Does the NSA intercept Americans' cell phone conversations?
No.
Google searches?
No.
Text messages?
No.
Amazon.com orders?
No.
Bank records?
No.
What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?
Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead.
If it was a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead and could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized.
But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States, it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it.
We're not authorized.
Okay, you've just heard General Alexander, head of the NSA, denying allegations.
In James Bamford's new article at Wired.com, the NSA is building the country's biggest spy center.
Watch what you say.
Bamford, of course, is the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory.
There's a PBS special about him called The Spy Factory.
And he's got a follow-up to this piece in Wired responding to the NSA chief.
The NSA chief denies domestic spying, but whistleblowers say otherwise.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, well, I'm very happy to have you here.
The articles are The NSA is building the country's biggest spy center.
Watch what you say.
And now the follow-up.
NSA chief denies domestic spying, but whistleblowers say otherwise.
You wrote not just the book, but three books about the National Security Agency.
And you cover a lot of brand-new ground in your most recent book.
But in this piece at Wired, you have brand-new sources, brand-new, named, very high-level sources at the National Security Agency spilling the beans.
So who are your whistleblowers, and what have you learned?
Well, as you said, there are very high-level whistleblowers and people with their hands on the earphones.
One of them was William Binney.
He's about as high as you can get when it comes to the technical knowledge of how NSA does its eavesdropping.
He was head of the very large 6,000-person organization.
He was the technical director for this very large 6,000-person organization in NSA that did the worldwide eavesdropping.
And then he became the founder and co-director of the organization at NSA that pretty much was in charge of automating all the eavesdropping capabilities around the world.
That was what they called the SART, the Signals Intelligence Automated Research Center.
And Bill Binney was, like I said, the founder and the co-director of that organization, and before that he was the technical director for the organization that did all the electronic spying around the world.
So he has enormous credentials.
He worked there for almost 40 years, and he was there at the time that NSA began its warrantless eavesdropping.
And that was the thing that he just couldn't stand, and he left in protest late in 2001.
And in addition to that, I've interviewed Adrienne Kinney, and she was one of the intercept operators working down in Georgia at the NSA's big listening post down there.
It's called NSA Georgia, which has just finished being rebuilt.
It now holds 4,000 people.
And she was saying how she was directed to eavesdrop on Americans calling other Americans, Americans calling other Americans from overseas.
A lot of times it would be journalists calling their families back into the U.S. and having intimate conversations with them, and she was told she had to listen to them and record them and transcribe them.
So you have all that, and then you have the director's denial that they do electronic eavesdropping in the United States today.
But one of the things that was really bizarre was the scenario that they created.
Hold on one second, because we have time.
We certainly want to get to the general's denials and what else you have to say about that.
But first of all, I wanted to ask, what all in this article, what all have you been told by these whistleblowers that's new?
Obviously they've confirmed a lot of what you reported in your most recent book, The Shadow Factory, just about all the mirrors and the storage facility in Utah, for example.
You obviously have a lot more information about that.
But what's the brand-new breaking thing other than just confirmation of what you already knew here?
Well, what Bill Binney did was he explained basically how the whole operation was set up, how many he gave a statistic, how many average phone calls they were taking in a day.
It was like 300,000 or something like that.
A lot of facts and figures in the article about how many phone calls were eavesdropped on.
He said that in addition to that monitoring room, the secret room they had in San Francisco, the AT&T switch in San Francisco, there's probably between 10 and 20 other facilities around the country and other telecom switches.
So he went into a great deal of detail about actually how this was done and where it was done and how much communications were being picked up.
It was the first time anybody's really gotten statistics on the methodology and the end result, how much came in.
Again, he spent most of his life focusing on the external targets of the United States.
He's dropping on people around the world.
He said that very soon after 9-11, the focus shifted and they were bringing in lines from within the United States for the first time.
That was enough to make him decide that he didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
He said it was totally unconstitutional.
