[NYTr] Bush Goes Private to Spy on You

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Corporate Watch via Alternet - Dec 6, 1007
http://www.alternet.org/story/69105/

 
Bush Goes Private to Spy on You

By Tim Shorrock

A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush
administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad
surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first
time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National
Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and
rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up
by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create
the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic
intelligence gathering that would make the United States one of the
world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of
electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific
agencies with no responsibility for national security or law
enforcement.

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely
heavily on private contractors, including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3
Communications and Science Applications International Corporation
(SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to
U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly
expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San
Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively
lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed
for domestic surveillance.

The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the
NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National
Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA) and other key agencies is used within the United States during
natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting
national security. The most critical intelligence will be supplied by
the NSA and the NGA, which are often referred to by U.S. officials as
the "eyes" and "ears" of the intelligence community.

The NSA, through a global network of listening posts, surveillance
planes, and satellites, captures signals from phone calls, email and
internet traffic, and translates and analyzes them for U.S. military
and national intelligence officials.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally
inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that
allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the
skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the
supersecret National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO), which builds and
maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground
stations where the NSA's signals and the NGA's imagery are processed
and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be
confined to foreign countries and battlefields.

The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in
2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence
community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S.
intelligence operations had not been updated for the global "war on
terror," turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va., one of the
largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with
studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance
planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to
security within the United States. The Booz Allen study was completed
in May of that year and has since become the basis for the NAO
oversight plan. In May 2007, McConnell, the former executive vice
president of Booz Allen, signed off on the creation of the NAO as the
principal body to oversee the merging of foreign and domestic
intelligence collection operations.

The NAO is "an idea whose time has arrived," Charles Allen, a top U.S.
intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007
after it broke the news of the NAO's creation. Allen, the DHS's chief
intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came
just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by
Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without
warrants, on telephone calls, email and faxes passing through
telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government
suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved. "These
[intelligence] systems are already used to help us respond to crises,"
Allen later told the Washington Post. "We anticipate that we can also
use them to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous
people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical
infrastructure for vulnerabilities."

Donald Kerr, a former NRO director who is now the No. 2 at ODNI,
recently explained to reporters that the intelligence community was no
longer discussing whether or not to spy on U.S. citizens: "Our job now
is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a
component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,'' Kerr
said. ''I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already
are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what
safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty
our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.''

What will the NAO do?

The plan for the NAO builds on a domestic security infrastructure that
has been in place for at least seven years. After the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA was granted new powers to monitor domestic
communications without obtaining warrants from a secret foreign
intelligence court established by Congress in 1978 (that warrantless
program ended in January 2007 but was allowed to continue, with some
changes, under legislation passed by Congress in August 2007).

Moreover, intelligence and reconnaissance agencies that were
historically confined to spying on foreign countries have been used
extensively on the home front since 2001. In the hours after the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks in New York, for example, the Bush administration
called on the NGA to capture imagery from lower Manhattan and the
Pentagon to help in the rescue and recovery efforts. In 2002, when two
deranged snipers terrified the citizens of Washington and its Maryland
and Virginia suburbs with a string of fatal shootings, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked the NGA to provide detailed images
of freeway interchanges and other locations to help spot the pair.

The NGA was also used extensively during Hurricane Katrina, when the
agency provided overhead imagery -- some of it supplied by U-2
photoreconnaissance aircraft -- to federal and state rescue operations.
The data, which included mapping of flooded areas in Louisiana and
Mississippi, allowed residents of the stricken areas to see the extent
of damage to their homes and helped first-responders locate
contaminated areas as well as schools, churches and hospitals that
might be used in the rescue. More recently, during the October 2007
California wildfires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
asked the NGA to analyze overhead imagery of the fire zones and
determine the areas of maximum intensity and damage. In every situation
that the NGA is used domestically, it must receive a formal request
from a lead domestic agency, according to agency spokesperson David
Burpee. That agency is usually FEMA, which is a unit of DHS.

At first blush, the idea of a U.S. intelligence agency serving the
public by providing imagery to aid in disaster recovery sounds like a
positive development, especially when compared to the Bush
administration's misuse of the NSA and the Pentagon's
Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) to spy on American citizens.
But the notion of using spy satellites and aircraft for domestic
purposes becomes problematic from a civil liberties standpoint when the
full capabilities of agencies like the NGA and the NSA are considered.

