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Meltdown Showed Extent of NSA Surveillance — and Other Tales From Hundreds of Intelligence Documents
The problem had been brewing for nearly a decade, intelligence sources had warned, as the National Security Agency vacuumed up more and more surveillance information into computer systems at its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters: There just wasn’t enough power coming through the local electric grid to support the rate at which the agency was hoarding other people’s communications.
“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” a former NSA manager told the Baltimore Sun in August 2006.
“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today.”
It turns out that manager, and other sources quoted in the Sun piece, were even more correct than was publicly known at the time: The NSA had, just the prior month, already experienced a major power outage and been forced for the first time to switch over its most critical monitoring — its nerve center, the National Security Operations Center — to a backup facility in Augusta, Georgia, according to an internal report classified “secret.” The culprit: hot weather and electric company problems generating sufficient power, according to an article posted on the internal agency news site known as SIDtoday.
For the NSA, the relatively smooth handoff was a triumph. But the incident marked an important turning point, underlining how the NSA was collecting too much information for its facilities to handle. The agency would go on to build a massive data center in a barren stretch of Utah desert, estimated to be capable of holding billions of gigabytes of information.
Indeed, the story of the 2006 Fort Meade brownout is one of several stories of overwhelming mass surveillance to emerge from a review of 287 SIDtoday articles, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Other tales, collected below, include how an NSA intern working in the English countryside marked for killing or capture nine people in Iraq; how a secret team of NSA commandos deployed to foreign countries to break codes; and how the NSA spied on satellite internet systems in the Middle East.
The Intercept is publishing three other articles taken from this cache of documents, including an investigation by Henrik Moltke into how revolutionary intelligence pooling technology first used by the U.S., Norway, and other allies in Afghanistan spread to the U.S.-Mexico border — raising questions about over-sharing at home and abroad. In another article, Miriam Pensack reveals how the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 was closely monitored by Norwegian (and eventually U.S.) intelligence, which knew more about the tragedy than was initially revealed. And Murtaza Hussain shows how the NSA drew up new rules in response to a request from its Israeli counterpart, which had sought to use U.S. intelligence to target killings, apparently at Hezbollah.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/29/nsa-sidtoday-surveillance-intelligence/
Mission Creep: How the NSA’s Game-Changing Targeting System Built for Iraq and Afghanistan Ended Up on the Mexico Border
In November 2005, two terminals for a new secure communications platform arrived at the U.S. military base at Bagram Airfield, outside Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The first of its kind, the system would enable the U.S.’s electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency, to instantaneously share select classified information with America’s closest allies in the fight against the Taliban, speeding the delivery of critical information to soldiers. Previously, the only way to pass intelligence at Bagram between the U.S. and partner nations was to hand it over as hard copy. These two first nodes in what would eventually become a larger network, known as CENTER ICE, would end the paper shuffling, ultimately saving the lives of troops in combat.
The NSA was to set up one of the two initial systems at Bagram for its own use, and the other for its counterpart from Norway, the Norwegian Intelligence Service, or NIS. The Norwegians were perfect guinea pigs. A “gregarious, friendly bunch” who threw good barbecue parties, they had “almost no collection capability” to eavesdrop independently and were thus “heavily dependent on the U.S.,” an NSA staffer at Bagram later wrote on an internal agency news site, SIDtoday. (The article and the other intelligence documents in this story were provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.) One of the new terminals failed when the NSA attempted to turn it on, but after the provision of some “necessary spares,” both were operational.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/29/nsa-data-afghanistan-iraq-mexico-border/
Israel Hated American Ban on Sharing Intel for Assassinations, So U.S. Made New Rules
As Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah exchanged blows during their short-lived but devastating 2006 war, Israeli military officials used private channels to pressure their American counterparts in the National Security Agency for intelligence to help assassinate Hezbollah operatives, according to a pair of top-secret NSA documents. The NSA was legally restricted from providing such information but, after Israeli officials asked for an exemption, U.S. intelligence officials decided on a new framework for information-sharing.
The documents, published on an NSA internal news site called SIDtoday and provided by agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, provide a glimpse into the intelligence relationship between two countries during the 2006 conflict.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/29/israel-drone-strikes-intelligence-nsa/