He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and he said, we're now this close to becoming a totalitarian society, a turnkey totalitarian society.
In other words, if a president wanted to just cancel an election and use this NSA lawlessly, completely against the American people to clamp down on them, that it would work.
The infrastructure for it has already been built, a turnkey totalitarian state.
Turnkey means that the infrastructure is there.
It's all there.
All you need to do is turn the key and that's basically what he said.
In other words, the feasibility is there.
One of the focuses of the piece is how for 10 years since 9-11, the NSA has been building this enormous infrastructure, basically pouring tons of money into building new listing posts, building new capabilities.
Then the final piece is this giant $1 million square foot, $2 billion data center in Utah.
It's where all the intercepted data will go.
It will be basically NSA's cloud so that the NSA people at headquarters and at the listing posts around the world would be able to tap into all that information that goes in there through fiber optic cables.
You actually have now these charts that show the whole infrastructure of these different data centers.
You go into depth, as you were saying, about the amounts, the petaflops and yottabytes and all these insanely large amounts of information.
In fact, could you tell them real quick the one about, I think you're quoting a guy from Google, about all the information, all the written text in the history of mankind up until 2005 and then they expect to have that much information processed on an annual basis for now, that kind of thing?
Yeah, those statistics, you have to read those in the article.
It's some mind-blowing numbers though, for sure.
They're enormous numbers and when you're getting up into that amount of data, a yottabyte, which is a measure of an amount of data, a yottabyte is the largest number that's been created.
There is no number after a yottabyte for the amount of data.
And the federal government, actually the Defense Department, has been talking about yottabytes of data now in terms of the creation of a yottabyte of data.
And if you measure the yottabyte in terms of actual pages, it would be 500 quintillion pages of text.
So we're talking enormous numbers here, but the amount of data that goes through the air and the amount of people that are getting internet coverage is just growing astronomically.
And then the NSA's job is intercepting this communication.
So that's one of the reasons for the data centers are getting more and more information.
The irony here is that the more information they collect, it doesn't seem to equate into progress in the ability to stop terrorists.
I mean, during the 1990s, they missed the first World Trade Center, then they missed the attack on the USS Cole, and then they missed the attack on the East Embassy buildings in East Africa, and then they missed 9-11.
And then even after that, when they've been building all this new capability and being showered with more and more money, they missed the underwear bomber on Christmas Day in Detroit, and then they missed the Times Square bomber and so forth.
So we're paying billions and billions and billions of dollars for improving this agency, but it seems to be that all we're doing is paying it to drown itself in data.
All right, now, one thing I wanted to try to get straight here, if I could, was the time frame on what your whistleblower is telling you.
Because I guess it's possible that a denial could take the form of saying, well, yeah, but that was during the Bush years, but then Congress passed this FISA amendments, and it's not altogether clear, I don't think, how the FISA amendments act works exactly.
But something like, instead of authorizing specific warrants for specific people, the FISA court can now authorize entire kinds of data to be swept up, that kind of thing.
So I just want to make sure that I understand you right, that you're telling me that the completely unhinged, illegal version of this in the Bush years is still the same thing that's going on to this day.
Well, as I mentioned in the article, Benny left at the end of 2001, so that was during the time under the Bush administration.
He's kept in touch with other people at the agency since then.
But that's why I put those timelines in there.
But as you mentioned, the FISA amendments act, which was passed by Congress after the eavesdropping was exposed to the NSA, it didn't really stop that from happening at NSA.
What it did was largely codify what was going on there.
So there could be some change, there could be some differences in it, but the point was that the legislation weakened the protections, it weakened the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
As you mentioned, they no longer have to do the kind of oversight that they used to do.
And the NSA is building a data center to put something in there, and they're getting a great deal of information from all these inputs that they've got around the country, one in San Francisco and the other one.
So, yeah, it's very interesting what could be going in there, and certainly from people that have worked in the listening posts and so forth, that NSA had a large concentration on trying to find domestic targets.