Imagine, for example, that U.S. intelligence officials have determined,
through NSA telephone intercepts, that a group of worshipers at a
mosque in Oakland, Calif., has communicated with an Islamic charity in
Saudi Arabia. This is the same group that the FBI and the U.S.
Department of the Treasury believe is linked to an organization
unfriendly to the United States.

Imagine further that the FBI, as a lead agency, asks and receives
permission to monitor that mosque and the people inside using
high-resolution imagery obtained from the NGA. Using other
technologies, such as overhead traffic cameras in place in many cities,
that mosque could be placed under surveillance for months, and --
through cell phone intercepts and overhead imagery -- its suspected
worshipers carefully tracked in real time as they moved almost anywhere
in the country.

The NAO, under the plan approved by ODNI's McConnell, would determine
the rules that will guide the DHS and other lead federal agencies when
they want to use imagery and signals intelligence in situations like
this, as well as during natural disasters. If the organization is
established as planned, U.S. domestic agencies will have a vast array
of technology at their disposal. In addition to the powerful mapping
and signals tools provided by the NGA and the NSA, domestic agencies
will also have access to measures and signatures intelligence (MASINT)
managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal spying
agency used by the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(MASINT is a highly classified form of intelligence that uses infrared
sensors and other technologies to "sniff" the atmosphere for certain
chemicals and electromagnetic activity, and "see" beneath bridges and
forest canopies. Using its tools, analysts can detect signs that a
nuclear power plant is producing plutonium, determine from truck
exhaust what types of vehicles are in a convoy, and detect people and
weapons hidden from the view of satellites or photoreconnaissance
aircraft.)

Created by contractors

The study group that established policies for the NAO was jointly
funded by the ODNI and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), one of only
two domestic U.S. agencies that is currently allowed, under rules set
in the 1970s, to use classified intelligence from spy satellites. (The
other is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) The
group was chaired by Keith Hall, a Booz Allen vice president who
manages his firm's extensive contracts with the NGA and previously
served as the director of the NRO.

Other members of the group included seven former intelligence officers
working for Booz Allen, as well as retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick M.
Hughes, the former director of the DIA and vice president of homeland
security for L-3 Communications, a key NSA contractor; and Thomas W.
Conroy, the vice president of national security programs for Northrop
Grumman, which has extensive contracts with the NSA and the NGA and
throughout the intelligence community.

>From the start, the study group was heavily weighted toward companies
with a stake in both foreign and domestic intelligence. Not
surprisingly, its contractor-advisers called for a major expansion in
the domestic use of the spy satellites that they sell to the
government. Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, they said, the "threats to the nation have
changed, and there is a growing interest in making available the
special capabilities of the intelligence community to all parts of the
government, to include homeland security and law enforcement entities
and on a higher priority basis."

Contractors are not new to the U.S. spy world. Since the creation of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the modern intelligence
system in 1947, the private sector has been tapped to design and build
the technology that facilitates electronic surveillance. Lockheed, for
example, built the U-2, the famous surveillance plane that flew scores
of spy missions over the Soviet Union and Cuba. During the 1960s,
Lockheed was a prime contractor for the Corona system of spy satellites
that greatly expanded the CIA's abilities to photograph secret military
installations from space. IBM, Cray Computers and other companies built
the supercomputers that allowed the NSA to sift through data from
millions of telephone calls and analyze them for intelligence that was
passed on to national leaders.

Spending on contracts has increased exponentially in recent years along
with intelligence budgets, and the NSA, the NGA and other agencies have
turned to the private sector for the latest computer and communications
technologies and for intelligence analysts. For example, today about
half of staff at the NSA and NGA are private contractors. At the DIA,
70 percent of the workers are contractors. But the most privatized
agency of all is the NRO, where a whopping 90 percent of the work force
receive paychecks from corporations. All told the U.S. intelligence
agencies spend some 70 percent of their estimated $60 billion annual
budget on contracts with private companies, according to documents this
reporter obtained in June 2007 from the ODNI.

The plans to increase domestic spying are estimated to be worth
billions of dollars in new business for the intelligence contractors.
The market potential was on display in October at GEOINT 2007, the
annual conference sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence
Foundation (USGIF), a nonprofit organization funded by the largest
contractors for the NGA. During the conference, which took place in
October at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown
San Antonio, many companies were displaying spying and surveillance
tools that had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq and were now being
rebranded for potential domestic use.

BAE Systems Inc.

