Reddit mentions of Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry

Stellar Wind called for the very Utah data center the NSA is in the process of finishing. Not closing. Not turning into a warehouse for outdated office equipment. Nor is the government re-purposing all the storage and computing power for some serious online gaming.

The Program is now called Ragtime or Ragtime-P. Status is operational. As is X-Keyscore. This may have been a redesign of Stellar Wind to meet metadata provisions put forth by Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

== Source ==

Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry Details Ragtime-A US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign, Ragtime-B intercepts from foreign governments that transits through the US, Ragtime-C counterproliferation actvities and Ragtime-P which is all domestic.

Elliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes, General Petraeus or just mundane chit-chat that has not been flagged. Not PRISM alone, it's Ragtime.

>Faulk described the personal nature of many of the calls, and how he and his colleagues would encourage each other to listen into a call where “there’s good phone sex” or “some colonel making pillow talk.”

Sources

Kurt Eichenwald
500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D1G86BU/ref=cm_sw_r_an_am_ap_am_us?ie=UTF8

http://vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mining-NSA-scandal

>Now, anyone who discusses this process without also mentioning minimization procedures is also either very uninformed or intentionally hyping the story. Minimization is a term of art in the world of NSA intercepts which essentially means “stay out of American citizen’s business.” If information about specific Americans (or even foreigners inside the United States) is captured, those details must be removed from all records and cannot be shared with any other entity in the government unless it is necessary to understand and interpret related foreign intelligence or to protect lives from criminal threats. But passing intelligence information to criminal investigators requires several layers of review and is not easily approved; minimization procedures are meant to insure that information collected by the NSA isn’t used in routine criminal investigations.

https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/347888405981569025

>Sigh. These last 2 stories have been little more than boilerplate recitation of Sec 702. I doubt ill persuade u, but so be it... are anonymized, meaning the info has been run through an algorithm that spits out an anonymous designator, such as XDSVC...

Marc Anbinder

Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118146689/ref=cm_sw_r_an_am_ap_am_us?ie=UTF8

https://twitter.com/marcambinder/status/348144189378281472

>as I said, I think the programs are good. Transparency by/ trust in USG lacking



Joshua Foust

http://prospect.org/article/three-guiding-principles-nsa-reform

>Yet, to even begin the discussion of reform, we have to grapple with why things got to where they are. One document published in the Guardian shows a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order for Verizon, the telecommunications giant, to hand over phone metadata (telephone numbers, call length, and location). The Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that the Fourth Amendment does not protect such metadata. Similarly, the PRISM data-mining program, which automates access to Internet company databases, was, misreporting aside, publicly discussed as a software platform used by the military and intelligence community for many years

http://joshuafoust.com/can-the-nsa-search-for-americans-who-knows

>The Committee report says the IC and DOJ requested additional queries authorities, which the Committee considered then rejected while studies of existing capabilities were finished. While Marcy is correct that this passage shows the Intelligence Community requested the ability to search on this data, the text of the report also shows that the Committee rejected that request and made the Intelligence Community and Department of Justice reaffirm that any queries adhere to the letter of the law and not circumvent “the general requirement to obtain a court order.

Blogger

Bob Cesca

http://bobcesca.thedailybanter.com/blog-archives/2013/06/greenwalds-latest-snowden-leak.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=greenwalds-latest-snowden-leak

>But here’s the most revealing part of Greenwald’s article: the program was stopped by the Obama administration in 2011. As Charles Johnson tweeted yesterday, the article’s headline could actually be “Obama discontinued NSA email program started under Bush.”

>Furthermore, Greenwald wrote: “It did not include the content of emails.” The NSA only collected metadata, authorized by bulk FISA court warrants. The program, like everything else, sought overseas communications, and those communications might have inadvertently included some data from US persons connected with the overseas emails. And, again, reminder: any data from US persons that’s inadvertently collected is anonymized, encrypted and destroyed. It’s only decrypted with an individual warrant.



And from the comments sections of the last link:

>Just before that article went up, Glenn and Ackermann had another one go up, "How the NSA is still harvesting your online data". Now when you read that you instantly think any email we send here in the U.S. is going to the NSA. Well there's nothing but speculation in that article about that, but the kicker they are focusing on is that the NSA bragged about processing their "trillionth" piece of metadata in 2012. In 2009 it was estimated the 294 billion emails were sent globally every single day, so that trillion is hardly anything, when you consider that 294 billion per day translates to about 90 trillion PER YEAR.

I have no idea how you managed to get that from that presentation.

1. XKeyscore was not a secret before the release. It was described in a fair amount of detail in a book published in April of this year, before Snowden even came on the scene. This one to be precise.
   
   
2. XKeyscore is a front end database access program. It doesn't have anything to do with the collection of information, only the presentation of it. Here is the author of that book describing it. He emphasizes that someone can only be targeted if the NSA has already targeted them for information gathering.
   
   
3. They most likely are storing metadata around internet usage. There was nothing that suggests they are storing records of everyone's activity or communications.

> "Deep State" is Russian talk. Kremlin talk. It didn't exist before it besides on Infowars

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Government-Secrecy-Industry/dp/1118146689

https://web.archive.org/web/20140102073615/http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/a-wordnado-of-words-in-2013.html

Actually it came from discussions of Egyptian politics and was used by people on the left for years. I must be a Russian shill collecting paycheques from Putin by pointing this out though. Or is the shill joke only funny when liberals are making fun of paranoid morons and not leftists?

The term originated in Turkey, actually, and has been used a lot by academics. I'm not sure when it first worked its way into US political discourse -- at least by 2013 when this book came out.

The linked tweet was tweeted by @ggreenwald on Mar 20, 2018 11:26:53 UTC

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Many Democrats have been led to believe this term was invented and popularized last year by Sean Hannity to help Trump. It's actually been something that serious foreign policy and government secrecy experts have discussed and analyzed for many years https://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Government-Secrecy-Industry/dp/1118146689 https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/976045546946232320

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A Little History of Science, by William Bynum. (Link) It's a little newer than Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, but on par with it in most respects. Covers the histories of medicine, astronomy, chemistry, the discovery of plate tectonics... pretty much all areas of science. Highly entertaining (particularly the section on anatomy and how early artists were painters by day and grave-robbers by night).

I also liked The Blogger Abides, by Chris Higgins (Link), which is an extremely practical guide to managing a freelance career. It's written for writers but is applicable to most freelance professions (photographers, consultants, etc.), and includes sections that most "be a writer" books wouldn't, like how to manage self-employment taxes and give pesky publicity people the brush without looking like an asshole.

For more traditional nonfic, I liked Deep State (link) about the government's secrecy industry; Agent Garbo (link), about a farmer who just decides to be a spy and ends up helping the Allies bring down the Nazis (it's insane); and literally anything written by Mary Roach -- even her tweets are great.