Going to check each of those wiki pages and was like.. oh wait, there was a bit more data to go, off this guy. Who were these couple other guys he mentions besides Snowden. Never heard of them. I ask bing AI. lol.
Generating answers for you…
Edward Snowden, Mark Klein, and William Binney are all whistleblowers who exposed the global surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its partners12
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents in 2013, revealing the extent of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, such as PRISM and XKeyscore. He is currently living in Russia, where he was granted asylum13
Mark Klein
Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician who disclosed in 2006 that AT&T had installed secret equipment to allow the NSA to monitor, capture, and process American telecommunications en masse. He provided evidence of the NSA’s collaboration with major telecom companies in the US12
William Binney
William Binney is a former NSA analyst and technical director who resigned in 2001, after becoming disillusioned with the agency’s data collection policies. He was the co-founder of a unit that developed a program called ThinThread, which was designed to protect the privacy of American citizens while analyzing signals intelligence. He later became a vocal critic of the NSA’s domestic spying and accused the agency of wasting billions of dollars on ineffective programs124
These whistleblowers have raised public awareness and sparked debates about the legality, morality, and implications of global surveillance. They have also faced legal repercussions, harassment, and threats for their actions1234
oh, we got a new tidbit that guy didn't mention.
Too much text to paste it all.. I'll just get the start.
XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.[1]
In July 2013, Edward Snowden publicly revealed the program's purpose and use by the NSA in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it was mentioned in earlier articles, and, like many other code names, it appears in job postings and online résumés of employees.[2][3]
On July 3, 2014, German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD, published excerpts of XKeyscore's source code.[4] A team of experts analyzed the source code.[5]
Scope and functioning
Part of a series on
Global surveillance
Disclosures
OriginsPre-20132013–presentReactions
Systems
XKeyscorePRISMECHELONCarnivoreDishfireStone GhostTemporaFrenchelonFairviewMYSTICDCSNBoundless InformantBullrunPinwaleStingraySORMRAMPART-AMastering the InternetJindalee Operational Radar Network
Agencies
NSAR&AWCSEBNDCNIASIODGSEFive EyesFSBMSSGCHQ
Places
The DoughnutFort MeadeMenwith HillPine GapSouthern Cross CableUtah Data CenterBad Aibling StationDagger ComplexGCHQ Bude
Laws
Five Eyes UKUSA AgreementLustreU.S. USA Freedom ActFISA amendmentsEU Data Retention DirectiveData Protection DirectiveGDPRChina National Intelligence LawCybersecurity LawUK Investigatory Powers Act 2016
Proposed changes
U.S. FISA Improvements ActOther proposals
Concepts
Mass surveillanceCulture of fearSecure communicationSIGINTCall detail recordSurveillance issues in smart cities
Related topics
EspionageIntelligence agencyCryptography TorVPNsTLSHuman rights PrivacyLibertySatellitesStop Watching UsNothing to hide argument
vte
XKeyscore is a complicated system, and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald explained XKeyscore as being a system which enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has said that usage of the system is limited and restricted.
According to The Washington Post and national security reporter Marc Ambinder, XKeyscore is an NSA data-retrieval system which consists of a series of user interfaces, backend databases, servers and software that selects certain types of data and metadata that the NSA has already collected using other methods.[6][7]
According to Snowden and Greenwald
On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in its TV interview: "What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?" and he answered:[1]
You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you're tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It's a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let's say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what's called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.
According to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, low-level NSA analysts can, via systems like XKeyscore, "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."[8]
He added that the NSA's database of collected communications allows its analysts to listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future".[8]
Where'd I see this.. checking that guy's profile who wrote the other thread. Was going through the comments of his post:
"Three years ago (October 2020), months before the rollout) the FDA somehow knew about a pretty comprehensive list of the vaccine symptoms we’ve been experiencing since it’s release. Most of which still denied. Not only is it still on the market, it’s back with even less testing this time."
