By E&P Staff

Published: May 15, 2006 11:40 AM ET

NEW YORK Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News reported on the networks "The Blotter" web site this morning that a senior federal law enforcement official had informed them that "the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources."

This source quipped: "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."

The two journalists added: "We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

"Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation. One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

"Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

"Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

"The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded. A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff ( letters@editorandpublisher.com)

 http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002502624

BREAKING NEWS: Senior federal source tells ABC that Bush is tracking their phone calls to sources, doing same to NYT and Wash Post
 http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/05/breaking-news-senior-federal-source.html

In the wake of the May 11 revelation by USA Today of a massive telephone spying program by the National Security Agency, directed against nearly every American citizen, the media commentary has deliberately downplayed the sinister nature of the program. This is a deliberate cover-up of what is without question the most wide-ranging invasion of privacy by the federal government in US history.

The press coverage has sought to obscure the vast scale of the data-gathering, as well as the political purposes to which it can be used, in order to lend credence to the Bush administration’s claim that the operation is targeted exclusively at suspected terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. There has not been a single serious media commentary questioning why a supposedly “narrowly focused” program should collect data on an estimated 225 million Americans. Nor has there been any suggestion that the real purpose of the spy program is to assemble a database on the political affiliations and activities of a wide range of American citizens.

Further details of the program have emerged, however, in scattered press reports as well as legal papers filed by civil liberties groups and lawyers acting for telephone company customers who object to their personal information being handed over to the federal government.

By these accounts, the computer programs being used by the NSA to analyze the phone call databases it purchased from the big telecommunications companies are a more advanced form of the “social-network analysis” software used by commercial and political marketing firms to profile potential advertising targets. Phone trees are traced to identify nodes and determine common interests and activities among those targeted.

In the case of commercial marketing, the purpose is to identify the best targets to receive a sales pitch. For the intelligence agencies, the purpose is to select targets for more intensive electronic surveillance, or arrest and (perhaps indefinite) detention.

The potential value of this information for purposes of political intimidation is enormous. Every person who has ever telephoned a 900 number, for instance, now has that fact permanently recorded in a government database, making him or her vulnerable to blackmail by federal agents. Likewise those whose phone records suggest problems with gambling, narcotics abuse, or even extramarital affairs.

The FBI regularly used such information for nefarious purposes during the notorious 50-year reign of J. Edgar Hoover, who kept special files on the sexual and other peccadilloes of congressmen and government officials. Now such information will be available on every American citizen.

The sheer size of the database makes the NSA surveillance program unique and truly Orwellian in character. AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, the three telecommunications companies which supplied the data, provided the NSA with the calling records on 224 million land-line and cellular telephone customers, 80 percent of the land-line and 50 percent of the wireless users in the US. According to press reports, the three companies connected 500 billion telephone calls in 2005 alone, and over two trillion since 9/11. Information on all these calls—the number calling, the number dialed, the time and duration—is now in the NSA database, along with historical information of unknown but vast dimensions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which sued AT&T earlier this year over its collaboration with the NSA, said that the AT&T call database alone spans 312 terabytes, the equivalent of more than 400,000 CD-ROMs. EFF attorney Kevin Bankston told the Los Angeles Times, “There is simply no legal process for this kind of wholesale invasion of privacy. What they claim to be doing with the data is irrelevant because the fact is they could do whatever they choose without any oversight.”

No previous regime, no matter how dictatorial—not Nazi Germany, not Stalinist Russia—was able to compile such an all-encompassing record of the private activities of its citizens. (The Nazis had to make do with primitive card-sorting devices supplied, at a hefty profit, by IBM.)

The press reports claim that the NSA did not actually eavesdrop on the phone calls, collecting only external information. Time magazine, for instance, writes: “Officials insist that the NSA is not eavesdropping on millions of law-abiding Americans, but merely compiling what the telephone companies refer to as ‘call detail’ information, recording what number called what number, when and for how long. ‘It’s just digits,’ insists a White House official.”

Two points should be made. First, even if true, this is a gross violation of personal privacy, one that would, in an ordinary police investigation, require the showing of probable cause to obtain a court order. Second, and more importantly, there is no reason to believe that NSA program was confined to call detail records and involved no eavesdropping.