Again, this was after 9-11 when we were attacked by people in the United States, so there was a heavy drive to find any more homegrown terrorists.
Well, so at this point then, is it just not believable to you when they say that...
Well, I mean, he was saying that in the denials yesterday, the general was saying, you know, we don't even really have the ability to read domestic email from an American to an American.
If we thought something was going on, we'd just tell the FBI about it, and they would have to go, I guess, with gum shoes and a trench coat, and hand deliver a warrant to a local ISP and have them give up some stuff.
But, gee, we're helpless in that circumstance.
That was just believable, or not at all, or what?
Well, you know, if you look at the history, and I have written the history of three books on NSA, going back, that's all the NSA ever seems to do, is deny things that eventually come out as being true.
The first one was Operation Shamrock, when they were eavesdropping, actually getting copies of all the telegrams coming through the country for 30 years illegally, totally without a warrant.
And they began eavesdropping on anti-war protesters, again, totally illegally, during the Vietnam War.
And then you had that long period where you had the FISA court in operation, and everything seemed to be going good.
One of the books I did, I mean, I'm trying to be fair with NSA, of the three books, NSA had a book party for me, or a book signing for me at NSA.
So then after 9-11, that's when NSA took off the gloves and it began doing the illegal eavesdropping.
And during that time, while that was going on, before the New York Times made the announcement, or broke the story about it, Bush got up and said on television in front of an audience, he was giving a speech at one point, somebody had asked him a question, and he said the United States would never eavesdrop on anybody without a warrant.
This was at a time with the height of Stellar Wind, the warrantless eavesdropping program.
It's very hard to say.
If you're looking at that denial from General Alexander yesterday, you have to look at what was said, how it was said, and what the scenario was.
Right.
That's where I interrupted you before.
Please go ahead with that.
I'm sorry?
That was where I interrupted you before.
I'm sorry.
Please get back to that.
Yeah, the scenario was this crazy scenario where, suppose that Dick Cheney became president, and then people were making fun of him because he shot somebody in the face with a shotgun, and Cheney wanted to know who these people were that were making fun of him because he wanted to waterboard him.
It was a bizarro scenario, and then the answers didn't really make any sense either because most of them were very parsed or garbled, or they didn't really fit the question.
That's sort of what's been happening with the NSA.
They try to parse these questions so that it sounds like they're saying nothing is going on, but in reality there is something going on.
For example, he always hedged his answers by saying, does the NSA have this capability to eavesdrop on this information?
He would say, no, it doesn't, not in the United States.
Well, that means they can maybe eavesdrop on it with a satellite up in space, or on an undersea cable, or by eavesdropping on it from Canada or Britain.
All these things are things that the NSA has done, and it's certainly a way.
The problem is there's no borders on information these days, no borders on digital communication.
So it's not as though the information is going to stop, the U.S. communication is going to stop at the border or whatever.
So you have to take all those things into consideration.
What I suggested in this little piece I just did for the website on WIRED was that you get all these whistleblowers.
You get Benny and Kenny and another one that I interviewed, David Falk, who was also a whistleblower from NSA Georgia, and confirmed basically what Adrian Kenny said.
You get all these people, put them under oath, put them on a panel, and let them have their say in front of the Congress, and then have NSA respond to them.
Instead of coming up with some crazy scenario about people being eavesdropped on or making fun of a vice president for shooting people in the face.
The scenario made Cheney a president, which is scary enough as it is without the shotgun.
So that's one way.
The public is not allowed to know what's being done with the communications, and that's a very frightening thing.
The public should know.
If the NSA has access to your communications and a democracy, they should have that right to know, especially when digital communications these days are so prolific and everybody puts everything on digital communications.
What pages you're looking at a book, what pornography you're looking at on the web, what websites you're going to, who you're talking on your cell phone, who you're tweeting, and all these pieces of information.
