A Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency Few Know Exists
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
1) This line reminded me how fallible my memory is. I held a view of Obama as always toeing the line on government surveillance. Then senator Obama's 2008 vote in favor of the FISA Amendments Act and pro-surveillance actions as POTUS dominate my memory. I had completely forgotten his anti-surveillance rhetoric and actions from '04 - '07 [1][2].
2) How incredible would it be to candidly hear answers from Obama about what changed his mind?
3) I also wonder what it would be like to hear his candid thoughts now about handing over a surveillance state, that he directly entrenched as POTUS, to our current president.
Wishful thinking, I know, but it's something so few have any direct information about aside from conjecture.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gove... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/barack-obama...
It would be biased bullshit anyway. If they had any examples of real attacks being thwarted, they would have presented this evidence just to stop the criticisms. The surveillance is effective for political and economic reasons, and possibly for law enforcement's domestic use, which is borderline unconstitutional.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/devin-nunes-donald-tru...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-...
Obvious hyperbole. They monitored everyone that communicated with foreign nationals, which Trump's aides were doing. They used the word "incidental collection" in that article for a reason.
> Nunes suggested this unmasking might have been done for political reasons, saying the evidence he had seen had been widely disseminated across the intelligence community and had "little or no apparent intelligence value."
We're rightfully worried about what Trump could do with such power; we should also be investigating what Obama actually did with it.
And political allies too. That's how dragnet surveillance works. What's your point?
> We're rightfully worried about what Trump could do with such power; we should also be investigating what Obama actually did with it.
I agree, so stop wasting your time on conspiracy theories like this and look at Obama's actual questionable actions.
It's ok to spy on your political enemies as long as you spy on everyone else too? Will you feel so charitable when Trump does the same?
> look at Obama's actual questionable actions.
His known and proven questionable actions, you mean? Tip of the iceberg, certainly.
Watergate itself was nothing more than a conspiracy theory at one time.
But you're right, I'm not interested in conspiracy theories. That's why I said we should investigate.
The real issue is whether it's ok to spy on everyone. Spying on everyone means spying on your political enemies too, and your specific focus on the political enemies is ignoring the important debate. You're effectively arguing that spying on everyone isn't important, as long as you don't spy on your political enemies.
> But you're right, I'm not interested in conspiracy theories. That's why I said we should investigate.
And waste time and resources on a completely stupid premise. Spend your political capital more wisely.
Not many seem to care, frankly, that the government is spying on them. I have some hope that they might care about America turning into a dictatorship where elections are decided by abuse of power.
On the other hand, I also see many reasons to fear that they won't care, as long as "their side" wins.
1) free from bias, prejudice, or malice 2) indicating or suggesting sincere honesty and absence of deception
Sure, Obama was an authoritarian bastard. But why do we think that Trump won't be one? Has he, for example, stopped assassinating random foreigners based on often iffy metadata?
There is no way you or anyone else besides those within the agencies themselves would be able to qualify on what data and for what reasons the US assassinates anybody.
Ok so, how about concentrating on ending the fruitless killing of foreign civilians based on cellphone metadata? Would that be good?
Maybe that'd engender less ill will against the US government in those and other communities, creating a significant positive change?
Right after I invent cold fusion and stop sarcasm on the internet! (Besides which, I do not believe anyone can know why secretive agencies in governments assassinate people, if you had been reading...)
The State Highway Patrol, who had nothing to do with this, requested for its intel unit, information about everyone arrested so they could begin tracking them via social media.[1]
It does not seem far fetched to me that any president or really any person in a position of power would wield that power to target any group they view as dissidents. The FBI's surveillance and meddling with MLK is well-documented [2].
[1] http://www.athensnews.com/news/campus/emails-clarify-ou-and-...
FTA: Specifically, the day after the protest, the State Highway Patrol’s Athens Post commander, Lt. Virgil Conley, emailed OU Police Capt. Brian Kapple, asking him for details on the protesters.
