Influential Senator Warned in ’75: “NSA’s Capability Could Be Turned Around On The American People”
“No
American Would Have Any Privacy Left …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”
Washington’s Blog
April 22, 2012
Senator Church’s Prophetic Warning
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 Before 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
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.
And see this and this.
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
Indeed, the NSA was listening in on the 9/11 hijackers’ phone calls before 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 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 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 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 hijackers as they
moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin
Laden’s operations centerin 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
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 havedone 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.
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