Writing about the National Security Agency myths is a tough task because the rules are always changing and whole agency is shrouded in secrecythough in the case of the latter, a good deal less than it once was, thanks in part to its empowerment after 9/11, and because of revelations by Edward Snowden. Anecdotally, when I was in high school (very pre-9/11), I wanted to write a report on the NSA, and when I asked the librarian about it, he ridiculed me, saying scornfully that the NSA was a fake spy agency on TV, and that it didnt exist in real life. I think the NSA would have approved, but any organization that secret is bound to gather a few urban legends along the way. Here are five myths about the National Security Agency.
Compared to the Central Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency, no, the NSA doesnt have that many field agents. Most of its thirty thousand or so employees work at Ft. Meade, MD. (There are 18,000 parking spaces at its headquarters, and enough office space that four U.S. Capitols could fit inside of it.) Still, the agency does have men and women who work in the field. They belong to the NSAs Special Collection Service, a group of signals intelligence spies who work jointly with the CIA abroad to penetrate foreign communications networks.
Because the SCS is so secretive, what, precisely they do in the field is likely a moving target. When a hard drive needs to be stolen, that assignment is probably going to go to the CIAs National Clandestine Service. But things like plugging into embassies overseas, planting antennas to intercept communications, and using state-of-the-art technology in the field to acquire signals are almost certainly jobs for the SCS. Though techniques and procedures change, as of a few years ago, small teams called Special Collection Elements, made up of two-to-five members of the Special Collection Service and National Clandestine Service, rotated into foreign embassies and operated abroad under the guise of business persons.
As a matter of technology, yes, most likely. And if you encrypt your messages, it can hang onto those emails forever, or until the encryption is cracked (see below). NSA software is integrated tightly with telecommunications switches for AT&T and, most likely, other such companies. When the companies arent knowingly doing the integration, the NSA does the integration themselves, surreptitiously intercepting routers to targeted facilities and implanting surveillance devices and firmware.
But legally, the NSA needs a lot more than simple ability if they want to start reading your letters to grandma. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to surveil non-U.S. persons abroad. Each year, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit certifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court stating the types of intelligence they would like to collect, and the way they will do it that is consistent with the law (i.e., heres how we will make sure we dont target Americans). Once the certifications are approved, the government goes to industry and compels them to assist with the surveillance. The court reviews these certifications annually.
Thats the basic legal process at work. In practice, if a non-U.S. person abroad fits the certified surveillance standard (e.g. he likes to make bombs for ISIS), and his communications are found to have foreign intelligence (e.g. hes corresponding with ISIS about where to send the bombs), his communications can be collected.
So if he happens to email yousay hes a fan of Game of Thrones, and you begin a robust correspondence on that seriess awful endingthen your email can only be searched in pursuit of foreign intelligence information, or, if the FBI gets involved looking for evidence of a crime. Only the attorney general can authorize the use of information collected under Section 702 in criminal proceedings against U.S. persons.
The upshot is that the NSA doesnt just type bomb into SpyGoogle and start vacuuming up anyones emails describing Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Which was mostly a pretty good movie, but dont get me started on The Force Awakens.) The whole thing is monitored by the court, senior analysts at the agency, and the Department of Justice.
Under Presidential Policy Directive 28 and its supplemental guidelines, information gathered from the bulk collection of non-U.S. person data must be related to foreign espionage, terrorism, threats to U.S. military forces, cyber warfare, and transnational criminal threats. In other words, if Cuervo Jones of Guadalajara is caught in the net, but isnt doing evil, his communications arent being used against him for other purposes. Moreover, information collected can only be held for five years. If, however, Cuervo has encrypted his correspondence, that can be held indefinitely. Its worth noting that the NSA is not allowed to collect trade secrets from foreign companies in order to give U.S. firms a competitive advantage.
Pretty Good Privacy is a popular encryption standard that uses hashing, compression, and public and private keys for encryption and authentication. (ClearanceJobs previously described how hashing works here.) As of 2014, leaked documents reveal that the NSA was unable to break PGP. A lot has changed in five years, and look, anything is possible, but not that much. As the PGP frequently asked questions document states for a PGP 128-bit encryption: Lets say that you had developed a special purpose chip that could try a billion keys per second. This is far beyond anything that could really be developed today. Lets also say that you could afford to throw a billion such chips at the problem at the same time. It would still require over 10,000,000,000,000 years to try all of the possible 128 bit keys. That is something like a thousand times the age of the known universe!
