Nation's Biggest Spy Center Settles into Utah

By David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Utah - Officially called the Utah Data Center, the enormous facility under construction will eventually house one million square feet of computers. Its mission will be to intercept, decipher, analyze and store large volumes of communications collected by the NSA from around the world.

 

Everything from private emails to cell phone calls to Google searches and more will be stored at the center, which is scheduled to operational in September 2013. It will also collect the details of financial transactions, big and small, secret communication of foreign governments, suspected terrorists and, perhaps, just about everybody else.

 

“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,” according to James Bamford in an excellent article in Wired. Bush went ahead anyway, enlisting the aid of the telecoms, and the Obama administration has moved the strategy forward.

 

The Utah Data Center will also be a center for cryptanalysis—code breaking—since one of its primary targets will be password-protected and intricately encrypted information.

 

The Data Center is expected to have at least 200 full-time employees and cost $40 million a year to maintain.

DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Any Partnership Between Google, NSA

By Mike Scarcella

United States - The Justice Department is defending the government's refusal to discuss—or even acknowledge the existence of—any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency.

The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.

The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear the dispute March 20.

EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request in early 2010, noting media reports at the time that the NSA and Google had agreed to a partnership following the cyber attacks in China that year against Google.
EPIC asked for, among other things, communication between the NSA and Google about Gmail and Google’s “decision to fail to routinely encrypt” messages before Jan. 13, 2010.

The NSA’s response to the request for records noted that the agency “works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associations” to ensure the availability of secure information systems. The agency, however, refused to confirm or deny any partnership with Google.

The security agency said it routinely monitors vulnerabilities in commercial technology and cryptographic products because the government relies heavily on private companies for word processing systems and e-mail software.

“If NSA determines that certain security vulnerabilities or malicious attacks pose a threat to U.S. government information systems, NSA may take action,” DOJ Civil Division lawyers Catherine Hancock and Douglas Letter said in a brief in the D.C. Circuit in January.

DOJ’s legal team said that acknowledging whether NSA and Google formed a partnership from a cyber attack would illuminate whether the government “considered the alleged attack to be of consequence for critical U.S. government information systems.”

NSA said it cannot provide documents—or confirm their existence—because the information would alert adversaries about the security agency’s priorities, threat assessments and countermeasures.

DOJ said media reports about the alleged Google partnership with NSA do not constitute official acknowledgement.

The Washington Post and The New York Times both reported that Google contacted the NSA after the Jan. 2010 cyber attack, which the company said was rooted in China and targeted access to accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Wall Street Journal said NSA’s general counsel worked out a cooperative research and development agreement with Google.

EPIC’s attorneys, including Marc Rotenberg, the group’s president, said in court papers that the document request includes records that are not relevant to the NSA’s information assurance mission.

“The NSA mischaracterizes EPIC’s FOIA Request by stating that responsive documents would reveal ‘information about a potential Google-NSA relationship,’” Rotenberg said.

The crux of the records request, Rotenberg said, is Google’s switch to application encryption by default for Gmail accounts soon after the cyber attack. Google in 2008 began allowing users to encrypt mail passing through the company servers, EPIC said in its brief, but encryption was not provided by default.

EPIC’s brief said the failure of the NSA to conduct a search for records “deprives the court of the ability to meaningfully assess the propriety” of the agency’s response that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records.

“Without first conducting the search, not even the agency can know whether there is a factual basis for its legal position,” Rotenberg said.

EPIC said its records request does not seek documents about NSA’s role to secure government computer networks. “Google provides cloud-based services to consumers, not critical infrastructure services to the government,” Rotenberg said.

Obama Fights to Retain Warrantless Wiretapping

By Matt Bewig and David Wallechinsky

 

United States - Despite being propelled to victory by progressive supporters critical of the Bush administration’s record on civil liberties, President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department to defend many of the policies of George W. Bush, including warrant-less wiretapping. Last week, the Justice Department filed papers asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that allowed the continuation of an ACLU lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a 2008 law giving the government unprecedented authority to monitor Americans’ international emails and phone calls.

 

That monitoring has its origins in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when, a few years later, President Bush instructed the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept Americans’ telephone calls without warrants, which were required by the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA, a post-Watergate statute meant to rein in domestic surveillance, created a special court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to approve or reject requests for domestic surveillance.

 

Between 1978 and 1992, presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presented 7,030 applications for warrants and the court approved all of them as submitted. During his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton and his Justice Department presented 6,057 warrant applications. The FISC approved 6,055 of them, modified one and rejected one.

 

However, the harmonious relationship between the executive branch and the FISC changed after George W. Bush became president. The court rejected six requests outright and modified 179. It is worth noting that all eleven members of the Bush-era FISC were selected by conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Annoyed by the FISC judges’ refusal to rubber-stamp his policies, Bush bypassed the law and ordered the NSA to secretly conduct illegal wiretapping.

 

When Bush’s secret program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, the Bush administration first agreed to seek FISC approval, and when that failed, got Congress to permit the previously prohibited warrantless wiretapping by passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. President Bush signed the bill into law on July 10, 2008, and the ACLU filed its challenge less than an hour later. The provisions of the act are scheduled to end at the end of 2012.

 

The appeals court ruling, which was issued in March 2011, rejected the Obama administration’s argument that the case should be dismissed because the ACLU’s clients could not prove their communications would be collected under the law, which was true largely because the law creates great secrecy around the wiretaps in the first place–a true “Catch-22.”