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James Bamford Releases DOJ Report On NSA Warrantless Wiretapping From 1976
For the last several years public focus on the NSA has been on Bush and Obama era reports of illicit domestic spying. From allegations of warrantless wiretapping reported by James Risen in 2005 to secret documents released to journalists at The Guardian by Edward Snowden a year ago. And smack in the middle, Bamford's 2012 revelation of the existence of a huge, exabyte-capable data storage facility then under construction in Bluffdale, Utah.
Given all this attention on recent events, it might come as a surprise to some that almost forty years ago Senator Frank Church convened a congressional committee to investigate reports of unlawful activities by U.S. intelligence agencies, including illegal domestic wiretapping by the NSA. At the time, Church brought an oversight magnifying glass over what was then half-jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency." And then, like today, James Bamford was in the thick of it, with a Snowden-like cloak-and-dagger game of spy-vs-journalist. It all began by giving testimony before the Church Committee. Writing yesterday in The Intercept, Bamford tells his firsthand historical account of what led him to testify as a direct witness to NSA's wiretapping of domestic communications decades ago and then details the events that led to the publication of his first book The Puzzle Palace back in 1982. Read on for more. Bamford writes:
...during the summer of 1975, as reports began leaking out from the Church Committee, I was surprised to learn that the NSA was claiming that it had shut down all of its questionable operations a year and a half earlier. Surprised because I knew the eavesdropping on Americans had continued at least into the prior fall, and may have still been going on. After thinking for a day or so about the potential consequences of blowing the whistle on the NSA—I was still in the Naval Reserve, still attending drills one weekend a month, and still sworn to secrecy with an active NSA clearance—I nevertheless decided to call the Church Committee.
But he didn't stop at the witness stand. Afterward, he continued researching the matter for a book. And the further he dug, the more waves he made. Until someone slipped him a then recently declassified copy of a 1976 Justice Department memo [PDF] detailing a criminal investigation into illicit domestic spying by the NSA. But when agency officials discovered he had that document they took extraordinary measures attempting to get it back. They threatened to prosecute under the 1917 Espionage Act and retroactively reclassified the memo to squelch its contents.
Fearing someone might break into his home and steal the manuscript, Bamford arranged to transport and secure a copy outside of U.S. jurisdiction with a colleague at the Sunday Times of London. It was only upon the 1982 publication of Puzzle Palace that the agency dropped their pursuit of Bamford and his document as a lost cause. That's at least one stark difference between then and today when it comes to whistleblowers — back then, they merely threatened espionage charges.
Yogi Berra famously once said, "It's like Deja Vu all over again." And though the Yankees' star wasn't speaking of illicit domestic wiretaps by the national security state, given a comparison of recent revelations to those detailed by Bamford decades earlier the quote certainly fits. In telling his story of how he published details about the last NSA Merry-Go-Round with warrantless wiretapping, Bamford shows us that our recent troubles of lawless surveillance aren't so unique. It's deja-vu all over again. But if deja vu is like a waking dream, this seems more a recurring nightmare for a body-politic lured to snoring slumber by a siren-song of political passivity.
That old Justice Department memo isn't likely to wake the public from their slumber. But within its pages is a stark warning we all should have heeded. As Bamford notes in that Intercept story, the report's conclusion that NSA lawlessness stems straight from the birth of the agency suggests a constitutional conflict systemic and intentional.
...the NSA's top-secret "charter" issued by the Executive Branch, exempts the agency from legal restraints placed on the rest of the government. "Orders, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive branch relating to the collection ... of intelligence," the charter reads, "shall not be applicable to Communications Intelligence activities, unless specifically so stated." This so-called "birth certificate," the Justice Department report concluded, meant the NSA did not have to follow any restrictions placed on electronic surveillance "unless it was expressly directed to do so." In short, the report asked, how can you prosecute an agency that is above the law?
Here's the "Prosecutive Summary" (PDF).