The New York Times, in a lengthy account Sunday, wrote that after the September 11 terrorist attacks Vice President Dick Cheney pressed the NSA to intercept purely domestic phone calls, although he was supposedly rebuffed by NSA lawyers, who cited longstanding constitutional and legal prohibitions on such spying. The Times reported that many domestic phone calls were nonetheless intercepted, and quoted a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, confirming the interceptions but denying that they were “intentional.”

The media reports on the surveillance program invariably state, without any qualification, that the telephone company records were handed over to the NSA without the names and addresses of the customers, implying that there was an effort to preserve confidentiality. There have been repeated descriptions of the data as “anonymized,” as though there was no way for the NSA to trace back from the telephone numbers to the identities of those making the calls. This is absurdly false.

Even the simplest Internet search can pull up individual names associated with particular phone numbers. And the federal government has access to many more databases than these search engines. As the New York Times pointed out in an editorial Friday, “By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with.” (The Times ended this editorial with the cynical suggestion that the Bush administration obtain permission from Congress to continue its warrantless telephone spying).

Three years ago there was a political uproar when it was revealed that the Pentagon had established a data-mining program, entitled Total Information Awareness (TIA), to consolidate commercial records and government intelligence and criminal files into a central database that would be used, allegedly, to identify potential terrorist threats. The program was headed by Admiral John Poindexter, a convicted felon in the Iran-Contra affair who was later pardoned by the first president Bush. TIA was shut down after Congress cut off its funding.

The NSA program is far more sweeping and intrusive than TIA, but there has been no suggestion from any congressional quarter, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, that it should be shut down. All the criticism revolves around demands that Congress be more fully informed of the program and given a say in how it operates—i.e., that Congress be a partner in the erection of the framework for an American police state, rather than a spectator.

A flagrant violation of the Constitution

For all the hemming and hawing in Congress and in media editorials, the lawless character of the Bush administration’s telephone spying is unquestionable. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution spells out the right to be free of illegal searches in unmistakable terms: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The Chicago Tribune interviewed Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst who was one source for the exposure last December of illegal NSA interception of international phone calls by thousands of Americans. Tice told the Tribune, “Everyone at NSA knew what they were doing was illegal, because it’s drilled into our heads over and over that it’s against NSA policy, that you do not do that. The choice is to speak out and get fired.”

The response of Qwest, the lone telecommunications company to refuse the NSA request for phone records, demonstrates that the surveillance program was widely understood to be illegal. Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio “concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act,” his lawyer said in a statement Thursday. Nacchio also cited the refusal of the NSA to obtain approval of the telephone surveillance from the special court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The reference to the FISA court is especially revealing. FISA was adopted in 1978 after the exposure of illegal CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon spying on American citizens throughout the Vietnam War period. Thereafter, in the midst of the Cold War, US intelligence agencies were required to go before the FISA court to obtain approval to wiretap the communications of suspected foreign spies. Yet today, when the enemy is not a powerful industrialized state armed with thousands of nuclear weapons, but a small band of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, the US government rejects the slightest democratic restraint on the activities of its police agencies.

Nacchio, the Qwest CEO, was repeatedly pressured by federal agents to comply. (He was later indicted on insider-trading charges, which he is currently fighting in court). His successor, Richard Notebaert, reached the same conclusion about the illegality of the surveillance program and ultimately broke off negotiations with the NSA in 2004.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Qwest-NSA discussions is that the agency consistently refused either to seek a court order or to present a directive from the US attorney general requiring the company’s cooperation. Tacitly acknowledging that it had no legal authority, the NSA sought Qwest’s voluntary cooperation, just as it had obtained the voluntary cooperation of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

At least three other telecommunications firms, Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile USA Inc. (a division of Deutsche Telekom), have denied participating in the NSA program, and the Internet companies Google, AOL and the MSN unit of Microsoft also declared that they had not supplied mass consumer information to the agency.

If the program was, as the Bush administration claims, absolutely vital for defending the American people from a new 9/11, how is the failure to enlist these companies to be explained? The reality is that the administration was well aware its requests were without legal authority, and it sought to conceal its mass snooping campaign from public scrutiny rather than seek court orders against non-complying companies.

There is ample reason to believe that the telecommunications companies themselves violated the law by handing over masses of consumer information to the NSA. An article in the Los Angeles Times Friday spelled out the legal precedents.

