Ramanisblog

Tag: NSA

  • How NSA Listened 540 Million Calls A Month

    Edward Snowden , as we are all aware,leaked information on How NSA spied on US citizens and Foreign Governments.

    Most , in fact all the taps are illegal as no wiretap can be done with out a warrant and there is evidence of warrant having been issued.

    The German Daily Der Spiegel did a cover story on how the NSA tapped the West Germans including its Chancellor Angela Merkel.

    A report states that NSA has possibly listened  to 380 million calls in the US and 60 Millions in Spain!

    NSA Listens illegally
    NSA Files

    No information is safe!

    Number of Calls listened to by NSA.

    2 November 2013

    Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 16:48:15 -0700 (PDT)
    From: xxxxx[at]efn.org
    To: cryptome[at]earthlink.net
    Subject: Correcting the US figure

    It seems that Greenwald already listed the US DNR total, and since he is looking at better images than I am (I am reading the Hindu’s images), I’m inclined to take his total. (though not the interpretation of it, I’ve gone into the reasons enough times)

    “There are no precise figures, but last January Brazil was just behind the United States, which had 2.3 billion phone calls and messages spied.”

    I have a US aggregate figure from Le Monde (3,095,533,478), Greenwald’s rounded DNR figure from O Globo (2,300,000,000), which leaves the approximate US DNI total to be (795,533,478)

    The revised DNR figures:

    Pakistan: 12.76 billion
    Afghanistan: 21.98 billion
    India: 6.28 billion
    Iraq: 7.8 billion? (blurry image)
    Saudi Arabia: 7.8 billion ? (blurry image)
    United States: 2.3 billion
    Egypt: 1.9 billion ? (blurry image)
    Iran: 1.73 billion
    Jordan: 1.6 billion
    Germany: 361 million
    France: 70.2 million
    Spain: 61 million
    Italy: 46 million
    Netherlands: 1.8 million
    The rest of the world: Lots and Lots

    Total: 124.8 billion.Dec 20, 2013.

    Revised fig. in the Image.

    It looks to me a lot like the Le Monde stories will follow the path of the Brazilian and Indian stories. It has occurred to me that this same story can also be told for many, many other countries: der Spiegel has already published BOUNDLESSINFORMANT graphs for the following: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. If we take careful measurements of these graphs, and work out the appropriate scaling, we can determine how many telephone metadata records we have in each of these countries over the same 30 day period (DNR). The accuracy will be plus or minus 1 pixel, scaled appropriately. I have enclosed my chart.

    The bottom Line:

    Germany: 361 Million
    France: 70 Million
    Spain: 61 Million
    Italy: 46 Million
    Netherlands: 1.8 Million

    Total: 539.8 Million

    NSA Listens.
    NSA Listening details.
    “

    Merkel has nothing to fear domestically from the recent turn of affairs. The election is over, the conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats are already in official negotiations toward forming a new government. No one wants to poison the atmosphere with mutual accusation.

    Nevertheless, Merkel must now answer the question of how much she is willing to tolerate from her American allies.

    Posing as Diplomats

    A “top secret” classified NSA document from the year 2010 shows that a unit known as the “Special Collection Service” (SCS) is operational in Berlin, among other locations. It is an elite corps run in concert by the US intelligence agencies NSA and CIA.

    The secret list reveals that its agents are active worldwide in around 80 locations, 19 of which are in Europe — cities such as Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague and Geneva. The SCS maintains two bases in Germany, one in Berlin and another in Frankfurt. That alone is unusual. But in addition, both German bases are equipped at the highest level and staffed with active personnel.

    The SCS teams predominantly work undercover in shielded areas of the American Embassy and Consulate, where they are officially accredited as diplomats and as such enjoy special privileges. Under diplomatic protection, they are able to look and listen unhindered. They just can’t get caught.

    Wiretapping from an embassy is illegal in nearly every country. But that is precisely the task of the SCS, as is evidenced by another secret document. According to the document, the SCS operates its own sophisticated listening devices with which they can intercept virtually every popular method of communication: cellular signals, wireless networks and satellite communication.

    The necessary equipment is usually installed on the upper floors of the embassy buildings or on rooftops where the technology is covered with screens or Potemkin-like structures that protect it from prying eyes.

    That is apparently the case in Berlin, as well. SPIEGEL asked British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell to appraise the setup at the embassy. In 1976, Campbell uncovered the existence of the British intelligence service GCHQ. In his so-called “Echelon Report” in 1999, he described for the European Parliament the existence of the global surveillance network of the same name.

    Campbell refers to window-like indentations on the roof of the US Embassy. They are not glazed but rather veneered with “dielectric” material and are painted to blend into the surrounding masonry. This material is permeable even by weak radio signals. The interception technology is located behind these radio-transparent screens, says Campbell. The offices of SCS agents would most likely be located in the same windowless attic.

    No Comment from the NSA

    This would correspond to internal NSA documents seen by SPIEGEL. They show, for example, an SCS office in another US embassy — a small windowless room full of cables with a work station of “signal processing racks” containing dozens of plug-in units for “signal analysis.”

