UNITED STATES OF SECRETS

“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.” says Obama in his speech. At the White House, in the waning months of the Bush administration, they were determined to find a way to make the program permanent.

The program PRISM is not about metadata, it’s about content. It’s the photos and videos you send. It’s the words of your emails. It’s the sounds of your voice on a Skype call. It’s all the files you have stored on a cloud drive service. It collects massive amounts of user data from Internet companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Pal-talk,  Youtube, Skype, Apple and etc.

In a program called Muscular, the NSA was secretly extracting data from fiberoptic cables overseas, where intelligence operations are much less restrained by surveillance laws. Muscular did not require a warrant. PRISM was the front door. Now they find out that through the back door, the government is actually breaking into their infrastructure and taking whatever they want. The NSA decided it was OK under Executive Order 12333, and with the backing of the Justice Department and the White House, to break into the private links, the private data links that connect the data centers of Google and Yahoo around the world.

In San Francisco, in the summer of 2002, a technician at AT&T, Mark Klein, was one of the first to witness something. What Mark Klein found was an infrastructure that suggested that the government was copying all traffic going through the AT&T Internet backbone. he found a device called splitter. The splitter is basically a glass prism. So you put a cable in there, the light beam goes in there and its splits, like that. One half is going to the secret room, and the other half was going to its normal assigned destination. But it’s been copied in the process. And this was important because if one can split the light or divert the light out of one of those networks, one can copy everyone’s traffic on the network. It’s kind of an unfathomable amount of information.

And lastly, Barton Gellman states “So where we are now is in a place where we’re living behind one-way mirrors. Corporate America and law enforcement and national security state know so much about us, and we know so little about them. We know so little about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it. And we can’t actually hold our government accountable because we truly don’t know what it’s doing”…