That does it! I'm not voting for Gerald Ford again!
Table-ized A.I.
Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives
In two tense meetings last June and July [2013] the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.
Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."
I would no longer consider England a safe country to use as a backup for documents that the American government wants back.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In both cases the government moved from the concern of external threats to a belief that the threats were internal.
It's a symptom of disunity and of a paranoid government.
But during the summer of 1975, as reports began leaking out from the Church Committee, I was surprised to learn that the NSA was claiming that it had shut down all of its questionable operations a year and a half earlier. Surprised because I knew the eavesdropping on Americans had continued at least into the prior fall, and may have still been going on. After thinking for a day or so about the potential consequences of blowing the whistle on the NSA—I was still in the Naval Reserve, still attending drills one weekend a month, and still sworn to secrecy with an active NSA clearance—I nevertheless decided to call the Church Committee.
So over 30 years ago, the NSA was doing the same thing its doing now. When it gets caught it says it stops doing it, yet it continues to do it (yet we didnt shut them down 30 years ago??!?!)
and this one is a doozy. At the same time the feds are complaining about google and apple using system wide encryption as in their eyes it "puts people above the law" yet at the SAME time the NSA charter puts the NSA above the law
The report’s prosecutive summary also pointed to the NSA’s top-secret “charter” issued by the Executive Branch, which exempts the agency from legal restraints placed on the rest of the government. “Orders, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive branch relating to the collection . . . of intelligence,” the charter reads, “shall not be applicable to Communications Intelligence activities, unless specifically so stated.” This so-called “birth certificate,” the Justice Department report concluded, meant the NSA did not have to follow any restrictions placed on electronic surveillance “unless it was expressly directed to do so.” In short, the report asked, how can you prosecute an agency that is above the law?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It occurs to me (aas it should have LONG ago) that when something secret becomes more and more "known" that it is being used as a distraction to help hide the newer "really secret" secret.
What I am saying is that the NSA is a decoy. Who and what is the new intelligence organization?
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
I read the entire article -- a damn good story if you have time. Aside from the obvious political implications explicitly stated by Bamford, it's interesting to see what a risk he took to write and publish his first book: "The Puzzle Palace", despite intimidation from the government.
For those who think the two major political parties have been the same on the NSA, it's also interesting to note that the Carter Administration's DOJ declassified the key memo whereas the Reagan Administration's DOJ reclassified the memo and tried to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Note that the Democratic Obama Administration to the right of the Reagan Administration on this issue. Another reason I'm an independent.
Finally, there are the detective aspects: Bamford found that one of the NSA's early leaders soured on the agency and deliberately left his papers to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where Bamford recognized them as a gold mine. Bamford also used to just go sit in the entrance area at the NSA and listen to people chatting about work around him while they waited to be processed in!
its always funny to see these posts from AC, no one has the balls to make such idiotic claims with their real names
If you think this is R vs D and not The people vs The government, i got a bridge to sell you.
Even if nixon started it, you have had how many democratic presidents since him? I mean, if the democrats REALLY wanted to end it, they could have. be it carter, or clinton, or now obama. But no. they dont only not stop it but they expand it.
When will people wake up and realize that voting for an R is the same as voting for a D, maybe not in the short term, but the long term as shown this to be the case
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The Church Committee also discovered that CIA had people stationed inside every major broadcasting network, in order to monitor and manipulate the information we get. They are supposed to have stopped that kind of activity. Yeah...
