James Bamford: “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11, to the White House Murder Machinations INC, to the Eavesdropping on America”

James Bamford: “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11, to the White House Murder Machinations INC, to the Eavesdropping on America”

The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. We speak to James Bamford about the NSA’s spying on Americans, the agency’s failings pre-9/11 and the ties between NSA and the nation’s telecommunications companies.

-- "POWER AND LAW ARE not synonymous. In truth they are
frequently in opposition and irreconcilable.... There is
God's Law from which all Equitable laws of man emerge
and by which men must live if they are not to die in
oppression, chaos and despair. Divorced from God's
eternal and immutable Law, established before the
founding of the suns, man's power is evil no matter
the noble words with which it is employed or the
motives urged when enforcing it. Men of good will,
mindful therefore of the Law laid down by God, will
oppose governments whose rule is by men, and if they
wish to survive as a nation they will destroy the
government which attempts to adjudicate by the whim
of venal judges."--Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
--

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/14/james_bamford_the_shadow_factory_the

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AMY GOODMAN: And the story goes beyond that....

-http://newhk.blogspot.com/2008/12/uniiic-ii-report-revisited.html-

JAMES BAMFORD: —the FBI would have put a—I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to say, the story goes beyond that. I was saying this was in the Washington Post; it was actually in the Congressional Quarterly, that they were prepared to say publicly that under pressure from the CIA, they kept the full truth from the Justice Department’s inspector general, which looked into the FBI’s handling of the pre-9/11 intelligence in 2004.

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, not only that, the 9/11 Commission, which did a pretty poor job on a lot of this, they never looked at any of the information that I’m reporting on the National Security Agency, and they also never interviewed either Rossini or Doug Miller, the two FBI agents in there. I mean, it seems incredible to me that the 9/11 Commission never interviewed the two FBI agents who were assigned to the bin Laden unit. So that’s part of the story that’s never been told, that the American public just has no idea of some of these things that took place leading up to 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford, we have to break, then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Investigative reporter, his third book in a trilogy on the NSA, out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Back in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of the telecoms’ role in domestic spying, I want to turn to Mark Klein. He’s the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on the involvement of phone companies in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. Klein was with AT&T for twenty-two years. In 2006, he leaked internal documents revealing the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the NSA access to its fiber-optic internet cables.

MARK KLEIN: We were told one day in late 2002 that an NSA representative was coming to the office to speak to a certain management technician about a special job. And this turned out to be installing a secret room in the next office I was going to be in the following year. And that secret room involved a lot of spying equipment. Only this one management technician could go in there, and the regular union technicians were not allowed to go in there.

But when—in 2003 I was assigned to that office, and I got hold of the documents which were available—they’re not classified—and the documents showed what they were doing. They were basically copying the entire data stream going across critical internet cables and copying the entire data stream to this secret room, so the NSA was getting everything.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on the involvement of phone companies in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. Jim Bamford, with us for the hour, author of The Shadow Factory, out today, can you talk about how the CIA or the NSA is now working out secret and potentially illegal agreements with the telecom industry in order to access US telecommunications and what exactly Mark Klein is talking about, not just potentially illegal, what they’ve done?

JAMES BAMFORD: Sure. And just before I do that, I’d just like to thank these people for speaking out. Having been writing on this topic for twenty-five years, I know how difficult it is for anybody to come out and speak about what’s going on at NSA; it’s a very difficult thing. So, Mark Klein and Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, Mark Rossini, these people, you know, I look at as heroes, because they’ve come out and pointed a finger at what’s been going wrong without—you know, there’s no compensation. They’re risking their—the rest of their career or possibly risking the US government by coming out and pointing these fingers. So, you know, I just have a lot of admiration for these people.

And what Mark Klein was talking about, he was a supervisor for twenty-two years over at AT&T, and he discovered this secret room in this facility in San Francisco, this very tall, ten-, twelve-story building out in San Francisco, which is basically the switch, AT&T’s switch for their communications in that part of the country, the sort of western part of the country.