Any reports of the Covid vaccine causing pregnancy? Maybe it'd be like if they're having sex and on birth control. I don't know.. but what if they're not even having sex and wind up pregnant. lol.. Never heard of this angle, or even thought of it. These guys could probably do that with this nano technology.
All we got with this guy here is those 4 other wiki pages he said before.
"Stellar Wind" (or "Stellarwind"[citation needed]) was the code name of a warrantless surveillance program begun under the George W. Bush administration's President's Surveillance Program (PSP).[1] The National Security Agency (NSA) program was approved by President Bush shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks and was revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times in 2004.[2][3] Stellar Wind was a prelude to new legal structures that allowed President Bush and President Barack Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.[4]
Program scope
The program's activities involved data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, telephone conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity.[3] William Binney, a retired technical leader with the NSA, discussed some of the architectural and operational elements of the program at the 2012 Chaos Communication Congress.[5]
The intelligence community also was able to obtain from the U.S. Treasury Department suspicious activity reports, or "SARS", which are reports of activities such as large cash transactions that are submitted by financial institutions under anti-money laundering rules.[3]
There were internal disputes within the U.S. Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants.[6][7] During the Bush administration, the Stellar Wind cases were referred to by FBI agents as "pizza cases" because many seemingly suspicious cases turned out to be food takeout orders. According to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, approximately 99% of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about".[2]
2004 conflict
From a report by the inspectors general of six US intelligence agencies that was declassified in September 2015, it became clear that President Bush had originally authorized the collection of telephone and e-mail metadata only if one end of the communications was foreign or when there was a link to terrorism. But in 2004, the Justice Department discovered that the NSA was apparently also collecting the metadata of purely domestic communications, after which President Bush declared that NSA had always been allowed to do so, but that analysts were only allowed to look at metadata related to terrorism. With this revised formulation, Bush reauthorized the program on March 11, 2004.[8]
In 2004, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jack Landman Goldsmith, wrote at least two legal memos authorizing the program, "We conclude only that when the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief ... that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the wiretapping capabilities of the National Security Agency within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority" to order warrantless wiretapping—"an authority that Congress cannot curtail", Goldsmith wrote in a 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004. In March 2004, the OLC concluded the e-mail program was not legal, and then-Acting Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize it.[9]
Revelations
In March 2012, Wired magazine published "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" talking about a vast new NSA facility in Utah and said, "For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellarwind, in detail", naming the official William Binney, a former NSA code breaker. Binney went on to say that the NSA had highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.[10] The article suggested that the supposedly-terminated Stellar Wind continues as an active program. This conclusion was supported by the exposure of Room 641A in AT&T's operations center in San Francisco in 2006.[11]
In June 2013, the Washington Post and the Guardian published an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) draft report, dated March 2009, leaked by Edward Snowden detailing the Stellar Wind program.[1][12] No doubt remained about the continuing nature of the surveillance program.
In September 2014, The New York Times asserted, "Questions persist after the release of a newly declassified version of a legal memo approving the National Security Agency's Stellarwind program, a set of warrantless surveillance and data collection activities secretly authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." as an introductory headline summary with a link. The accompanying article addressed the release of a newly declassified version of the May 2004 memo.[13][14][15] Note was made that the bulk of the program—the telephone, Internet, and e-mail surveillance of American citizens—remained secret until the revelations by Edward Snowden, that to date, significant portions of the memo remain redacted in the newly released version, and that doubts and questions about its legality persist.[14][15]
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.[1][2]
Description
Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 14.6 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.[1] It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic.[3] In the analysis of J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, it has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic."[4]
The existence of the room was revealed by former AT&T technician Mark Klein and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T.[5] Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.[6]
Room 641A and the controversies surrounding it were subjects of an episode of Frontline,[7] the current affairs documentary program on PBS. It was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS Nova episode "The Spy Factory".
