More details emerging of NSA's next generation Internet surveillance

The Obama administration is continuing to expand a National Security Agency-run Internet surveillance program first started by the Bush administration.

The surveillance project, known as Einstein, was previously reported by WMR to be a surveillance program and not, primarily, a network security countermeasure as billed by NSA and the Bush administration.

On September 15, 2008, WMR reported: "WMR has learned from government sources that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the 'Einstein' program. Billed as a cyber-security intrusion detection system for federal computer systems and networks, WMR has been told that the actual intent of Einstein is to initially monitor the email and web surfing activities of federal employees and contractors and not in protecting government computer systems from intrusion by outsiders. In February 2008, President Bush signed a directive that designated the National Security Agency (NSA) as the central administrator for the federal government's computer and network security. Although Einstein is primarily a program under the aegis of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) of the National Cyber Security Division of the Homeland Security Department, WMR has learned that it has the personal support of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, a former NSA director. Einstein is advertised as merely conducting traffic analysis within the dot (.) gov and dot (.) mil domains, including data packet lengths, protocols, source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, time stamp information, and autonomous system numbers. However, WMR has learned that Einstein will also bore down into the text of email and analyze message content. In fact, most of the classified budget allotted to Einstein is being used for collecting information from the text of messages and not the header data."

WMR further reported: " . . . WMR has learned that most of the classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWALE, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation's critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called "black" projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains."

The Internet surveillance project reported by WMR in September 2008 is known as "Einstein 2." The system that will extend NSA surveillance into the private sector is known as "Einstein 3." On September 16, 2008, WMR reported Einstein's expansion globally: "The National Security Agency's (NSA) 'Einstein' Internet surveillance technology is set to be extended to the nations of the South Pacific if New Zealand's NSA counterpart, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) gets its way."

Speaking at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco on March 3, Greg Schaffer, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for cybersecurity and communications, tipped attendees off on the future plans of the NSA and Homeland Security Department to extend Einstein 3 surveillance to non-government networks, including the Internet.

Einstein was a personal pet project of Bush's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. With Chertoff continuing to advise the Homeland Security Department and Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Obama administration is continuing to embrace the Internet surveillance policies adopted by the Bush administration. Napolitano is also continuing Chertoff's policies by keeping most of the details about Einstein, both versions 2 and 3, classified.

The NSA and the Obama administration are claiming that Einstein 3 does not read the content of e-mail messages, however, much of the details of the system are not only classified but AT&T, which was instrumental in conducting highly-classified warrantless wiretaps of Internet traffic on behalf of the NSA as part of STELLAR WIND, is involved in testing Einstein 3.

The history of NSA's expansion of its surveillance capabilities suggests that it is being as disingeneous about Einstein 3 as it was about previous forays into private telecommunications surveillance, including the Clipper and Capstone encryption key escrow systems that allowed NSA to possess the decryption keys to listen to and read scrambled private phone calls and e-mail messages, respectively.

NSA often will state we want to do "A" but not "B." In fact, NSA always wants to do "A" and "B," with plans to do "C."

The future is now: planned Internet censorship previewed by U.S. visa rejections.

With more and more indications coming from the Obama administration that it is planning to limit freedom of speech and expression on the Internet -- particularly with the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who advocates censorship and web site disruption -- a blueprint for what is to come can be seen in the government's banning of certain foreigners from entering the United States for political reasons.

In his book, "Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge," Sunstein writes: "Every day, like-minded people can and do sort themselves into echo chambers of their own design, leading to wild errors, undue confidence, and unjustified extremism." Sunstein complements the web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, which has attacked WMR's editor, as a "conservative-leaning" web site that is an example of "civility, intelligence, and over-all high quality." The Volokh Conspiracy, is, in fact, a neoconservative propaganda outlet that now enjoys a fan who also happens to be the White House "information czar." This is what Volokh parroted about this editor's reporting: "Think twice when you're the only guy in the world with an amazing insight. Or, as they say, They all laughed at Columbus. But they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown." What else can you say about an Information Czar that credits such a web site? Of course, Sunstein works for the first teleprompter elected President of the United States and its avatar, a well-spoken push button-operated human named Barack Obama.

Perhaps the bext example of what Sunstein and his friends have in store for the Internet is found by the decisions of the State Department in who they ban from receiving U.S. visas to travel to the United States and why the individuals are banned.

Perhaps the most well-known person who has been refused entry to the United States merely because of his religion is Yusuf Islam, who is better known as Cat Stevens. Stevens adopted his new name when he converted to Islam. Islam's name is on a U.S. watch lost and he has been banned from entering the United States because of his advocacy for Muslims around the world. A prominent Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss national, also saw his U.S. visa revoked after he was due to take up a professorship at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution.

However, it is not only Muslims who have been seen their U.S. visas lifted for political reasons. The politically-outspoken British rapper, M. I. A., also known as Maya Arulpragasam, a British-born Tamil whose parents were born in Sri Lanka, also ended up on a U.S. "terrorist watch list" in 2007. Her crime was that her father was a member of a Tamil pro-independence movement, the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), that was linked by the United States to the Tamil Tigers, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that saw its members and other Tamils massacred last year by the Sri Lankan military with the assistance of the United States and Israel.

But M. I. A. committed another crime in the eyes of the United States. Her song's lyrics supported the struggles of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. In her song "Sunshowers" M.I.A. sings, "like PLO/we don't surrend-o."

The United States contended that M.I.A.'s appearance with a tiger in the above music video was an endorsement of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. But when the U.S. government comes up with a cockamamie conspiracy theory -- it results in drastic actions being taken.

Under Sunstein and the coming Internet censorship regime, supporters of the Palestinians and Tamils will be the first to feel the heat. Arulpragasam's views of the U.S. "global war on terror" would also not find a happy home in Sunstein's world view. She has been quoted as saying: "No one was singing about a million people dying in Iraq and us [Britain and America] fucking up and Saddam (Hussein) being hanged." Ironically, Arulparagasm is married to a member of the Zionist Bronfman whiskey family of Canada, although her husband goes by the name of Ben Brewer.

2007 also saw another pop star banned from the United States. Lilly Allen, who was to have filmed a music video with rapper Kanye West, who attacked George W. Bush over his handling of the Katrina disaster, was refused entry into the United States. Allen, a British national, was hauled into an interrogation room at Los Angeles International Airport after a flight from Australia and informed her work visa was not longer valid.

In Sunstein's "brave new Internet world," if you are a Palestinian or Tamil activist, an uppity African American rapper, or a Muslim who refuses to be pigeon-holed as a terrorist, watch out because Sunstein will be watching out for you.