August 12, 2014 • 43 mins
Chuck and Josh dive into the secret world of the National Security Agency, from the origins of the snooping outfit, to the recent revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry with
her stories she makes up and this is w should know.
(00:23):
Uh yeah, we have a Jerry story, but not for
this one. For the oven we're recording and spoiler coming up?
What's the spoiler? Like, he just gave a spoiler about
a spoiler that Jerry has a personal story relating to
the second of the two shows we're reporting today. Not
much of a spoiler, but people love any nugget from Jerry.
(00:44):
They're like, oh my god, what is it, right, especially
when she talks Yeah, um Chuck. Yes. So if we
weren't on any sort of watch list before, after researching
yesterday and today for this episode, we most decidedly are
some kind of red list. Yeah, if that's the highest list,
I would guess we're probably on it. Yeah. I don't
(01:06):
know if that's the highest, but it's a list that
we're probably on, or at least on the same list
as Glenn Greenwald, who I think is a righteous dude.
Did you read his book? Right? Uh huh yeah, yeah,
Oh thanks for bringing that up. I think that we
should point out a few pieces of required reading slash
viewing for this one. If if, if this episode like
strikes your fancy, read Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to
(01:29):
Hide awesome, like all sorts of new revelations in there,
and like his take on the media and how um
it's just a great read. Have you read it? You should?
I will. Um. You should also read why Privacy Matters
even if you have Nothing to Hide, which is an
article by Daniel J. Solov in the Chronicle for Higher
(01:50):
Education that is a must read because I think that's
a lot of people's argument is that, well, you know,
if you're known to terrorists, and what do you care exactly?
It does matter? He dim all, it's just that argument. Well,
it's not an argument, um, And then argument and then
you should also watch parts one and two I think
they're both online of the United States of Secrets, which
is a front Line. I haven't seen that documentary. It's amazing. Yeah,
(02:14):
it's so good. And Frontline, which is always good. Yeah,
it's just like a great nonfiction magazine article. But for
your eyes come to life. Yeah, thanks man. So, um,
was there anything in here that you didn't really know
about the n S A well, yeah, I mean I
(02:35):
imagine we'll cover it in this order, which is a
little bit about the organization and then all the scary
things that they do. Um. But yeah, I mean I
read a lot of uh Edward Snowden's revelations, but there
were so many. Um, I think you have to read
a book. Yeah. I mean when we were researching this,
(02:55):
there were things like that I didn't know about. And
it's such an ongoing, like ever evolving story too, that
like if if I was reading an article and it
was from longer than a year ago, you know, it
was virtually useless because that was Priest Noden revelations. And
then even the stuff that came out in like June two,
it's they seem so naive. Now it's just like, oh,
(03:18):
the n S as admitted to this. Oh, and it
turns out that they were totally lying, but so now
they've admitted to this, and then you know, it just
kept expanding and every time like they were just just
admitting just the barest minimum. And then there was another
revelation and it just showed that whatever they admitted to
could be magnified times a thousand or whatever. Yeah, I
(03:38):
listen to an NPR thing on just the the policing
of the police essentially, or the policing of the n
s A, and how it's virtually impossible because their whole
deal is two and I guess this is the beginning
of what they do. It's not only do they try
and crack codes and intercept messages, but they're also charge
(04:00):
with safeguarding their own and a lot of the government
agency's own, uh important information. So the police and organization
like that. It's just it's an exercise and futility because
their job is to avoid that. Yeah, they encrypt and decrypt. Yeah,
so it's tough and there's no checks and balances. It
seems like it's scary. Yeah, they're supposed to be. But
(04:20):
we'll talk about that in a minute. So let's talk
n say, the whole thing came about in h under
Harry Truman that stood for nothing. Yeah, And I want
to go ahead and point out now I'm not gonna
get to opinion aated, but I don't feel that there
should not be something like the n s A because
they serve a valuable you know service. Um, But you
(04:45):
have to do in the right ways, sure, and I
don't think they are right. And that's the last thing
I'm going to say opinion life. Everything else will be
just fact. I just don't want this to come across
as like poopooing, like they should shut them down forever. Well, yeah,
I think you just overtly said you don't feel that way.
Harry Truman, Harry S. Truman and the st for nothing,
(05:06):
that's right. Um, he created the n s A basically two, um,
try to get electronic information eavesdropping on other countries and
do some encryption. So basically from the beginning, the NSA
has had the same dual mission that it has today. Yeah.