“Can you advise how many were arrested last night? Also, I have a request from our intel unit if you were to provide their names and DOB, they can begin to track them through social media and open resources,” Conley wrote. “As we know, these folks tend to move around a little bit and are involved in other instances across the state, and that would assist other agencies in identifying those subjects and mitigate future issues.”
Although I haven't been reading it as much since the election - maybe the editors are pushing the anti-Trump angle hard like NYTimes has been shamelessly doing recently. It's writers are very 'internationalist' and focused on geopolitical diplomacy so a lot of them are falling under the 'I'm appalled at Trump and must bring it up at every moment to show that America is still okay'.
It's tough being a news junkie and not being a typical foaming at the mouth US mainstream liberal these days (which to the surprise of many in that category does not make one a right wing Trump supporter, nor American for that matter).
Relevant reading verifying they are part of a conspiracy against the US: Carroll Quigley.
Nothing wrong with pointing that concern out, to give the article some context about the potential domestic power of this agency.
But, worded more eloquently, I think that Trump's ego, insecurity, arrogance, and overall personality makes him more likely to abuse his power; especially for petty or vindictive reasons.
Not incredibly more likely. I don't think he's going to call the NSA director and ask him to spy on an ex-wife or something (probably...). I just think Obama respected the gravitas of his position more.
And everyone around him knows this and wouldn't hesitate to say "don't f*ing do it, the media will crucify you if you do and they hear about it"
Trump also doesn't have a good relationship with the intelligence agencies.
There's two sides to the coin. I think the fact that Trump does not have a good working relationship with these agencies is probably a good thing.
I don't disagree, though. I just think the media cried wolf too many times and they're not a real threat anymore.
It really comes to this: Deep down, is Trump a good guy or not? Who knows?
As an aside, from what I can tell he seems to not realize the power of his words as President, or the consequences of certain actions in the realm of politics.
After taking credit for good things happening he had nothing to do with, I nautrally wonder how much credit he will take if things don't pan out as he plans.
The buck stops with him, I don't think that has fully sunk in during this past 90 days or so of his adminstration.
Only time will tell.
Failing to understand such basic concepts would make me extremely concerned about giving the man access to anything.
Not all are great, but some of the apps are really useful and valuable.
It's a huge and hugely valuable organization that has started to become the analysis backbone for current intelligence - largely because decision makers want photos.
The AF and NRO run the satellite system, but pretty much everything valuable that is in Low Earth Orbit that takes "pictures" is processed and analyzed through the NGA - then fused and productized with all source data from CIA/DIA/NSA.
Truly invaluable organization - if bloated (like everything in the USG).
People are always sort of disbelieving when I show them this sort of thing, in plain day. I can't figure out how the media has managed to never capitalize on this.
Military humor ;)
http://jaredfarmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Political-...
This is not correct. Manhattan has tall buildings which are a great defense against arial surveillance. They also do not do active monitoring. So if you travel more than 10 - 15 miles, you would end up entering or exiting their surveillance radius, which means they couldn't link your entire set of actions together.
Further, the resolution is not very good. They can currently trace back cars and humans walking, but the features are not great. So if you were to board a bus and exit the bus, and you weren't wearing some very distinct color (or you took off your jacket), you would be lost to them.
The company that provides this service is called PSS. I do not like them very much. [1]
Yes, it's pretty hard to even tell it's a human from aerial image. This is how humans look at 7cm/pixel (DJI drone at 150m altitude): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9P9V4RHDRkkalJYcmZWTG1JeFk..., https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9P9V4RHDRkkTEN6Y0hQVTRIbG....
Shameless plug: We don't plan to do any surveillance, but at tensorflight.com we automatically detect a few object classes and our automatic human detector is almost ready. https://twitter.com/tensorflight/status/843606859399405568 , please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you are interested in this space.
Also there are lots of CCTV cameras at every corner for tracking people without a cell phone.
The NGA is in there, interestingly, along with a bunch of others I never thought existed.
* Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
* Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
* National Security Agency (NSA)
* Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (OICI)
* Border and Customs Service Intelligence Unit [Homeland]
* US Coast Guard Intelligence [Homeland]
* Office of Homeland investigations [Homeland]
* Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) [State]
* Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence [Treasury]
* Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) [Defense]
* National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
* National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
* US Cyber Command
* US Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (ISR)
* National Air and Space Reconnaissance Center (NASIC)
* US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM)
* National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) [Army]
* US Marine Core Intelligence Activity (MCIA)
* US Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)
* FBI National Security Branch [Justice]
* Office of National Security Intelligence of Drug Enforcement Administration (ONSI DEA) [Justice]
Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, Revised Edition (2016) by Edward N. Luttwak. Pages 60-62
The first edition (1968) is timeless, but the revised edition (2016) is amazingly on-point and is updated to reflect the structural changes which have occurred in the half century since it's first printing. It's only 300-odd pages, highly recommended.
Is that a... bureaucratic pun?
If these are the same people, in 1994 they could read 3 inch headlines from a satellite. That was the stuff I worked on.
Edit: in reading through the thread I wonder if the people I knew were the NRO.
You're partly right though -- up until 2003 they were part of the Treasury department, but they were re-orged into DHS when it was created.
But your point is still valid.
> -- James Bamford: THE PUZZLE PALACE, 1982.
Yes, I learned of a stealthily intelligence agency, but also learned that today's news outlets don't really have editorial integrity
Eh, what? What does the National Reconnaissance Office do, then? I thought that was their job.
Five Eyes Burgers & Fries would actually be a great name for some joint operation/meeting/etc.
1. A Chinese gaming forum
2. The spy agency's official Twitter mouth piece
3. The spy agency's own website
4. National Governors Association
5. Spy agency's Wikipedia article
That's some fine reverse-SEO work right there.
I mean, if you were trying to hide, that seems like an obvious thing to cut out.
The rest is political fluff.
For those interested, the original Youtube interaction is in the link posted in the child comment.
[2]: http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2009/05/in-which-the...
That was the timestamp in the Politico post, but I missed the conversation.
I guess that Five Guys is popular with the NGA.
Edit: this was a joke. I imagine that is getting close to the Shannon limit with available RF spectrum.
Gorgon Stare is the platform to which the ARGUS-IS system is basically a camera upgrade. It works by "tiering" the data so objects of tactical interest get downlinked quicker and more frequently. You're certainly not sending raw bitmaps over the air
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
I would imagine that you would effectively take a "keyframe" image and then record "P-frames" on top of that like any other compression system. Only instead of a psychovisual model you have a psycho-tactical model, where you want to throw lots of bandwidth at the objects of interest and not so much to everything else.
But yeah, 6 petabytes per day is the throughput of the camera system. Most of the data will be compressed away especially on the live downlinks, and they will probably only retrieve a high-quality copy of the full "historical" data (with high-quality data on objects that aren't designated "interesting") at the end of the mission when the Reaper lands.
After all, you just can't beat the bandwidth of a Reaper full of tapes hurtling down the runway...
Time for napkin math! If you figure they are putting out 6 petabytes (6000 terabytes) of raw data per day, and let's say they are flying 20 commodity hard drives at 10 TB per drive... that gives you 200 TB per day of video, and you'd need to hit a compression ratio of 30:1 over the uncompressed bitmaps.
Seems plausible, like I bet you could get that out of a standard H264 encoder with decent quality (assuming it supports the resolutions - or you start chunking the video up). Even a more reasonable figure like 5-10 hard drives per day (60-120x compression) would probably still be within the reach of standard encoders. H264 is pretty good especially when your baseline is "raw bitmaps".
Remember, the US military doesn't give a fuck about money. Flying out a couple C-17s of hard drives every month to support a whole combat theater is chump change, especially if it means other hardware/wetware isn't getting blown up. And at least with the Gorgon Stare system they only retained data for 30 days, so we're not even talking about a huge throughput in terms of hardware for permanent retention.
edit: here is a more serious technical analysis of it that I dug up
http://ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2012/08/argus-is.html
- It blackmails the rest of the globe with the biggest nuclear deterrence across land, sea, air and probably space.
