On the slide entitled “PRISM Collection Details”, one should also note the sentence “What You Will Receive in Collection (Surveillance and Stored Comms)?”.

This seems to say that the NSA defines surveillance and stored communications as 2 different things.

As I’ve commented before, there has been much media attention devoted toward the stored communications part used for forensic or historical analysis (those call records of domestic communications of all Americans obtained by Section 215 orders over the last 7 years), but little attention paid to the real-time surveillance programs like Blarney and Fairview that NSA runs via their triggers placed in Narus systems on massive fiber optic pipes in the US.

Interesting speculation on the undersea cables – I remember a few years ago, I think 2007-2008 actually, reading about when at least one or two cables (near Egypt, I think?) snapped unexpectedly and had to be repaired. Makes me wonder who did the repairs and who cut the cables. It was suggested as terrorism at the time but that fizzled and then I believe it was reported as accidental.

@grayslady: Recall that the telecoms have not had to list all their income from the government, for going on 40 years. In short, back in the 70s, someone came up with the bright idea that the Russians could figure out how much wiretapping and related work the US was doing by looking at the SEC disclosures the telephone companies were required by securities (stocks and bonds securities) laws. I think it was just so they could cover up from the American public just how much the government was laying out for wiretapping. But that’s just suspicious, cynical me.

So, they wrote an exception into the securities laws wherein the telcos were not required to give the public honest balance sheets and financials in their otherwise-required SEC filings: they are not to list the money the government gives them for wiretapping and similar work. But, rest assured, the telcos charge the gocernment for every wiretap and every pen register and so on. They charge handsomely.

All of which is a longwinded way of confirming your supposition that the telcos are making a lot more than they say, and are turning that money into fiberoptic (and other stuff).

Stalin would have loved this security system. Suppose the head of NSA doesn’t like what Rand Paul is doing and he knows all Pauls personal info. Trust us just doesn’t cut it as a safeguard.

Why were the slides prepared?

Their detail and apparent complexity don’t suggest to me an executive summary for, say, nat security council or dod heads.

Were they prepared as a sales pitch?

Sales of what? To whom?

Capabilities? Data? Reports?

Might booze-a-h be doing the selling? In asia – hence hawaii?

Is that why they were accessible to booze-a-h employee snowden?

@ P J

On this narrow point, I think you need bmaz to chime in on “51%”. This looks like a non-lawyer version of “more likely than not”, which I think is the definition of “probable cause”.

@Rayne:

A workshop in hawaii? Nice.

Dang, if i’d known about it, i’d have volunteered to go :))

According to the article linked below, from the security analyst’s point of view, it appears that they are receiving data directly from the 9 companies’ servers, but according to the anonymous source, that is not how it actually works.

Instead, the 9 companies push their data (my guess – detailed server logs) to govt servers located either on-site or at Quantico, where NSA and other govt agencies can send query terms and task the system for information. This prevents anyone at the 9 companies from knowing what is being queried.

See page two of this article for the above explanations:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-company-officials-internet-surveillance-does-not-indiscriminately-mine-data/2013/06/08/5b3bb234-d07d-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html

@tjallen:

“The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,” says Michael V. Hayden, who oversaw the privatization effort as NSA director from 1999 to 2005. He was referring not to the NSA itself but to the business park about a mile down the road from the giant black edifice that houses NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. There, all of NSA’s major contractors, from Booz to SAIC to Northrop Grumman, carry out their surveillance and intelligence work for the agency.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/digital_blackwater_meet_the_contractors_who_analyze_your_personal_data/

More about the PRISM slides

http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/06/are-nsas-prism-slides-photoshopped.html

@Rayne Slides could also be orientation/training for new users. What we got was the overview slides, and not all of them.

One slide has a bullet directing operators “You Should Use Both” systems. One was UPSTREAM and the other was PRISM. That sounds like they missed something because an operator did not check all his/her sources and they did not want it to happen again. Comes under the heading of “pay attention bozos”. That sounds like (re)training.

90% of the PPT show was not released. Reportedly that was because it contained specific system architecture or operating information that Snowden felt would compromise national security if it was released. 10 slides for every one we have seen would cover a lot of territory. I believe we can infer from that it was a very specific and targeted technical presentation. Hence operator training.

PS – look at that S#, that’s gotta be way down in the organization.
The slide numbers have gaps and are inconsistent between sources. Dunno which, or if all, were renamed, but each seems to be part of a sequential series. That makes it likely there were other classified systems or uses addressed even at the overview level.

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

The NSA’s Panopticon

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/06/the-nsas-panopticon.html

@bsbafflesbrains: Appropos of nothing in particular, has anyone ever wondered why Obama suddenly switched from con to pro on telcom immunity in the spring of 2008?