Lawsuits
Main article: Hepting v. AT&T
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecommunication company of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. On July 20, 2006, a federal judge denied the government's and AT&T's motions to dismiss the case, chiefly on the ground of the state secrets privilege, allowing the lawsuit to go forward. On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.[8]
A different case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation was filed on September 18, 2008, titled Jewel v. NSA. After many years of litigation, on April 25, 2019, ruling from the Northern District of California for Jewel v. NSA[9] concluded that the evidence presented by the plaintiff's experts was insufficient; "the Court confirms its earlier finding that Klein cannot establish the content, function, or purpose of the secure room at the AT&T site based on his own independent knowledge." The ruling noted, "Klein can only speculate about what data were actually processed and by whom in the secure room and how and for what purpose, as he was never involved in its operation." The Court further went on to discredit other experts called upon, citing their heavy reliance on the Klein declaration.
In the Spring of 2006, over 50 other lawsuits were filed against various telecommunications companies, in response to the article.[10]
There has been speculation that several rooms similar to this exist all over the United States.[11][12]
This one's pretty long.. not going to paste it all.
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.[1][2][3] The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN.[4][5] PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6] Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier,[7][8] and to get data that is easier to handle.[9]
PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration.[10][11] The program is operated under the supervision of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).[12] Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities.[13] The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division and PRISM partners in the millions of dollars.[14]
Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports", and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702 authority."[15][16] The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.[17][18]
U.S. government officials have disputed criticisms of PRISM in the Guardian and Washington Post articles and have defended the program, asserting that it cannot be used on domestic targets without a warrant. Additionally claiming the program has helped to prevent acts of terrorism, and that it receives independent oversight from the federal government's executive, judicial and legislative branches.[19][20] On June 19, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama, during a visit to Germany, stated that the NSA's data gathering practices constitute "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people."[21]
Media disclosure of PRISM
Further information: Global surveillance disclosure
Edward Snowden publicly revealed the existence of PRISM through a series of classified documents leaked to journalists of The Washington Post and The Guardian while Snowden, who was an NSA contractor at the time, was visiting Hong Kong.[1][2] The leaked documents included 41 PowerPoint slides, four of which were published in news articles.[1][2]
The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.[22] The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft".[1]
The slide presentation stated that much of the world's electronic communications pass through the U.S., because electronic communications data tend to follow the least expensive route rather than the most physically direct route, and the bulk of the world's internet infrastructure is based in the United States.[15] The presentation noted that these facts provide United States intelligence analysts with opportunities for intercepting the communications of foreign targets as their electronic data pass into or through the United States.[2][15]
Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data[23] – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true[24] – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",[13] and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications",[13] with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty.[25][26][27]
railblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program intended to develop a capability to analyze data carried on communications networks like the Internet. It was intended to track entities using communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail.[1][2]
NSA employees J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staff Diane Roark complained to the Department of Defense's Inspector General (IG) about waste, fraud, and abuse in the program, and the fact that a successful operating prototype existed. The complaint was accepted by the IG and an investigation began that lasted until mid-2005 when the final results were issued. The results were largely hidden, as the report given to the public was heavily (90%) redacted, while the original report was heavily classified, thus restricting the ability of most people to see it.