So much information goes out from humans these days that any agency that has enormous capability to intercept it and store it and analyze it should be accountable to the public and for decades it hasn't been accountable to the public and the Congress has been basically its cheerleaders as opposed to acting as a buffer between the agency and the United States citizens.
A common reaction that I've witnessed at least a few times, and it makes sense, is that there's just no way they could be spying on all of us, especially those of us who are just going about our day-to-day lives.
You would need half the population to be their employees to sift through everybody's email to find out who they wanted to persecute, and so pretty much if you have nothing to hide, you don't have anything to worry about kind of attitude, still can prevail.
How could it be that the National Security Agency is surfing on all this data rather than just drowning in it, as I think you put it in your book, or quote someone putting it that way in your book?
Well, yeah, both in the book and the article, I don't make any allegations that NSA eavesdrops on everyone everywhere at all times.
I mean, that's just technologically nonsense.
So the way it's done and the way I explain it in the book and the way it's come out is they have inputs come into the United States and they put these things called NARIS devices that are very fast, what they call deep packet inspections.
As the information travels through the routers coming into the country and going through the country at these big AT&T switches, the information is sifted through these.
You can think of it as a big sift.
These NARIS devices that are looking for particular words, particular phrases, particular names, email addresses, and when it hits that it's able to get the entire content of that document, all the information, the content of that email.
And the idea is that once it flags that information, it sends that off to a copy of it, to put a copy off to NSA.
That was the whole purpose for these NARIS devices, is to be able to do deep packet inspection.
And so you're not looking at every single, NSA is not looking at every single communication.
You have a filtering device that filters out who they're looking for and what they're looking for.
I think people probably picture like the Simpsons movie, where there's this one room with 100,000 NSA spies at cubicles, sitting there listening.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
But it's really not necessary.
It's all just in the software to comb through, looking for what they're looking for.
Well, you have different levels of software.
You have the initial level, probably the satellite, is probably the initial level where it will pick only certain communications frequencies up.
It might not need all the communications coming in and out of Lichtenstein or from Monaco or someplace, but it would want everything going in and out of Libya or it would want everything going out of other countries.
So there's filtering mechanisms, filtering software on the satellite itself that will determine which communications to pick up and which not to pick up.
And then once it picks up that or actually relays it to an NSA listening post, and again in the article I describe how all that works, and then there's another filter where they'll go through maybe an initial scan to see what may be important and what's not.
And so eventually it will get to analysts at NSA headquarters that will be subject area experts, and they'll have a final look at it and take a look at the final amount.
By then, a lot of the other information has been filtered out, just like separating the wheat from the chaff.
So that's pretty much how it works.
And it works well?
Is that your understanding, that they basically can surf on all this data and figure out what it is that they're looking for?
Well, the software looks through it.
It's just like there's software that's designed to find out whether you're downloading a movie or downloading pictures or downloading email.
I mean, all this has a signature when it goes through, when it's being transmitted and so forth.
And so, you know, on a much more detailed level, that's what this hardware and software does.
It looks for what the agency is looking for.
If you have this device set up in San Francisco, for example, where it will filter everything through this device, it would be able to kick out whatever the NSA is looking for, and the NSA could program it and reprogram it and change the target remotely.
They don't have to be in San Francisco and have a little room to do it.
They just program it remotely from headquarters, put a particular name down there, a particular phone number, a particular email.
And it doesn't have the power to listen to every conversation.
What it does is it's looking for certain phone numbers, and any of those phone numbers that are on the target list will be forwarded to NSA for analysis.
It's much more detailed when it gets the email because it can actually look inside the content of the email for whatever they're looking for, you know, a name, a word, a phrase, an address, whatever it is they're looking for.
Right now, I'm talking with James Bamford, author of Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, The Shadow Factory, a new article in Wire Magazine and a follow-up at Wire.com, following up on NSA Chief Keith Alexander's dismissal of the allegations in his article yesterday in front of the Congress.
And I wanted to give you a chance again to tell me about, because it's been a little while, I was hoping you could tell me about the data storage station, I guess it is, down in San Antonio.
