Surveillance State: Inside The NSA’s Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG)

It is a very common trend to see “Counter-Terrorism” programs and technology that were once used to save American Military and Civilian lives in war get re-directed to spy on American citizens in Peace time. This is something to keep in mind with this program. -SF

Relentless attacks on American military personnel at the height of the Iraq war made the U.S. intelligence community confront a dire problem: They needed real-time intelligence to take Al Qaeda off the battlefield and dismantle its bomb-making factories.

This realization was the start of a highly secretive program, developed by the National Security Agency, to put NSA specialists on the battlefield in order to send “near real-time” intelligence to the troops so they could avoid ambushes and root out insurgents. For the first time, going in depth with Fox News, senior NSA leadership is speaking publicly about that program, called the Real Time Regional Gateway or RT-RG.

“Starting in 2005, we started seeing a big uptick in casualties caused by IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and ambushes,” NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett told Fox News. The RT-RG program created to combat those attacks, he said, “was really a complete change in how we provided signals intelligence support to the tactical war fighter.”

The program, parts of which were classified until now, has dispatched thousands of NSA experts into war zones since 9/11. It has put those experts – from an agency most-known for its controversial surveillance programs – at grave risk across multiple theatres. But in the process, officials say, RT-RG has saved the lives of fellow Americans.

Col. Bob Harms, one of the first people on the ground for the NSA at Baghdad’s Camp Victory, said the goal was to “get in front of our adversaries.”

Exclusive images shared with Fox News from Camp Victory show the basic set-up, which took traditional streams of intelligence and married it up with information gathered from raids – for instance, taking satellite images and combining that with on-the-ground information about an insurgent’s movements and contacts, to pinpoint threats.

Some of the most useful information came from captured operatives – information known in the intel world as “pocket litter.” Harms said this included “pattern of life” details including “when do they go to sleep, where do they go to sleep, where do they work and those types of things.”

The NSA’s goal was to compress the timeline for crunching all this information from a period of weeks or days, to just hours or minutes. Think of it like a phone app — but instead of giving directions, it’s flagging threats.

“[Battlefield commanders] would actually feed us information … so that we could give them a roadmap to the next site,” Harms explained.

Ledgett said the program harnessed big data, in a way that it could be used immediately on the battlefield. Ledgett said RT-RG “integrated hundreds of pieces of information,” and then software was developed to draw connections that could “put things on graphical displays” so it was easy for analysts and operators to understand.

“It might connect something like a phone number to a location, to an activity and display that to an analyst who could then, via radio, contact a convoy and say, ‘Hey looks like there’s an ambush waiting for you at this point — go left or go right or take an alternate route,’” he said.

Asked about collateral damage – the accidental killing of civilians — Ledgett said the program reduced those numbers because targeting data was drawn from multiple sources. No further specifics were offered.

Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News military analyst, said the program “gave a tool to brigade commanders, who were spread out all over the battlefield, something that they never had before.”

It also took NSA experts out of the office and placed them in the field, to work side-by-side with special operations.

“We needed to be coffee-breath close in order to have that shared situational understanding,” Harms said.

The program extended from Iraq to Afghanistan, and then other conflict zones that the NSA will not publicly identify. The statistics, declassified for this report, are sobering.

“Since 2001, we’ve deployed 5,000 NSA people to Iraq and 8,000 to Afghanistan — and in total, 18,000 to hostile areas around the world,” Ledgett said. “When the operational community embraces you that way and says ‘I want you on my team and I want you there with me’ … that’s a pretty significant statement of value.”

The deployments came with risk. Since 9/11, 24 names have been added to the NSA’s memorial wall, which pays tribute to fallen employees. Among them is NSA technical expert Christian Pike, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2013 working with the Navy SEALs.

“I’m sorry, I get a little emotional about this one,” Ledgett said, taking a pause during the interview as he described a cabinet in his office with memorial cards for James T. Davis, one of the first Americans killed in Vietnam; NSA’s Amanda Pinson, killed by an IED in Iraq while providing signals intelligence support; and Christian Pike. Pike was also a family friend.

This Saturday is Armed Forces Day – and what was a ground-breaking NSA program a decade ago is now widely used by the war fighter.

Ledgett said one of the commanding generals in Iraq during the surge credited the NSA with helping take over 4,000 insurgents off the battlefield.

“There was an intense effort here … How do we drive those losses down?” Ledgett said. “Our job was to get the information to the people who needed it.”

