UNITED STATES OF SECRETS

The documentary United States of Secrets goes behind the headlines to reveal the inside story of how the U.S. government came to monitor and collect the communications of millions of people around the world and the things that they did as they tried to hide this massive surveillance program from the public. 

History of the NSA's Surveillance Program

Part 1

The biggest leak of government secrets ever began in December of 2012 with a single e-mail delivered to an IP address in Rio de Janeiro to Glenn Greenwald, one of the world’s busiest journalists.

Greenwald is sitting in his home in Rio, and he sees an e-mail from someone he doesn’t know. It’s not a friend, it’s not his mum. And it just says, “I’ve got some stuff you might be interested in.”And the story begins there. Gleen Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras decided to have a secret meeting with that person in a foreign country, China. They knew that this was incredibly risky and uncertain, but the story had to be reported. Poitras shares the documents with Greenwald that had sent to her and Greenwald states “…top secret NSA documents that were about a wide range of surveillance activities, that came directly from some of the most sensitive areas of the agency”.

The National Security Agency (NSA) reads every email, every tweet, looks at every image you upload to instagram or facebook, listens every phone call you make, tracks your movements, all with virtually no accountability. It basically invades the privacy of every user. So, they finally meets this 29-year-old kid, Edward Snowden. The documents Snowden delivered revealed the history and details of one of the United States government’s most closely guarded secrets. It was known as “the program.” The program began on September 11th, 2001, at Fort Meade in Maryland.

The worldwide known terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 terrorized U.S. like no other singular event since the 1942 attack on Pearl Harbor. To prevent threats like Pearl Harbor, the Federal Government created NSA after World War II. But they had failed. They thought NSA had not been aggressive enough with their intelligence gathering operations. That’s why, On October 4, 2001, President Bush secretly authorized the executive order for "The Program." It would gather data on the phone calls and Internet traffic of hundreds of millions of Americans, then search it for suspicious connections.

This order is one of the most closely kept secrets of the Bush/Cheney administration for four years. It’s kept so secret that many people involved in national security inside the White House and the government don’t know about it. After October 4th, emails, text messages, phone calls, Skype calls started to be collected by the government. They needed a data system that could handle all these data. ThinThread, a program that could capture and sort massive amounts of phone and e-mail data, was the brainchild of veteran crypto-mathematician Bill Binney. The whole idea was to build networks around the world of everybody and who they communicate with. Then you could isolate all the groups of terrorists. And once you could do that, you could use that metadata to select that information from all those tens of terabytes going by.

Once Thomas Drake realized that the White House was lying about ThinThread, that they were desperate to protect the domestic surveillance program, he decided to act on his own without the ThinThread team. He’d reach out to a newspaper reporter. Siobhan Gorman worked for The Baltimore Sun. The New York Times revealed the story of that standoff in Attorney General Ashcroft’s hospital room, and a leak to USA Today revealed the government had been collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

In the election of 2008, Obama promised to create a transparent administration in U.S. history. “I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That’s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." stated Obama. The last step for the president Bush was to pass The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 which allows some of the things we were doing under the president’s authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes. So in a sense, the FISA Amendment Act not only validates the terrorist surveillance program, it expands it.

Obama won the election. He did learn all about The Program. He was told about the trillions of phone calls, e-mails and Internet data that had been secretly gathered. After that, he really began to understand the true scope of how much the NSA had gotten its hands into the backbone of the internet. Convinced the program was effective and necessary, Obama would now own it. At the NSA, they were now spending more than $10 billion a year on capturing communications of people around the world. After this, Drake was charged with violating the Espionage Act. None of the other suspects in the leak investigation were ever charged.It had been more than 10 years. Despite the revelations of insiders like Drake and the news reports about the program, there was little public outrage and few congressional critics. “The program” was continuing to grow.

Turkmen & Ranpura