    Sources.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-nsa-spied-on-merkel-cell-phone-from-berlin-embassy-a-930205.html

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files+content/document

    http://cryptome.org/2013/10/nsa-125b-calls.htm

    http://www.eturbonews.com/40967/wikileaks-documentary-videos-top-secret-interesting-and-fascinat

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  • Secret US Intelligence Community Not Accountable,Details

    There is furor over NSA’s eavesdropping and the latest fact that France is livid with the US for listening in to about million Calls.

    We know CIA,FBI, Home Land Security, NIA and may be another five or ten visible Intelligence Communities of The US.

    Dana Priest.
    Dana Priest who exposed the Secret Intelligence Community in US.

    But not this one.

    You would find, towards the end of the post , a Video on  Secret White House Bank Account.

    And this information is through Washington Times Advertisers and I am sure the Newspaper has published verified information.

    While checking on this, I stumbled into the Intelligence Community.

    “Dear Washington Times Reader,

    You have to see this…

    A colleague of mine has stumbled onto some rather intriguing research.

    In short, it’s an account almost no one in the country has ever heard about. By one expert’s estimate, only 0.07% of Americans (one in 1,500) has one of these private accounts.

    But the rich have long favored this idea…

    President Roosevelt, for example, had an account.

    So did Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, JFK, and even current Vice President Joe Biden.

    John McCain at one time even held over $1,000,000 inside his own account!

    What’s so special about this account? Well, for one, it can let you retire 100% tax-free. You can pass it along to your heirs without paying a dime to the IRS. It also grows your money 3-4 times faster than standard CDs… and, to top it off, you can access your money ANYTIME!

    But here’s perhaps the best part: This account is available to nearly anyone… regardless of how much money you have or even if you don’t have any political connections!

    My colleague literally invested over $100,000 of his own money into this idea once he was convinced of how good it was.”

    About three years ago. Washington Post‘s Reporter,Pulitzer Prize Winner, Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and William Arkin wrote that they found “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” After nine years of “unprecedented spending,” the intelligence community has become a sector of government so massive that oversight is next to impossible and that it is of questionable benefit to the United States’ security.

    That there is even a behemoth of an Intelligence Group is tucked away behind the Public eye.

    This Intelligence community is managed by ,

    ,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the country.

    — An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

    — In the Washington area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work have been built or are under construction since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

    Worse is that it is not accountable to any one nobody knows how much Budget is allocated to it!

    Interview with Dana Priest excerpts.

    ‘A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post Priest is the author, along with William Arkin, of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Here she takes FRONTLINE through the rapid growth of Top Secret America, which began with an impulse to secrecy and a blank check from Congress in the days after 9/11, and which now employs nearly a million people at 1,900 private companies and 1,300 federal organizations. “These are gigantic edifices that are going to stay,” she says. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on June 18, 2011.

     

    I just think that we have accepted what it is the government says we need to do without questioning how much money it costs, without questioning whether it’s effective or not. And in part we’ve done that because we’ve accepted the secrecy that surrounds it all.

    ..

    The reaction in Congress, which becomes so important in our story, is they really wrote a blank check. … The money flowed out. And there weren’t very many constraints on it at all. There definitely wasn’t any sort of oversight of what was going on with the money, because, again, people were worried. …

    And so George Bush, for example, gave the CIA a billion dollars right off the bat, because the CIA was in the best position, not the military, to go after bin Laden and his followers in Afghanistan. And he gave them a billion dollars, and he also ordered the military to do whatever it took to support the CIA. …

    They did the same thing with the NSA. Lots of money poured into the National Security Agency, which was the eavesdropper around the world. And they couldn’t grow fast enough. Not only were they asked to eavesdrop in many different places that they weren’t used to doing — not just capitals and not just leaders of countries, which is really what they were doing, mostly, prior to 9/11. They would want to know what a leader was saying or what an opposition group was saying. And they would report those conversations back.

    Source:

    http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/19/top-secret-america-washington-post-unmasks-unwieldy-security/

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/topsecretamerica/dana-priest-top-secret-america-is-here-to-stay/

    The White House’s Secret Account video Link.

    http://pros.palmbeachletter.com/1309PBLIFL495LEGPN/LPBLPA64/?h=true

    The President’s Secret Book.

     

     

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  • US Bugs Indian Embassy Compromises Security

    Indian Embassy Washington DC.
    In another disclosure, the Guardian said the NSA took measures to intercept communication from 38 Embassies including Indian Embassy in Washington. A file photo. The Hindu.

    There has been a furor over Snowdon revelations on NSA snooping all and sundry.

    But the Indian Embassy probably was busy attending cocktail circuits, while the NSA merrily  bugged the Indian embassy in Washington DC, with bugs capable of copying the entire hard Drive of Computers,let alone conversations!

    At the political level there is nobody to take care of these small issues as they are busy drafting legislation to save tainted, jailed MPs,Ministers.

