 I'm going to apologize in advance for the slide deck because it's got no contrast, which is a part of the theme of, you know, being in the background and covert. Steganography. Steganography, all right, bonus points. You guys are great. I'm getting a picture of the audience. This will be a first, huh? This goes into a database. I'm not telling you which one. All right, smile. All righty, look at that. Okey-dokey. So if you can't see that, that's by design. What has the NSA done for me lately is the name of the topic. And the idea is not really to validate one position or another, but really to give you an alternative perspective of sorts, just to kind of look at what's going on, not from the legalistic sense, because we're going to have great coverage from EFF on that. And that'll be Sunday, as well as the talk that you're probably just coming from that they gave on digital rights. So I'm not a lawyer and I won't go down that road. My name's Tim O'Neill. I have an email at TimothyO'Neill at BoiseState.edu. So if you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at that address. So basically our issues with NSA, or should we say extrajudicial domestic surveillance, is really who are these guys, these organizations that are charged with both security as well as surveillance and whatnot. If you know a lot about the tradecraft world of espionage or spying, you know that people abhor revealing secrets or methods or sources. It's an absolute no-no. But by the same token, many of the techniques utilized for surveillance or for intelligence gathering or collection may not necessarily be, well let's say legal in that regard. So there's really two different perspectives to look at. The first one is that the government might claim, you can't read this, I'll read it to you, but a surveillance threat to liberty. So if you're with the ACLU or the EFF or just a concerned citizen, you would say the surveillance threat to liberty consists of multiple and overlapping collection efforts. So it's not just going to be the NSA, it's going to be a number of alphabet soup agencies as well as some private contractors and others who are engaged in a large collective action. So to pin this all on the NSA, pinata and beat it to me is a little bit naive or maybe even unfair. The legislation obviously is perhaps dubious and questionable and is it Sunday at noon the EFF has the NSA versus AT&T lawsuits, so this will be a great place to get a free plug for those guys and go see that talk and find out those issues from that perspective, the legalistic. The other argument that could be made, and I can't define a terrorist, one man's terrorist is another's insurgent. However, the government's rationale might be to explain to you that a terrorist threat to liberty would consist of physical and psychological disruption and or injury, so you've got a surveillance threat to liberty and a terrorist threat to liberty. So we're going to try to balance. I'm all about balance. I'm a Libra, so. Alrighty. Okay, historical overview of intelligence. The world's second oldest profession is basically espionage and who really is a master at trade craft? Who's really good at this kind of endeavor? I am. You are. Well, okay. Well, actually, no, I was going to say teenage girls because who can gossip? I mean, come on. These people are masters of deception. So the idea is for those who can't read, again, this is by design. So operate in total secrecy or at least compartmentalize on what's called a need to know basis. And ideally, if I'm an operative or an agency, which I'm not so you can't get a t-shirt, I don't want to give you public disclosure, right? I mean, that's just nature versus nurture. It's in the nature of these groups to be secretive and to hold the cards close to the chest. Remember, other lives are at stake when you think, well, they should reveal everything. Well, other lives are at stake down, you know, cutouts and agents and access folks and recruiting. So there's other lives at stake. Historically, the early warning was designed to provide to the president an alarm about national security issues. So hey, one by land or two by sea, the last guy was from the UK. We won't pick on him, but because he was talking quite eloquently about the US visit program, so if you need a green card and you come to this country, well, these are kind of alarm systems of sorts. And if you've ever heard of the phrase, speaking truth to power, you'll understand this is the intelligence agencies with an intelligent product from collection giving that to the president or authority decision type makers. Alrighty. So historical overview of signals intelligence Did this just happen in 2002? Well, no, not really. We can go back in history, at least in America, and see that there was what's called a black chamber. And black chambers are historically organizations that read snail mail or the old telegram, like Western Union. And so, in fact, the Austrians used to have the most famous black chamber, Geheim, Cognitz, Kanzler. If you're from Germany and Austria, I apologize. And then, of course, Yardley, who's the gentleman in the book picture, he started MIA, or what's called the American Black Chamber. Wiretaps were also used as early as the First World War. That meaning coming off of telegrams, so Morris Code and trying to intercept radio signals. So this is not necessarily new. There's a paradigm shift, however, in intelligence. So today's secret agent is not James Bond. You're going to have various types of individuals with various skill levels, and the ability to infiltrate. You know what? She can go anywhere she wants. She's got all access, as far as I'm concerned. But as my friend, Jen, would point out, that's the mail buys to the computer guys, because we were having a discussion earlier about swordfish. Everyone's seen swordfish? And in fact, if you saw Johnny Long's presentation, if you go tomorrow, it is Hollywood, hacking Hollywood. He'll show you some great clips, and