On the first day of the conference, three employees of BAE Systems Inc.
who had just returned from a three-week tour of Iraq and Afghanistan
with the NGA demonstrated a new software package called SOCET GXP. (BAE
Systems Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of the U.K.-based BAE, the
third-largest military contractor in the world.)

GXP uses Google Earth software as a basis for creating
three-dimensional maps that U.S. commanders and soldiers use to conduct
intelligence and reconnaissance missions. Eric Bruce, one of the BAE
employees back from the Middle East, said his team trained U.S. forces
to use the GXP software "to study routes for known terrorist sites" as
well as to locate opium fields. "Terrorists use opium to fund their
war," he said. Bruce also said his team received help from Iraqi
citizens in locating targets. "Many of the locals can't read maps, so
they tell the analysts, 'there is a mosque next to a hill,'" he
explained.

Bruce said BAE's new package is designed for defense forces and
intelligence agencies but can also be used for homeland security and by
highway departments and airports. Earlier versions of the software were
sold to the U.S. Army's Topographic Engineering Center, where it has
been used to collect data on more than 12,000 square kilometers of
Iraq, primarily in urban centers and over supply routes.

Another new BAE tool displayed in San Antonio was a program called
GOSHAWK, which stands for "Geospatial Operations for a Secure Homeland
-- Awareness, Workflow, Knowledge." It was pitched by BAE as a tool to
help law enforcement and state and local emergency agencies prepare
for, and respond to, "natural disasters and terrorist and criminal
incidents." Under the GOSHAWK program, BAE supplies "agencies and
corporations" with data providers and information technology
specialists "capable of turning geospatial information into the
knowledge needed for quick decisions." A typical operation might
involve acquiring data from satellites, aircraft and sensors in ground
vehicles, and integrating those data to support an emergency or
security operations center. One of the program's special attributes,
the company says, is its ability to "differentiate levels of
classification," meaning that it can deduce when data are classified
and meant only for use by analysts with security clearances.

These two products were just a sampling of what BAE, a major player in
the U.S. intelligence market, had to offer. BAE's services to U.S.
intelligence -- including the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism
Center -- are provided through a special unit called the Global
Analysis Business Unit. It is located in McLean, Va., a stone's throw
from the CIA. The unit is headed by John Gannon, a 25-year veteran of
the CIA who reached the agency's highest analytical ranks as deputy
director of intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence
Council. Today, as a private sector contractor for the intelligence
community, Gannon manages a staff of more than 800 analysts with
security clearances.

A brochure for the Global Analysis unit distributed at GEOINT 2007
explains BAE's role and, in the process, underscores the degree of
outsourcing in U.S. intelligence. "The demand for experienced, skilled
and cleared analysts -- and for the best systems to manage them -- has
never been greater across the Intelligence and Defense Communities, in
the field and among federal, state and local agencies responsible for
national and homeland security," BAE says. The mission of the Global
Analysis unit, it says, "is to provide policymakers, warfighters and
law enforcement officials with analysts to help them understand the
complex intelligence threats they face, and work force management
programs to improve the skills and expertise of analysts."

At the bottom of the brochure is a series of photographs illustrating
BAE's broad reach: a group of analysts monitoring a bank of computers;
three employees studying a map of Europe, the Middle East and the Horn
of Africa; the outlines of two related social networks that have been
mapped out to show how their members are linked; a bearded man,
apparently from the Middle East and presumably a terrorist; the fiery
image of a car bomb after it exploded in Iraq; and four white radar
domes (known as radomes) of the type used by the NSA to monitor global
communications from dozens of bases and facilities around the world.

The brochure may look and sound like typical corporate public
relations. But amid BAE's spy talk were two phrases strategically
placed by the company to alert intelligence officials that BAE has an
active presence inside the United States. The tip-off words were
"federal, state and local agencies," "law enforcement officials" and
"homeland security." By including them, BAE was broadcasting that it is
not simply a contractor for agencies involved in foreign intelligence
but has an active presence as a supplier to domestic security agencies,
a category that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and
the FBI, as well as local and state police forces stretching from Maine
to Hawaii.

