The NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Program was one of the many illegal measures taken by the George Bush Administration after the September 11 terrorist attacks took place on their watch and the neo-cons jumped at the opportunity to turn tragedy into an imposition of personal agendas on the nation. The NSA warrantless wiretapping program was authorized directly through the White House and essentially permitted the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international calls of any and all Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act mandates that a warrant must first be obtained.
The NSA warrantless wiretapping program was only one of the unconstitutional and illegal measures that the Bush Administration took, another controversial one was the creation of the U. After the September 11 terrorist attacks President George Bush and the neo-conservatives in his Administration imposed on the United States numerous measures that denied Americans their Constitutional rights. One of the unconstitutional measures taken the World Trade Center attack was the creation and authorization of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program which allowed the national security agency to play it fast and loose in regards to listening in on phone calls of Americans without having to worry about obtaining a warrant as they are legally required to do.
The law eventually causes the NSA to alter its rules on domestic intelligence gathering and concentrate on foreign spying. Four airplanes on the East Coast are hijacked mid-flight and aimed at important financial and government buildings. Another airplane, apparently headed for Washington, D. September 25 John Yoo, Former Administration Official, Claims President Has Widespread Anti-Terrorism Powers John Yoo, formerly from the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, writes a memo claiming that the President has the authority to approve anti-terrorism tactics, including warrantless wiretapping, in times where he or she feels that it is necessary for national security interests.
October 11 Rep. Supporters of the law claim that it will allow the government to respond quicker to terrorist threats, but opponents fear that it will be used inappropriately and, ultimately, be ineffective. It is later disclosed that the newspaper had known about the program for over a year. In addition, he says that the program is overseen by various government agencies and is in compliance with the Constitution. Furthermore, he asserts that the program is vital to national security, and points to communications between the US-based September 11 hijackers and Al Qaeda members overseas as evidence that the program is essential to the security of the United States.
It also states that President Bush determined after September 11 that there was a need for quicker detection of terrorist threats, and that FISA was not fast enough. It tells how the NSA approached telecommunications companies and asked them to keep records of international telephone and Internet communication patterns that were deemed suspicious.
All of the wiretapping is done without requesting a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. President Bush signs the new version of the act, but also issues a signing statement, which exempts him from reporting when government agencies use some of the powers described in the law. When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J.
Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption.
Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths— bits, bits, and bits—it's incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications.
Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be undecillion 10 Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze.
The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.
The plan was launched in as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program , its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion 10 15 operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast.
About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the "secret city" where uranium- was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.
Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it's engaged in a new secret war.
But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed. In , as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly.
He is one of three sources who described the program. It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects.
The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA's now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you'd know it. At the DOE's unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5.
Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1. Meanwhile, over in Building , the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. The NSA's machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems.
The code-breaking effort was up and running. The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. The reason? In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans' personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers.
Break all that and you'll find out a lot more of what you didn't know—stuff we've already stored—so there's an enormous amount of information still in there. That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can't be broken today may be broken tomorrow.
But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The AES made its first appearance in and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time.
And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along. But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion 10 18 operations a second, and eventually zettaflop 10 21 and yottaflop.
These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through for the Department of Energy's exascale computing initiative the NSA's budget requests are classified.
They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. The reason was clear: By late the Jaguar now with a peak speed of 2. But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop or higher machine by , the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling , square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge.
Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits.
According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in , it will be an "unassuming facility with limited view from roads," in keeping with the NSA's desire for secrecy.
And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about megawatts, enough to power , homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60, tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers. It's a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies.
That project, due in , will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
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