This may be pure speculation on my part but:

In looking at these slides I think that they are internal advertising. In any large company groups exist to solve some sort of problem or perform some task and continue to exist only so long as they do so better than someone else or have political protection much like a very skewed marketplace. Indeed in a large enough organization such groups will be funded based upon how many end-users use their work thus making advertising all the more important. In this day and age of privatized spying the NSA is a big marketplace much like the DOD.

For better or worse slides like these are used to “advertise” the group’s services to other parts of the organization such as the top brass, new analysts, etc. Thus they are used more to describe “what we can do for you” rather than to discuss detailed policy or practical implementations. And they are often widely available because when someone makes a presentation they tend to give them out to the recipients to be consulted later.

This is consistent with your astute analysis about the project designation, and it suggests that the PRISM group is essentially a middleware collation project that sits between the raw collection (i.e. people who tap backbone fiber) and the end users (i.e. the analysts who track drug rings).

That hypothesis would also explain why these slides omit a great deal of the detailed information such as how or under what regieme the data is collected. Confliciting reporting suggests either that there exist direct taps (perhaps at the backbone providers) or just some person at Google who responds to bulk FISA requests. And how the data is used legally (or not).

In essence, from the perspective of the slides’ author(s), the exact collection of the data and its end use may be someone else’s problem and the sole purpose of our unknown presenter is to show how his/her middleware can be used by them.

And, this might fit with the access level of someone like Snowden who would have been working on the development level with middleware such as this and Boundless Informant but not necessarily involved in cutting undersea cables or tracking drug rings.

If that is in fact the case then it would explain things that have bugged me such as the relativly loose discussion of things like “collection” and the absence of crucial legal and technical details. Indeed the full set of slides might never have them but may go on to discuss some specific operations or successful uses of the tool that would be explosive which is why the Guardian and WaPo are being careful with them and why Snowden said what he said today about hacks in China.

Again just pure speculation.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but is there another source for the slides shown in the two articles? I mean a published one?

First off, the WaPo article has a slide not in the Guardian article, and the images in the the WaPo article are much easier to read than those in Guardian. Hard to read some of the Guardian text. I am referencing the two pieces you posted at top of this piece.

Am I missing something?

Morell resigns:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/06/12/us/politics/ap-us-cia-morell-resigns.html?hp

He says it’s time to spend more time with his family, which consists of college-age kids. I guess he wants to go to frat parties with them.

Any idea what the real story here is?

You’d think with a $10 billion budget, they could afford to hire someone with a better eye for design. Those are among the most god-awful visuals intended for display among colleagues that I’ve ever seen.

Here is the likely source for the Prism ppt:

For his first week or two with Booz Allen, Snowden attended training sessions near Fort Meade, the Maryland military installation where NSA headquarters is located and where numerous agency contractors have offices.

Those slides look a lot like the intro presentation for an onboarding process. Like most onboarding presentations, it is mostly misinformation.

@ryanwc: I absolutely agree on the slides, they suck. We may find that color blindness correlates with the condition formerly known as asperger’s, or other common autism spectrum diagnoses associated with really, really bright folks.

Bad as they are, the slides clearly convey that we’ve been massively had in several ways. I’d wager good money that there’s more and bigger ways in the slides that haven’t been released. Is there any doubt in your mind that we’ve been fucked? If not, the presentation worked.

Slide quality reinforces my inference that this was for orientation/training. Click here, fill in this box, don’t forget to use all the resources. It is not selling anything, it is practical instruction on how to get results out of the system. It accomplishes that mission.

Bitching about the graphics quality of the presentation seems a lot like complaining that the quality of the music on the Titanic went down at the end.

Hi Rayne!

So I’ve been cooking on this Prism thing for a while, what with the different companies responses to these slides. They’ve been so uniform and so earnest, and I’ve been scratching my head as to how they could deny “direct server access” indicating limited data returns to the NSA, and then NSA’s claims about direct server access.

I’m concluding the answer is in semantics and web services known as WSDLs – Web Service Design Language.

Web services are a common and newfangled way for servers/clients to request and respond to data requests.

Inside every WSDL is an XSD – a common/exetensible design schema so that each requesting and responding system understands what data element is what; what it’s supposed to be, alpha, numeric and such, and if it’s a required element. This includes authorized users, and other such security ino.

This is how Credit Card transactions work over the web. You have an account, and then it gets authorized to commit monies out of your account to complete your purchase.

So I’m saying I think that some of these companies, Google, etc, have exposed WSDLs to Prism. I think that how Prism gets to a ~20M price tag is that it only asks those host companies on an ad-hoc basis, for which each request needs an authorization code, much like a Credit Card type WSDL, and that that auth code is produced by the authoritative FISA type grantor. IOW, something happening on a legal action basis.

Then the web service – without human intervention, so it stays secret, goes and grabs the Host company (Google, etc) info with an authority token/password.

