National Security Agency

National Security Agency   (Intelligence agency)
Fort Meade, Maryland USA
Motto	"Defending Our Nation. Securing The Future."
Predecessor	Armed Forces Security Agency
Formation	November 4, 1952
Parent organization	US/Department/Defense
Headquarters	Fort Meade, Maryland
Leader	Director of the National Security Agency
Subgroups	National Tactical Integration Office
Staff	?
Interest of	James Bamford, BillCaseyHoneyPot, Fred Chang, Ty Clevenger, Scott Shane, Elizabeth Vos
Member of	United States Intelligence Community
Founder of	Main Core
Exposed by	James Bamford
"No Such Agency". Spook agency working closely with Silicon Valley

The National Security Agency is a notoriously secretive US intelligence agency, nominally responsible for signals intelligence and information assurance. It became infamous in 2013 after the commercially-controlled media gave prominence to Edward Snowden's revelations about its mass data collection programs. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that it has suffered from poor morale and lost many of its most capable employees since 2015.

Official Narrative

The NSA promises on its website to "protect national security interests by adhering to the highest standards of behavior".

“Your Data: If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear”
NSA

Problems

The NSA is so shrouded in secrecy that there is no way to know what it is doing, never mind to check its claim to "adhere to the highest standards of behavior". For example, in 1964 the US Congress passed by a great majority a bill giving the Director of the NSA the power to fire at will any employee without due cause - leading the Washington Post to write: "This is the very definition of arbitrariness. It means that an employee could be discharged and disgraced on the basis of anonymous allegations without the slightest opportunity to defend himself."

The NSA appears to be completely controlled by he US deep state. Rather than defending US citizens' data by publicising flaws found in computer code, for example, it has long been using zero day exploits for its own purposes and in 2014 was specifically authorised to do to by Barack Obama. The NSA has denied that it was aware of the Heartbleed bug, but other sources report that the agency used it regularly for years, and decided not to warn anyone else that their data was at risk.

Whistleblowers

The agency had several whistleblowers throughout the years, most where harassed for dissent or going public:

• Kirk Wiebe
• William Binney
• Mark Klein (working for AT&T)
• Thomas Drake
• Russ Tice
• Edward Snowden

Activities

John Perkins wrote in Confessions Of An Economic Hitman that he was recruited by Einar Greve, NSA liaison. His book was so popular that in 2006 it prompted an official denial by the US State Department, which claimed that Perkins' claim was not credible because "the National Security Agency is a cryptological (codemaking and codebreaking) organization, not an economic organization." Little was known publicly about the NSA's activities at the time of this counterclaim, but subsequently, leaks and whistleblowers have shed more light on them.

"Cyberterrorism"

Full article: “Cyberterrorism”

Tha NSA has contradictory goals - to maximise cyber security and to itself to carry out attacks against cyber security. It has claimed not to be hoarding zero day exploits, but this is belied by the evidence,

The NSA is probably the most advanced and active group worldwide in the area of cyberterrorism. Bruce Schneier observes that "The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others' computers."

Stuxnet

Full article: Stuxnet

Stuxnet was the first piece of malware proven to be an NSA production. The 2016 film Zero Days quotes an anonymous source that this was developed in concert with Unit 8200 and that if it had not been modified by Unit 8200 and released into Iran in this form, it might have never been detected.

Other malware

The NSA created malware, some of which was published by the group Equation Brokers and was compromising security of a lot of Microsoft Windows users.

"Cyberespionage"

Full article: Cyberespionage

The NSA (or perhaps Unit 8200) is reckoned to be the world's leading developer of cyberespionage tools, a realisation which has gained traction particularly since the Edward Snowden Affair. Documents released by Snowden have pointed the NSA's close collaboration with GCHQ.

In 2015 multiple revelations gave insight on the NSA's cyberterrorism capabilities. In March 2015, Kaspersky Lab revealed details of the EquationDrug cyberespionage platform, which resembles a "mini operating system" due to the use of kernel-mode and user-mode components which interact with each other via a custom message-passing interface. Over 100 plugins are suspected and the existence of Windows 9X modules suggests that it may well date back to the 1990s. Its connection to the NSA is currently somewhat tenuous - resting on text strings, timezone and filestamp data, though considering the platform's sophistication, no alternative teams of developers have been suggested.