The people who filed the IG complaint were later raided by armed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. While the U.S. government threatened to prosecute all who signed the IG report, it ultimately chose to pursue an NSA Senior Executive Thomas Andrews Drake who helped with the report internally to NSA and who had spoken with a reporter about the project. Drake was later charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. His defenders claimed this was retaliation.[3][4] The charges against him were later dropped, and he agreed to plead guilty to having committed a misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, something that Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, which helped represent him, called an "act of civil disobedience".[5]
Background
Trailblazer was chosen over a similar program named ThinThread, a less costly project which had been designed with built-in privacy protections for United States citizens.[3][4] Trailblazer was later linked to the NSA electronic surveillance program and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.[3]
In 2002, a consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was chosen by the NSA to produce a technology demonstration platform in a contract worth $280 million. Project participants included Boeing, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The project was overseen by NSA Deputy Director William B. Black, Jr., an NSA worker who had gone to SAIC, and then been re-hired back to NSA by NSA director Michael Hayden in 2000.[6][7][8] SAIC had also hired a former NSA director to its management: Bobby Inman.[9] SAIC also participated in the concept definition phase of Trailblazer.[10][11]
Redacted version of the DoD Inspector General audit, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Project on Government Oversight and others.[5][12]
The NSA Inspector General issued a report on Trailblazer that "discussed improperly based contract cost increases, non-conformance in the management of the Statement of Work, and excessive labor rates for contractor personnel."[13]
In 2004 the DoD IG report criticized the program (see the Whistleblowing section below). It said that the "NSA 'disregarded solutions to urgent national security needs'" and "that TRAILBLAZER was poorly executed and overly expensive..." Several contractors for the project were worried about cooperating with DoD's audit for fear of "management reprisal." The Director of NSA "nonconcurred" with several statements in the IG audit, and the report contains a discussion of those disagreements.[14]
In 2005, NSA director Michael Hayden told a Senate hearing that the Trailblazer program was several hundred million dollars over budget and years behind schedule.[15] In 2006 the program was shut down[3] after having cost billions of US Dollars.[16] Several anonymous NSA sources told Newsweek later on that the project was a "wasteful failure".[17]
The new project replacing Trailblazer is called Turbulence.[3]
Whistleblowing
According to a 2011 New Yorker article, in the early days of the project several NSA employees met with Diane S Roark, an NSA budget expert on the House Intelligence Committee. They aired their grievances about Trailblazer. In response, NSA director Michael Hayden sent out a memo saying that "individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow... Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform N.S.A., and I cannot tolerate them."[3]
In September 2002, several people filed a complaint with the Department of Defense IG's office regarding problems with Trailblazer: they included Roark (aforementioned), as well as ex-NSA senior analysts Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Senior Computer Systems Analyst Ed Loomis, who had all quit the agency over concerns about its mismanagement of acquisition and allegedly illegal domestic spying.[3][18][19] A major source for the report was NSA senior officer Thomas Andrews Drake. Drake had been complaining to his superiors for some time about problems at the agency, and about the superiority of ThinThread over Trailblazer, for example, at protecting privacy.[19] Drake gave info to DoD during its investigation of the matter.[19] Roark also went to her boss at the House committee, Porter Goss, about problems, but was rebuffed.[20] She also attempted to contact William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court Chief Justice at the time.[19]
Drake's own boss, Maureen Baginski, the third-highest officer at NSA, quit partly over concerns about the legality of its behavior.[3]
In 2003, the NSA IG (not the DoD IG)[19] had declared Trailblazer an expensive failure.[15] It had cost more than $1 billion.[8][21][22]
In 2005, the DoD IG produced a report on the result of its investigation of the complaint of Roark and the others in 2002. This report was not released to the public, but it has been described as very negative.[18] Jane Mayer writes that it hastened the closure of Trailblazer, which was at the time in trouble from Congress for being over budget.[3]
In November 2005, Drake contacted Siobhan Gorman, a reporter of The Baltimore Sun.[17][23][24] Gorman wrote several articles about problems at the NSA, including articles on Trailblazer. This series got her an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.[17]
In 2005, President George W. Bush ordered the FBI to find whoever had disclosed information about the NSA electronic surveillance program and its disclosure in the New York Times. Eventually, this investigation led to the people who had filed the 2002 DoD IG request, even though they had nothing to do with the New York Times disclosure. In 2007, the houses of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe were raided by armed FBI agents. According to Mayer, Binney claims the FBI pointed guns at his head and that of his wife. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union.[3][18] None of these people were ever charged with any crime. Four months later, Drake was raided in November 2007 and his computers and documents were confiscated.
In 2010 Drake was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of obstructing justice, providing false information, and violating the Espionage Act of 1917,[17][25][26] part of President Barack Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leakers".[17][18][23][27] The government tried to get Roark to testify to a conspiracy, and made similar requests to Drake, offering him a plea bargain. They both refused.[3]
In June 2011, the ten original charges against Drake were dropped; instead he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.[5]
Going to check each of those wiki pages and was like.. oh wait, there was a bit more data to go, off this guy. Who were these couple other guys he mentions besides Snowden. Never heard of them. I ask bing AI. lol.
