How secure are our conversations and e-mails?

Following last night's post about the ever-more-encroaching state, I thought I'd mention another article that I found on Earth-Bound Misfit, this one dealing with the surveillance of US citizens by our government via 'alternative means' to get around legal restrictions.

How the Spooks at the NSA Long Ago Got Around the Law Prohibiting Eavesdropping on Americans

They got the Canadians, specifically the Communications Security Establishment, to do it for them:

[Mike]Frost, [author of Spyworld,] for one, says CSE has carried out missions for both London and Washington that they deemed too delicate domestically to be handled by their own intelligence agencies.

. . .

All of this, of course, is just peachy with the politicians of both countries, who do their utmost to ensure that any revelation of the depth of the spooks' intrusion into the affairs of American and Canadian citizens goes unremarked. More and more, the idea that we have privacy or a freedom to be left alone is an illusion (and any Teabagger who blames President Obama alone for this is an idiot).

So if you want a conversation to have some expectation of privacy, the only way to do so is face-to-face. The FBI might put forth the effort to try and bug it, but at least you can talk without the NSA's enormous ears listening in.

There's more at the link. Worthwhile reading.

This happens to be a subject about which I know a fair amount, both from personal experience and from long contact with those who do it for a living. I thought it might be a good idea to clear up a few misconceptions.

First, the UK-USA Agreement of 1946, as later expanded, links five nations (the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) in pooling their communications intelligence resources. Each nation co-operates with the others in intercepting any and all communications, analyzing them for relevant information, and sharing what they learn with each other. As Earth-Bound Misfit notes, this co-operation can sometimes extend to having one nation's interception services listen to communications that, for one reason or another (frequently legal), another nation's services aren't allowed to overhear. It's quite true that Canadian authorities have sometimes listened to domestic US conversations at the behest of US organizations that aren't allowed to do so. The latter can then receive 'intelligence gathered by a foreign ally', and use it to pursue domestic investigations, sometimes submitting it as evidence to obtain a court order for more in-depth surveillance.

However, the sheer volume of material to be intercepted and analyzed means that an individual's privacy is relatively secure. Interceptions will try to pick out key words or phrases in a conversation - for example, 'terrorist' or 'bomb' or 'our group's target', things like that. When such 'trigger terms' are encountered, the rest of that conversation will probably be analyzed rather more thoroughly. In most cases, however, the volume of traffic means that it's practically impossible to screen everything for such terms. What happens in most cases is that when a particular source (an address or telephone number) is identified as being of interest, surveillance is concentrated on that particular source. Also, groups of people who have interests that may be of concern to the authorities (e.g. so-called 'militia movements', firearms enthusiasts, general aviation, etc.) may be selected for closer monitoring, and the members of such groups may receive greater surveillance attention.

It's relatively rare to find a 'nugget' amid the 'dross' of the vast amount of everyday communications. However, such 'nuggets' are valuable, and therefore there is a concentrated effort, world-wide, to analyze all traffic. Programs such as Echelon and Carnivore are well-known in theory, but their practical application (and further developments of them, such as NarusInsight and the technology revealed in the Hepting vs. AT&T court case) is increasing all the time. There's a reason why national intelligence agencies run supercomputers . . . and it's not to improve their weather forecasting capability!

There's also a growing offshoot of what President Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex' dedicated to security issues. Many companies market surveillance hardware and software to government departments, institutions and agencies. (See, just as an example, the LINCOLN range of products, and how the Federal Emergency Management Agency addresses their operational use.) Much of this equipment is used without oversight from politicians - it's under the day-to-day control of bureaucrats, whose focus is on getting their job done. They're unlikely to be too fastidious about observing the minutiae of the law as to what they're allowed to intercept; and if they come up against a legal road-block, they have ways around it (like asking an allied service in another country to listen on their behalf). Technically, this isn't breaking the letter of US law (although, of course, it violates the spirit of the law).

(This evasion of legal restrictions by bureaucrats is nothing new. It's gone on in many countries for decades, if not centuries! I can recall, back in the 1970's, when a mandatory UN arms embargo had been declared against South Africa. While the politicians were trumpeting their moral virtues in enforcing this embargo, at the South African Navy's subterranean operational headquarters at Silvermine, near Cape Town, there was a room entirely filled with full-time, 24/7/365 hot-linked telex machines to every NATO country and to NATO headquarters. Needless to say, they weren't linked to politicians or diplomats, but to military authorities. The South African armed forces passed on information of interest to them, and they did the same in return. When South Africa captured Soviet hardware of interest to NATO and the West, there were all sorts of shenanigans arranged to make it available. For example, South Africa was the first pro-Western nation to capture examples of the AGS-17 grenade launcher and the SA-8 and SA-16/18 missile systems. In exchange for providing examples to the West, a great deal of electronic equipment needed by South Africa was supplied through third countries, violating the UN arms embargo. However, since there was no 'paper trail' linking the NATO nations to the arms supplied, the politicians in those countries never found out - at least, not officially. They merely congratulated their own security organs on their good work in obtaining samples of the latest Soviet weapons, without asking too many questions about how they'd done so. Politicians are good at that. It's called 'plausible deniability'.)

So, I think Earth-Bound Misfit is quite correct to be angry and troubled by the ongoing surveillance of US citizens and residents by anonymous, faceless security bureaucrats. It's undoubtedly happening, and is likely to get worse, not better. However, it's also a fact of life. I don't see it changing in a world where terrorism is a very real threat. I personally take my constitutional rights and freedoms very seriously, and loathe the thought of my privacy being invaded: but I also have to accept that whether I like it or not, the reality of that invasion happened a long time ago, is continuing as I speak, and is most unlikely to change, even if politicians order departments of State to do so. The bureaucrats will always find ways around political, legal and other restrictions. That's their reason for existence, after all. Politicians come and go, but the system goes on forever!

Peter