Mass Surveillance

Full article: Universal Surveillance

33 Thomas St. in New York, a windowless skyscraper used to carry out mass surveillance.

During the cold war, the NSA watch list included anti-war activists and civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, as well as Senator Frank Church. “The National Security Agency has for years controversially collected the call records of Americans from cell providers like AT&T and Verizon (which owns TechCrunch), despite the questionable legality.”

Technological

The NSA's mass surveillance is facilitated by decades of work for using a variety of techniques to insert backdoors and other weaknesses into security products and protocols.

“I worked with the National Security Agency on the design of a secured version of the internet but we used classified security technology at the time and I couldn't share that with my colleagues. If I could start over again I would have introduced a lot more strong authentication and cryptography into the system.”
Vint Cerf (7 Apr 2014)  Vint Cerf wanted to make internet secure from the start, but secrecy prevented it

In 2004, a division of the NSA called the National Tactical Integration Office fitted a 62-foot diameter airship called the Hover Hammer with an eavesdropping device.

Death of UN-SG Dag Hammarskjöld

Full article: Dag Hammarskjöld/Premature death

Susan Williams' book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? points to the existence of NSA radio intercepts of warplanes in the area in which UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld's plane crashed in Africa which are still top secret after over 50 years. She suggests that this may be due to involvement in a shootdown by Jan van Risseghem.

Exposure

In 1971, Perry Fellwock, the first NSA whistleblower, stated that "there's a lot of corruption too. Quite a few people in NSA are into illegal activities of one kind or another. It's taken to be one of the fringe benefits of the job. You know, enhancing your pocketbook. Practically everybody is into some kind of smuggling".

Cancelled investigation by US DOJ

The US DOJ spent a over year looking at the possibility of indicting the NSA after it was revealed that Richard Nixon had instructed the agency to spy on anti-war protestors. They concluded that such a prosecution would result in too many secrets being revealed in court, and so they created FISA in an effort to prevent future US presidents from using the NSA for domestic political purposes. James Bamford states that this was ineffective because of the ease of subversion of the FISA process.

Edward Snowden Affair

Full article: Edward Snowden Affair

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden collected a series of documents which revealed wholesale, illegal, data collection by the NSA. Shunning anonymity, stating that he had done nothing wrong, but was acting in the interests of the US people and the NSA, Snowden began to release a long series of tranches of the documents through the commercially-controlled media.

The NSA claimed on 2014-01-10 that they could not legally inform congress whether they were collecting data on them, since to do so would violate the law. In February 2014, after legal challenges to their data collection program, the NSA suggested that it might be legally obligated to expand the data collection program to avoid potential charges of destroying evidence.

Mass Surveillance

Full article: Mass surveillance

Following James Clapper's flat out lie to the US Congress about data collection, key NSA personnel have repeatedly lied about its mass surveillance programmes, first by denying their existence and later by making wildly exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of such data collection in preventing "terrorism".

In 2014, it was revealed that the NSA collects nearly all the telephone calls made in the Bahamas and Afghanistan.

Brian Patrick O’Callaghan

On Feb 16, 2014, a 36 year old, Brian Patrick O'Callaghan, chief of the NSA's Korea division - whose attorney also said he was involved in the high profile rescue of US Army POW Jessica Lynch - was charged with first degree murder and child abuse.

Relationship with other intelligence agencies

GCHQ

The NSA has long had particularly close links with its British counterpart, GCHQ. In the early 1980s it was suggested that "the relationship between NSA and GCHQ is stronger than any between the NSA and any other American intelligence agency." This relationship does not prevent the NSA spying on the UK. According to Howard Teicher, the former Middle East director of the US National Security Council, the NSA monitored Britain's Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia from its base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.

Japan

Japan allowed NSA to maintain at least three bases on its territory and contributed more than half a billion dollars to help finance the NSA’s facilities and operations. In return, NSA has kitted out Japanese spies with powerful surveillance tools and shared intelligence with them, although continuing to spy on Japanese officials itself.