Officially that's called signets, which, um, everyone loves the acronyms
(05:28):
and these intelligence agencies and military signal intelligence. That's the
eaves dropping part. Yeah. And then information assurance, which is
you know, trying to assure them all that their information
is safe, so safeguarding and by encrypting it. Yeah. So
they've been doing that since the beginning. The thing is is,
since even though they've been around since nineteen fifty two,
(05:48):
they haven't been publicly acknowledged as existing until the mid seventies.
Thanks to the Church Committee hearings which sussed out all
sorts of intelligence community to abuses like the CIA experimenting
on unsuspecting Americans with LSD and what the n s
A was up tune. Until that point, it was just
(06:09):
outright denied that the n s A even existed. Yeah,
and uh, a lot of people might think the CIA
is the same thing, But n s A is generally
just intelligence, and c i A is acting on that
intelligence exactly out in the field. And I say, their
hold up in some room somewhere, and they've been keeping
in locks locks step over the years, well especially since
(06:31):
two thousand one. I shouldn't say over the years, but
really since two thousand one, they've been kind of symbiotically
growing with the Internet, um and as a result they
become incredibly more prominent as far as the seventeen agencies
tasked with gathering and collecting and analyzing intelligence for the
executive branch go um, maybe even more so than the
(06:55):
CIA these days, because their job, what they do, fits
so nicely into the expansion of the Internet. Like basically
they can do their job just by tapping into the Internet.
And they've spent the last decade or so figuring out
how to do that more efficiently. They love the Internet
and to gather as much stuff as possible. It's that's right.
(07:15):
It's basically like they used to have to and I'm
not saying it's not hard work, but now basically they said, well,
every all the information we need for the most part
is now gathered in one big corral exactly called online. Yeah,
and everybody just just tell your friend whatever you want.
It's secret. Uh, you know, share what you like on Facebook.
(07:35):
We can't put it together with all the other data
and can create a complete profile on you and know
you better than your mother. That's why number stations, buddy. Yeah,
it's gonna go back to the past. I wonder I
could see it. I mean, I'm surely bad people realize
that the internet is not a safe way to do
business anymore. Yeah, but there's such a reliance on that
(07:58):
kind of communication that it's on. I mean, have we
passed the point in our return where it's like it's
just people just don't talk on the phone about stuff
like that anymore. People don't talk on the phone anymore, right,
or they don't talk over email anymore. Yeah, you know, alright,
So the n s a works alongside the something called
the c SS, the Central Security Service, and they are
(08:20):
basically the military side that does the same thing that
the n s A does. Right, So, from what I understand,
as of two thousand thirteen, there was thirty thousand military
personnel as part of the n s A, So maybe
that's what makes up the c s S, and then
sixty thousand and seventy thousand contractors working for the n
(08:42):
s A. So basically there's like ninety hundred thousand people
who work for the n s A. Yeah, and that
contractor's number maybe going down because, Um, one of the
fears that the government now has because Edward Snowden was
a contractor, is that we've got way too many civilian
contractors working uh for us. Maybe. So the thing is
is Snowdon was portrayed as a low level, a Booze
(09:04):
Allen contractor. And did you watch that interview with him
on NBC I think a couple of months ago. It
was the only American interview he's given to this point.
Didn't he basically said, actually didn't even basically said. He said,
I'm a spy. I'm a highly trained spy. This whole
thing where they're saying like I was a low level contractor.
(09:26):
He's like, that's not true. He said, I've been working
undercover in a foreign country for the c I A.
I've worked undercover for in a foreign country for the
N s A. So the whole idea that just some
low level contractor had access to all this stuff is
not correct. He was like a pretty high level spy. Yes,
supposedly they're not interested in him anymore, although I don't
(09:46):
buy it. I don't buy that. They came out like
literally two days ago and said, you know what, as
time goes on here, his information is less and less relevant.
That's now, that's true, And they said, so we honestly,
he's because he's trying to cut it the to get
back to the US and now or at least it
may change. But now they're saying, I don't really care
(10:07):
a right, stay over there in Russia, like you're you're,
you're the stuff you have as old news by now, right,
And I mean through such a wrench in the works
that they may have to just go back and start
from scratch. I'm sure they'd just like to get their
hands on them, though, And even if they're not having
to start from scratch. It seems to be that the
capabilities of the n s A are evolving so quick that, Yeah,
(10:29):
the snapshot that he provided from what April two thirteen
is you know, now it's more than a year old.