Well maybe. But probably not. Under Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA is allowed to build contact chains of telecommunications metadata. Not the calls/emails/etc. themselvesbut call detail recordsinformation about the contact in question. This year, the NSA stated that it has ended the CDR program. In the old days of building those CDR chains, however, the agency used a method called hops. If I am John Terrorist and I appear on the NSAs radar, the agency can use my call detail records to start looking at the people I call (hop one), and the people they call (hop two). So if I call 10 people, those ten people are now in the NSAs metadata surveillance crosshairs. Moreover, the people those ten people call are now in the NSAs web of watchers as well. If each of those people contacted ten people, youve now got 101 people being monitored. The NSA is limited to two hops, though previously could go out as far as three hops, which meant that one person could lead to the monitoring of 1001.
So is the NSA spying on you? Even if the agency has secretly restarted the program, its still highly unlikely, though if you were an Uber driver and John Terrorist called you to give you directions, its possible that you might be in the system. And if you hired a local landscaper to mow your lawn, he or she might be in the net as well. There is no way for you to find out, and nothing you can do if you are. But as a matter of numbers, youre probably safe. Last year fewer than ten thousand queries of American communications stemmed from this program.
See the rest here:
5 Myths About the National Security Agency - ClearanceJobs
- Iraq to NSA spying: The biggest revelations by Julian Assanges WikiLeaks - Al Jazeera English - June 26th, 2024
- Just the Facts: What We Know About the NSA Spying on Americans - December 28th, 2022
- Big Brother Has Hacked the Constitution - Tenth Amendment Center - September 13th, 2022
- Julian Assange is my husband his extradition is an abomination - The Independent - June 29th, 2022
- NSA Surveillance: Why NSA Spying On Us - RedefinePrivacy - April 28th, 2022
- Edward Snowden - Wikipedia - April 13th, 2022
- EU/US Say They've Agreed To A New Privacy Shield That Doesn't Seem To Deal With Any Of The Problems Of The Old One - Techdirt - April 1st, 2022
- Global surveillance disclosures (2013present) - Wikipedia - January 15th, 2022
- Four refugees who sheltered Snowden find sanctuary in Canada - FRANCE 24 - October 5th, 2021
- Section 215 Expired: Year in Review 2020 - EFF - December 31st, 2020
- America's Nihilism blues | The Retriever - The Retriever - November 18th, 2020
- The socialist perspective in the 2020 US elections - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS - November 7th, 2020
- Big Brother is spying on you - Hillsboro Times Gazette - October 28th, 2020
- From Scandals To War, Here Are The 15 Best Documentaries Of All Time According To Rotten Tomatoes - ScoopWhoop - September 29th, 2020
- Guest view: Should Trump pardon Edward Snowden? - The-review - August 30th, 2020
- Screen Talk 300: Revisiting the Biggest Stories of the Last Six Years - IndieWire - August 30th, 2020
- Trump Wants to Build a Wall Around the Internet, How Worried Should The U.S. Be? - Gizmodo Australia - August 21st, 2020
- A list of known NSA spying techniques - Tumbex - July 27th, 2020
- How does NSA spying effect you? (Infographic) - ProPrivacy.com - July 22nd, 2020
- NSA Spying Federal Jack - July 22nd, 2020
- NSA Spokesman Accidentally Admits that the Government Is ... - July 22nd, 2020
- Liz Cheney the latest target of Trump loyalists which is enough to label her voice of reason on the left - RT - July 21st, 2020
- EU Court Again Rules That NSA Spying Makes U.S. Companies ... - July 18th, 2020
- Op-ed: Congress must act now to rein in the NSA's ... - July 18th, 2020
- Join EFF's 30th Anniversary Livestream and Party Like It's 1990! - EFF - July 9th, 2020
- 8 Ways The NSA is Spying on You Right Now - July 9th, 2020
- The Lizard People Invented Bitcoin: Why Crypto is a Hotbed for Conspiracy Theories - Cointelegraph - June 3rd, 2020
- Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President? - The... - May 29th, 2020
- Author David Rohde on what the deep state is and why Trump is obsessed with it - Vox.com - May 13th, 2020
- Yes, Section 215 Expired. Now What? - EFF - April 17th, 2020
- More Than Half of Adults Say Their Video Calls Are Secure, Despite Hacking Concerns - Morning Consult - April 12th, 2020
