No Such Agency
The following is from a great site, which contains extensive excerpts from books and additional information from other media sources referencing the UKUSA agreement, ECHELON, the NSA and domestic espionage. Some of the information is review from previous posts on this subject:
Attorney John Loftus is the author of four histories of intelligence operations. As a former prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, he had unprecedented access to top-secret CIA and NATO archives. Mark Aarons is an investigative reporter and author of several books on intelligence related issues.
One day I was flipping channels, and came across "The Leon Charney Show". Attorney Charney was interviewing Attorney Loftus, who has many many connections in the intelligence world.
Mr. Loftus described a room in NSA's Fort Meade that was actually British soil (diplomatic territory), with a British guard posted outside...
In 1943 this resulted in the Britain-USA (BRUSA) agreement to merge the Communications Intelligence (COMINT) agencies of both governments.
One of the little-known features of BRUSA was that President Roosevelt agreed that the two governments could spy on each others' citizens, without search warrants, by establishing "listening posts" on each others' territory.
According to several of the "old spies" who worked in Communications Intelligence, the NSA headquarters is also the chief British espionage base in the United States. The presence of British wiretappers at the keyboards of American eavesdropping computers is a closely guarded secret, one that very few people in the intelligence community have been aware of, but it is true.
An American historian, David Kahn, first stumbled onto a corner of the British connection in 1966, while writing his book The Codebreakers. One indication of just how sensitive this information is considered on both sides of the Atlantic is the fact that Kahn's publishers in New York and London were put under enormous pressure to censor a great deal of the book. In the main, Kahn simply revealed the existence of the liaison relationship, but when he wrote that the NSA and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters, "exchange personnel on a temporary basis", he had come too close to revealing the truth.
The U.S. government told Kahn to hide the existence of British electronic spies from the American public. Kahn eventually agreed to delete a few of the most sensitive paragraphs describing the exchange of codes, techniques, and personnel with the British government.
His innocuous few sentences threatened to disclose a larger truth. By the 1960s the "temporary" British personnel at Fort Meade had become a permanent fixture. The British enjoyed continued access to the greatest listening post in the world.
The NSA is a giant vacuum cleaner. It sucks in every form of electronic communication. from telephone calls to telegrams, across the United States. The presence of British personnel is essential for the American wiretappers to claim plausible deniability.
Here is how the game is played. The British liaison officer at Fort Meade types the target list of "suspects" into the American computer. The NSA sorts through its wiretaps and gives the British officer the recording of any American citizen he wants. Since it is technically a *British* target of surveillance, no *American* search warrant is necessary. The British officer then simply hands the results over to his American liaison officer.
Of course, the Americans provide the same service to the British in return. All international and domestic telephone calls in Great Britain are run through the NSA's station in the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Menwith Hill, which allows the American liaison officer to spy on any British citizen without a warrant.
According to our sources, this duplicitous, reciprocal arrangement disguises the most massive, and illegal, domestic espionage apparatus in the world. Not even the Soviets could touch the U.K.-U.S. intercept
technology.
Through this charade, the intelligence services of each country can claim they are not targeting their own citizens. This targeting is done by an authorized foreign agent, the intelligence liaison resident in Britain or the United States.
Thus, in 1977, during an investigation by the House Government Operations Committee, Admiral Inman could claim, with a straight face, that "there are no U.S. Citizens now targeted by the NSA in the United
States or abroad, none."
Since the targeting was done not by NSA but by employees of British GCHQ, he was literally telling the truth. According to a former special agent of the FBI, the you-spy-on-mine, I'll-spy-on-yours deal has been extended to other Western partners, particularly Canada and Australia. The British, with the help of sophisticated NSA computers, can bug just about anyone anywhere. The electronic search for subversives continues, particularly in the U.S.
The NSA conceded precisely that point when the U.S. Justice Department investigated its wiretapping of American protesters during the Vietnam. The NSA assured the Justice Department that the information was acquired only *incidentally* as part of a British GCHQ collection program.