Who knows how much it's changed. So you're right, like
this is getting less and less relevant as it goes on. Yeah,
what's scary is that you just referred to close to
two million documents as a snapshot, and that's true, that
is just a small portion. Yeah, what's going on if
(10:49):
you're watching the NSA though, UM and a lot of
people are now more than ever. Uh, they appear to
be continuing to expand and expand expand. Like they've got
this data center in UM Salt Lake City that we
just opened, and it, Chuckers is capable of storing data
in the range of zetta bytes z e t t
(11:10):
a bytes. How many terabytes is that? I don't know
how many terabytes it is, but it's one six tillion bytes.
Zeros consider this on the low end estimate, So they
can store at least one sex tillion bytes of data
in this place in Salt Lake City. There are on
(11:33):
the low end, ten sex tillion stars in the entire
visible universe. That's a lot of data that they just
build a house for out in Salt Lake City. So
they don't appear to be slow in the role at all. No,
and they in fact hired UM in two thousand eleven,
two thousand twelve about thirty new employees UM. And this
(11:53):
article very just sweetly points out if you want to
go work for the n s A, you don't even
have to be a computer made year. You can major
in music and history and still engage in cryptanalysis. Right.
So that's good to know, right, because I mean, if
you think about it, they sometimes they use more than
just key codes. Like if somebody wanted decrypt your number
(12:14):
station key, they would have to be familiar with what
was it to Kill a mocking Bird? That was that
the book we use. Yeah, yeah, so you would want
to hire like a lip major or something like that
to to crack too, crypt analyze something like that. So
it makes sense. Yeah. Plus they train them that you're
not expected to come into the n s A as
a uh securities encryption expert. They will send you to
(12:37):
school and class right to teach you how to do
this stuff. That's right, And then you have to meet
certain requirements. They also have internships for students. That's right,
and that crazy. Can you imagine just interning at the
n s A for the summer, Yeah, and not being
killed afterwards. Um. Some of the victories over the years
with the n s A, like the Cuban Missile crisis,
(13:00):
we should note because of sigint again signals intelligence. Um,
we realized that the Russians were not just installing uh well,
we discovered they were installing nuclear warheads and they just
weren't vacationing in Cuba. And we also found out from
sigints from the n s A is that the Russians
(13:21):
had taken over the controls of the Cuban missile system.
So Russia installed nuclear warheads and had the key had
Yeah in Cuba pointed right here at the US. But
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the n s A also
diffused the whole thing by eavesdropping and finding some sort
(13:42):
of transmission among I think the Russian Navy that showed
that Russia was not going to challenge this quarantine the
US had put around Cuba, which was kind of like
the new line in the sand that Kennedy had drawn. Yeah,
perhaps avoided nuclear war thanks to them to tell agents.
So they have delivered the goods before. They sure have.
(14:03):
They were under fired after nine eleven for not delivering
the goods Um, and I remember Um famously said, you know,
we had some communications that there was something big going down.
They had like thirty of them, and to specifically mentioned
September eleven, right, but we didn't know what it was
or where it was. And Um, it's kind of hard
to throw a dragnet over the country and they didn't
(14:26):
even know it was going to be in the country supposedly. Yeah,
there's a guy in the UM United States of Secrets
who was one of the n s A analysts who
like missed nine eleven, like one of the guys, and
he is a wreck. Oh I'm sure he's just weeping,
like sobbing the whole interview. It's really tough to watch
(14:48):
because guys is gonna go to his grave like every
day just hating himself for it's really Sam that is sad. Um.
They since nine eleven, a lot of changes have taken place.
Obviously we'll get to the online aspects, but it's just
a different deal these days. The people that you're looking
for able to hide and plain sight and they're operating. Um.
(15:11):
Best case scenario, they're operating in a cell of you know,
a dozen people that you might be able to track.
Worst case scenario, you've got a single person just acting
on their own, which is nearly impossible to uh to
kind of root that person out. You have to wait
and catch them in the act, which was the case
in Times Square with what was his name, uh Fazl Shazad.
(15:37):
I think that sounds Times Square bomber or would be bomber.
He was a lone wolf. The thing is a lot
of people criticize the n SAY for even having these
cases associated with their names because these cases were made
from regular old, um warranted police work, real police Yeah.
So UM, there's a lot of criticism that the n
(15:58):
s A really hasn't delivered the goods for many many years,
and that um one of the problems is that it's
drowning in data, like it missed the Boston bombers. Um,
it missed the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, like there
was these were even overseas targets. People like planning and plotting, well,
when you're tracking every cell phone call made in the
(16:21):
United States, you're bound to be a wash and data.
