[Diarist’s Notes: First of all, a big hat-tip to the folks over at Daily Kos’ own Evening Blues (especially Kossacks Joe Shikspack and Johnny the Conqueroo, for their tireless work) for bringing this latest, breaking Snowden/NSA document leak story to the community’s attention.
CommonDreams.org has published an excellent summary of the story, released this weekend, on Saturday by The Intercept in the U.S., and on Sunday by the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand. It is the latest of four massive, National Security Agency stories that have appeared in print over the past four weeks.
Personally, while I have published more than a dozen posts here over the past three years about the Five Eyes global network, and the reality that the U.S. public is well aware that the NSA runs massive surveillance operations around the globe, many reading this latest breaking news may overlook the implications within this story as they relate to our government’s “Collect it all!” policy, right here at home. I’ll be publishing a long-overdue piece in follow-up to that last statement later this weekend.
A continuous theme that I’ve fully documented about the Five Eyes network is that the Five Eyes partners/nations facilitate their partners' surveillance dirty work† (see footnotes at bottom of this post) by “legally” circumventing domestic surveillance restrictions in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (i.e.: the Five Eyes partners). Interestingly, one of the maps in the Sunday Star-Times visually indicates that the NSA's surveillance of Hawaii is facilitated by a New Zealand-based station. (Ooops!) Another fact unmentioned in these latest stories is that the NSA has approximately 2,000 of its employees onsite at General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the U.K.'s version of the NSA) locations throughout Great Britain. More about all of this later. In the meantime, lucky for us, Common Dreams' version of this breaking story was published complete with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.]
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The summary from CommonDreams.org...
NSA Global Spy Stations Revealed: 'Sniff It All, Collect It All, Know It All, Process It All, Exploit It All'
Jon Queally, staff writer
Common Dreams
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Latest documents leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden offer new insight into mysterious 'domes of Waihopai' and the global spy network of which they represent only a part
The Five Eye spy bases around the world.
A new batch of Snowden documents offer an unprecedented look into the close relationship of the surveillance agencies of the so-called "Five Eyes" nations and how a close look at a secretive base in New Zealand reveals new details about a global network of listening stations are operating to fulfill the NSA mantra on communications data which says, "Sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all."
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(continued from above)
Reported on Saturday by The Intercept in the U.S. and the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand, the documents offer a detailed look at the "alien-like" station located in Waihopai Valley and reveals who and what kind of information the station targets, its inner workings, and how its operations link to an international network of spy facilities run by the other so-called "Five Eyes"—comprised of the intelligence agencies of the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
With names like "Jackknife," "MoonPenny," "Scapel," and "LadyLove" – the Five Eyes maintain enough listening bases around the world to capture the bulk of the entire planet's digital and telephonic communications.
Regarding this global network of surveillance stations, the Sunday Star-Times reports:
Altogether, these bases can snoop on the entire world, friend as well as foe.
The leaked documents do not talk about "Waihopai". They use the station's secret Five Eyes code name Ironsand ("IS"). It's not clear why Waihopai is Ironsand.
An NSA map shows it is one of a global network of oddly-named satellite interception stations. These stations are the eyes of the Five Eyes alliance.
Australia has a base near Geraldton, a small port city on the west coast of Australia. Its codename is Stellar.
The British station in Oman has the codename Snick. Britain's Kenya base is known as Scapel. Britain also spies on satellites from Carboy, a station in Cornwall, and from a base in Cyprus called Sounder.
The American equivalents of Waihopai are Jackknife in Washington State on the Pacific coast, Timberline in West Virginia and Coraline in Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. The biggest of these is the Moonpenny base in Harrogate, Yorkshire.
According to the reporting, each of these bases is relatively identical and all of the information collected at the various sites in sent back to the NSA via a series of databases controlled and monitored by the agency.
Earlier this week, The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald revealed how the Waihopai base was being used to spy on communications across the Pacific Islands and share intercepted data in bulk with the NSA and the other Five Eyes. In turn, the other stations across the world are each responsible for collecting data over their assigned geographic area.
Saturday's reporting expands on what has previously been disclosed about the New Zealand operations at Waihopai. According to the Star-Times, "Everything inside the top secret station except the staff is foreign."