It noted that in 1986 Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, in response to a 1979 Supreme Court decision, Smith v. Maryland, which allowed local police to obtain phone records without a warrant. The high court ruled by analogy to ordinary mail service, finding that the contents of the envelope were private, but the address written on the outside was not. Similarly, the court argued, there should be no expectation of privacy for the phone number dialed or the email address used to send an electronic message.

Congress specifically overturned this precedent in the 1986 law, which declares, in Section 2702, that providers of “electronic communications... shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer... to any government entity.” Since then, local police have been required to show probable cause and get a search warrant from a court to obtain the record of anyone’s telephone calls. Companies that violate the law can be compelled to pay damages of $1,000 per violation per customer.

The first lawsuit under the 1986 law was filed Friday against Verizon in a Manhattan federal court. Bruce Afran, one of the lawyers, declared, “This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any US administration. Americans expect their phone records to be private. That’s our bedrock governing principle of our phone system.”

The scale of the damages is staggering: with trillions of phone calls disclosed, at $1,000 each, any award that was proportional to the scale of the violation would bankrupt the corporations which collaborated with the illegal spying.

jackbird writes "Brian Ross, Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC news says a confidential source informed him that reporter's phone records are being used by the administration [  http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html ] to track down leaks. Apparently reporters for the New York Times, ABC News, and the Washington Post are being scrutinized. The fact that ABC News journalists are even seriously wondering about whether the warning is connected to the NSA's domestic surveillance activities indicates just how anxious many people in Washington have become."

 http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/05/15/1922209.shtml

Mobile phone location tracking, and licence plate recognition systems mean that the journeys of vast numbers of Humans are tracked in the US and UK.

Then add financial transaction monitoring WHENEVER money is used electronically (eg., credit or debit cards).

Then add complete access to all electronic written communication, including Email, SMS 'texting' and IM (IM was invented in Israel as an intelligence gathering mechanism).

NOW IF ***YOU*** WERE IN POWER, WHAT COULD YOU ***NOT*** DO, WHEN GIVEN ACCESS TO THE OPTIONS LISTED ABOVE?

Little people aren't worth targetting as individuals, but their thoughts ARE data mined, since their support still keeps their masters in power.

HOWEVER, amongst the more powerful humans are vast numbers who can be neatly caught out in 'compromised' circumstances via the above, and thus made SLAVES to those that control the intelligence gathering services.

Here is a thought. Given that the West used slaves in ways that usually had the slave populations greater in size than the non-slave populations that owned them, how were the slaves 'persuaded' to remain slaves? What mechanism perpetuated the status quo?

I ask this question in order to point out that Blair is building the mechanisms that will enable HIM to keep US as slaves forever. If all Blair's inetlligence gathering services were destroyed in their entirety tomorrow, the negative effect on crime would be near zero. The positive effect would be the destruction of Blair's ability to remain in power, and thus the removal of Blair's police state, Blair's universal business and political corruption, and Blair's ability to wage war and start new wars.

History gives us precise information about the very reasons monsters create massive intelligence gathering services, and the exact uses they put these services to. Blackmail and corruption are WINNING METHODS when ruthlessly and skillfully applied.

It is also ironic that focus is placed on NSA spying on US citizens, and not GCHQ (and the rest) spying on UK citizens. Why ironic? Because it is Blair, whose longevity and success inspires all other monsters, who is the driving force for change of this nature in the US. Every act of recent mass surveillance was done first in the UK, and then sold by Blair to as many other Western nations as possible as the way of the future.

The US has a Constitution that has to be trashed. The UK has NONE, making Blair's job a million times easier, and better, preventing ANY backlash when Blair's programs become widely known.

Blair's data mining of our electronic words means that EVERY DAY he samples the state of the British mind. When he pushes a particular propaganda campaign, like those recently about the BNP, or Animal Rights, he is able to see the consequences of his Mass Media Campaigns in REAL-TIME, and adjust the propaganda accordingly.

The opinions of significant numbers of eligible voters for both the Liberal and Conservative leadership campaigns were monitored via the same methods, to ensure that propaganda campaigns pushing Blair's prefered choices were successful.