And that's that's probably the most salient criticism. Like even
Glenn Greenwald agrees with you, like that, we don't need
to do away with the n s A. But the
problem is if you are doing what General Keith Alexander
who runs the show there wants, which is collect everything, um,
(16:43):
then you're a washing data. It's big data with the
capital being the capital D where you have so much
data you can't make sense of anything, you can't possibly
wade through it. And um when when you're in that situation,
you can easily have something that you need and just
pass right by. Yeah. So what Greenwalt says is we
(17:03):
should be targeting people but more effectively, Like, yes, use
the n s A capabilities, they're awesome, but put them
to good use. Don't. Don't just cast this wide net
across the entire world that doesn't do anything. Yeah. One
of the big controversies that we're going to get into
right after these messages has to do with UH warrants
and whether or not you should have to have a
(17:24):
warrant to UH collect information on someone. So we'll get
to that right after this. So Chuck, We've been talking
about the n s A, and um, did we even
say what it stood for? Surely we did, didn't we?
I don't think we did. Oh, it's the National Security
Agency and for many years it had a the nickname
(17:47):
no such agency because they were just so secretive. Yes, um.
And under under a law that was past as the
as part of the Church Committee hearings, UM, this thing
called the FISI Court was set up. And the FISI
Court was came out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA,
(18:10):
and it basically said the n s A, to do
its job, can go forth and eaves drop on everybody
outside of the U S. Please do that's that's your job.
But we understand that some of those people who you
need to keep an eye on actually come into the
US while we have a line drawn there. You guys
need to get a warrant. And since night, as far
(18:34):
as anybody knew, until about two thousand, two thousand two, Uh,
that's how the NSA operated. If you needed if you
wanted to uh listen in on someone's phone call inside
the US, you had to go to this court and
get a warrant. Eleven members and out of thirty four
(18:54):
thousand warrant applications between nineteen seventy all but eleven we're
path through. Yeah, so there was a fis A court,
but they approved ninety nine of warrants, right, So it
wasn't hard you wanted to. If you wanted to target somebody,
all you have to do is ask. There was a
rubber stamp just hovering right over the desk. You know.
(19:18):
I wonder what the deal was with those eleven They
just must have been agreedious. Um the paper boy, right,
the thing who like over charges. Yeah, like I want
to spy my paper boy in my milkman. Um. The
thing is is in two thousand two, a lot changed
(19:38):
as a result of nine eleven. It's part of the
USA Patriot Act and the name of that act. Um.
As part of the Patriot Act, the n s A
was given broader abilities to eavesdrop within the US. That's right.
So basically what happened was that, George Bush said, the
(20:00):
n s A can monitor international emails and phone calls
if they're generated within the US, as long as they're
going overseas and they're part of a targeted investigation warrant.
Without a warrant that's right. That's the key, UM, and
that happened in two thous two. The press actually knew
about this. The New York Times sat on it during
(20:21):
an election. Bushes re election and was roundly criticized once
they finally released it in two thousand five after he
was re elected. Um. But the point is that as
part of the Patriot Act and that this Bush Executive
Order UM, the n s A was allowed to start
paying attention to business records that the FEDS could get
(20:43):
from American companies, and they could eavesdrop on domestic initiated calls. Yeah,
and the business records. That was an expansion there. You
could always subpoena or get a warrant for business records,
but under the terms UM it expanded to was that
quote any tangible thing related to an investigation to obtain
(21:05):
foreign intelligence or protect against terrorism. So any tangible thing.
It's about as broad as it gets. You can basically
say anything, and uh, if it's not, hey, I want
to spy on my paper boy, then you can get
that warrant. But if you say I want to spy
on my paper boy and his name is Akbar, the
FISI Corpus probably be like Okay, here's two take two warrants. Well, yeah,
(21:30):
I got some stuff on that we'll get too later. Um. So,
as if that weren't expansive enough, I mean, having to
go get a warrant and having a nine seven percent
approval right then not having to get a warrant for
a lot more stuff. If that weren't enough. In two
thou eight, Barack Obama expanded it even further. Yeah, I
should say, reduced the obstacles between the n s A
(21:52):
and the information that seeks even further. He said that
he I think he signed an executive order that's that, Um,
you can monitor the communications between a U S National
and a foreign national if the foreign nationals a target
of an investigation. Before it was like, oh, there's an
American involved n SSAS out, maybe we'll tip off the
(22:15):
CIA or the FBI or something like that. But the
n s A is out. That was changed in two
thousand eight, yeah, and enacted for another five years through
uh this starting in December. Right. Yeah. It also did
something really really huge. The big one for the two
thousand and eight flies, the expansion, um, is that it
(22:37):
took away the need to get a warrant for bulk
communications collection as long as it was metadata, which meant
now that the n s A could go grab as
much data as it wanted, phone call records, email records,
all that stuff with the help of the phone companies.
