NSA's ad-hoc collection of surveillance "black programs" evades scrutiny

Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency's mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

It isn't clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency's work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.

A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy "has never really been resolved," said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.

~ from NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data ~

Air Force Wants to Counter Sat-Killers, ASAP

It's all the rage for superpowers to shoot down satellites.  So the U.S. Air Force is planning to field a capability to counter an anti-satellite weapon by 2011, reports Aviation Week & Space Technology. The basis of the system, according to the article, is the "Rapid Attack Identification Detection Reporting System (Raidrs) Block 20."

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Block 20, as Aviation Week notes, is the only acknowledged counter-ASAT system (the implication being there could well be other programs tucked away in the black budget).

~ link ~

Navy contingent pushing for UFO disclosure

According to sources leaking information to UFO/ET researchers as to a secret UN UFO meeting recently there exists a United States Navy working group that is secretly pushing for full and open disclosure of extraterrestrial reality. This group sees "… a logistical "window of opportunity" to end over 60 years of denial during this "lame duck" period (of the Bush Administration) and before the next administration takes office; this helps to facilitate disclosure at this time in order to put overt contact at the forefront of future plans."

One of the ways that this group hopes to effect disclosure is through calculated leaks of UFO/ET related information to the public. The question now is if the Navy takes the lead will the Air Force, Army and Marines follow? (For some history on this U.S. Navy UFO working group go to the following site and scroll down to the discussion of this in this article on the Black Budget. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0209/S00126.htm )

Clearly as far as the war in the Middle East is concerned many in the armed services are becoming fed up being used by the civilian leadership to support global entrenched economic and political interests against the best interest of the American people. Some of this realization and dissatisfaction with being manipulated and used by the global elite seems to be spilling over into other areas like the cover up of extraterrestrial reality.

~ from Where the Navy Leads Will the Air Force Follow? ~

It's the war economy, stupid

From Columbia Missourian :

A January 2008 report by the National Priorities Project indicates that the U.S., to date, has spent $495 billion on the War in Iraq. According to political scientist Chalmers Johnson, “The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the 'smartest guys in room'... (However), the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.”

When George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, the national debt was approximately $5.7 trillion. Today that debt exceeds $9 trillion. If one assumes a 5 percent interest rate for future payments, the Bush debt will require the government to pay its creditors, including the Japanese and Chinese, some $200 billion a year indefinitely, even before any of the nation's pressing health, education, employment and infrastructure problems are addressed. The Bush administration's record is, to say the least, hypocritical given the Republican mantra that Democrats are “tax and spend liberals,” while its own policy of “ borrow and spend” has dug the country's economy into a seemingly endless morass.

'What Congress and the public don't know is hurting them'

Several enormous spying programs started before and after the 9/11 attacks, once partially disclosed, were so controversial that Congress intervened to put a halt to them. But they didn't stop operations. Like rogue companies that go out of business only to come back under different names, or under no name at all.

The FBI's "Carnivore" system, approved during the Clinton administration, is designed to tap e-mail and cell-phone links -- what numbers and e-mail addresses are calling each other, what's in the subject-line of e-mails, time stamps, lengths of communications. Negative press reports compelled the FBI to change the name but not the program, to something blandly called the "Digital Collection System," until the agency dropped the system in 2005 in favor of another secret spying system. The same thing happened to the ominously called "Total Information Awareness" program started by a Pentagon agency in 2002. That program was designed to sift through as much data as possible on any given individual from as many sources as possible. Congress stopped funding the program in 2003 -- but not really. The program was adopted by the National Security Agency. It's now paid for from a "black budget," the secret funding of intelligence activities that gets minimal congressional scrutiny.

~ from Underworld of Carnivores ~