How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the NSA

I am a paranoid person by nature.
Truth be told, I see a very nice, very churchgoing doctor who gives me pills to help with the paranoia. They're quite pleasant. They taste like orange peels and cigarette butts, which is why you're not supposed to chew them.  But those little dollies aren't what really got me to stop worrying and love the NSA. Nope.

It was knowledge, plain and simple.

This isn't an easy topic to fold into a box and tie with a bow, but I'm going to try.  I think that a basic historical timeline will be the easiest approach.... I'm hoping it will.

1. The Berlin Tunnel Project


Once upon a time (1952 - 1956) the CIA, SIS and MI5 dug a very long, very secret tunnel from the West side to the East side of Berlin. It was a very big deal.  Doing it without the Soviets noticing that we were digging was not easy. It cost a shitload of money. We used it to tap into a crucial junction of Soviet phone cables.  This allowed our boys to suck straight from the teat of Soviet communications and fly tons of old school reel to reel tapes loaded with phone chatter back to Washington D.C.. It all had to go back to D.C. because it was only safe to decode, translate and analyze here in the states. Why? Well, frankly, the CIA and MI5 were so riddled with infighting, moles, double agents and assholes that nobody could trust anybody in Berlin.  Everybody was compromised or inept. But that wasn't seen as an issue.

There were, however, three flaws in the plan.

     A: The sheer volume of information gathered was far too great to really ever be muddled though by a handful of security cleared translators, much less combed for pertinent data in a timely manner.

     B: Even with the pile of communications we had, the really good stuff, the military information in particular, was encoded.  Of course that stuff was.  And we couldn't break the encryption.

     C: The whole thing was blown from day one.  George Blake, a top MI5 official who was present in the initial planning meetings for the whole project, was a KGB mole.  The Soviets knew about the project from the day it went up on the drawing board.  Even now, we don't know how much of what we pulled out of there was valid information they let slide in order to fool us into thinking our plan was working, and how much of it was bullshit they fed into the phone lines to throw us off.

Awesome.

2. Watergate


This is a complex, absurd and colorful tale of assholery run amuck.  I will not take the time to explain it in detail.  Instead, I'll hit the high points and try not to leave out anything pertinent. In an nutshell, the CRP, a fundraising group for the Nixon campaign, came up with a scheme to tap the democratic party's phones and offices. They planned it out and paid a couple of morons to break in and place wiretaps.  The idiots hired to do the deed were so inept that they failed twice before, on a third attempt, they actually got busted by a security guard.  In the aftermath, the CIA was ordered to block the FBI investigation by Nixon. This was due in no small part to G. Gordon Liddy (one of the other masterminds behind the scheme) leaving a briefcase full of surveillance equipment on his desk that the FBI found almost as soon as the investigation began. In the end, 43 people went to jail and Nixon had to resign.  His famous quote, "I am not a crook!" is almost as telling as to his part in the whole thing as his slightly less famous quote, "I'm not saying it wasn't illegal, I'm saying it isn't illegal when the president does it." What a douche.

There were three interesting things that came from the scandal.

A: The plan was, in part, engineered by a former CIA officer named Howard Hunt. He ended up doing three years in prison for his role in the plan. This is the sort of guy who spent a career hiring spies and running intelligence operations around the world, and he put a couple of idiots on the case.  Obviously, the CIA's track record is not too good on getting away with wiretapping.

B: The burglars were paid thousands of dollars directly out of the CRP's fundraising accounts. Wow. One of them was even a Republican Party security aide. This is a classic example of what happens when you disregard the old adage, "Don't shit where you eat."

C: It was the Watergate scandal, in particular the connection between an illegal activity and a political fundraising party, that led to the first attempts at campaign finance reform.

This brings us to...

3. Campaign Finance Reform


Starting (to some degree) with Watergate, our democracy has struggled with campaign finance.  It breaks down like this: To get elected you have to campaign.  To campaign you need to raise money.  Money is used to buy things, people don't give it away. They certainly don't give it away by the boatloads needed to run a campaign at even a senatorial level. Therefore, if huge sums of money are spent then something is expected in return.  The debate as to how to regulate this process has gone back and forth for decades and, until recently, it remained a mess that nobody could agree on.  Finally, in 2010, the supreme court, in Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission, came to a decision.  In a very confusing turn, the court basically mandated that money, as provided for the election of or against a candidate, is an expression of the first amendment.

In other words, democracy is now another extension of the open market.  (The argument can be made that it always has been. However, this ruling makes it official.) Candidates are products, parties are brands and votes are consumer demographics. In twenty years the Tea Party will be the New Coke of the political arena.  That's a fairly dated reference, but for those who've never tasted New Coke, you should know that it hit the tongue like a mixture of corn syrup and prune diarrhea.

If shitty wiretapping is a hallmark of our intelligence agencies, and it has been misdirected for purely political purposes, and political purposes are no longer governed by law but rather by the free market, where do we go next?

London, actually.

