CODENAME RAGTIME: Obama’s Surveillance Program Targets American Citizens
reposted from NTEB
More
than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a set of extraordinary
and secretive surveillance programs conducted by the National Security
Agency has been institutionalized, and they have grown.
These
special programs are conducted under the code name Ragtime, and are
divided into several subcomponents, according to the new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. (I purchased a copy this morning.)
Obama’s
surveillance program is much larger than Bush’s, so WHY are the
Liberals keeping so quiet about it. Where’s Code Pink? Hmmm.....
The
authors, both journalists who cowrote a previous book about special
operations in the military, have dug deep into the code names and
operational nitty gritty of the NSA’s secretive and hugely controversial
surveillance programs, and they’ve come up with impressive new
details. Ragtime, which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four parts.
Ragtime-A: involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign counterterrorism-related data;
Ragtime-B: deals with data from foreign governments that transits through the US;
Ragtime-C: deals with counterproliferation actvities;
Ragtime-P: P stands for Patriot Act. Ragtime-P is
the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program, the name
given to so-called “warrantless wiretapping” activities after 9/11, in
which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the United
States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil
liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more
information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what
authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.
Only
about three dozen NSA officials have access to Ragtime’s intercept data
on domestic counter-terrorism collection. That’s a tiny handful of the
agency’s workforce, which has been pegged at about 30,000 people.
As many as 50 companies have provided data to this domestic collection program, the authors report.
If
the NSA wants to collect information on a specific target, it needs one
additional piece of evidence besides its own “link-analysis” protocols,
a computerized analysis that assigns probability scores to each
potential target. This is essentially a way to use a computer
data-mining program to help determine whether someone is a national
security threat. But the authors find that this isn’t sufficient if NSA
wants to collect on said target. And while the authors found that the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rarely rejects Ragtime-P
requests, it often asks the NSA to provide more information before
approving them.
How
the surveillance is approved tells us a lot about the breadth of the
NSA’s intelligence gathering. The court and the Attorney General both
certify a slate of approved targets under Ragtime-P, the authors find.
That includes a certain amount of “bulk data”—such as phone call logs
and records—that can be collected around those targets. An NSA official
told the authors that Ragtime-P can process as many as 50 different data
sets at one time.
What happens next looks like a 21st-century data assembly line. At
the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called
Xkeyscore processes all intercepted electronic signals before sending
them to different “production lines” that deal with specific issues.
Here, we find another array of code names.
Pinwale
is the main NSA database for recorded signals intercepts, the authors
report. Within it, there are various keyword compartments, which the NSA
calls “selectors.” Metadata (things like the “To” and “From” field on
an e-mail) is stored in a database called Marina. It generally stays
there for five years. In a database called Maui there is “finished
reporting,” the transcripts and analysis of calls. (Metadata never goes
here, the authors found.)
As
all this is happening, there are dozens of other NSA signals activity
lines, called SIGADS, processing data. There’s Anchory, an all-source
database for communications intelligence; Homebase, which lets NSA
analysts coordinate their searches based on priorities set by the
Director of National Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions
that are a priority for the Department of Defense; Wrangler, an
electronic intelligence line; Tinman, which handles air warning and
surveillance; and more.
Lest
you get confused by this swirl of code names and acronyms, keep this
image in mind of the NSA as a data-analysis factory. Based on my own
reporting, the agency is collecting so much information every day that
without a regimented, factory-like system, analysts would never have the
chance to look at it all. Indeed, they don’t analyze much of it.
Computers handle a chunk, but a lot of information remains stored for
future analysis.
So who is monitoring this vast production to ensure that the communications of innocent Americans aren’t spied on? Ambinder
and Grady report that for the NSA’s terrorism-related programs, the
agency’s general counsel’s office regularly reveals “target folders,”
which contain the identities of those individuals who are under
surveillance, “to make sure the program complied with the instruction to
surveil those reasonably assumed to have connections to al-Qaeda.”
That
the NSA is policing itself may come as small comfort to many critics of
the Obama administration’s intelligence programs. The size of the
“compliance staff” that monitors this activity is only about four or
five people, depending on what’s available in the budget at any moment,
the authors report. They also say that we cannot know whether the
program is pushing beyond the boundaries of the law.
However,
outside the closed circle of about three dozen NSA employees who are
read in to Ragtime, there more than 1,000 people “outside the NSA are
privy to the full details of the program.” If NSA is breaking the law,
“how much longer can that secret last?” the authors ask.
We
have a preceding example to test this hypothesis, albeit in a limited
fashion. In 2004, the senior leadership of the Justice Department and
the FBI threatened to resign over what they saw as illegal collection
activities at the NSA, collection activities that are still going on
under Ragtime and under new surveillance law.
Back
then, James Comey, acting as Attorney General while John Ashcroft was
in the hospital, refused to sign a set of certifications provided by the
Justice Department to Internet, financial, and data companies, the
authors report. Why? Comey believed that the justification for providing
bulk data to the NSA wasn’t sufficient.
The administration’s tortured
logic “drove him bonkers. There was just no way to justify this,” the
authors report, quoting people who have spoken to Comey, who has never
publicly said why he objected. Interestingly, the authors find that the
parts of the program he was objecting to didn’t implicate the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.
This comports with my own reporting in my book, The Watchers.
The NSA was making “mirrors” of telecommunications databases, so that
analysts could go through the data and mine it for clues. As it has been
explained to me, the problem here dealt with how the government viewed
its legal authorities to access data stored in computers, and whether
analysts could dip back into it without specific authorizations.
Importantly, this data consisted of that so-called “bulk data.” It
wasn’t recorded phone calls or the text of e-mails. That information was
governed by FISA–or should have been–because it was considered
“content” under law, and that requires a warrant
to obtain.
The
White House panicked when Comey and Ashcroft refused to sign off,
Ambinder and Grady report, fearing that the companies on which NSA was
depending for information would cut the agency off if they didn’t get a
signed order from the Attorney General himself. It took six months for
the administration to reshape the program so that it comported with
“interpretation of the metatdata provisions” that were promulgated by
the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Had
these officials resigned, it’s unthinkable that the secrets of NSA’s
intelligence gathering activities would have stayed hidden. A year
later, in 2005, they were revealed in part by the New York Times.
Here, too, Ambinder and Grady have some new insights. It turns out that
while the NSA’s director, General Michael Hayden, was publicly
excoriating the newspaper for disclosing the classified activities, he
was privately glad that they withheld what he considered key operational
details. source – Washingtonian
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