“Why Are They Following Me?”

I’m not talking about your Twitter followers.

The question conveys the sense of threat that you would feel walking down a darkened city street and becoming suddenly aware that large armed men are following you.

There is no privacy any more. None. Warrantless wire taps? Remember those? Surveillance equipment is like weaponry: no system has ever been built that has not been used against someone perceived to be a threat. “We don’t need no stinking warrants.”

Once we secure the rights of women once again, we should work to have a constitutional amendment to protect privacy. Our state and local governments,  far from protecting our rights, are proving themselves to be eager agents of their erosion. The corporations we’re paying for services are their accomplices.

According to this article in Wired Magazine, the NSA is constructing a building that will be 5 times the size of the US Capitol when completed and require 60,000 tons of cooling equipment: as much as was needed for the two World Trade Center towers. It’s high-tech, high level clearance purpose:

 to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

They are giving particular attention to breaking encryption codes.

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US.

“Look at our new toy,” you can almost hear them squeal. “Whose privacy shall we invade? We must be sneakier than Murdoch.”

They can know everything we are doing, but we are not permitted to know anything our public servants are doing. Why?

The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Because we are a threat to them, apparently. They could have restricted their surveillance to international traffic.

. . . the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006.

Wired’s main source for the article is an ex-NSA crypto-mathematician (whatever that is). He reminds me a bit of Greg Smith, who recently made a very public exist from his former employer, Goldman Sachs.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.”

But what about those telecom companies that are always sending us unsolicited info to assure us that they are looking out for our privacy? ”Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T [who have been implicated in this work] said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.” In other words, they bestow their loyalty on those who are spying on us, citizens and customers. Why wouldn’t their loyalty be to those who pay them? Perhaps because they have invested in office holders, and have received, for their patronage, laws and regulations favorable to their  formation of near monopolies. Who is your local provider of cell phone coverage? This is very different than asking, “Who is your provider of local cell phone coverage?” That would be Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, T Mobile. There are NO local cell coverage providers. Those whom we pay to provide the service are “in cahoots” with the government that wants that information. Corporations pay a lot to lobby and support the re-election of politicians who help them out with favorable regulations. They, in turn, funnel money which they earn from us into politicians’ re-election campaigns. It’s a pretty sweet party that we are paying for and are excluded from.

(This scenario reminds me of the relationship between oil and gas companies and the military. We pay for oil. The companies pay for politicians’ re-elections, who continue to pass regulations favorable to those companies. Meanwhile, we go to war  against countries who have been selling oil to these same companies – countries whose militaries are financed by the money we pay to put gas in our tanks. Militaries that our military, our sons and daughters, must fight, at huge cost to our families and our economy. So we pay, in effect, for our army, their army, the huge corporate profits, and the re-election of the politicians who make the feedback loop possible.)

If you think your AES 256 bit encryption is crack-proof . . . you might not want to take any bets on that.

“Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. 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.”

In other words, they have been storing even the material they haven’t been able to read, on the assumption that, with further breakthroughs, it won’t be a problem. So what you have encrypted today, and so well encrypted that no one can break it, with current knowledge . . . they’re putting that in their “To Open Later” file.

Big Brother is here. Quiet bugger, isn’t he?