Read the Original Article at Fox News

The Surveillance State: Twitter and Data Mining

Twitter has barred Dataminr, a service that analyzes tweets from across the globe to inform users about news events, from providing its information to US intelligence agencies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The social network has not confirmed that it cut the agencies off from the service, which claims to have informed clients about the Brussels terror attack in March 10 minutes ahead of news media, but the WSJ cites a senior US intelligence official and other people familiar with the matter.

The agencies had reportedly used Dataminr’s service for two years before Twitter decreed that it must stop, with sources saying Twitter was concerned about appearing too close to the American intelligence community. Twitter said in a statement that its “data is largely public,”  specifying that the “US government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could,” but did not comment on how Dataminr had come to be selling information to intelligence agencies in the first place. The WSJ notes that Twitter has a policy banning third-party companies such as Dataminr from selling information to government bodies for the purposes of surveillance.

Dataminr — in which Twitter owns a 5 percent stake — is the only company Twitter allows to see a real-time feed of every tweet on its network and sell that information on to clients. Intelligence agencies reportedly got access to Dataminr’s product when the company received investment funding from In-Q-Tel — a venture capital firm that invests in companies whose products and services benefit the CIA and other intelligence agencies — but Twitter reportedly told Dataminr it wanted that link severed when the pilot program ended recently. In a statement provided to The Verge, Twitter said that it has “never authorized Dataminr or any third party to sell data to a government or intelligence agency for surveillance purposes.” The company said this was “a longstanding Twitter policy, not a new development.”

Read the Remainder at The Verge

The Surveillance State: Twitter Lawsuit and FISC Court Updates

A federal judge delivered a blow Monday to Twitter’s drive to release more details on surveillance orders it receives, but the tech firm won a chance to try to reformulate its case.

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Rogers said the government has the power to prohibit the release of classified information, barring claims Twitter made in a lawsuit filed two years ago challenging as unconstitutional the limits federal officials have placed on publication of some statistics about surveillance demands.

“The First Amendment does not permit a person subject to secrecy obligations to disclose classified national security information,” Rogers wrote, citing a 1980 Supreme Court case about a former CIA analyst publishing the names of CIA personnel overseas. “Twitter has conceded that the aggregate data is classified. In the absence of a challenge to the decisions classifying that information, Twitter’s Constitutional challenges simply do not allege viable claims.”

However, the Oakland, California-based judge’s order went on to essentially invite Twitter to re-file its case, incorporating a claim that government has not “properly classified” the statistics at issue.

Read the Remainder at Politico

U.S. spy court rejected zero surveillance orders in 2015

The secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court did not deny a single government request in 2015 for electronic surveillance orders granted for foreign intelligence purposes, continuing a longstanding trend, a Justice Department document showed.

The court received 1,457 requests last year on behalf of the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for authority to intercept communications, including email and phone calls, according to a Justice Department memo sent to leaders of relevant congressional committees on Friday and seen by Reuters. The court did not reject any of the applications in whole or in part, the memo showed.

The total represented a slight uptick from 2014, when the court received 1,379 applications and rejected none.

The court, which acts behind closed doors, was established in 1978 to handle applications for surveillance warrants against foreign suspects by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and grew more controversial after 2013 leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Read The Remainder at Reuters

The Surveillance State: The CIA is Investing in Firms that “Mine” Your Twitter and Instagram Data

SOFT ROBOTS THAT can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

Yet among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant.

Those four firms, which provide unique tools to mine data from platforms such as Twitter, presented at a February “CEO Summit” in San Jose sponsored by the fund, along with other In-Q-Tel portfolio companies.

The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media. Last September, David Cohen, the CIA’s second-highest ranking official, spoke at length at Cornell University about a litany of challenges stemming from the new media landscape. The Islamic State’s “sophisticated use of Twitter and other social media platforms is a perfect example of the malign use of these technologies,” he said.

Social media also offers a wealth of potential intelligence; Cohen noted that Twitter messages from the Islamic State, sometimes called ISIL, have provided useful information. “ISIL’s tweets and other social media messages publicizing their activities often produce information that, especially in the aggregate, provides real intelligence value,” he said.

The latest round of In-Q-Tel investments comes as the CIA has revamped its outreach to Silicon Valley, establishing a new wing, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which is tasked with developing and deploying cutting-edge solutions by directly engaging the private sector. The directorate is working closely with In-Q-Tel to integrate the latest technology into agency-wide intelligence capabilities.

Read the Remainder at The Intercept