Twitters and Echelon and Iran and Planetary Management, Oh My!

Yes, I've avoided commenting on the Iranian elections for a week now, even after the State Department credited the always-annoying Twitter with enabling street protests. And I've ducked a lot of comments on the National Security Agency's growing problems with Congress until the NSA made the front page in The New York Times today. Then, with members of Congress expressing faux-shock at NSA, even as Jeff Pulver's 140 Character conference told us this week that Twitter will make us smart and strong and free forever, I simply melted down. AUUUGGGGHHH! Here, some related observations on all topics.

First, Iran: Obama is right that Moussavi's record as PM during the Iran-Iraq War doesn't raise a lot of hope that he'd be that much of an improvement over the lewd and rude Ahmadinejad. But the shout-mouth tendencies of the latter is precisely why he probably won the election fair and square, albeit not with the percentages claimed. One dependable tendency that applies globally is that people like dumb loud-mouthed populists more than they like democratic reformers. When the populist claims that the world is picking on Nation X, the people of Nation X will roar their approval. Funny how Kim Jong Il isn't trying this in North Korea, though his people are too cowed and starving to respond to the "us against the world" rhetoric.

I love seeing young Iranian demonstrators sacrifice all for the sake of a pseudo-reform. And it is indeed great to see them use tools like Twitter to bypass state censorship. But they can often forget that rural, unconnected and highly traditionalist people in Iran (and in Thailand and in Venezuela and even in the good ol' US of A) are often the ones that determine elections, and they like to hear strong messages from their jingoist daddy. And unfortunately, they often cheer when some group like the Basij starts cracking the heads of the demonstrators. The plain fact of the matter is that Iran will never have democracy until the Council of Guardians, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards are destroyed, and the clerics are hanging from lampposts. I don't see that happening very soon.

Now, to the role of Twitter with democratic forces in Iran and Gaza, and with repressionist forces within the Israeli Defense Forces and the US Defense Department: Yes, Twitter can be a tool of liberation. But, as always, the Twitter network is now dominated by messages from corporate PR headquarters, Wall Street monetizers, and the power brokers who control the large armies of the world. Just as the al-Qaeda terrorists realized quickly that they had to stop using satellite phones, those who say they are in opposition to the planetary powers will quickly learn that they cannot tweet without providing information to those that would keep them down. Meanwhile, Jeff Pulver tells attendees at the 140 Characters conference that Twitter is a tool for transforming our lives. Puh-leeze. Twitter is a temporarily-interesting social network that will be replaced by another social network soon. And its underlying technology, like that of SMS or simple e-mail, can be monitored by the good old National Security Agency.

Which brings us to the front-page NYT article on NSA. Its one relevant point is saying that few in Congress are intelligent enough to understand NSA's underlying technology. Hell, few in Congress are intelligent enough to write a freaking bill on any topic. The NSA relies on a worldwide monitoring network called Echelon, that is managed by the five members of the UKUSA Treaty, who truly are a "white boys' club": US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. No NATO, no anyone else. Echelon operates largely from space on a 24/7 basis, and its default state is "on." Satellites do not recognize national boundaries. The NSA is always intercepting analog voice traffic and digital TCP/IP traffic (including email, Twitter, packet voice, etc.) on a global basis, and has to figure out ways to filter out the US citizen traffic. And it claims to "mistakenly" collect this traffic? Really? Seriously? Please don't insult our intelligence.

If there is any advantage to decentralized, short-message systems like Twitter, it's that widespread use will flood the NSA's capabilities, making it harder to implement planetary management. Unfortunately, the NSA will use that as an excuse to build gargantuan new storage facilities like "Storage Station Freedom" near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. And Congress will be dumb enough to give NSA the funding. And US agencies will cheer the brave decentralized use of Twitter even as NSA scrambles to intercept the messages. And pundits will cheer the use of Twitter even as it is twisted around for nefarious purposes, while encouraging more ADHD-style thinking in the populace. And we will watch faux battles for democracy played out between populists and faux reformists. And little will change. And since Echelon has been around for nearly 60 years now, we can truly say we've seen this movie before. And we will see it again and again and again. And sorry, Jeff, we will not be transformed by Twitter or anything else, though we will certainly be monitored.

Jane Harman, AIPAC, and the NSA

In a mere 48 hours, the case of Rep. Jane Harman and the National Security Agency has gotten so convoluted, it's almost impossible to tell who the good guys are, if any. Do the leaked NSA transcripts revealed in Congressional Quarterly and The New York Times indicate that she was a shill for the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee? Do the existence of the transcripts indicate the NSA is regularly monitoring all members of Congress? Can we believe the Harper's story that the Bush administration used the existence of the transcripts to blackmail Harman into supporting FISA bypass - and into bullying The New York Times in an attempt to prevent the paper from revealing the bypass efforts in the first place?