Generating answers for you…
Edward Snowden, Mark Klein, and William Binney are all whistleblowers who exposed the global surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its partners12
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents in 2013, revealing the extent of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, such as PRISM and XKeyscore. He is currently living in Russia, where he was granted asylum13
Mark Klein
Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician who disclosed in 2006 that AT&T had installed secret equipment to allow the NSA to monitor, capture, and process American telecommunications en masse. He provided evidence of the NSA’s collaboration with major telecom companies in the US12
William Binney
William Binney is a former NSA analyst and technical director who resigned in 2001, after becoming disillusioned with the agency’s data collection policies. He was the co-founder of a unit that developed a program called ThinThread, which was designed to protect the privacy of American citizens while analyzing signals intelligence. He later became a vocal critic of the NSA’s domestic spying and accused the agency of wasting billions of dollars on ineffective programs124 These whistleblowers have raised public awareness and sparked debates about the legality, morality, and implications of global surveillance. They have also faced legal repercussions, harassment, and threats for their actions1234
oh, we got a new tidbit that guy didn't mention.
Too much text to paste it all.. I'll just get the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.[1]
In July 2013, Edward Snowden publicly revealed the program's purpose and use by the NSA in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it was mentioned in earlier articles, and, like many other code names, it appears in job postings and online résumés of employees.[2][3]
On July 3, 2014, German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD, published excerpts of XKeyscore's source code.[4] A team of experts analyzed the source code.[5]
Scope and functioning Part of a series on Global surveillance
Disclosures OriginsPre-20132013–presentReactions Systems XKeyscorePRISMECHELONCarnivoreDishfireStone GhostTemporaFrenchelonFairviewMYSTICDCSNBoundless InformantBullrunPinwaleStingraySORMRAMPART-AMastering the InternetJindalee Operational Radar Network Agencies NSAR&AWCSEBNDCNIASIODGSEFive EyesFSBMSSGCHQ Places The DoughnutFort MeadeMenwith HillPine GapSouthern Cross CableUtah Data CenterBad Aibling StationDagger ComplexGCHQ Bude Laws Five Eyes UKUSA AgreementLustreU.S. USA Freedom ActFISA amendmentsEU Data Retention DirectiveData Protection DirectiveGDPRChina National Intelligence LawCybersecurity LawUK Investigatory Powers Act 2016 Proposed changes U.S. FISA Improvements ActOther proposals Concepts Mass surveillanceCulture of fearSecure communicationSIGINTCall detail recordSurveillance issues in smart cities Related topics EspionageIntelligence agencyCryptography TorVPNsTLSHuman rights PrivacyLibertySatellitesStop Watching UsNothing to hide argument vte XKeyscore is a complicated system, and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald explained XKeyscore as being a system which enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has said that usage of the system is limited and restricted.
According to The Washington Post and national security reporter Marc Ambinder, XKeyscore is an NSA data-retrieval system which consists of a series of user interfaces, backend databases, servers and software that selects certain types of data and metadata that the NSA has already collected using other methods.[6][7]
According to Snowden and Greenwald On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in its TV interview: "What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?" and he answered:[1]
You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you're tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It's a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let's say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what's called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.
According to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, low-level NSA analysts can, via systems like XKeyscore, "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."[8]
He added that the NSA's database of collected communications allows its analysts to listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future".[8]
Where'd I see this.. checking that guy's profile who wrote the other thread. Was going through the comments of his post:
"Three years ago (October 2020), months before the rollout) the FDA somehow knew about a pretty comprehensive list of the vaccine symptoms we’ve been experiencing since it’s release. Most of which still denied. Not only is it still on the market, it’s back with even less testing this time."
https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/16rebyg/three_years_ago_october_2020_months_before_the/
Then I saw this one from the screenshot.