I think you compared it to the size of the Alamo Dome, which is pretty big, and then it was going to be just a few miles away from a new Microsoft Center.
I believe the last time we spoke they were working on it.
Is that thing up and running now?
I think it's just a completer.
It has been completed.
It's actually a former Sony computer plant in San Antonio.
NSA bought it and converted it into a sort of small version of what they have in Utah.
It's almost the size of the Alamo Dome.
It could probably serve as a backup for Utah if something happened there.
It's not as big, but it can hold quite a bit of information, plus there are a lot of analysts down there.
The way it works is the listening posts that used to be overseas are largely in the U.S. now.
A listening post in Georgia focuses on communications in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.
In Texas they focus on Central and South America, but they also have additional people that watch the Middle East from there.
Then in Hawaii they have what they call NSA Hawaii, which looks at the Far East and so forth.
Then there's a facility right outside of Denver in Colorado that is the downlink for all the satellite information.
In other words, satellites around the world pick up these communications and retransmit it down to Aurora, Colorado, Buckley Air Force Base.
Like I said, that's another filter.
From there it will go to Bluffdale, the NSA facility in Utah.
You said that they really have made significant advances in the speed of the computers that they use to crack even the toughest new encryption methods.
Is that right?
Yes, that's another new thing.
There's a fairly long article quoting Binney about the domestic aspect.
It's just one small part of it.
The other aspects deal with how big the data center is, basically describing the whole data center, what it's basically going to be made up of, how many square feet of storage space and all that, and how that will be the final piece of this puzzle.
But the other aspect of the data center is not just the storage, but breaking codes.
NSA has three basic jobs.
One is intercepting communication, the other is breaking encryption systems, breaking codes, and the third is making encryption systems for the U.S. government.
On the second part, if you're breaking codes, it's very important you get two things.
One is a lot of communication, because what you're looking for are patterns.
If you have one piece of communication, you're not going to find a pattern.
If you have two, it's going to be very difficult to find a pattern.
If you have 200,000, it's going to be much more easy to find patterns.
So the more information they store at the NSA data center in Utah, the more they'll have to go through looking for patterns.
The tool they use to simplify it as much as possible, the main tool they use to look for these patterns through a process known as brute force, is very fast computers.
Very fast computers will go through zillions of combinations of looking for different combinations within this group of data that they have at Utah.
So, in other words, if they have 200,000 messages from a particular target that's in a particular encryption system, they'll run just enormous numbers of combinations through them.
Right now they've developed a computer that will do what's known as pentaflop.
It's a measure of speed.
A pentaflop is a quadrillion operations a second.
And NSA has a computer that will do probably five to ten pentaflops worth of speed, which is probably the fastest computer in the world right now.
And it's working on a computer that will do one order of magnitude higher than that, which will be an exaflop.
So you're getting in these terms that nobody's ever heard of, and these are like the land speed record for computers in terms of being able to do very fast analysis.
And in order to build this supercomputer, they're building it down in Tennessee, at the same place where they, in World War II, built the atomic bomb, down in Oak Ridge.
So in World War II, they had this program to build the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and now they've got a program to build the ultimate supercomputer down there, the fastest computer in the world.
And it's very secretive.
This is the first time it's come out, this whole...
Any detail at all about the brand-new supercomputer they're working on down in Tennessee.
Oh, really?
Good.
Well, another feather for your cap.
Always incredible journalism for more than a generation now.
Jim, thank you very much for your time on the show.
Yeah, my pleasure, Scott.
Good talking to you.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That is James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory.
He's the subject of a NOVA special on PBS, which you can watch online, which is all about the science of how they gobble up all this data, called The Spy Factory.
And he's got a new piece in WIRED magazine, the NSA is building the country's biggest spy center.
Watch what you say.
And a follow-up at wired.com, NSA chief denies domestic spying, but whistleblowers say otherwise.