Here's some things we can say with certainty: Harman, who represents Venice, California in the LA area, is a very creepy gung-ho-Israel and gung-ho-national-security person, a female equivalent of Sen. Joe Lieberman. Even if Obama urged Congress to play nice with Joltin' Joe, people like Harman and Lieberman have no business being in the Democratic Party. Harman's willingness to get in bed with AIPAC and take away our civil liberties shows us that she is only getting the infamous "chickens coming home to roost" treatment.

AIPAC's efforts to bribe her into pushing the Justice Department to go easy on the lobbying organization, by offering to give her the chair of the Intelligence Committee, only shows how smarmy the organization is on a regular basis. And her willingness to go to bat for two low-life criminals Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, shows how easily she can be swayed by a good Zionist lobby.

And yet, and yet... She's absolutely right that the NSA had little business monitoring her calls to begin with, and that no one should have leaked NSA transcripts, inside or outside of the agency. Yet there is a sense of poetic justice to all of this. Harman wanted to keep the public from knowing about the NSA bypass. Apparently, she may have pushed for this in order to keep those transcripts silent. When NPR got hold of Harman Tuesday afternoon, to call her on-air responses "sputtering obfuscation" would be too kind.

Well, Rep. Harman, no honor among thieves, criminals, and authoritarian whores. The NSA is a criminal global monitoring agency, and AIPAC is a criminal gang of thugs pushing the hard-right Israel line. Play with thugs, and you shouldn't be surprised to be taken out into the back alley for a whupping.

Comcast Rides Again

Of course I'm hypocritical keeping my Comcast account, they're the best bundle out there right now, OK? But the company annoys and outrages me again and again with its pesky political influence-peddling and censorship. If you're unfamiliar with the smarmy history of this legion of scumbags, check out some of Bruce Wagner's tales of censorship, the complaints of poor voice quality and poor customer service, and the company's packing of FCC hearings on net neutrality with paid lackeys.

The latest atrocity involves the censoring of a New Mexico activist emailing people about a rally regarding Israel's occupation of Gaza. Bob Anderson of Stop the War Machine was sending out rally notices Jan. 9 and found his outgoing mail service had been shut off. Bob tells us that "Comcast security says they sent a message about the shut down. But it never arrived here. I don't know when they might have sent it either. This means they must have sent it earlier than the shutdown ... Comcast said I had been reported to them as a spammer and was using Port 25 on their server which is a violation of some type. I should have been on Port 517, they said. I know nothing of what this means except the Comcast rep implied I had been improperly using a business port or some other port and not a residential port. This seemed hostile and a red herring answer. I asked from whom it was that they had a report to shut me down and they said that was proprietary information and they would not tell me ...

"I think a person should have the right to know who is doing this to their private email. I pay Comcast for the email service, they treat it like it is a privilege to email with them. Comcast is one of the telecom companies who have agreed to work secretly with Homeland Security in their interruption and surveillance of terrorists. The question is, does protected political dissent in this country constitute a terrorist activity? I am not a spammer, just a normal politically concerned American citizen concerned that my government is aiding and abetting a genocidal foreign policy in Palestine."

Bob's case is all too common. One thing that concerns me is that an active federal probe under a new administration would find plenty of wrongdoing by both the Bush administration and telecom service providers working with the FISA bypass. Judging by the front page of the Jan. 12 New York Times, Obama is not too thrilled to look into past wrongdoing.

Data Centers and Snooping

In two visits to the National Security Agency's British intelligence station at Menwith Hill over the last 12 years, the wonderful women at WoMenwith Hill have clued us in to the way the base is linked to Hunters Stone, a telephone switching center near Harrogate owned by BT plc (formerly British Telecom). The bulk of British inter-LATA phone calls could simply be sucked up by NSA wholesale. But Hunters Stone was designed for a time when voice circuit-switching still mattered.

For several years now, the NSA has claimed to have run out of storage space in the Maryland area, and had called for potential employees to sign up for a future "Storage Station Freedom" in Colorado. While those of us watching the watchers spent months trying to figure out whether such a facility might be near Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora or near the storage corridor on US 36 near Boulder, we failed to notice two things: City officials from San Antonio, Texas were going to Fort Meade to push for new NSA facilities to augment Medina Annex, a major North American crypto-training and listening post. And San Antonio was also lobbying Microsoft to bring a new data center to San Antonio, touting Texas' cheap electricity as a factor.

