Barrett Garese

After Classified Briefing Lawmaker Says NSA Revelations Are Only 'The Tip Of The Iceberg'

Sanchez said that what lawmakers learned ”is significantly more than what is out in the media today,” which is interesting when considering previous reports by journalists and whistleblowers.

Here’s a rundown of the reports and the allegations:

• In 2006 NSA insiders told Leslie Cauley of USA Today that the NSA has been collecting almost all U.S. phone records since shortly after 9/11.
• In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin of The Washington Post reported that “collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications” every day.
• According to a 2007 lawsuit, Verizon built a fiber optic cable to give the “access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center.”
• In April 2012 Wired’s James Bamford reported how the U.S. government hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap AT&T.
• AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered the “secret room” at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively “vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that “much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.”
• Former NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake testified that the NSA is using Israeli-made hardware to “seize and save all personal electronic communications.”
• A classified program called Prism, leaked by Snowden, appears to acquire information from the servers of nine of the biggest internet companies. The Washington Post reported that the government’s orders “serve as one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year.”
• NSA Whistleblower William Binney that the NSA began using the program he built (i.e. ThinThread) to use communications data for creating, in real time, profiles of nearly all Americans so that the government is “able to monitor what people are doing” and who they are doing it with.
• In July the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), established to “hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance,” found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures “on at least one occasion.”
• BONUS: In March CIA Chief Technology Officer Ira “Gus” Hunt said: “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information.”

If there is “significantly more” to the NSA’s domestic snooping, then we’re all ears and eyes.

I guess the only good thing that’s come from this whole NSA issue is that those of us who read and repeated that “the NSA has been aggregating and monitoring all internet traffic using AT&T and Verizon fiber splits since about 2006” look a lot less crazy. I mean, it was always accurate information - it’s been widely reported and well sourced for almost a decade, as the above demonstrates - but now it seems a lot more people are finally paying attention to the implications.

What did you think a $4 Billion, 65 Megawatt-powered, data storage and analysis installation in Utah was being used for? Bitcoin mining?