The "incidental" British exception has become the rule. To this day Congress does not realize that the British liaison officers at the NSA are still free to use American equipment to spy on American citizens. And, in fact, they are doing just that. Congress has been kept in the dark deliberately. This is a fact, not a matter of conjecture or a conclusion based on anonymous sources.
In the early 1980s, during the Reagan administration, one of the authors of this book submitted to the intelligence community a draft of a manuscript that briefly described the wiretap shell game and mentioned the secrecy provisions concerning British liaison relationships with the NSA have escaped congressional knowledge. The result was an uproar. The intelligence community insisted that all passages explaining the British wiretap program had to be censored and provided a list of specific deletions.
John Loftus and Mark Aarons
The Secret War Against the Jews
ISBN 0-312-11057-X, 1994
Never Say Anything
Various excerpts from James Bamford's Puzzle Palace (see link above for page numbers):
David Kahn, in a transatlantic phone call, reluctantly agreed to delete a handful of paragraphs dealing with the most sensitive subject of all: NSA's relationship with its supersecret British partner, GCHQ. "The two agencies exchange personnel on a temporary basis... A similar but much smaller liaison program is maintained with Canada and Australia."
After two years of compromising and negotiating, the BRUSA Agreement was supplemented in 1947 by the five-power UKUSA Agreement, which, according to one report, established the United States as a first party to the treaty, and Britain, Canada, and Australia-New Zealand as second parties.
...quite likely the most secret agreement ever entered into by the English-speaking world. Signed in 1947 and known as the UKUSA Agreement, it brought together under a single umbrella the SIGINT organizations of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The UKUSA Agreement's existence has never been officially acknowledged by any country even today.
Sharing seats alongside the NSA operators, at least in some areas, are SIGINT specialists from Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). According to a former Menwith Hill official, the two groups work very closely together.
David Watters, a telecommunications engineer once attached to the CIA's communications research and development branch, pulls out a microwave routing map of the greater Washington area and jabs his index finger at a small circle with several lines entering it and the letters NSA. "There's your smoking pistol right here." Watters says it is tied into the local telephone company circuits, which are interconnected with the national microwave telephone system owned by AT&T. Other specialists testified to the same thing: purely domestic intercepts.
"Technical know-how" for microwave communications intercept was aided by William Baker, head of AT&T's Bell Laboratories and at the same time an important member of the very secret NSA Scientific Advisory Board. After all, it was Bell Labs under Baker that, to a great extent, developed and perfected the very system that the NSA hoped to penetrate.
["The Rise of the Computer State", David Burnham, 1984, ISBN 0-394-72375-9 "A Chilling Account of the Computer's Threat to Society"FYI note: this document's opening quote is from this book.
For the last three decades the NSA has been a frequent and secret participant in regulatory matters before the Federal Communications Commission, where important decisions are made that directly affect the structure of the telephone company, the use of radio airwaves and the operation of communication satellites.]
1962. Now, for the first time, NSA had begun turning its massive ear inward toward its own citizens. With no laws or legislative charter to block its path, the ear continued to turn.
The Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI and the DIA submitted entries for the NSA's watch list.
The names on the various watch lists ranged from members of radical political groups to celebrities to ordinary citizens involved in protest against their government.
Included were such well-known figures as Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverand Ralph Abernathy, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, and Chicago Seven defendants Abbie Hoffman and David T. Dellinger.
A frightening side effect of the watch list program was the tendency of most lists to grow, expanding far beyond their original intent. This multiplier effect was caused by the inclusion of names of people who came in contact with those persons and organizations already on the lists.
Because of the NSA's vacuum cleaner approach to intelligence collection ---whereby it sucks into its system the maximum amount of telecommunications and then filters it through an enormous screen of "trigger words" --- analysts end up reviewing telephone calls, telegrams, and telex messages to and from thousands of innocent persons having little or nothing to do with the actual focus of the effort. And when a person made the watch list, any conversations EVEN MENTIONING that person are scooped up.