I'm not going to steal that thunder, but wow. All righty, so the other threat to information collection on intelligence agency is the Internet, or the electronic world. So these are two paradigms that they have not been necessarily accustomed to historically. Humid intel challenges. How many people speak Tajik? I don't, you don't. We probably couldn't get into the areas that one would be needed. Going deaf, drowning in the data, this might apply to the signals folks. They can't hear because of the cell phones, or because of other media. They're drowning in so many emails and faxes that to pull that needle out of the haystack is increasingly more difficult. Can we say obsolete? I don't know. I'm sure there's people who are very concerned. Analog to digital is also a transformation that fiber pipe, the fiber optics are going to present some real challenges if you're trying to tap information. E-crime and terrorists, the so-called terrorists, right? I don't define that. But they alter their communication methods or methodologies. They use blog, they use spam, a steganography like my slide. They've, you know, encryption, VoIP. If you go to Johnny's, if you've been to his Johnny Long's forensic talk about the thousand cuts, you found out that Johnny has a hex editor that does a good job of your comment fields or some other non-suspicious places to put information or messaging. And then finally, at 9-11, who is more informed? You sat in bed and watched CNN, the classified news network? So the timing here is critical. Okay, where does that lead us? FISA, there's great discussions on FISA with EFF here. I don't want to really go through a whole lot of that, but to tell you that, well, here's this act and that the argument the government would make is simply that it was appropriate for large state actors such as the USSR. However, for non-state entities or the so-called NGOs or whatnot, it's too nebulous. They've got wiggle room, they're slippery. So they would claim it's ill-suited by today's definition of what national borders are, the geopolitics. And besides, these so-called persons of interest, they don't wear uniforms or have a fixed physical address. So what's at stake? I would propose striking some kind of a balance. And it's terrific that we're having that dialogue throughout three or four talks at this very conference, so that's fantastic to see that happen. This is actually the wrong document. It's not the Bill of Rights, but then it's kind of an old parchment document that would be representative. But essentially, the Constitution is at stake, separation of powers. What we're seeing is a balance between how do you collect without being invasive to, let's be frank here, American citizens, how do you protect their privacy while at the same token getting relevant critical information to offset a likely threat. The second item of discussion, this is probably the really important one, is disclosure to the public. Folks like the ACLU and the EFF would argue that we got to have some separations of power, of governmental actions, and this oversight within the agency. Who is the decider? If you saw that famous clip by George Bush, he would say that he's the decider. Well, then this maybe should be called what has George Bush done for me, if that makes any sense. Okay, I'm going to watch for that red dot on my forehead. Okay, so the schedule's changed a little bit, but we've got Meet the Fed sometime today. It's in the calendar. But this would be great aspect to go see what these people are doing from the horse's mouth, so to speak. And also then, as I suggested, that the EFF, NSA versus the ATT lawsuit, that litigation, that is coming up on Sunday. So these would be great fundamental talks basically I wanted to go into what is the domestic and international espionage techniques and quite frankly the subsequent blowback. Now blowback is a term for those of you who don't know, this is when things go south, things go wrong with an operation like the Bay of Pigs and people found out. Oops. Oh, that's not true. Okay. All right, so we have a correction with the gentleman saying the blowback's actually media that was fabricated or propaganda placed in foreign media sources and then brought back to say USA Today for our consumption. The standard wiretaps, of course, are law enforcement. It's a big transition between law enforcement and intelligence. I mean, in intelligence you don't necessarily need to have a prosecution or an arrest, but in the law enforcement paradigm you do need to have convictions. That might be very difficult. If you convict somebody you may blow your sources and your operation. I want a t-shirt. You know, all right. Phone records, obviously the domestic calls. So implies cooperation with the groups like AT&T, Verizon, Bell South or others who may have contributed to that endeavor. Now the NSA has not billed the taxpayer for that. So if you have a subscription or a service with those fine companies then you're actually paying for the surveillance. Okay, in 1986 the U.S. government had the Economic Communications Privacy Act to protect, this is the irony, is to protect communication with email, cell phones, other digital things. Now there's always a caveat here and there about when we're in wartime and what presidential authorities there are, but I thought this was interesting to have a legislative protection for digital communications. Then Kayla comes out, a lot of people are probably familiar with Kayla, but Kayla says, hey, we have the right as the government to come in now and place onto the existing service providers some kind of a data collection. So making it easier for law enforcement wiretapping and such. And then finally we have a great device called NARIS, STA, Semantic Transfer Analyzer 6400. So if we go to the website we can actually see the proprietary and confidential analysis schematics here of the way the data is correlated. They have some very efficient algorithms to model and reconstruct