Any reports of the Covid vaccine causing pregnancy? Maybe it'd be like if they're having sex and on birth control. I don't know.. but what if they're not even having sex and wind up pregnant. lol.. Never heard of this angle, or even thought of it. These guys could probably do that with this nano technology.
All we got with this guy here is those 4 other wiki pages he said before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind
"Stellar Wind" (or "Stellarwind"[citation needed]) was the code name of a warrantless surveillance program begun under the George W. Bush administration's President's Surveillance Program (PSP).[1] The National Security Agency (NSA) program was approved by President Bush shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks and was revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times in 2004.[2][3] Stellar Wind was a prelude to new legal structures that allowed President Bush and President Barack Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.[4]
Program scope The program's activities involved data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, telephone conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity.[3] William Binney, a retired technical leader with the NSA, discussed some of the architectural and operational elements of the program at the 2012 Chaos Communication Congress.[5]
The intelligence community also was able to obtain from the U.S. Treasury Department suspicious activity reports, or "SARS", which are reports of activities such as large cash transactions that are submitted by financial institutions under anti-money laundering rules.[3]
There were internal disputes within the U.S. Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants.[6][7] During the Bush administration, the Stellar Wind cases were referred to by FBI agents as "pizza cases" because many seemingly suspicious cases turned out to be food takeout orders. According to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, approximately 99% of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about".[2]
2004 conflict From a report by the inspectors general of six US intelligence agencies that was declassified in September 2015, it became clear that President Bush had originally authorized the collection of telephone and e-mail metadata only if one end of the communications was foreign or when there was a link to terrorism. But in 2004, the Justice Department discovered that the NSA was apparently also collecting the metadata of purely domestic communications, after which President Bush declared that NSA had always been allowed to do so, but that analysts were only allowed to look at metadata related to terrorism. With this revised formulation, Bush reauthorized the program on March 11, 2004.[8]
In 2004, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jack Landman Goldsmith, wrote at least two legal memos authorizing the program, "We conclude only that when the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief ... that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the wiretapping capabilities of the National Security Agency within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority" to order warrantless wiretapping—"an authority that Congress cannot curtail", Goldsmith wrote in a 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004. In March 2004, the OLC concluded the e-mail program was not legal, and then-Acting Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize it.[9]
Revelations In March 2012, Wired magazine published "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" talking about a vast new NSA facility in Utah and said, "For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellarwind, in detail", naming the official William Binney, a former NSA code breaker. Binney went on to say that the NSA had highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.[10] The article suggested that the supposedly-terminated Stellar Wind continues as an active program. This conclusion was supported by the exposure of Room 641A in AT&T's operations center in San Francisco in 2006.[11]
In June 2013, the Washington Post and the Guardian published an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) draft report, dated March 2009, leaked by Edward Snowden detailing the Stellar Wind program.[1][12] No doubt remained about the continuing nature of the surveillance program.
In September 2014, The New York Times asserted, "Questions persist after the release of a newly declassified version of a legal memo approving the National Security Agency's Stellarwind program, a set of warrantless surveillance and data collection activities secretly authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." as an introductory headline summary with a link. The accompanying article addressed the release of a newly declassified version of the May 2004 memo.[13][14][15] Note was made that the bulk of the program—the telephone, Internet, and e-mail surveillance of American citizens—remained secret until the revelations by Edward Snowden, that to date, significant portions of the memo remain redacted in the newly released version, and that doubts and questions about its legality persist.[14][15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.[1][2]
Description Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 14.6 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.[1] It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic.[3] In the analysis of J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, it has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic."[4]
The existence of the room was revealed by former AT&T technician Mark Klein and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T.[5] Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.[6]
Room 641A and the controversies surrounding it were subjects of an episode of Frontline,[7] the current affairs documentary program on PBS. It was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS Nova episode "The Spy Factory".