A new article from Greg Schwartz at San Antonio Current claims that NSA decided to locate a storage facility, probably the elusive "Freedom," at an abandoned Sony semiconductor plant not far from Medina. And the agency made its decision soon after Microsoft located a data center nearby.

These days, telephone switching centers represent the ancien regime. Most consumer data, including voice telephony, is carried using the Internet Protocol, and the aggregation centers of choice are the data centers performing routing, switching, and peering. These are the centers managed by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, located in nondescript buildings and using the amount of power of a small city. These data centers are now NSA's favorite neighbors for obvious reasons, and the Microsoft-NSA relationship in San Antonio is the type of thing we should expect to see in many cities, both within the U.S. and worldwide.

Intelligence Spending: Be Sure to Read the Fine Print

Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, said on Oct. 28 that Fiscal 2008's intelligence budget was $47.5 billion. But a Baltimore Sun article admitted that this does not include tactical military intelligence. Ten years ago, the TIARA Project (Tactical Intelligence And Related Activities) totaled more than $10 billion. This means the full U.S. intelligence budget exceeds $60 billion.

Another Associated Press article stated that DOD agencies consume 80 percent, or about $37 billion of the total that does not include tactical. Since National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency are less than $5 billion in size, this probably means the National Reconnaissance Office (nation's largest by budget) must be well above $10 billion, while the National Security Agency must be approaching, if not exceeding $10 billion. Feel safe yet?

NSA to Soldiers in Iraq: We've Got Your Datebook!

The good old National Security Agency is at it again. An ABC report on the night of Oct. 9 said that cryptanalysts had been listening in to U.S. soldiers in Iraq phoning home to loved ones. Honestly, for being Upper Echelon, these guys are pretty low-class.

Radomes Face Deflationary Pressures from Plowshares

Not all of the "God's golf balls" radomes used by technical intelligence agencies are quite as solid as they appear. In one of the more unique Plowshares actions of the last couple decades, religious peace activists in New Zealand used scythes to puncture and deflate one of the radomes at the Waihopai intelligence base, run by the Government Communications Security Bureau on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency.
Activists were in court May 5, and may face up to ten years in prison. It's a pity the puncture didn't cause the radome to fly around the New Zealand countryside backwards, making loud sputtering noises. And before neighbors of Menwith Hill in England or Buckley Field in Colorado get any ideas, most radomes have a buckminster-fulleresque frame structure that would not allow punctures. For more information on New Zealand's participation in the NSA's global Echelon intelligence program, see Nicky Hager's fantastic book, Secret Power.

Kaboom!

Got a problem with wayward spy satellites leaking hydrazine, revealing their own secrets, and leaving large parts of themselves all over the globe? The solution is simple: shoot down the suckers with the new improved Navy SM-3 missile, on board every Aegis cruiser involved in theatre missile defense! In advance of a Valentine's Day press conference at the Pentagon, the Associated Press reported that that the DoD already had decided to shoot down USA 193, an experimental satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office, before it falls to Earth in early March.

USA 193 was an experimental spy satellite, reportedly built by Lockheed-Martin and launched on a Delta-II rocket from Vandenberg AFB in December 2006. The New York Times cited specific problems with an imaging device on the satellite, but Jonathan's Space Report said that the satellite was meant to test several types of imagers, including radar, and that the satellite itself failed.

John Pike at Globalsecurity.org assumes the most important reason to shoot the satellite down is the toxic hydrazine used as a propellant. Security specialists wonder, since the satellite was intended for experimental sensors, if the intelligence agencies want the satellite destroyed before curious eyes can examine what's left of the payload. And critics of missile defense wonder if the whole show is just a way to promote the handy-dandy Aegis cruiser and its resident missile.

Warrantless Surveillance and the Lookalike Parties

To no one's surprise, the Senate completely caved in Feb. 12 and provided the White House and the National Security Agency everything it wanted in gutting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including full indemnity for phone companies that get conned into performing illegal surveillance. The New York Times was smart enough to realize that the big issue was not simply how much of FISA was destroyed, or to what extent carriers could parade their "get out of jail free" cards, but rather the degree to which cowed Democrats in both houses of Congress, even when in a majority position, give the president everything he wants so as not to look "soft on terrorism." As the Times article points out, this does not bode well for Guantanamo, waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, habeas corpus, or much of anything else in the Bush imperial presidency. It's nice to have two lookalike parties - note that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did not vote.

But Where is Intruder?