And what happened is that during the 1990s and early in the ’80s and the ’70s, the NSA used to collect information by putting out big dishes and collecting satellite communications that would come down. It was very easy. They put the dishes out; satellite transmits the telephone calls and messages, emails and so forth down to earth; and the satellite picks it up. And then NSA collects it. NSA didn’t have to deal with the telecommunication companies at all, because they could get the information independent of the telecom companies.

Then, in the late ’90s, things began to change, and fiber optics became a big thing for telecommunications. Fiber optics are cables in which the communications are transmitted, not electronically, but by photons, light signals. And that made life very difficult for NSA. It meant the communications, instead of being able to pick them up in a big dish, they were now being transmitted under the ocean in these cables. And the only way to get access to it would be to put a submarine down and try to tap into those cables. But that, from the people I’ve talked to, has not been very successful with fiber-optic cables. So the only other way to really do this is by making some kind of agreement with the telecom companies, so that NSA could actually basically cohabitate some of the telecom companies’ locations. And that’s what happened. NSA began making these agreements with AT&T and other companies, and that in order to get access to the actual cables, they had to build these secret rooms in these buildings.

So what would happen would be the communications on the cables would come into the building, and then the cable would go to this thing called a splitter box, which was a box that had something that was similar to a prism, a glass prism. And the prism was shaped like a prism, and the light signals would come in, and they’d be split by the prism. And one copy of the light signal would go off to where it was supposed to be going in the telecom system, and the other half, this new cloned copy of the cables, would actually go one floor below to NSA’s secret room. So you had one copy of everything coming in and going to NSA’s secret room. And in the secret room was equipment by a private company called Narus, the very small company hardly anybody has ever heard of that created the hardware and the software to analyze these cables and then pick out the targets NSA is looking for and then forward the targeted communications onto NSA headquarters.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have these companies, AT&T and Verizon, that are secretly working with the NSA and tapping Americans’ phone lines, and these companies actually outsource the actual tapping to some little-known foreign companies? VERINT...., AMDOCS....etc.


JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah. There’s two major—or not major, they’re small companies, but they service the two major telecom companies. This company, Narus, which was founded in Israel and has large Israel connections, does the—basically the tapping of the communications on AT&T. And Verizon chose another company, ironically also founded in Israel and largely controlled by and developed by people in Israel called Verint....

So these two companies specialize in what’s known as mass surveillance. Their literature—I read this literature from Verint, for example—is supposed to only go to intelligence agencies and so forth, and it says, “We specialize in mass surveillance,” and that’s what they do. They put these mass surveillance equipment in these facilities. So you have AT&T, for example, that, you know, considers it’s their job to get messages from one person to another, not tapping into messages, and you get the NSA that says, we want, you know, copies of all this. So that’s where these companies come in. These companies act as the intermediary basically between the telecom companies and the NSA.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It’s a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don’t know—I don’t think they even know that there is—that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive in—hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he’s wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to these charges.

So, you know, you’ve got companies—these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies—through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or another. And it’s even—gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights—Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And despite all of this—

JAMES BAMFORD: —this is a whole area—I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: Despite all of this, these telecom companies still have access to the most private communications of people all over America and actually, it ends up, around the world. And at the beginning of the summer, the Democrats and Republicans joined together in granting retroactive immunity to these companies for spying on American citizens.

JAMES BAMFORD: Yes. It looked like they were going to have a fight earlier in February, when the temporary law ran out and came time to either pass a new law or keep the old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the way it used to be, with all the protections. And they did resist for a number of months. They resisted from February until August. But in August, the Congress, seeing the election is coming, most of them caved in and decided to just join in the administration’s bill. And as a result, you have this fairly open-ended bill that came out that gives a lot of permissions to the NSA to do a lot of this eavesdropping without much accountability. I mean, it basically neutered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took a lot of powers away from them, and put the powers back at NSA. So the ultimate problem is when you have NSA as both—as judge, jury and executioner on the eavesdropping.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, we only have a few minutes, and I want to get to-–

JAMES BAMFORD: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —Bridgetown, Missouri, the AT&T hub there. What is the NSA’s role in spying there?


JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Bridgetown, New Jersey—I’m sorry, Bridgetown, Missouri is one of the centers for AT&T, because it’s the—it’s sort of central in the country, and they could control much of the network of AT&T from there. And it was there that AT&T actually developed a system by which they could get into fiber-optic communications. And just like they built this secret—the NSA built this secret room in San Francisco, and Mark Klein said that he had heard that they had built these secret rooms in other places around the country, there was also a secret room built in Bridgetown. And the worrisome part of that is Bridgeton controls the whole network.

So you have the problem of these secret rooms not just being in San Francisco, they’re throughout the network, and they’re in other parts of the country. And the American public really has no idea what’s going on, in terms of who has access to their communications, what’s being done with it. And is there somebody sitting there—as David Murfee Faulk talked about, in the NSA listening post in Georgia, are there people just sitting there listening to people’s private conversations and laughing about them?

AMY GOODMAN: And the building in—

JAMES BAMFORD: One final thing—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, go ahead, Jim.

JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah, I was just going to mention that it isn’t just the picking up of these conversations and listening to them and laughing about them. These conversations are transcribed. They’re—and then they’re recorded, and they’re kept forever. There’s a big building in Texas that’s being built in San Antonio that’s going to be used to house a lot of these conversations. NSA is running out of space at Fort Meade, their headquarters, so they had to expand, and they’re building this very big building. It’s reportedly going to be about the size of the Alamodome down there, to store all these—this huge amount of data communications. And when you think how much information two gigabytes could be put on a small thumb drive, you can imagine how much of information could be stored in a data warehouse the size of—almost the size of the Alamodome.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute, less than a minute, but—

JAMES BAMFORD: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: —the building in Miami where all communications from Latin America are stored and then a single switch for communications, much of Africa’s communications? And finally, where they can’t get cooperation of companies, a specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor to tap foreign cables?

JAMES BAMFORD: A lot of communications are consolidated. A lot of the international communications in South America all pass through one obscure building in Miami. And according to the landing rights that the company had to sign, which I read, they basically have to turn over everything that they get to the NSA if the NSA asks for it. So, you have a problem here today. I mean, the overall big problem is that there is a tremendous amount of eavesdropping going on. It’s all being stored, it’s all being analyzed, either electronically or by a human. And the public really doesn’t have much of—knowledge of all this that’s going on right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, I want to thank you very much for being with us, investigative journalist, author of three books, his latest on the National Security Agency out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBapXsLcro

Mark Klein, ATT whistleblower on ISRAEL wiretapping all of US

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html

FRONT LINE, Whistle blower Mark Klein.

"...What did you do for AT&T? How long did you work there?

I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up. ...

So you handled the hottest high-tech stuff that AT&T had.

That's right. Our job was to keep everything up and running smoothly.

What goes on inside the building on Folsom Street [in San Francisco]?

While I was there we worked on three floors which belonged to AT&T. The sixth floor was the traditional phone switch, ... which handled the public's telephone calls and was the workhorse of the phone system. The seventh floor was where the Internet room was, and that's where I spent a lot of my time. That's where there are a lot of Cisco routers, a lot of fiber-optic lines coming in and going out. The eighth floor is more diversified, more routers and other kinds of equipment, what's called multiplex equipment and various kinds of telecommunications equipment.

So this is an operations center. Are we talking about serving San Francisco? Are we talking about serving the state of California? Are we talking about America and Asia? What's the traffic that's going through there?

Well, this is an important hub for the Bay Area in terms of if you're talking about Internet. There's lots of Internet traffic, as you can imagine, that goes in and out of this office, probably hundreds of fiber-optic lines that go out, carrying billions -- that's billions with a "B" -- billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you're doing, whatever you're doing on the Internet -- the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet -- all that stuff's going in and out of there.

And then of course there's also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it's been doing since before the Internet.

Handling millions of calls. ...

Handling millions and millions of phone calls, right. That's its job.

So this is a big hub.

It's a big hub, yes.

Take me back to the summer of 2002. What happens? ...