ManTech, Boeing, Harris and L-3

ManTech International, an important NSA contractor based in Fairfax,
Va., has perfected the art of creating multiagency software programs
for both foreign and domestic intelligence. After the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, it developed a classified program for the Defense Intelligence
Agency called the Joint Regional Information Exchange System. DIA used
it to combine classified and unclassified intelligence on terrorist
threats on a single desktop. ManTech then tweaked that software for the
Department of Homeland Security and sold it to DHS for its Homeland
Security Information Network. According to literature ManTech
distributed at GEOINT, that software will "significantly strengthen the
exchange of real-time threat information used to combat terrorism."
ManTech, the brochure added, "also provides extensive, advanced
information technology support to the National Security Agency" and
other agencies.

In a nearby booth, Chicago-based Boeing, the world's second largest
defense contractor, was displaying its "information sharing
environment" software, which is designed to meet the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence's new requirements on agencies to
stop buying "stovepiped" systems that can't talk to each other. The
ODNI wants to focus on products that will allow the NGA and other
agencies to easily share their classified imagery with the CIA and
other sectors of the community. "To ensure freedom in the world, the
United States continues to address the challenges introduced by
terrorism," a Boeing handout said. Its new software, the company said,
will allow information to be "shared efficiently and uninterrupted
across intelligence agencies, first responders, military and world
allies." Boeing has a reason for publishing boastful material like
this: In 2005, it lost a major contract with the NRO to build a new
generation of imaging satellites after ringing up billions of dollars
in cost overruns. The New York Times recently called the Boeing project
"the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of
American spy satellite projects."

Boeing's geospatial intelligence offerings are provided through its
Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which also holds contracts with
the NSA. It allows agencies and military units to map global shorelines
and create detailed maps of cities and battlefields, complete with
digital elevation data that allow users to construct three-dimensional
maps. (In an intriguing aside, one Boeing intelligence brochure lists
among its "specialized organizations" Jeppesen Government and Military
Services. According to a 2006 account by New Yorker reporter Jane
Mayer, Jeppesen provided logistical and navigational assistance,
including flight plans and clearance to fly over other countries, to
the CIA for its "extraordinary rendition" program.)

Although less known as an intelligence contractor than BAE and Boeing,
the Harris Corp. has become a major force in providing contracted
electronic, satellite and information technology services to the
intelligence community, including the NSA and the NRO. In 2007,
according to its most recent annual report, the $4.2 billion company,
based in Melbourne, Fla., won several new classified contracts. NSA
awarded one of them for software to be used by NSA analysts in the
agency's "Rapidly Deployable Integrated Command and Control System,"
which is used by the NSA to transmit "actionable intelligence" to
soldiers and commanders in the field. Harris also supplies geospatial
and imagery products to the NGA. At GEOINT, Harris displayed a new
product that allows agencies to analyze live video and audio data
imported from UAVs. It was developed, said Fred Poole, a Harris market
development manager, "with input from intelligence analysts who were
looking for a video and audio analysis tool that would allow them to
perform 'intelligence fusion'" -- combining information from several
agencies into a single picture of an ongoing operation.

For many of the contractors at GEOINT, the highlight of the symposium
was an "interoperability demonstration" that allowed vendors to show
how their products would work in a domestic crisis.

One scenario involved Cuba as a rogue nation supplying spent nuclear
fuel to terrorists bent on creating havoc in the United States.
Implausible as it was, the plot, which involved maritime transportation
and ports, allowed the companies to display software that was likely
already in use by the Department of Homeland Security and Naval
Intelligence. The "plot" involved the discovery by U.S. intelligence of
a Cuban ship carrying spent nuclear fuel heading for the U.S. Gulf
Coast; an analysis of the social networks of Cuban officials involved
with the illicit cargo; and the tracking and interception of the cargo
as it departed from Cuba and moved across the Caribbean to Corpus
Christi, Texas, a major port on the Gulf Coast. The agencies involved
included the NGA, the NSA, Naval Intelligence and the Marines, and some
of the key contractors working for those agencies. It illustrated how
sophisticated the U.S. domestic surveillance system has become in the
six years since the 9/11 attacks.

L-3 Communications, which is based in New York City, was a natural for
the exercise: As mentioned earlier, retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick M.
Hughes, its vice president of homeland security, was a member of the
Booz Allen Hamilton study group that advised the Bush administration to
expand the domestic use of military spy satellites. At GEOINT, L-3
displayed a new program called "multi-INT visualization environment"
that combines imagery and signals intelligence data that can be laid
over photographs and maps. One example shown during the
interoperability demonstration showed how such data would be
incorporated into a map of Florida and the waters surrounding Cuba.
With L-3 a major player at the NSA, this demonstration software is
likely seeing much use as the NSA and the NGA expand their
information-sharing relationship.