Lawsuits Main article: Hepting v. AT&T The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecommunication company of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. On July 20, 2006, a federal judge denied the government's and AT&T's motions to dismiss the case, chiefly on the ground of the state secrets privilege, allowing the lawsuit to go forward. On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.[8]
A different case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation was filed on September 18, 2008, titled Jewel v. NSA. After many years of litigation, on April 25, 2019, ruling from the Northern District of California for Jewel v. NSA[9] concluded that the evidence presented by the plaintiff's experts was insufficient; "the Court confirms its earlier finding that Klein cannot establish the content, function, or purpose of the secure room at the AT&T site based on his own independent knowledge." The ruling noted, "Klein can only speculate about what data were actually processed and by whom in the secure room and how and for what purpose, as he was never involved in its operation." The Court further went on to discredit other experts called upon, citing their heavy reliance on the Klein declaration.
In the Spring of 2006, over 50 other lawsuits were filed against various telecommunications companies, in response to the article.[10]
There has been speculation that several rooms similar to this exist all over the United States.[11][12]
Maxed out.. gonna do the rest in another comment.
[part 2] checking that guy's few links before he disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
This one's pretty long.. not going to paste it all.
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.[1][2][3] The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN.[4][5] PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6] Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier,[7][8] and to get data that is easier to handle.[9]
PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration.[10][11] The program is operated under the supervision of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).[12] Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities.[13] The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division and PRISM partners in the millions of dollars.[14]
Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports", and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702 authority."[15][16] The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.[17][18]
U.S. government officials have disputed criticisms of PRISM in the Guardian and Washington Post articles and have defended the program, asserting that it cannot be used on domestic targets without a warrant. Additionally claiming the program has helped to prevent acts of terrorism, and that it receives independent oversight from the federal government's executive, judicial and legislative branches.[19][20] On June 19, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama, during a visit to Germany, stated that the NSA's data gathering practices constitute "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people."[21]
Media disclosure of PRISM Further information: Global surveillance disclosure Edward Snowden publicly revealed the existence of PRISM through a series of classified documents leaked to journalists of The Washington Post and The Guardian while Snowden, who was an NSA contractor at the time, was visiting Hong Kong.[1][2] The leaked documents included 41 PowerPoint slides, four of which were published in news articles.[1][2]
The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.[22] The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft".[1]
The slide presentation stated that much of the world's electronic communications pass through the U.S., because electronic communications data tend to follow the least expensive route rather than the most physically direct route, and the bulk of the world's internet infrastructure is based in the United States.[15] The presentation noted that these facts provide United States intelligence analysts with opportunities for intercepting the communications of foreign targets as their electronic data pass into or through the United States.[2][15]
Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data[23] – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true[24] – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",[13] and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications",[13] with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty.[25][26][27]
Lots more there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
railblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program intended to develop a capability to analyze data carried on communications networks like the Internet. It was intended to track entities using communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail.[1][2]
NSA employees J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staff Diane Roark complained to the Department of Defense's Inspector General (IG) about waste, fraud, and abuse in the program, and the fact that a successful operating prototype existed. The complaint was accepted by the IG and an investigation began that lasted until mid-2005 when the final results were issued. The results were largely hidden, as the report given to the public was heavily (90%) redacted, while the original report was heavily classified, thus restricting the ability of most people to see it.