... In 2002 I was sitting at my workstation one day, and some e-mail came in. I opened it up, and it was just a notice saying that somebody from the National Security Agency, NSA, was going to come visit for some business. They didn't say what, of course, just letting us know. I was also told the same thing by the manager of the office.

Don Henry?

Don Henry, who mentioned that there was going to be a visit from this person from the National Security Agency. ... That struck me as a little odd to begin with, because I remember from back in the '70s, the NSA is not supposed to be doing domestic spying, so what were they doing in an AT&T company office? It struck me as odd, but I didn't know anything more about it, so I just let it lie and waited for the guy to come.

Sometime later, maybe a few weeks -- I don't remember exactly -- he did show up. This NSA representative showed up at the door. I happened to be the one who opened the door. I let him in. I directed him to the appropriate people. He was very closemouthed and unsmiling, and he did his business. ... I didn't hear anything about it for a while, and I thought, well, that was over and I'll probably never hear anything about it again. So I never kept the e-mail. I thought it was just routine e-mail, and I'd never hear about it again. That whole incident probably took place in, I think it was the summer of 2002.

Then in the fall we started hearing these stories. ... We'd start talking to those guys over there at Folsom Street, and we'd hear stories coming back, because the field support guys, they would work at several offices. The guy that the NSA had interviewed [at our office on Geary Street] we heard was working on something over at Folsom Street. And I heard from our manager, Don, that he's working on some new room that's being built -- not Don; I mean the other guy. And so people start speculating: Now, what's this new room being built?

At the same time I started getting more suspicious about it. This was around the end of 2002. You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere -- and this was in The New York Times -- draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody's doing at any time of day. And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in The New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress. ...

You've seen these stories in the paper about Poindexter. So what's the scuttlebutt [in the office]? ...

We obviously started to speculate, because the stuff that was being talked about by Poindexter was he wanted to get, without warrants, huge databases so he could do searching and connect the dots, whatever that means, on everybody without warrants. ... And funny thing, by coincidence, here this NSA guy shows up in our office at the same time. And the Total Information Awareness Program is involved with the NSA and with DARPA, which is the Defense [Advanced Research] Projects Agency.

So I began to connect the two, because it seemed quite logical at least that if they are looking for large amounts of Internet data to sift through and vacuum up, what would be a perfect place? It would be in the Internet room at a place like AT&T. And lo and behold, the NSA guy shows up. ...

Then I started learning that it's not only a new room; it's a room that all the technicians cannot go into. Only the one guy -- a management guy, no union people -- a management field specialist with security clearance obviously given to him by the NSA, only he could go into this room, which was being built on the sixth floor, right next door to the phone switch room. So I got very worried about that. What does this mean? What are they doing there? ...

Then it started to get more interesting in January of 2003 when ... they brought us over there for a tour to see the office.

So in January 2003 you're invited over to this Folsom Street office for a tour, and this is the place where this room is being built.


We went for a tour -- it was me and three other technicians from the Geary Street office [who] went over for this tour of the Folsom Street office just so we could get to know the office and the people, because they were obviously eventually planning to bring us over there. ... So we did a tour of the office, and one of the technicians was walking around with us, and then we got to this secret room, and they were just finishing the outer door. Some workman was working on the lock, and I was standing there talking to him, and he suddenly talked [in a] very low voice like he didn't want to be overheard. He felt like this was something secret, you know, and he didn't know much about it, and he was saying: "None of us can go in there. It's all secret." This was not only an affront to the technicians; it was a violation of union rules, because they were obviously planning to install telecommunications equipment, which is supposed to be the jurisdiction of the union technicians. We had a contract. So the technicians were not only angry about this secret thing that they're not let in on, but also the fact that there's work there that they're excluded from. And they were told nothing about it. So that was it.


The secret room....
I got to see the room. It was right next door to the phone switch room. But I didn't know whether there was a definite connection between the two or not, or whether that was just a coincidence. At any rate, I thought the whole thing rather weird and sort of heightened my worry about this whole operation, that the technicians were excluded and that the NSA was involved. I thought this was real fishy. ..."

YOU ARE BEING LISTENED TO RIGHT NOW BY ISRAEL....