(22:58):
As long as it didn't content the text of the
email or it wasn't a voice recording of the phone call,
they didn't need to get a warrant for everybody's stuff. Now,
they still were supposed to when they found out that
and they had an American's information, they were supposed to
destroy it unless it was related to a cyber crime,
any crime at all, conceivably was related to some sort
(23:21):
of security issue or there's some other reason, then they
could keep it for five years, and then that could
be extended for another five years. And again this is
really broad stuff. So if they caught an American stuff,
they can conceivably hang onto it for five years, no problem. Yeah,
the problem here is twofold is not having a warrant
(23:43):
is shady enough, but to have the warrants not be
what they're supposed to be, which is an effective checks
and balances system. It sounds like the warrant system was
a joke anyway. So even even if they said, well,
we gotta have warrants again, it's acted that joke of
a system exactly. So either way, it's kind of like,
(24:04):
you know, a joke it is in the process, Yeah,
the joke being that there are any real checks and balances. Yes.
So what what came out over time over these Snowden
revelations because all this was secret, Um that that the
oversight that there was on the n s A after
(24:24):
two thousand and one was just peeled back more and
more and more, and there was barely any oversight to
begin with. And that at the same time they were
expanding their capabilities to And the third prong in this
trident of cloak and dagger ishness is um that they
also had the complicity of telecommunications and internet companies. Yeah,
(24:49):
with Operation Prism, which was another one of Snowdon's revelation.
They collect Internet information anything that you do on the Internet,
your search history, your file transfers, your emails, what you
do on Facebook. And like you said, it is with
the assistance of Apple and Facebook and Google and Yahoo. Uh.
(25:09):
I don't think they've admitted that though, right they have
said basically the company if the if the n s
A comes with a warrant A seven or two I
think is what it's called from a FISA court. They
hand it over. They don't like it, but they'll hand
it over. But yes, I don't think they ever have
publicly admitted and they've denied that they have allowed the
(25:31):
n s A free access into their servers. But what
the snowdon files have come out and said is there's
here's this process where the n s A, somebody, some
contractors somewhere, types into a computer that he wants this
guy's everything through PRISM, and then that request is routed
through the FBI. The FBI sends it out to these
(25:53):
companies who send back everything they've got on that person.
And then the FBI turns around and hands it back
to the n s A. And let's take between an
hour and a day, depending on who you ask, And
then you have everything on that person. You have photos,
you have their Snatchat stuff, you have their UM, dropbox stuff, Facebook, Twitter, everything,
(26:15):
you have all other stuff, their emails, their phone calls,
everything through PRISM. So how much the companies were complicit
or not is still at issue. Yeah, one of the
things snowden Um said to the Garden, I think The
Guardian was where he first dumped all this information. Right
the Guardian, in the Washington Post and the Post. Um
he said that I, sitting at my desk, could wire
(26:37):
tap anyone, uh, from you or your accountant to a
federal judge or even the president if I had their
personal email. Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
said that that's a lie and it is impossible for
him to do that. Um. But I guess we should
talk about the program x key score, which UM basically
(27:01):
makes it look like that's exactly what could happen like
through x key score. UM, it's supposedly the n s
as widest reaching system for collecting electronic data. You can
watch what people are doing in real time on their
Facebook page, on their Gmail account. Um. All that jazz.
(27:22):
And apparently, remember when we talked about in the is
My Is your Employer Spying on You? Episode? That you
could watch somebody while they were typing, even though they
hadn't saved the documentary something, and then they'd erase it
and then re type it a different way. This is
the impression I have is that that's what x key
score does. Again, um, without attaining a warrant or even
(27:42):
having to get your supervisor on board. Yeah, you can,
just you know, if you have the access to this program,
you can. Oh yeah, if you're the name the n
s A contractor, right, Um. And they're supposed to be
some sort of like approval process, but apparently that's not
really real either. Um. And then check. There's one other
that's kind of related to this. UM dropout JEEP is
(28:06):
a program where some somehow in iPhones there is a
software implant that's I don't the impression I have is
that it's in all iPhones and from anywhere in the world.
