(Merkel publicly expresses "concern" about spying on German citizens, as German
intelligence agencies work in tandem with the NSA)
Data Surveillance with Global Implications
By Marcel Rosenbach, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock
Der Spiegel
June 10 2013
The American intelligence director and the White House have finally confirmed
what insiders have long known: The Obama administration is spying on the entire
world. Politicians in Germany are demanding answers.
South of Utah's Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), a United
States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive
secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US
military's Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house
superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion
(€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume
of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling
system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.
Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Bill Binney told SPIEGEL in March that
the facility would soon store personal data on people from all over the world
and keep it for decades. This includes emails, Skype conversations, Google
searches, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, bank transfers -- electronic data of
every kind.
"They have everything about you in Utah," Drake says. "Who decides whether they
look at that data? Who decides what they do with it?" Binney, a mathematician
who was previously an influential analyst at the NSA, calculates that the
servers are large enough to store the entirety of humanity's electronic
communications for the next 100 years -- and that, of course, gives his former
colleagues plenty of opportunity to read along and listen in.
James Clapper, the country's director of national intelligence, has confirmed
the existence of a large-scale surveillance program. President Barack Obama
further explained that Congress authorized the program -- but that American
citizens are exempt from it.
A top-secret document published last week by the Washington Post and Britain's
Guardian shows where the NSA may be getting the majority of its data. According
to the document, which was allegedly leaked by former CIA employee Edward
Snowden, the intelligence agency began seeking out direct access to servers
belonging to American Internet companies on a wide scale in 2007. The first of
these companies to come onboard was Microsoft. Yahoo followed half a year
later, then Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype and AOL. The most recent
company to declare its willingness to cooperate was Apple, in October 2012,
according to the secret government document, which proudly states that this
access to data is achieved "directly from the servers" of the companies.
The companies in question denied that claim on Friday. But if what the document
says is true, the NSA has the potential to know what every person in the world
who uses these companies' services is doing, and that presumably includes
millions of Germans.
'Total Surveillance of Germans is Inappropriate'
On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed through a spokesman that
she plans to discuss the NSA's controversial data surveillance program with
President Obama during his visit to Berlin next week. A spokesperson for the
German Justice Ministry also said that talks are currently underway with US
authorities. The discussions will include implications to Germany and "possible
impairment of the rights of German citizens."
German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has called for "clear answers"
from the companies implicated in the document, and the German Green Party has
demanded that the government investigate the circumstances of Prism immediately.
"Total surveillance of all German citizens by the NSA is completely
disproportionate," Volker Beck, secretary of the Green Party group in
parliament, said on Monday. The party has proposed that the topic be discussed
at next week's parliamentary session.
Mormon Roots, International Reach
The program's Utah compound is full of security fences, watchdogs and
surveillance cameras, as well as biometric identification system equipment. Two
informants say the location for the server facility was by no means an
accident. Utah is home to the largest number of Mormons in the world. This
highly patriotic religious community sends its young members around the world
as missionaries -- and many are then recruited by the Utah Army National Guard,
whose 300th Military Intelligence Brigade employs 1,600 linguists. The NSA has
access to these linguists at all times, and one insider believes they are used
in "analyzing international telecommunications."
In the secret document, the NSA's surveillance program is referred to by the
name "Prism." A prism is also the shape that reflects light in fiber optic
cables -- the same cables that form the backbone of the world's Internet
traffic. The document, which was authored for an internal NSA presentation,
shows that even data streams traveling from Europe to Asia, the Pacific region
or South America often pass through servers in the US. "A target's phone call,
email or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct
path," the document reads.
The Bush administration legalized this new dimension to government snooping,
but it was the Obama administration that renewed the law in question in
December 2012. The law permits, for example, the surveillance of all Google
users not living in the US, as well as communications between American citizens
and people in other countries.