Mark Klein from above FRONT LINE INTERVIEW

"..There were terrorists who were living among us prior to 9/11. They were moving around; they were going to flight schools; they were renting apartments; they were traveling around. Doesn't the government need to do something in terms of gathering information to try to prevent the next terrorist attack?

I think if they needed anything, they had it already on the books. There's lots of -- maybe too much -- leeway for surveillance as it is. And they had lots of information that 9/11 was going to happen. But for some strange reason, they didn't act.

So I think you're asking this government -- which is full of prevarications and misleading statements and not very truthful and also a large component of simply incompetence -- handing them the keys to everybody's private information. I don't trust them with that. I think they're far more interested in just aggrandizing power for power's sake, and they're just using it as an excuse -- the so-called war on terror, which is their excuse for everything they do. Everything is aggrandizing power secretly, with no oversight. And I'm against that. It's dangerous. ..."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16088947


AT&T Wiretap Whistleblower Fights Senate Deal
Listen Now add to playlist

All Things Considered, November 7, 2007 · In 2002, Mark Klein, a former technician for AT&T, came forward with information that the company was collecting data for the National Security Agency. His testimony was central to several class-action lawsuits against AT&T for its alleged wiretapping.

Klein is now in Washington, D.C., to speak out against a possible Senate deal that would grant immunity to AT&T and the other telecoms for their role in NSA surveillance — effectively nullifying those lawsuits.

Robert Siegel talks with Klein.

Zionist Occupied Government, ZOG!

USA IS ZOG !!!

The Ponerology book is worth a read. I was drawn to it as a physician, as I began to come to the conclusion that most of the members of the Elite are clinically psychotic - beyond being simple sociopaths, many are overt psychopaths and, hence, are not bothered by the death and dismemberment of millions upon millions caused by their endless quest for power over their fellow man.

Their actions are so outrageous - so beyond the bounds of simple greed and envy - that it began to dawn on me some years ago that most of these folks should be committed to state facilities for the criminally insane. When you look at the magnitude of these people's criminality, it is really astounding.

They are not satisfied with stealing most of the material wealth of the planet - they are not satisfied with enough weaponry to destroy the solar system - they are not satisfied with the killing and enslaving of the entire population of the planet. They can and will never be satisfied in their running after power...

This insanity, of course, is not sustainable and contains within it the seeds of their own destruction. Hopefully, painful as it may be for us proles, their day is coming to an end.

There are literally only a few thousand people on the planet who are the true monsters. They need to be caged or eliminated.

This insanity, of course, is not sustainable and contains within it the seeds of their own destruction. Hopefully, painful as it may be for us proles, their day is coming to an end.

--

This is why this world is so utterly evil and corrupt, and why the damned who are still plugged into The Matrix of the White House Murder Inc, of CIA2/MOSSAD, The Matrix of illusion can’t see the Light of HK, who tried singlehandedly to save Lebanon from the devastating WARS since 1985, why their consciences are “asleep at the wheel”... from January 15th 1986, to January 24th 2002, to January 2009...and counting....!

Since 1995, The Evil Matrix of the White House Murder Inc, has been active in crime, assassinations and murder... in the Levant.!

“The Matrix is a system. The Evil Matrix of the White House Murder Inc,. That system is our enemy... But when you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? CIA/MOSSAD, Business people, politiCIAns, lawyers, military....Now you see why the U.S. Government is ULTRA-EICHMANN,ultra-amoral, ultra-vain, ultra-greedy, ultra-oblivious, ultra-criminal, ultra-supercorrupt, ultra-foolish, ultra-damned, and ultra-manipulated by the real evil power behind the power in USA, and this is why they were behind the scuttling of the Tripartite agreement in 1985/86, which could have spared so many lives, livelihoods and more for the tiny Jewel in the Levant: Lebanon...

The very kinds of people HK tried to save since 1985.... But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them still gullible to the same kinds of machinations by the evil Matrix. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged... And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on "the system" that they will fight to protect it..., like Asef Shawkat, Maher Al-Assad, and Bashar Assad, the pimp.”-