By now, the names of U.S. citizens on NSA's many watch lists for fighting the drug war had grown from the hundreds into the thousands.
Even when Noel Gayler took over as Director of the NSA in August 1969, NSA personnel waited a year or so before briefing even him on the NSA watch list program.
NSA Director General Allen testified to Congress that there is no statute that prevents the NSA from interception of domestic communications. Asked whether he was concerned about the legality of expanding greatly its targeting of American citizens, the NSA replied: "Legality? That particular aspect didn't enter into the discussions."
Innocent Americans - people neither targeted nor watch-listed - are scooped up into the NSA's giant vacuum cleaner. This happens with considerable frequency because of the way in which names and phrases are jam-packed into the computers. Even though NSA's specialized supercomputers have enormous storage capacities, the tremendous number of targets forces the Agency to squeeze the watch lists together as tightly as possible.
Its power to eavesdrop, the NSA had always insisted, came under no earthly laws but rather emanated from some celestial "inherent presidential authority" reposed in the chief executive by the Constitution.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy tried year after year to pass legislation to require the NSA to submit to judicial review.
Finally, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] was signed into law by president Carter on October 25, 1978. The key to the legislation could only have been dreamed up by Franz Kafka: the establishment of a supersecret federal court.
The legislation established a complex authorization procedure and added a strict "minimization" requirement to prohibit the use and distribution of communications involving Americans inadvertently picked up during the intercept operations.
These requirements constitute the most important parts of the FISA law, and were included to prevent the watch-listing of American citizens, which took place during the 1960s and 1970s. The Supreme Court Chief Justice picks which federal judges serve in the Star Chamber.
The FISA court judge rules that black-bag jobs of "nonresidential premises under the direction or control of a foreign power" need no court approval. The FISA legislation also exempts from judicial review communications of these sites, including embassies. A final judicial review exception authorized the Agency to distribute the communication if it relates to criminal activity.
Within the United States, FISA still leaves the NSA free to pull into its massive vacuum cleaner every telephone call and message entering, leaving, OR TRANSITING the country.
By carefully inserting the words "by the National Security Agency" into the FISA legislation, the NSA has skillfully excluded from the coverage of the FISA statute as well as the surveillance court all interceptions received from the British GCHQ or any other non-NSA source. Thus it is possible for GCHQ to monitor the necessary domestic circuits and pass them on to the NSA through the UKUSA Agreement, giving them impunity to target and watch-list Americans.
Three decades after its creation, the NSA is still without a formal charter. Instead, there is a super hush-hush surveillance court that is virtually impotent; the FISA, which has enough loopholes and exceptions to render it nearly useless; and an executive order that was designed more to protect the intelligence community from citizens than citizens from the agencies. In addition, because it is an executive order, it can be changed at any time at the whim of a President, without so much as a nod toward Congress.
On January 24, 1978, President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order imposing detailed restrictions on the nation's intelligence community. The order was designed to prevent the long list of abuses of the 1960s and 1970s. But four years later President Ronald Reagan scrapped the Carter order and broadened considerably the power of the spy agencies to operate domestically.
Under the Reagan executive order, the NSA can now, apparently, be authorized to lend its full support - analysts as well as computers - to "any department or agency" in the federal government and, "when lives are endangered," even to local police departments.
Like an ever-widening sinkhole, the NSA's surveillance technology will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and gradually eliminating more and more privacy. If there are defenses to such technotyranny, it would appear, at least from past experience, that they will not come from Congress. Rather, they will most likely come from academe and industry in the form of secure cryptographic applications to private and commercial telecommunications equipment. The same technology that is used against free speech can be used to protect it, for without protection the future may be grim.
Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, referring to the NSA's SIGINT technology:
At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter.
There would be no place to hide. If the government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.
Such is the capability of this technology...
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.
That is the abyss from which there is no return.
James Bamford
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's most secret intelligence organization
1983 revision, ISBN 0-14-00.6748-5
also see:
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