- Edward Snowden warns COVID-19 could give governments invasive new data collection powers that will last long a - Business Insider India - March 30th, 2020
- ASSANGE EXTRADITION: An Extension of the US War on Terror - Consortium News - March 27th, 2020
- Assange's Extradition: An Escalation of the US War on Terror - Common Dreams - March 27th, 2020
- Presidential Candidates Should Declare Their Stance on "Costly Failure of the NSA's Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance Program," Says... - February 27th, 2020
- LTE: The Deep State is alive in well - GoErie.com - February 27th, 2020
- Pilger, Burchett and Assange: Three Extraordinary Australian Journalists That Spoke Truth to Power - Mintpress News - February 12th, 2020
- Edward Snowden warns that Assange and Greenwald prosecutions mark new stage in assault on press freedom - World Socialist Web Site - January 31st, 2020
- 8 Ways the NSA Is Spying on You Right Now | ExpressVPN - January 19th, 2020
- Trump administration to illegally divert an additional $7.2 billion to border wall construction - World Socialist Web Site - January 19th, 2020
- So, who has been wiretapping the prime minister? - Free Malaysia Today - January 9th, 2020
- Tucker Carlson Patrick McGeehan and Rising Deep Red State Revulsion Against the Neocons - Morgan County USA - January 8th, 2020
- 11 Tech Trends We Need to Dump in 2020 - PCMag AU - December 26th, 2019
- If Devin Nunes wants to call the FBI 'dirty cops', he better be ready to propose a solution - The Independent - December 19th, 2019
- The Simpsons even predicted the Anthony Joshua v Andy Ruiz Jr rematch - GIVEMESPORT - December 9th, 2019
- Nov. 21 Letters to the Editor | Opinion - Lewiston Morning Tribune - November 21st, 2019
- Democrats Make a Huge Mistake If They Just Focus Impeachment on the Ukraine Scandal - CounterPunch - November 5th, 2019
- Democrats make a huge mistake if they just focus impeachment on the Ukraine scandal - NationofChange - November 2nd, 2019
- Democrats are Making a Huge Mistake on Impeachment if They Focus on the Ukraine Scandal - ThisCantBeHappening! - October 31st, 2019
- NSA Spying on Americans Is Illegal | American Civil ... - October 7th, 2019
- Opinion: Why NSA spying puts the U.S. in danger ... - May 31st, 2019
- NSA spying? Everyone does it. - CSMonitor.com - May 26th, 2019
- NSA spying fiasco sending customers overseas | Computerworld - May 23rd, 2019
- NSA Spying Violated The Constitution - Business Insider - May 13th, 2019
- Judge Dodges Legality of NSA Mass Spying, Citing Secrecy ... - May 3rd, 2019
- Judge who ruled against NSA spying passes on Corsi case ... - April 5th, 2019
- Hearing Friday in Jewel NSA Spying Lawsuit: EFF Asks Court ... - March 28th, 2019
- Video: New NSA Spying Revelations Spark Call for More ... - March 19th, 2019
- NSA spying scandal: what we have learned | US news | The ... - March 8th, 2019
- Clapper claims he didnt lie about NSA spying on ... - March 7th, 2019
- NSA spying program ended six months ago, maybe permanently ... - March 7th, 2019
- Clapper: I Didnt Lie to Congress About NSA Spying I ... - March 7th, 2019
- Congress Reauthorizes NSA Spying on Americans American ... - March 5th, 2019
- European officials lash out at new NSA spying report - CBS ... - March 1st, 2019
- Huawei: U.S. Is Afraid We Will Stop NSA Spying -- It Has ... - February 28th, 2019
- Obama Justifies NSA Spying: Paul Revere Did It First - February 28th, 2019
- Mass government surveillance pros and cons: NSA spying ... - February 22nd, 2019
- Judge: NSA spying almost Orwellian, likely unconstitutional - February 12th, 2019
- The NSAs Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities - August 5th, 2018
- The Trump Administration Is Hiding a Crucial Report on NSA ... - July 16th, 2018
- Obama knew of NSA spying on Merkel and approved it, report ... - July 16th, 2018
- AT&T collaborates on NSA spying through a web of secretive ... - June 28th, 2018
- Potential NSA spying hub revealed in D.C. AT&T building ... - June 28th, 2018
- RNC condemns NSA spying in huge turnaround | MSNBC - April 2nd, 2018
- Stop the Expansion of NSA Spying - eff.org - February 25th, 2018
- Congress demanded NSA spying reform. Instead, they let you ... - January 21st, 2018
- National Security Agency - Wikipedia - January 17th, 2018
- Dont Reauthorize NSA Spying in a Must-Pass Funding Bill ... - December 21st, 2017
- FACT CHECK: Did Clapper Get 'Caught Lying To Congress'? - The Daily Caller - August 24th, 2017
- The struggalo is real as radical ICP fans mobilize online - A.V. Club - August 18th, 2017