtually all phone calls, emails, internet usage, purchases and rentals, break all encryption, and then store everyone’s data permanently....
The former head of the program for the NSA recently held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:
We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state
So Senator Church’s warning was prophetic.
Spying Began way Before the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11....
While you might assume that the NSA’s spying on Americans is a response to 9/11, the government’s illegal spying on Americans actually began before the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11.....
Bloomberg reported in 2006:
The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”
“The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T’s participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause `exceptionally grave harm to national security’ and would violate both civil and criminal statutes,” AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk said in an e-mail.
U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller and NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment.
In other words, the NSA’s trashing of the constitutional rights of American citizens had nothing to do with 9/11.
NSA Heard the 9/11 Hijackers’ Plans from Their Own Mouths … But Didn’t Stop Them....lol
Indeed, the NSA was listening in on the 9/11 hijackers’ phone calls long before the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11, but didn’t do a whole lot to stop them:
- The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls
- According to various sources, on the day before the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls
- Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls to the United States from Bin Laden’s chief of operations
- According to the Sunday Herald, two days before the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of Bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.
- And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, “the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former
Soviet Republic of Georgia”, and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it probably did so in the months leading up to the horrendous Inside Job of 9/11 as well)
As we reported in 2008, the NSA even monitored the hijackers within the United States:
We’ve previously pointed out that the U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouth. Most of what we wrote about involved the NSA and other intelligence services tapping top Al Qaeda operatives’ phone calls outside the U.S.
However, as leading NSA expert James Bamford - the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for almost a decade, winner of a number of journalism awards for coverage national security issues, whose articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the only author to write any books (he wrote 3) on the NSA – reports, the NSA was also tapping the hijackers’ phone calls inside the U.S.
Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before 9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.
The NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen phone for years. So NSA recorded all of these phone calls.
Indeed, the CIA knew as far back as 1999 that al-Mihdhar was coming to the U.S. Specifically, in 1999, CIA operatives tailing al-Mihdha in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, obtained a copy of his passport. It contained visas for both Malaysia and the U.S., so they knew it was likely he would go from Kuala Lumpur to America.
ABC News reported in 2002:
Shortly before Sept. 11, NSA intercepts detected multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden’s chief of operations, to the United States. The intercepts were never passed on.
And Raw Story wrote in 2008:
Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA … and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 lackeys/bogeymen/hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden’s satellite phone, starting in 1996.
“The NSA never alerted any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington,” Bamford told PBS.
PBS also found that “the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA’s role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and the FBI.”
In a review of Bamford’s book, former senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey wrote, “As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out the names of two recruits who had been present — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — and suspected that one and maybe both of them had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency ‘never made the effort’ to trace where the calls originated. ‘At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds.’”
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer told PBS, “None of this information that we’re speaking about this evening’s in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored all of it.”
Spying Unrelated to Keeping Us Safe....
As we’ve previously documented, the spying isn’t being done to keep us safe … but to crush dissent …
and to help the too big to fail businesses compete against smaller businesses (and here).
Indeed, the NSA monitoring efforts will not focus on spying on potential terrorists – or even criminal activity – but in recording every phone call, email, internet search or other communication in the country....
Not Just the NSA: Other Agencies and Shady Foreign Groups Spying on Americans As Well..., think MOSSAD-AMAN-LAKAM.....
It’s not just the NSA....
As Nat Hentoff writes:
Thirty years after Church’s principled stand, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had already been enlisting other intelligence agencies to assist its surveillance of “people inside the country suspected of having terrorist connections” (“Bush Authorized Domestic Spying,” Dan Eggen, Dec. 16, 2005).
On what basis? That’s classified.....
And Bamford reports that shady companies with ties to Israel are wiretapping Americans for the NSA:
One of the [National Security] agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.
And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency ….
***
Secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.
According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.
At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.
What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.
In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”
Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties....
Obama Aggressively Prosecutes Whistle-blowers … But Refuses to Go After White Collar Criminals....
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton each prosecuted financial crime more aggressively than Barack Obama.
But that doesn’t mean that Obama is failing to prosecute. He is just aiming at a different type of target.
The New York Times reported last year:
In President Obama’s 26 months in office, civilian and military prosecutors have charged five people in cases involving leaking information, more than all previous presidents combined.
Andrew Kreig notes:
[Government Accountability Project's] Homeland Security and Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack, a well-credential ethics adviser in 2001 at the Bush Department of Justice [said] “Obama … has brought more prosecutions against whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than any previous president and all presidents combined.”
The former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program – William Binney – confirmed to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman:
AMY GOODMAN: [T]he number of people who have been indicted are more than all presidents combined in the past.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Right. And I think it’s to silence what’s going on.
And see this interview with former CIA intelligence asset Susan Lindauer....
HK