 

Events carried out

Event	Description
NSA/PRISM
Project SHAMROCK	NSA surveillance program

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
George Carlin	“Hello. We’re the ones who control your lives. We make the decisions that affect all of you. Isn’t it interesting to know that those who run your lives would have the nerve to tell you about it in this manner? Suffer, you fools. We know everything you do, and we know where you go. What do you think the cameras are for? And the global-positioning satellites? And the Social Security numbers? You belong to us. And it can’t be changed. Sign your petitions, walk your picket lines, bring your lawsuits, cast your votes, and write those stupid letters to whomever you please; you won’t change a thing. Because we control your lives. And we have plans for you. Go back to sleep.””	George Carlin
Ron Johnson	“We met delegation after delegation of European representatives. Basically the entire conversation was about Edward Snowden, about tapping Angela Merkel's phone. But then Charlie Hebdo happened. I haven't heard a word about Edward Snowden or what the American security services were trying to do. What I'm hearing now is 'Where's America?'”	Ron Johnson	2017
Nieuwsuur	“The AIVD and MIVD are subordinates of the Americans. The Dutch work for the Americans. They do what we tell them to do. They aren't valued because of their capacity, but just because they give us a free passage, that's what the NSA uses them for. (...) Look what France is doing and even they couldn't stop all those terror attacks”	Edward Snowden Nieuwsuur
UFO	“So, are Unacknowledged Special Access Programs out of control in the United States? Good question. The term "Special Access Program", let alone "Unacknowledged Special Access Program", is only very seldom mentioned in the media. For example, these terms have not been mentioned at all in relation to the NSA spy revelations in recent years of William Binney and Edward Snowden, even though one would expect that many of the NSA spy programs as PRISM, Stellar Wind, Boundless Informant and JTRIG fell into this category. The term "Special Access Program" did recently surface with regard to the Hillary Clinton email scandals. As Obama's secretary of state, Clinton, against protocol, maintained a private mailbox full of information on all kinds of Special Access Programs. No details on these programs have been provided.”	Joël van der Reijden

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	End	Description
Alan Standorf	Civil employee	1991	Alleged to have leaked documents relating to the PROMIS intelligence software. Found dead in 1991.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Affidavit of William Casey	Wikispooks Page		William Casey	An admission by William Casey, DCI, that he approved smuggling of cocaine into USA, having chosen Mena, Arkansas as a shipment point, with the support of Bill Clinton and Bill Weld. Casey names a range of names, including John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, Oliver North and William Colby, the CIA, NSA and ASA.
Document:Dag Hammarskjöld - US, UK and South Africa still withholding crucial information	Article	10 October 2019	Ludwig De Braeckeleer	“Communications sent from the CX-52 cryptographic machine used by Dag Hammarskjöld appear to have been intercepted by British and United States signals and intelligence agencies as a result of a secret interception and decryption setting that those agencies held that enabled them to intercept surreptitiously.”
Document:Electronic Espionage - A Memoir	interview	August 1972	Perry Fellwock
Document:Google and the NSA	article	24 August 2013	Julian Assange
Document:Huawei Hypocrisy	blog post	7 May 2019	Craig Murray	Former Deputy PM Nick Clegg said GCHQ's ability "to hack anything from handsets to whole networks … needs to be much better understood".
Document:NSA GCHQ and the Death of Gareth Williams	article	14 November 2011	Trowbridge Ford	A speculative article connecting the NSA with the death of Gareth Williams
Document:The Shadow Factory	Book	2008	James Bamford	The workings and scope of the US Military-Intelligence complex focussing particularly on the NSA. Introduction.
Document:The Terrorists Among US- Traitors and Terror 3	article	21 June 2019	George Eliason Michael Jasinski	George Eliason interviews professor Michael Jasinski about the dire effects of outsourcing intelligence gathering and information dissemination.
Document:The demise of global communications security	Wikispooks Page	21 September 2005	Wayne Madsen

 

A document sourced from National Security Agency

Title	Type	Subject(s)	Publication date	Author(s)
Document:Bitter Roots - The Bases of Present Conflicts in the Middle East	speech	Middle East US/Israel lobby	1977	J. Rives Childs