The people who filed the IG complaint were later raided by armed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. While the U.S. government threatened to prosecute all who signed the IG report, it ultimately chose to pursue an NSA Senior Executive Thomas Andrews Drake who helped with the report internally to NSA and who had spoken with a reporter about the project. Drake was later charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. His defenders claimed this was retaliation.[3][4] The charges against him were later dropped, and he agreed to plead guilty to having committed a misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, something that Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, which helped represent him, called an "act of civil disobedience".[5]
Background Trailblazer was chosen over a similar program named ThinThread, a less costly project which had been designed with built-in privacy protections for United States citizens.[3][4] Trailblazer was later linked to the NSA electronic surveillance program and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.[3]
In 2002, a consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was chosen by the NSA to produce a technology demonstration platform in a contract worth $280 million. Project participants included Boeing, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The project was overseen by NSA Deputy Director William B. Black, Jr., an NSA worker who had gone to SAIC, and then been re-hired back to NSA by NSA director Michael Hayden in 2000.[6][7][8] SAIC had also hired a former NSA director to its management: Bobby Inman.[9] SAIC also participated in the concept definition phase of Trailblazer.[10][11]
Redacted version of the DoD Inspector General audit, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Project on Government Oversight and others.[5][12] The NSA Inspector General issued a report on Trailblazer that "discussed improperly based contract cost increases, non-conformance in the management of the Statement of Work, and excessive labor rates for contractor personnel."[13]
In 2004 the DoD IG report criticized the program (see the Whistleblowing section below). It said that the "NSA 'disregarded solutions to urgent national security needs'" and "that TRAILBLAZER was poorly executed and overly expensive..." Several contractors for the project were worried about cooperating with DoD's audit for fear of "management reprisal." The Director of NSA "nonconcurred" with several statements in the IG audit, and the report contains a discussion of those disagreements.[14]
In 2005, NSA director Michael Hayden told a Senate hearing that the Trailblazer program was several hundred million dollars over budget and years behind schedule.[15] In 2006 the program was shut down[3] after having cost billions of US Dollars.[16] Several anonymous NSA sources told Newsweek later on that the project was a "wasteful failure".[17]
The new project replacing Trailblazer is called Turbulence.[3]
Whistleblowing According to a 2011 New Yorker article, in the early days of the project several NSA employees met with Diane S Roark, an NSA budget expert on the House Intelligence Committee. They aired their grievances about Trailblazer. In response, NSA director Michael Hayden sent out a memo saying that "individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow... Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform N.S.A., and I cannot tolerate them."[3]
In September 2002, several people filed a complaint with the Department of Defense IG's office regarding problems with Trailblazer: they included Roark (aforementioned), as well as ex-NSA senior analysts Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Senior Computer Systems Analyst Ed Loomis, who had all quit the agency over concerns about its mismanagement of acquisition and allegedly illegal domestic spying.[3][18][19] A major source for the report was NSA senior officer Thomas Andrews Drake. Drake had been complaining to his superiors for some time about problems at the agency, and about the superiority of ThinThread over Trailblazer, for example, at protecting privacy.[19] Drake gave info to DoD during its investigation of the matter.[19] Roark also went to her boss at the House committee, Porter Goss, about problems, but was rebuffed.[20] She also attempted to contact William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court Chief Justice at the time.[19]
Drake's own boss, Maureen Baginski, the third-highest officer at NSA, quit partly over concerns about the legality of its behavior.[3]
In 2003, the NSA IG (not the DoD IG)[19] had declared Trailblazer an expensive failure.[15] It had cost more than $1 billion.[8][21][22]
In 2005, the DoD IG produced a report on the result of its investigation of the complaint of Roark and the others in 2002. This report was not released to the public, but it has been described as very negative.[18] Jane Mayer writes that it hastened the closure of Trailblazer, which was at the time in trouble from Congress for being over budget.[3]
In November 2005, Drake contacted Siobhan Gorman, a reporter of The Baltimore Sun.[17][23][24] Gorman wrote several articles about problems at the NSA, including articles on Trailblazer. This series got her an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.[17]
In 2005, President George W. Bush ordered the FBI to find whoever had disclosed information about the NSA electronic surveillance program and its disclosure in the New York Times. Eventually, this investigation led to the people who had filed the 2002 DoD IG request, even though they had nothing to do with the New York Times disclosure. In 2007, the houses of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe were raided by armed FBI agents. According to Mayer, Binney claims the FBI pointed guns at his head and that of his wife. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union.[3][18] None of these people were ever charged with any crime. Four months later, Drake was raided in November 2007 and his computers and documents were confiscated.
In 2010 Drake was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of obstructing justice, providing false information, and violating the Espionage Act of 1917,[17][25][26] part of President Barack Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leakers".[17][18][23][27] The government tried to get Roark to testify to a conspiracy, and made similar requests to Drake, offering him a plea bargain. They both refused.[3]
In June 2011, the ten original charges against Drake were dropped; instead he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.[5]