and then do some traffic analysis as well as semantics. Anyone have a Nimbus 2000? All right, well this is not a secret listening device, although there's probably a lot of good information that you could get from one of these. All right, Domestic International Techniques. Anyone remember the, well that's what we want. Hey, cheers. All right, what the fuck? I happen to have a Nimbus right now. All righty, so anyone remember the DARPA project? Well, who knows where it went. Is it classified now? But if you understood the implications it was to have a total information awareness collecting all available information in coordination with a couple of other projects that would enable people to have a lot of decision making power based on predictive analysis. Internet usage, data and text mining, this data text mining business is at rest and in motion. Now in motion, okay, so transmission and what not, packet sniffing or blah blah. But at rest, I mean to me, so my data right now is at rest. I don't know, so maybe there's other experts here who could really delve into what they mean by how are they getting information at rest, so that's good to know. Civilian contractors, there are a lot of companies that work for the government and provide that intellectual leverage and capability. U.S. Treasury had a program to look at financial records at SWIFT, which is located in Belgium, so we're looking at financial records, so you're seeing that the NSA is but one player in an orchestra of collection techniques. And then finally you've got foreign agencies, so you might have like the Deutsche Bundes-Nachsrischendienst, which is kind of like our version of the NSA of sorts, a very signals group, you might have GCHQ, the English equivalent, MI6 or others, they may share information. The U.S. Army recently in the Pentagon had that case where a number of Quakers had been placed on a suspect list for activities that were questionable regarding protests of recruiting. So they have a program called Talent, Threat, and Local Notice, so this would be where folks from Army MI would go and they would watch your activities at a protest and make note of that. They would also use social network analysis to think of this as kind of like the military equivalent of Friendster, so you hung out with so-and-so, and Betty Joe is related with Rand, now don't they burn things? No, that's elf, elf burns things. And you're trying to prohibit, you know, recruitment to the military for some reason. Local police also have what's called Criminal Intelligence Divisions and they also work with the Joint Task Force, so oftentimes you'll have the stovepipes of information now freely flowing or flowing more freely than traditionally or legislatively restricted. And then of course the use of confidential informants with the information. Now interestingly enough, this quote that you can't see by design is coming directly from the DOJ manual on the confidential informants themselves. And it says, however, undercover techniques inherently involve an element of deception and may require cooperation with persons whose motivation and conduct are open to question. So you know, we're not dealing with maybe the most squeaky clean Mr. Rogers types all the time. How about Google? So now if we've got to see any of again Johnny Long's Google this is great. Here you see, you know, I did a search for French military victories and Google says, well, you mean defeats? Alright. Okay. I was a little bit worried. Well, if the NSA has all my calls and I got my cell phone and they track me with GPS what does Google know about me? This is crazy. You know, they got my call records or they got my address and so I went and I Googled and not, yeah, they know where I live and they know what I do and anybody knows that now. So I'm like, okay, there's got to be a balance maybe there as well with the open source, but you can see the power of the open source is being realized as well by these governmental entities. Oh, anyone have Google mail? So based on your mail, you get some messaging targeted ads, you know, let's say they're right size just for you. Well, it's probably hard to see, but the ad that came to me was don't tap our wireless. Go to www.workingassetswireless.com switch to a cell company supporting ACLU's lawsuit based on my emails. So, oh, by the way Jeff, you're in that list so, yeah, that's kind of scary. We're both from Boise here. Okay, super secret spy stuff. I thought, well, what if you buy stuff, you know, off the internet? Are there any disclaimers? Hey, you got a mini parabolic and a tin can with a string. So, disclaimers, remember play safe when spying. Play nice. Okay, quote directly from the site, devices may not be used to violate the privacy rights of others to accessor intercept electronic communications in violation of wire tap statutes. So I can't really do that. And phone tapping and eavesdropping is illegal in certain states. So there you go. Couple of the cool things. They have a pin recorder and it actually has earphones. So you got the ability to hear what the person borrowing your pin is saying. You also have a pin detector so you can do a wireless detector with your other pin. And then here's the telephone voice analyzer. And that's it for me. That was turbo, wasn't it? Do we have time for a question or two? Yeah, let's go two minutes. Okay, let's take some questions at this time. Wasn't that in Google? That's on a need-to-know basis. Remember sources and methods shouldn't I can neither confirm nor deny any such activities if they did in fact exist. Okay, well you can buy me another Red Bull vodka. It's just stolen. Do we have another question? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? The Blue Turf is a winning strategy to create a national champion. Oh, you know what? They wanted to be... We have seagulls and they get confused. They fly in. Anything else? All right. All right, folks. Thank you very much. The next speaker will be right with you.