- It ensures trading routes remain open by muscling American naval and air superiority. Not to benefit others or play fair, it's there to benefit American interests.
- It actively undermines and spies under 3 letter acronyms, including it's own citizens and allies to benefit American corporarchy [1]
- It consistently outspends the rest of the world combined on it's military upkeep which guarantees it's #1 postion.
Just how long on earth will such superficially-democratic superpower maintain it's hegemony? It's like holding everyone hostage and telling them to trade with each other by selling their own clothing or body with the US taking a cut on every transaction.
This is fucked.
If you don't like downvotes, feel free to post this to a web forum that doesn't implement them.
It's perfectly normal human behaviour to assume that one's own country's motivations and activities are benevolent and effective. However, the picture looks very different to folks living outside the magic circle of the national border.
Those of us on HN who are not Americans find the giant sprawling US intelligence-industrial complex to be potentially terrifying — especially in view of the USA's demonstrated ability to extradite or kidnap (via extraordinary rendition) people it assumes to be hostile, and in extremis to target people for assassination by flying killer robot. It's the sort of capability that, in the hands of a Doctor Doom figure, or just a corrupt megalomaniac -- as opposed to the erudite, contemplative, great-hearted, and scholarly President of the United States of America who we all know and love -- would be the making of a dystopian novel or a superhero comic. (But of course, that would never happen.)
The OP seemed genuinely upset that nobody wanted to engage him on the topic, and angry that he was getting downvoted, so I tried to help him understand why people might just downvote and move on.
Sorry if that caused you inconvenience.
Consider, you state: "blackmails the rest of the globe with nuclear deterrence"
Blackmail is the threat to expose something the victim doesn't want to see exposed, in exchange for some price or service. Nuclear deterrence, is just that, deterrence. Meaning to mitigate (or deter) an adversary from attacking.
"it ensures trading routes remain open" -- all nations with navies protect legitimate trade from pirates, there are ships from at least a half dozen navies protecting cargo from Somali pirates for example.
The US uses its intelligence agencies to undermine the constitution in the service of corporate interests [paraphrased, if you don't agree feel free to correct my interpreatation] -- The US certainly doesn't do this as a matter of policy, if you know of a different policy it would help your case to actually include it as a citation.
"it outspends the rest of the world on defense" -- In terms of real dollars or in terms of percentage of GDP? The last time I checked as a percentage of GDP, Israel outspent everyone else but I haven't looked in a while. There is also an economic size effect here, the US spends more (in real dollars) than any other country on social programs as well (for example). You probably want to stick to per capita numbers though if you're doing nation-state comparisons.
There are lots of things you can say about the US that are both facts, and make the country look bad, but the choices you made aren't facts so they have a hard time persuading the reader of your 'hegemony' thesis.
which oil rich part of the world do you think they were raining bombs from aircraft carriers?
Who spies on US allies and their corporations to benefit American ones?
Who spends more than the US on the military?
I'm not responsible for whether or not you choose to extract value.
I think it's just the way the world works and if it wasn't the U.S being up there it would be another country (U.K, Russia, China) that do awful things because they could get away with it. Plus, add in the obligatory "absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It's a terrible situation, but what do you suppose an effective alternative is? Because cooperating and "compromise" have never been the most beneficial for both parties.
- George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb
The age of steel and combustion is coming to a close and being succeeded by that of silicon and electricity.
The more heavily a country relies on such things, the easier it will be for weak to gain claws through programming.
But I wouldn't hold out too much hope for an outpouring of democracy and more equitable relations between individuals and states in an age of total global electronic surveillance. That is a weapon that is extremely expensive, complex and singular.
Count me pessimistic, Orwell continues:
"We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another.
The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable.
Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors."
and biology. Bio-weapons will be cheap and effective.
"The lesson of the first Gulf War: ...military success would now depend on mastering the electro-magnetic spectrum and the information and telecommunications media it supports."
All colonialism is inherently evil. I guess you are saying the US is the "lesser evil" which I tend to agree.
I have no idea what the alternative is, I'm just writing what I observe based on facts that this article reminded me of.