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• Security and intelligence They know much more than you think. James Bamford, New York Review of Books, 15 August 2013, pp. 10.

Security and intelligence They know much more than you think. James Bamford, New York Review of Books, 15 August 2013, pp. 10.

01 February 2014

Bamford, the author of the first major work on the National Security Agency (NSA), The Puzzle Palace (1982), takes a look at what the government has been telling the public about the agency’s surveillance activities over the years, and compares it with what we know as a result of the information released by former NSA contract employee and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, and others. Bamford starts with the “Black Chamber” (the NSA’s earliest predecessor), and goes on to document the “secret illegal agreements with the telecom companies to gain access to communications” until the 1978 introduction of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). FISA and FISC required the NSA to get judicial approval for eavesdropping on US citizens (although the courts seldom turned requests for a warrant down). This was dropped by George W. Bush after 11 September 2001, despite the administration telling the public the opposite. When the president’s position was exposed, rather than strengthen the controls governing the NSA, Congress voted to weaken them. The NSA’s powers were expanded under Obama and the agency continued to deceive the population about the extent of its spying: “Snowden’s documents and statements add greatly to an understanding of just how the NSA goes about conducting its eavesdropping and data-mining programs, and just how deceptive the NSA and the Obama administration have been in describing the agency’s activities to the American public.” Bamford then discusses the UPSTREAM cable-tapping operation, which captures 80% of “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past” and is considered “far more secret and far more invasive than the PRISM program revealed by Snowden.” Whereas PRISM gives the NSA access to data from individual internet companies, through UPSTREAM the agency gets “direct access to fibre-optic cables and the supporting infrastructure that carries nearly all the Internet and telephone traffic in the country.”

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Inside GCHQ: how the US pays Britain’s spy agency £100m for a very special relationship. Nick Hopkins and Julian Borger, The Guardian, 1 August 2013.
This article examines top secret US government payments to the UK spy agency GCHQ “to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes” as revealed by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Snowden has commented on the “close” relationship between the NSA and GCHQ (“They are worse than the US”) but British government ministers have denied that GCHQ carries out the NSA’s “dirty work.” Snowden further alleges that the organisations have been “jointly responsible for developing techniques that allow the mass harvesting of internet traffic.” Hopkins and Borger highlight the following points: GCHQ is “pouring money” into gathering personal information from mobiles and apps; GCHQ staff have expressed concerns at the “morality and ethics” of their work; the amount of personal data from internet and mobile traffic has increased by 7000% in the past 5 years; and China and Russia are blamed for most cyber attacks on the UK.

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