Philip Taubman did an impressive and gargantuan front-page piece (the size rarely seen in print any more) on the troubled National Reconnaissance Office in the Nov. 11 Sunday New York Times. The bulk of the piece was on the multi-billion-dollar optical spy satellite, Future Imagery Architecture, its cancellation, and Boeing's failures. Taubman tangentially mentioned NRO's problems with Misty (a stealth signals-intelligence satellite) and SBIRS (Space-Based Infrared Surveillance) as well. But there was a big gaping hole where Intruder and IOSA (Integrated Overhead SIGINT Architecture) should be. This is all the more unusual since Boeing was the prime contractor on IOSA and Intruder, as well.
NRO's biggest federal partner in space is the National Security Agency, and the two collaborate on satellites that listen in to communications from space, using unfurlable antennas as big as three football fields. Yet it seems that every time the major media talk about spy satellites and NRO's problems, the subject of signals intelligence remains off limits. C'mon, you guys, of course it's sensitive, but IOSA/Intruder was as big a boondoggle as FIA! Is anyone (besides NSA) listening?

Intelligence Agency Housing Bubble

I first got interested in Corporate Office Properties Trust when the Wall Street Journal identified the company as a virtual real-estate proprietary for the intelligence community, particularly the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. Not long after that, in the fall of 2006, COPT acquired several key pieces of real estate in the Colorado Springs area, conveniently close to military bases and large defense contractors. Now, the COPT logo is everywhere .... in Interquest in northern Colorado Springs....








In Patriot Park near Powers and Platte...










... and in the expansion of SI International off Powers Blvd. near Peterson AFB. Even when the rest of the real estate market is in a slump, it's nice to know the intelligence agencies are helping us recover from the subprime crisis.



SEPT. 14 ADDENDUM -- Thanks to Mark Lewis for pointing me to this Colorado Springs Gazette article on COPT winning a new city contract for developing a massive, military-oriented business park near the airport. COPT will be owning the durned city pretty soon...

Enhancing JTTF and Domestic Intelligence from Space

OK, I'll just cite the original Wall Street Journal article here on Department of Homeland Security getting access to spy-satellite intelligence, and refer you to my EE Times blog as to what this means re: different intelligence agencies have different rules for sharing info, they all operate from space, and who keeps Michael Chertoff's mitts off stuff he shouldn't have? Certainly not Alberto Gonzales -- or our president for that matter!

Here's why you should care: the Denver Police Intelligence Bureau's scandal in the late 1990s and early 2000s for reviving Red Squad-era dissident intelligence files, actually constituted precisely what former Attorney General John Ashcroft wanted local intelligence bureaus to do. And since Ashcroft asked the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to serve as liaisons for putting intelligence of questionable veracity into law-enforcement files, well, we can be sure this will escalate by a factor of ten now that Department of Homeland Security can gain access to intelligence from space. Don't look for FISA restrictions -- Congress has given Bush everything he wanted in FISA bypass, and then some. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Even Tom Has a Monica Problem

Friends and regular readers (all two of you) know that I have very little respect for New York Times punditmeister Thomas Friedman. He's been such an unabashed cheerleader for globalization and the possible good impacts of the Iraq War, he simply bashed all Seattle WTO protesters as stupid hippies, and regularly made fun of those who opposed the war before it started. Tom's been morphing slowly into an Iraq War critic, hardly surprising since he resembles that strange bird of the 1960s known as the Cold War (Pseudo)Liberal. In the May 16 NYT, Tom did a great column bringing together three threads: evangelism in government, problems in Paul Bremer's de-Baathification strategy, and the collapse of the Justice Department under the ethically-challenged Alberto Gonzales.
The centerpiece of the Bush administration "problem," as Friedman sees it, is exemplified by former Gonzales underling Monica Goodling (pictured above). Goodling, one of the first to leave Justice after the U.S. prosecutor scandal began, supposedly ran a regular vetting operation for Gonzales in which she weeded out potential Democrats and insufficiently-Christian candidates from the U.S. attorney stable. As Friedman says, the similarities to the 2003-4 efforts to purge the Iraqi government of Baathists is only too clear.

On the one hand, I see a useful purpose in continuing to hound Goodling even after she has left the White House, since she exemplifies everything that is wrong with the way the Bush cabinet works. But let's not lose sight of two bigger goals: First, Paul Bremer, though long out of office, should be excoriated with equal fervor for the nasty way he ran the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Second and more important, Monica's former boss is still in office, and Bush is implying that, unlike the type of soft exit that might be envisioned for Paul Wolfowitz, the president will not let go of Alberto Gonzales unless and until he is impeached. With all the evidence of criminal behavior before them, capped off by recent revelations of forcing an NSA monitoring program on a very sick John Ashcroft, members of Congress have plenty of ammunition to justify taking Gonzales out of the Justice Department and into a prison cell.