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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Stepping Stones to a surveillance state –by James Bamford

 By James Bamford  -  Mon Jun 10, 2013 8:22pm  http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/15/actualidad/1371327354_762712.html

(Reuters) - "God we trust," goes an old National Security Agency joke. "All others we monitor.
Last week, the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed another massive NSA surveillance program, called Prism, that required the country's major Internet companies to secretly pass along data including email, photos, videos, chat services, file transfers, stored data, log-ins and video conferencing.

Today the NSA is the world's largest spy organization, encompassing tens of thousands of employees and occupying a city-size headquarters complex on Fort Meade in Maryland.

NOVA | The Spy Factory | PBS


There were three Stepping Stones:

STEP ONE (1920-29)
In 1920, its earliest predecessor, known as the Black Chamber, fit into a slim townhouse on Manhattan's East 37th Street.
World War One had recently ended, along with official censorship, and the Radio Communication Act of 1912 was again in effect. This legislation guaranteed the secrecy of electronic communications and meted out harsh penalties for any telegraph company employee who divulged the contents of a message. To the Black Chamber, however, the bill represented a large obstacle to be overcome-illegally, if necessary.
So the Black Chamber chief, Herbert O. Yardley paid a visit to  the headquarters of Western Union. This was the nation's largest telegram company - the email of that day.
Their object was to convince him to grant them secret access to the private communications zapping through his company's wires. It was easier achieved than Yardley had ever imagined.

Time and again over the decades, this pattern has been repeated. The NSA, or a predecessor, secretly entered into agreements with the country's major telecommunications companies and illegally gained access to Americans' private communications.

The influential Republican statesman, Henry L. Stimson, was deeply offended by the very notion of snooping into people's private communications. As the new secretary of state in 1929, Stimson shut down the Black Chamber with the now immortal phrase, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

STEP TWO (1942-75)

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt later appointed Stimson secretary of war during World War Two, Stimson changed his mind. He wanted to eavesdrop on every possible communication, especially on the Germans and Japanese.

Once the guns of World War Two began falling silent, however, the communications privacy laws again took effect. Thus, Preston Corderman, the chief of the Signals Intelligence Service faced the same dilemma Yardley confronted after World War One: a lack of access to the cables flowing into, out of and through the country.
So, once again, deals were made with the major telegraph companies to grant the SIS secret access to their communications.


Codenamed "Operation Shamrock," agents would arrive at the back door at each telecom headquarters in New York around midnight; pick up all that days telegraph traffic, and bring it to an office masquerading as a television tape processing company. There they would use a machine to duplicate all the computer tapes containing the telegrams, and, hours later, return the original tapes to the company.
The secret agreement lasted for 30 years. It only ended in 1975, when the nation was shocked by a series of stunning intelligence revelations uncovered by a congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church.
The illegality and vast breadth of this one operation stunned both the left and the right, Republicans as well as Democrats. The parties came together to create a new law to make sure nothing like it could ever happen again.

But that all changed soon after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush administration began its warrantless wiretapping program.

STEP THREE (2001-13)

Once again, an NSA director sought the secret cooperation of the nation's telecom industry to gain access to its communications channels and links. Again, the companies agreed - despite violating the laws and the privacy of their tens of millions of customers. Eventually, when the operation was discovered, a number of groups brought suit against the companies, Congress passed legislation granting them immunity.

The NSA was so flooded with billions of dollars from post-Sept. 11, 2001 budget increases that it went on a building spree and also expanded its eavesdropping capabilities enormously. Secret rooms were built in giant telecom facilities, such as AT&T's 10-story "switch" in San Francisco. There, mirror copies of incoming data and telephone cables are routed into rooms filled with special hardware and software to filter out email and phone calls for transmission to NSA for analysis.

Thus, for roughly 100 years, whenever the government knocked on the telecommunications industry's door and asked them to break the law and turn over millions upon millions of private communications, the telecoms complied.

EPILOGUE:
Why not, since they knew that nothing would ever happen to them if they broke the law.
Now, it appears that the NSA has again gone to Verizon and other telephone companies and obtained secret access to billions of private communications. But unlike with Yardley and the Black Chamber, the dangers today of secret cooperation between the telecom and Internet industry and the NSA are incomparable: access to someone's telephone records and Internet activity can provide an incredibly intimate window on their life.
Secret agreements between intelligence agencies and communications companies should not be allowed in a democracy. There is too much at risk.

In a dusty corner of Utah, NSA is now completing construction of a mammoth new building, a one-million-square foot data warehouse for storing the billions of communications it is intercepting. If the century-old custom of secret back-room deals between NSA and the telecoms is permitted to continue, all of us may digitally end up there.
Contrary to what Simpson may have asserted, gentlemen (and women) do read each other's mail - at least if they work for the National Security Agency.
And in the future, given NSA's unrestrained push into advanced technologies, the agency may also be able to read your thoughts as well as your mail.

(James Bamford writes frequently on intelligence and produces documentaries for PBS. His latest book is "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.")
(James Bamford)


Tuesday, June 11, 2013

love letters -Dylan Thomas

The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914 –1953)
 was a Welsh poet and writer.

 Hotel Chelsea 
New York 
May 7th 1953 
O Caitlin Caitlin Caitlin,
 my love my love, where are you & where am I and why haven't you written and I love you every second of every hour of every day & night. I love you, Caitlin. In all the hotel bedrooms I've been in in this two weeks, I've waited for you all the time. She can't be long now, I say to my damp miserable self, any minute now she'll be coming into the room: the most beautiful woman on the earth, and she is mine, & I am hers, until the end of the earth and long long after. Caitlin, I love you. Have you forgotten me? Do you hate me? Why don't you write? 
Two weeks may seem a small time but to me it's old as the hills & deep as my worship of you.... And in two weeks I've travelled all over the stinking place, even into the deep South: in 14 days I've given 14 readings... I'm coming back, by plane, on the 26th of May, & will tell you later just when the plane arrives. Will you meet me in London?.... 
I love you, I want you, it's burning hell without you. I don't want to see anybody or talk to anybody, I'm lost without you. I love your body & your soul & your eyes & your hair & your voice & the way you walk & talk. And that's all I can see now: you moving, in a light... 



In April 2004, the earliest surviving love letter written by Dylan Thomas to his future wife fetched more than £12,000 pounds at auction in New York.
The poet's letter to Caitlin Macnamara was sold at Sotheby's for nearly four times its estimated value.

The First Love... and Afterward

The first letters in this book are written to Pamela Hansford Johnson, who's described as "Dylan's first love, and a major female figure in his life." His letters offer a look into his frustration with writing, as he says, "The old fertile days are gone, and now a poem is the hardest and most thankless act of creation." He feels pain and muscle contractions as he attempts to drag "some connected words that will explain how the starry night of the dead is seen..."
 In spring 1936, Thomas met Cailin (wiki)
Caitlin, darling, darling... 

And Death Shall Have no Dominion" by Dylan Thomas