Over the past two years, for example, the NGA has deployed dozens of
employees and contractors to Iraq to support the "surge" of U.S.
troops. The NGA teams provide imagery and full-motion video -- much of
it beamed to the ground from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) -- that
help U.S. commanders and soldiers track and destroy insurgents fighting
the U.S. occupation. And since 2004, under a memorandum of
understanding with the NSA, the NGA has begun to incorporate signals
intelligence into its imagery products. The blending technique allows
U.S. military units to track and find targets by picking up signals
from their cell phones, follow the suspects in real time using overhead
video, and direct fighter planes and artillery units to the exact
location of the targets, and blow them to smithereens.

That's exactly how U.S. Special Forces tracked and killed Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the alleged leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the NGA's director,
Navy Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, said in 2006. Later, Murrett told
reporters during GEOINT 2007, the NSA and the NGA have cooperated in
similar fashion in several other fronts of the "war on terror,"
including in the Horn of Africa, where the U.S. military has attacked
Al Qaeda units in Somalia, and in the Philippines, where U.S. forces
are helping the government put down the Muslim insurgent group Abu
Sayyaf. "When the NGA and the NSA work together, one plus one equals
five," said Murrett.

Civil liberty worries

For U.S. citizens, however, the combination of NGA imagery and NSA
signals intelligence in a domestic situation could threaten important
constitutional safeguards against unwarranted searches and seizures.
Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies,
a nonprofit advocacy organization, has likened the NAO plan to "Big
Brother in the Sky." The Bush administration, she told the Washington
Post, is "laying the bricks one at a time for a police state."

Some Congress members, too, are concerned. "The enormity of the NAO's
capabilities and the intended use of the imagery received through these
satellites for domestic homeland security purposes, and the unintended
consequences that may arise, have heightened concerns among the general
public, including reputable civil rights and civil liberties
organizations," Bennie G. Thompson, a Democratic member of Congress
from Mississippi and the chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee, wrote in a September letter to Secretary of Homeland
Security Michael Chertoff. Thompson and other lawmakers reacted with
anger after reports of the NAO and the domestic spying plan were first
revealed by the Wall Street Journal in August. "There was no briefing,
no hearing, and no phone call from anyone on your staff to any member
of this committee of why, how or when satellite imagery would be shared
with police and sheriffs' officers nationwide," Thompson complained to
Chertoff.

At a hastily organized hearing in September, Thompson and others
demanded that the opening of the NAO be delayed until further studies
were conducted on its legal basis and questions about civil liberties
were answered. They also demanded biweekly updates from Chertoff on the
activities and progress of the new organization. Others pointed out the
potential danger of allowing U.S. military satellites to be used
domestically. "It will terrify you if you really understand the
capabilities of satellites," warned Jane Harman, a Democratic member of
Congress from California, who represents a coastal area of Los Angeles,
where many of the nation's satellites are built. As Harman well knows,
military spy satellites are far more flexible, offer greater
resolution, and have considerably more power to observe human activity
than commercial satellites. "Even if this program is well-designed and
executed, someone somewhere else could hijack it," Harman said during
the hearing.

The NAO was supposed to open for business on Oct. 1, 2007. But the
congressional complaints have led the ODNI and DHS to delay their
plans. The NAO "has no intention to begin operations until we address
your questions," Charles Allen of DHS explained in a letter to
Thompson. In an address at the GEOINT conference in San Antonio, Allen
said that the ODNI is working with DHS and the Departments of Justice
and Interior to draft the charter for the new organization, which he
said will face "layers of review" once it is established.

Yet, given the Bush administration's record of using U.S. intelligence
agencies to spy on U.S. citizens, it is difficult to take such promises
at face value. Moreover, the extensive corporate role in foreign and
domestic intelligence means that the private sector has a great deal to
gain in the new plan for intelligence sharing. Because most private
contracts with intelligence agencies are classified, however, the
public will have little knowledge of this role. Before Congress signs
off on the NAO, it should create a better oversight system that would
allow the House of Representatives and the Senate to monitor the new
organization and to examine how BAE, Boeing, Harris and its fellow
corporations stand to profit from this unprecedented expansion of
America's domestic intelligence system.

[Tim Shorrock has been writing about U.S. foreign policy and national
security for nearly 30 years. His book Spies for Hire: The Secret World
of Outsourced Intelligence will be published in May 2008 by Simon &
Schuster. ]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.