As the report continues:
All or nearly all the major surveillance systems at the Waihopai base are US-supplied and could be found identically at the other stations. All the phone calls and Internet communications they intercept and sort at the base then go into NSA databases.
The only difference between this and an NSA base on New Zealand soil is that it is New Zealanders who arrive each day to maintain the NSA surveillance systems.
Sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all - the jocular spyspeak slogans are a perfect summary of a truly global surveillance system.
The Five Eyes alliance is a global digital vacuum cleaner which can scoop up prodigious amounts of information - far more than the human mind can really comprehend.
Writing for The Intercept, journalist Ryan Gallagher reports that the primary target for the Ironsands station in New Zealand has been the "large international telecommunications satellites that provide communications to and from all of New Zealand’s Pacific Island neighbors and other Asia-Pacific nations."
In terms of fallout and reactions to the latest revelations, Gallagher added:
New Zealand’s prime minister John Key insisted that the revelations were wrong, but then refused to explain why, telling a press conference he had “no intention of telling you about how we do things.” Meanwhile, GCSB chief Sir Bruce Ferguson admitted that “mass collection” of data was indeed being undertaken in the Pacific, and said it was “mission impossible” to eliminate New Zealanders’ communications from the data being swept up.
Responding to the latest revelations on Saturday, GCSB declined to comment. In a statement issued to The Intercept and the Sunday-Star Times, the agency’s acting director, Una Jagose, said: “We do not comment on operational matters. Everything we do is authorized under legislation and subject to independent oversight.”
NSA spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines said in a statement that the agency would not comment “on specific, alleged foreign intelligence activities.” Vines added: “The National Security Agency works with foreign partners to address a wide array of serious threats, including terrorist plots, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and foreign aggression. NSA’s activities with foreign partners comply with U.S. laws and the applicable laws under which our partners operate.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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Diarist's (and Wikipedia's) Footnotes
†=Per previous posts from yours truly, and also via Wikipedia...
“Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY (Five Eyes) have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on domestic spying.[7][8][9][10]”
[7] Ball, James (20 November 2013). "US and UK struck secret deal to allow NSA to 'unmask' Britons' personal data". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
[8] MacAskill, Ewen (2 December 2013). "Revealed: Australian spy agency offered to share data about ordinary citizens". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
[9] Watt, Nicholas (10 June 2013). "NSA 'offers intelligence to British counterparts to skirt UK law'". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
[10] British spy agency taps cables, shares with U.S. NSA – Guardian, Reuters, 21 June 2013. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
Two more key references about this Five Eyes' tradecraft…
I have also reported on this story, noting these realities have been reported in the media for over a decade. See here: “GCHQ's/NSA's Covert Online/Blog Infiltration Slideshow (and other inconvenient truths).”
…For at least a decade, it's been a widely-know fact in the intelligence community that all five nations participating in the Five Eyes program do each others' "dirty work." But, don't take my word for it, here's a column from Great Britain's Independent, from 2004 (and per my post here on December 27, 2013), to explain this...
How Britain and the US Keep Watch on the World
By Phillip Knightley
Independent (via Global Policy Forum)
February 27, 2004
From the National Security Agency’s imposing headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, ringed by a double-chain fence topped by barbed wire with strands of electrified wire between them, America “bugs” the world. Nothing politically or militarily significant, whether mentioned in a telephone call, in a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, or in a company fax or e-mail, escapes its attention.
Its computers – measured in acres occupied by them rather than simple figures – “vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum”, homing in on “key words” which may suggest something of interest to NSA customers is being conveyed. The NSA costs at least $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year to run. It employs at least 20,000 officers (not counting the 100,000 servicemen and civilians around the world over whom it has control). Its shredders process 40 tons of paper a day.
Its junior partner is Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation. Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ’s real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security. Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ’s staff at Cheltenham, about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere. Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel. Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year. A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right to run NSA listening stations in Britain – Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales – and on British territory around the world.
The collaboration between the two agencies offers many advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier, it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday that all Britain’s bugging is lawful. The two agencies simply swap each other’s dirty work. GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens’ calls, as they do. The NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone conversations interest the NSA…
(Bold type is diarist's emphasis.)
And, since Kossack
kurious notes it in the comments in today's diary, here's a link to a piece from ForeignPolicy.com, which is (already) a key source for my next post on this overarching story: "
Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work."
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