Blair's control of the Mass Media means that he is able to speak directly and constantly to the vast majority of people, on a daily basis. Blair's monitoring of their electronic thoughts means that he is able to observe how successful his words have been, and modify them accordingly. And by HIS WORDS, I mean the TOTAL propaganda output of the Mass Media.

NO MONSTER IN HUMAN HISTORY HAS HAD EVEN ONE TENTH OF BLAIR'S POWER WITH RESPECT TO MASS MEDIA COMMUNICATION, DIRECT POPULATION MONITORING, OR MILITARY CAPABILITY (via his US proxy forces). The level of corruption in the UK at least rivals the worst seen at other times in history, and the degree to which Blair has been able to place his people in charge of ALL major institutions is unprecedented in UK history.

Our side has what, exactly? Idiots stating for the tenth time that the war will be over (whoops, I mean Blair will be gone) by Christmas. Anti-Blair people that listen carefully to Blair's OWN propaganda, and then proclaim that the worst threats that we face are fat kids, climate change, muslims, and peak oil. Blair can turn the death of one citizen into a circus in our media for DAYS and WEEKS. Our last World War killed tens of millions, and our next will kill BILLIONS, and yet Blair KNOWS that he can rely on people giving not even a fleeting thought to stopping him from launching WW3, once they've sucked up his latest Media circus.

BLAIR KNOWS WHAT WE THINK, AND HAS A VOICE LOUD ENOUGH TO REACH ALL OF US DAILY. Am I repeating myself? Yes I am, because only when people wake up to the consequences of all powerful intelligence gathering (in its ONLY useful form, not the rubbish pushed in spy films), combined with total control of the Mass Media, is their even a possibility of fighting back.

There is a simple low tech solution if eavesdropping by governments upsets you. Buy a pay as you go telephone. Encourage everybody you know to buy a pay as you go telephone. Tell everybody that your new number is xxx-xxx-xxxx or whatever. Warn everybody that this number will no longer be your number in one week. After a week of using this telephone swap it with someone else. For a more interesting variation flick a coin to decide how many days to keep the telephone for. For increased anonymity simply swap the telephone with your most distant aquaintance.

This technique was first suggested by Paul Erdos. He was a mathematician working for AT&T. His mathematical forte was combinatorics - how small numbers of things combine to make huge numbers of things. Two things come out of this process. For the law abiding it increases their security. For the lawbreaking it increases the chance they will be caught.

312 Tb of call information sounds a lot, but that really could be just call time start, duration, number dialled and charge information - the 'stdout' of a PABX. The fun starts when the indices and tables with the 'primary keys' (i.e. names, telephone numbers) of such a dataset are loaded up onto a monster-sized block of RAM. The Department of Homeland Security are in a league of their own wnen it comes to buying up the world's largest RAM-drives, they have at least one 2.5Tb monster in Washington DC. If your PC has a miserly 256Mb of RAM, think how much quicker it might be with 10000 times as much memory.

Who said nobody would ever need more than 640Kb of RAM?

The Department of Homeland Security have taken operations beyond the cyber-frontier very seriously. They have been splitting the one and the zero in a Manhattan Project that goes beyond mere data capture and a few SQL outer joins. This is the era of 'Full Spectrum Dominance' and live exercises have also been carried out to see if the censorship apparatus really can save the world from learning 'the truth' via an electronic word of mouth campaign.
With 'Cyberstorm' earlier this year all was put to the test, allegedly with a virus that had psychological payload. With media stories, blog entries and some help from Cisco, Microsoft and the A/V companies the world was not to learn what this psychological payload was, except through direct experience. If media stories are to believed, 'victims' were then studied as to what they would do next, in knowledge that the 'sky was to fall in' (as far as they were concerned). So, all over the world many computer users had real problems with their computers, and the violation had an edge of blackmail to it - how would you like Bob reading that email intended for Alice? Meanwhile, somewhere in America someone was watching - SECGEN Rumsfeld, and he was most pleased with the results. Afterall, you did not know how insidious CyberStorm was, did you? Voila...
The virus that did the rounds, carrying the mystery psychological payload at or around the same time as Operation Cyberstorm was written so as not to infect computers in the .gov or the .mil domain, so, if you cannot beat em, join em. There are loads of jobs going in the military nowadays - haven't you seen the adverts? Government jobs also have quite a high turnover right now, if recent reshuffles are anything to go by.