So there is a “direct access” from the Prism asking point of view, but a “limited access” from the Host company point of view, but without an intervening human.

Have I described this schema well enough?

@P J Evans:
Former boss Hayden said this exact thing on NPR last Sunday morning.

MARTIN: It’s my understanding, though, that analysts who are making these determinations only have to be 51 percent sure that this person is a foreigner. That seems mushy.

HAYDEN: Yeah, well, actually, in some ways, you know, that’s actually the literal definition of probable, in probable cause. And I understand. It makes Americans nervous. Fifty-one percent; you’re going to get some of these wrong. But, Rachel, the way this works is you get to do the first step, based on a belief that this is probably a foreign conversation. All right? But as you go through it, you are under a constant requirement to try to shred out whether you’re still sure it’s foreign or American. And if it’s American, you’re done.

Here’s something everyone can try:

Let’s examine an open API, not a secure one, against which ANYBODY can make a web service/WSDL

Here’s one the FCC has made open –

https://stations.fcc.gov/developer/

Returns the facility details (BTW this is why I think “facility” is an importnat word in the discussion these days):

API URL
http://data.fcc.gov/v01/tv/facility/search/nnn.xxx

So what you do, and PLEASE, try this at home:

Make a URL string that has this stuff first –

http://data.fcc.gov/mediabureau/v01/tv/facility/search/

Then to the end of that add your state and then .xml

so like this:

http://data.fcc.gov/mediabureau/v01/tv/facility/search/CO.xml

Copy that into your browser URL field, and you get a list of results for the state of Colorado

That’s the sort of response that’s coded into a WSDL/API that a requesting system can consume

So if you made an XSD/Definition sheet? Alla sudden WHAM that call you just made to that FCC open API server is now in your database.

So did you just have direct access to a server? Yes, you did. :)

@KellyCDenver: Thanks, it’ll get here real soon now I’m sure. C’mon EW, moderate.

Jeez, doesn’t “nSacha” even get a *groan* ?

@ryanwc:
Some people, while not colorblind, have no sense of colors and what happens when you put together a bunch of them.
I worked with a guy who liked to do maps and spreadsheets in colors like that. We finally got him to turn it down, about the time he went to a different department.

@William Ockham: Duh, missed your post on likely PRISM source. Sorry to reiterate it. Thought I had a blinding flash, but it was just a reflection.

@KellyCDenver: It’s also quite possible that the 20M figure was just for PRISM itself and omitted the cost of collection.

SIGAD US-984 is PRISM.

The ‘X’ and ‘N’ in US-984XN, are meant to denote a wildcard for components of the sub designator or sub address. X repesents a placeholder for an alphabetic character, while N respresents a placeholder for a numeric character. For example, Microsoft would be US-984A and Yahoo would be US-984B. The first collection device at a Microsoft facility would be US-984A1 and the second US-984A2. The first collection device at a Yahoo facility would be US-984B1 and the second US-984B2.

@Greg Bean (@GregLBean): That was one of my first thoughts, that having access to world wide communications, phone and digital, makes it much easier for our US oligarchs to “compete.”

Oh, my.

The graphic discrepancy of the logos bothers me. I’m gathering that Greenwald received his copy of the .ppt significantly later than Gellman did, suggesting possibility that the .ppt had been changed (the logo, specifically) by its author in the intervening period. But this would mean that Snowden downloaded it twice from NSA, which seems prohibitively unlikely.

I don’t think the discrepancy is at all trivial and deserves an answer.

@Rayne: Yes, where is the value. Exposing that would be Pulitzer Prize winning reporting, and I’m not a reporter so only suggest it as a very worthwhile effort.

I am not sure how one would even start pursuing this, but on another blog, where I’ve made a similar comment, (my bad), I got this response.

“This whole ‘war on terror’ is nothing but a Wall ST, bankster, and MIC/CIA money machine.
Since WWll, we have never been threatened by war—we have instigated it.
‘Grand Theft Pentagon :Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror’ by Jeffrey St. Clair is a good read. And ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ by Perkins. ”

I have not yet read these yet, but from their titles they appear to relate.

The question that they would not have been able to raise/answer, as it was not known of when these where written, is, “is NSA spying a key component of this economic effort”.

Linking back to the revelation that Cablegate exposed diplomacy as significantly for commercial advantage, another question is appropriate, “where do the US diplomats, who act as salesmen, get their information?”. Is it sourced from NSA spying?

This whole idea, NSA spying for economic advantage, gets more logical with each previously unanswered question.

– Why such vast expenditure for miniscule reduction in ‘terrorist’ risk
– Why such astonishing secrecy
– Where do US diplomats get commercial information they use when ‘selling’
– where is the benefit

If a single example can be found that ties these together, yup, ding-ding!