I just assume that the intelligence agencies do what they please and try not to get caught. They will lie, deny and withhold to maintain their programs. And with all the classification, black ops and special access programs, it's nigh impossible to find out what they're doing. Such things have no place in a representative government; it is beyond control of the people or their representatives. We are told it is necessary in a dangerous world. But the people who tell us that are the same ones who lie to us on a regular basis.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
its always funny to see these posts from AC, no one has the balls to make such idiotic claims with their real names If you think this is R vs D and not The people vs The government, i got a bridge to sell you. Even if nixon started it, you have had how many democratic presidents since him? I mean, if the democrats REALLY wanted to end it, they could have. be it carter, or clinton, or now obama. But no. they dont only not stop it but they expand it. When will people wake up and realize that voting for an R is the same as voting for a D, maybe not in the short term, but the long term as shown this to be the case
Well said. These days it's also about inside vs. outside; those with access to government and those without it. Or maybe ultra-wealthy vs. everyone else.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I was just graduating high school, an intern in the IT department of a sizable company in CA, my first tech job. We had an issue with a Unix print server and the IT manager (awesome boss who loved the Grateful Dead and drove an old beetle) called in a friend to consult for a couple days. Being a bright eyed youth with lots of interest in how this grey haired consultant was able to command a $150/hr consulting fee, I asked a lot of questions. And he told me some awesome stories about the early internet. This guy was a battle hardened networking/internet engineer going back to the early 1970s (graduated from MIT in the early 60s), he helped connect the first copper trans-pacific data cables from San Fransisco to Asia. Probably the most interesting stories he told were about what the NSA was doing circa 1980s.
He said the buildings that house the trans-oceanic data cables were designed from the ground up with small rooms, broom closet sized, that the primary data cables run through. Nobody other than federal agents with code word level clearance were allowed in via a heavy security door that had a guard 24/7. He said that all data traffic entering those rooms left them with a noticable amount of latency (at the time, late 80s he said it was about 10ms), but no hops. He claimed that the federal government had been monitoring internet activity in these data hubs since the dawn of the web.
I still believe him to this day, and have not been surprised by Snowden's revelations or really any news I see about the government snooping on traffic. The internet started as a DARPA project. It would be stupid to assume that data traversing what is essentially a military network can't be monitored by government entities.
I really hated Men In Black---
that movie stuck in my craw
So arrogant and smug
as they tampered with minds
in parody of due process of law.
There is a special brand of stupid
that only affects those who are smart.
By their own hands they have brought this great evil
in which they knowingly play a part.
NSA is to gather blackmail, is all---
for when and why--- they haven't a clue.
Just following orders for the almighty buck
---they fuck
their own children, fuck me and fuck you.
And so to St. Peter I must say
They learned their lesson well---
They continue to serve today's NSA
so send them on to hell!
Oath breakers! Get the hell out of there and blow the lid off this thing while there is still time!
(But first... ya gotta get mad!)
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
[...] from space capability, like tracking breathe and heart rate, and license plates [...] read emanations of electromagnetic frequencies from space or radar, but they're capable of that as well. Which enables tapping of what is being processed by a computer, what is on your screen, USB, Ethernet, telephone, and other cables, without a physical connection to the devices or network in question, again all done from space and long range. Turns out the brain emanations aren't any different, and once intercepted can be passed to neural decoders to extract passcodes, memories, thoughts, and other gogglygook.
Aside from some well developed purely terrestrial distance TEMPEST capability for use against computers and networking devices, I call bullshit on the rest, including the license plates. Tice may have seen things that unnerved him, but (sadly) it is likely that he either embellished the state of the art or (more likely) was made an asset, fed bits and pieces of stories about this kooky dreamland tech in order to excite and incite him into dwelling on these incredible things, to divert his attention away from the more mundane yet heinous act of direct taps and splits.
Folks like Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein hold more credibility.
Even James Bamford has been an 'asset' of theirs over the years. Puzzle Palace [1982] introduced the NSA to a whole generation of young folk interested in intelligence careers, focusing on its broad global reach and exciting technical resources. And yet it also contained a clear and dire warning that a charter-be-damned domestic spy apparatus was being built -- I personally believe this revelation was leaked from NSA insiders (probably close to retirement) who did not like the agency's new direction. Body of Secrets [2001] was more sedate about this, but it also contained a gripping account of the 1967 USS Liberty incident that stirred controversy, but again like the warning, a story the NSA insiders wished to be told.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>