    Story;

    According to the 2010 COMINT (communication intelligence) document about “Close Access SIGADs”, the offices of Indian diplomats and high-ranking military officials stationed at these important posts were targets of four different kinds of electronic snooping devices:

    Lifesaver, which facilitates imaging of the hard drive of computers

    Highlands, which makes digital collection from implants

    Vagrant, which collects data of open computer screens, and

    Magnetic, which is a collection of digital signals

    All the Indian “targets” in the list are marked with an asterisk, which, according to the document, means that they “have either been dropped or are slated to be dropped in the near future.” The NSA document doesn’t say when and how the bugs were implanted or how much of data was lifted from Indian offices, but all of them were on the “target” list for more than one type of data collection bugs.

    Asked by The Hindu, why India’s U.N. mission and embassy, which clearly pose no terrorism threat to the U.S., were targeted by the NSA, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The U.S. government will respond through diplomatic channels to our partners and allies. While we are not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity, as a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. We value our cooperation with all countries on issues of mutual concern.”

     

    But the spokesman didn’t answer The Hindu’s specific questions about why the top-secret document about spying on Indian missions shouldn’t be revealed or “reproduced by this newspaper in full or part”…

    The Indian mission to the UN has so far not reacted to either the reports of snooping on foreign missions nor to The Hindu’s queries sent to its office in New York, but the embassy officials have discussed the issue with their American counterparts. “Our government has expressed concerns over the reports of monitoring of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. by U.S. agencies, and the Embassy in Washington D.C. has raised these concerns with the U.S. government,” said an embassy official in an email repose to The Hindu’s queries, without elaborating at what level and in which meeting the issue was raised or what was the response of American officials.

    Source:

    http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/nsa-planted-bugs-at-indian-missions-in-dc-un/article5164944.ece

  • How NSA Listens To Your Information

    Imge,.annotated-img img { margin-left: 145px !important; position: relative;
    Analyzing information collected from private companies
    After communications information is acquired, the data are processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and “digital network information” that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets.
    Source Washington Post.

    The Washington Post obtained  The Classified Slides of  the NSA, which details the mode of collecting information..

    This is in addition to the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency.This issue is rocking the US, courtesy Snowden.

    But the modes described are yet to be addressed..

    Story:

    One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies, which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month. The slide also shows a separate category labeled “Upstream,” described as accessing “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”..

    The interaction between Upstream and PRISM — which could be considered “downstream” collection because the data are already processed by tech companies — is not entirely clear from the slide. In addition, its description of PRISM as “collection directly from the servers” of technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook has been disputed by many of the companies involved. (They say access to user data is legal and limited.)

    However PRISM works, the NSA slide makes clear that the two collection methods operate in parallel, instructing analysts that “You Should Use Both.” Arrows point to both “Upstream” and “PRISM.”

    Source:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide-you-havent-seen/2013/07/10/32801426-e8e6-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html

    ”

    A Brazilian newspaper on Tuesday published an article it said is based on documents provided by the former American contractor Edward Snowden asserting that the United States has been collecting data on telephone calls and e-mails from several countries in Latin America, including important allies such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

    The paper, O Globo, based in Rio de Janeiro, says the documents show the National Security Agency amassed military and security data on countries such as Venezuela, an American adversary that has been accused of aiding Colombia’s Marxist rebels and maintaining close ties with Iran. But the documents also show that the agency carried out surveillance operations to unearth inside commercial information on the oil industry in Venezuela and the energy sector in Mexico, which is under state control and essentially closed to foreign investment.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/paper-reveals-nsa-ops-in-latin-america/2013/07/09/eff0cc7e-e8e3-11e2-818e-aa29e855f3ab_story.html

  • Hacker Army Of NSA US

    While the US has been raising a hue and cry about Chinese hacking, obviously with the Chinese Government‘s Blessings, it hs come out  in the open , not that it was not known before but not to this extent, that the National Security Agency(NSA),US, not only has a Data Mining Center  but an army of dedicated Personnel for Hacking!

    NSA,US.
    National Security Agency,Fort Meade,USA

    Claims and Counterclaims on this subject were tossed around when ‘This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China’s newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour — cyber-espionage — a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining.

    Story:

    When the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources, the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics to be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to dominate the discussions.

    Then, two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of China’s widespread use of computer hacking to steal U.S. government, military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in Washington who spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting’s agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing about it.

    So the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and have alleged that Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a front-page Washington Post article, which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese government’s top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back that Beijing possessed “mountains of data” showing that the United States has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government secrets. This weekend’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA undercover operative named Edward J. Snowden, who is now living in Hong Kong, only add fuel to Beijing’s position….

    Hidden away inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, in a large suite of offices segregated from the rest of the agency, TAO is a mystery to many NSA employees. Relatively few NSA officials have complete access to information about TAO because of the extraordinary sensitivity of its operations, and it requires a special security clearance to gain access to the unit’s work spaces inside the NSA operations complex. The door leading to its ultramodern operations center is protected by armed guards, an imposing steel door that can only be entered by entering the correct six-digit code into a keypad, and a retinal scanner to ensure that only those individuals specially cleared for access get through the door.

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_nsa_s_ultra_secret_china_hacking_group