4. Rupert Murdoch is Going To Hell

Rupert Murdoch is a newspaperman who managed to use the wiretapping capacity of his nation's intelligence and police agencies for financial rather than political purposes.  He was very talented at buying private secrets and selling them to the public masses. He let the pros sift the dirt for him, paid them for the juicy bits, and billed the sensational product as 'journalism'.
The case is ongoing, but it does point out a couple of things:

A: The expansion of wiretapping and electronic surveillance in the US and UK is so great that the communications stream of any individual can be tapped into without difficulty. Obviously we've come a long way from the Berlin Tunnel and Watergate.

B: In the end, unlimited spying isn't really possible. No matter how many people the law allows our security agencies to spy on, there are only only so many people to do the spying.  Just like the Berlin Tunnel, more data is just more data until it can be sorted out. Thus, although anybody could be targeted for surveil, the only people that were really looked in on in any detail in this case were the royals, pop stars and the families of the 7/7 London bombings. After all, those were the people who make the best news! But tapping the phones of people who have lost loved ones to a terrorist attack makes Murdoch a very special kind of asshole.

C: While Scotland Yard and MI5 did their best to cover things up a bit, as this is a particularly embarrassing case, the fact that money talks remains quite clear.  No matter how trustworthy your security clearance says you are, cash is still king. A government salary just isn't fat enough to turn down a bribe for some really salacious bits of gossip.

So wiretapping, criminal ineptitude on the part of our nation's intelligence services, political campaigning and Rupert Murdoch's damnation... how do these things relate to the NSA? Just like this...

5. The Utah Data Center


In the middle of nowhere, in the Utah desert, the NSA is building a massive data storage facility.  Huge, monstrous, fuck all big.  Seriously, this thing is designed to contain a yottabyte of information.  How much is that? Well, a yottabyte is a million exabytes, an exabyte is a million terabytes, a terabyte is a million gigabytes... and so on.  It has been estimated by the bigwigs at Google that the sum of human data to this point in history totals to around five exabytes. So, this place is really big. Anyway, this place in out in the boonies surrounded by polygamists, connected to everything from massive networks of listening posts that tap our electronic traffic, satellites that scan the same stuff moving through the air and a series of massive supercomputers.  One of which is the new supercomputer center in Hawaii where we are trying to build the most powerful parallel processing computer in the world in order to break codes.

Interestingly, we are third in the world when it comes to having the fastest supercomputer.  1. China, 2. Japan, 3. Us.

Well, here's the problem.  The basic encryption program that the US government and military use is the same as used by nearly all other governments and major corporations... even minor corporations for that matter. It's called the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). And while there is some debate as to wether or not it can be cracked at all, everybody agrees that at our present speed of computation, it would take longer to crack a message encrypted with an AES than the universe has been in existence.

Dang.

Now here we are, back at the Berlin Tunnel, we have an unholy shitload of traffic being monitored and no way to look at the really important stuff, not yet anyway.  And again the volume of data is so great and the content so overwhelmingly pointless (OMFG u r 2hott!!!) that even with top flight search engines, there is too much to sort through.

So what the fuck is the point?

All I have is a guess.

It's an enormous political leverage machine. Who would pay for detailed phone conversations, private e-mails, private cell phone shots and the money trails attached to every limo ride, fine dinner and hotel stay? Anybody who wanted to elect/defeat a political candidate, that's who.  Murdoch was definitely onto something.  If you can buy surveillance from the very agencies that control it, then you can leak it to whatever end you like.  Have an incumbent legislator that won't sign a bill to let your company put a cadmium mine in the middle of a national forest? No problem, search every available piece of data related to him and his campaign, his staffers, his family, etc. Shake the skeletons and the pocket lint out of him and everyone around him. then, simply let him know to change his tune or lose his next election.

Since the supreme court ruling in 2010 has made democracy into a straightforward cycle of investment in which money is exchanged for political leverage. Laws will be made or reshaped in order to benefit those who invest. And the best way to control those lawmakers who are outside your scope of campaign contributions (perhaps because a competing corporation or special interest group maintains their war chests) is to be able to push them around with threats of blackmail or outright character assassination. Don't get me wrong, this capability isn't likely to be auctioned off to any old batch of campaign financiers just because they can afford it. I doubt much of that will happen.  It will more likely be spent by the very people building the facility now.  Those government contractors who are in charge of creating the fastest computer and the biggest data center and the most invasive satellites will be the ones pulling the levers of democracy.  Those companies, and those that coexist with them (which is to say the whole of the military industrial complex) are the primary benefactors of this new age of surveillance. I'm sure a tidbit of delicious gossip and political scandal will hit here or there because it's been paid for by the right people and sold at the right time.

And if you think the folks working in the NSA wouldn't fall to the sort of temptations that MI5 and Scotland Yard did for Murdoch, remember, they can hide any movement of cash better than anybody else.
After all, it's their job.

In summary, don't sweat the global panopticon of invisible surveillance, they aren't watching you or me, we're ants to them.  As long as you aren't a political figure or media whore already, they probably won't be interested in you.

And that's how I learned to stop worrying and love the NSA.