Broadened Legal Basis for Spying
The document also shows that with programs such as Prism, the NSA is
reinterpreting the legal basis for its actions on one crucial point. For
decades, intelligence services required an order from a special court with
precise specifications on their suspect if they wanted to monitor an email
account, for example. Now, it's enough if the NSA has reasonable evidence that
a subject is either living abroad or communicating with someone who lives
outside the US. This expands the circle of potential suspects, lowers
bureaucratic hurdles and reduces democratic checks and balances, making it even
easier and faster to gather data on even more people.
The NSA's data collection powers extend far beyond American Internet servers.
The agency also conducts reconnaissance around the globe, for example with
satellites. It has also installed high-performance antennae in various
countries to pick up mobile phone communications. Never before has a government
collected data on such a large scale.
The NSA is a useful partner for German authorities. The director of the NSA,
four-star General Keith Alexander, regularly receives delegations from Germany
at his headquarters at Fort Meade. These meetings are generally constructive,
in part because the pecking order is clear: The NSA nearly always knows much
more, while the Germans act as assistants. Germany's foreign intelligence
agency, the BND, conducts various secret operations in tandem with the NSA,
most of them concerning large-scale data collection. German authorities have
also helped the American security agency with a number of activities,
especially in regions in crisis.
For its part, the NSA regularly shares with Germany's security agencies the
leads it has on suspects. A 2007 bomb plot by an Islamist terror cell in
Germany, the so-called Sauerland group, was discovered because of emails and
telephone conversations that the NSA monitored and passed along to its German
counterparts.
According to former NSA employee Binney, American programs have also been used
in Germany, although a former high-ranking security official in the country
says German authorities were not involved in the Prism program.
Information Overload?
It is now clear that what experts suspected for years is in fact true -- that
the NSA monitors every form of electronic communication around the globe. This
fact raises an important question: How can an intelligence agency, even one as
large and well-staffed as the NSA with its 40,000 employees, work meaningfully
with such a flood of information?
The answer to this question is part of a phenomenon that is currently a major
topic for the business community as well and goes by the name "Big Data."
Thanks to new database technologies, it is now possible to connect entirely
disparate forms of data and analyze them automatically.
A rare glimpse into what intelligence services can do by applying this "big
data" approach came last year from David Petraeus. This new form of data
analysis is concerned with discovering "non-obvious relationships," the then
freshly minted CIA director explained at a conference. This includes, for
example "finding connections between a purchase here, a phone call there, a
grainy video, customs and immigration information."
The goal, according to Petraeus, is for big data to "lead to automated
discovery, rather than depending on the right analyst asking the right
question." Algorithms pick out connections automatically from the unstructured
sea of data they trawl. "The CIA and our intelligence community partners must
be able to swim in the ocean of 'Big Data.' Indeed, we must be world class
swimmers -- the best, in fact," the CIA director continued.
The Surveillance State
The value of big data analysis for US intelligence agencies can be seen in the
amount the NSA and CIA are investing in it. Not only does this include
multimillion-dollar contracts with providers specializing in data mining
services, but the CIA also invests directly, through its subsidiary company
In-Q-Tel, in several big data start-ups.
It's about rendering people and their behavior predictable. The NSA's research
projects aim to forecast, on the basis of telephone data and Twitter and
Facebook posts, when uprisings, social protests and other events will occur.
The agency is also researching new methods of analysis for surveillance videos
with the hopes of recognizing conspicuous behavior before an attack is
committed.
Gus Hunt, the CIA's chief technology officer, made a forthright admission in
March: "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever."
What he meant by "everything," Hunt also made clear: "It is really very nearly
within our grasp to be able to compute on all human-generated information," he
said.
That statement is difficult to reconcile with the Fourth Amendment to the US
Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy. This is probably why Hunt
added, almost apologetically: "Technology in this world is moving faster than
government or law can keep up."
Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein
URL:
•
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/prism-leak-inside-the-controversial-us-data-surveillance-program-a-904761.html
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