The n s A can turn your camera on, turn
your microphone on, and turn your iPhone this thing that
(28:29):
you interact with so intimately, um into a mole and
it eavesdrops on you. That's pretty scary. Stuff like that
makes you want not not want to like be yourself
in your own home if your phone is sitting there
like that's that's paranoia, and but it's well founded paranoia. Yeah,
(28:53):
all right, Well we'll get right after this mention is
we're gonna get a little bit into them. The non
argument that if you have nothing to hide, it's the
big deal. Okay, so the non argument, if you have
(29:13):
nothing to hide, then who cares? Um. One of the
problems is this, Uh, it depends what the n s
A considers. Well, first of all, they're just mining all
this uh like bulk material from everybody. Yeah. Can I
throw a couple of numbers out? In one month? In
(29:33):
two thousand thirteen, the n s A gathered in one
month a hundred and twenty four billion phone calls, the
whole call, not just metadata, which by the way, supposedly
gives a clearer picture of you and your behavior than
a phone call necessarily would. Um. And if three billion
of those phone calls were from the United States, that's
(29:56):
a lot. And that's a single month, three billion phone calls. Yeah,
and then let me give you one more number. There's
a from the Snowdon files. Um. Some journalists analyzed them,
and they analyze a hundred and sixty thousand emails and
I AM chats that the n s A collected were
from average Americans and they contained identifying, um details, intimate
(30:19):
details like just the stuff like you would share to
like your closest confidant. Um. The n s A had
and of it was just average Americans. Well, uh, remember
when we talked about Tour in our Deep Web episode,
UM it's an Internet anonymizer UM that allows you to
(30:41):
search the Internet supposedly anonymous. The n s A revealed
recently that they consider everybody that uses tour a potential extremist.
In that two thousand and eight fives An Amendment Act,
one of the one of the exceptions for getting rid
of an Americans off is if it's encrypted. So if
(31:02):
you are using encryption stuff, that they can target it
and try their best to decrypt it just because it's encrypted. Yeah,
everybody that. In fact, if if you even visit tours website,
you're going to be put on the n s a's
red list supposedly just by visiting the site. And as
we pointed out in the Deep Web episode, not everyone
that uses tours on the deep Web is an extremist.
(31:25):
There's a lot of people that just like their privacy. Journalists, attorneys,
civil rights activists, regular schmos that don't want to be
spied on are now considered potential extremists because they don't
want to be spied on under this two thou eight
executive order by Obama. That's right, who else might be
(31:46):
looked at how about potential um someone you don't like
in politics. It was just released. Um. I think Greenwall
was who exposed this too, that five Americans were surveiled
under or this program without a warrant. One was a
Republican Party operative, one was a civil rights activists. A
(32:06):
few of them were professors. They were all Muslim. That's
no accident. Uh, just regular folks though nothing not extremists,
not terrorists. The Republican Party operative was a served in
the Navy. He's he's like a good dude and was
being spied on and um. In two thousand eleven, wire
dot Com revealed FBI training documents that said view all
(32:29):
Muslims as potential radicals and and say internal training document
UM as a placeholder for surveillance targets, uses the term
Mohammed raghead. And that's basically, if you're a Muslim and
you live in the United States or abroad, then you
are looked at as the enemy as far as the
NSA is concerned, or a potential enemy. Well, that was
(32:51):
the thing when all of this stuff started to come out,
Obama's administration was saying, like, we don't spy on Americans
were not like getting all of this inform nation on Americans.
It's not Americans, it's everybody else. And the internet companies
were like, um, like a good portion of our customer
base or overseas, and you're sitting here saying like, we
(33:11):
still target them, yeah, because their foreigners. It's it's so
yeah either way, it doesn't really dovetail with your point,
but you just chog my memory. What about spying on
your wife or your girlfriend. Surely no one would ever
use this capability to do something like that, right, it happens,
and they they have data that said they used a
(33:32):
warrantless surveillance on wives girlfriends would be girlfriends, uh and
abuse that spawned the intelligence communities term love ant instead
of sig NT. So some guy has the program open
xki stroke and he's like, Hey, I wonder if my
girlfriend's cheating on me or not even that, I just
(33:53):
want to spy on this person, this girl I want
to go out with. That's what And I'm not saying
that's happening all over the place, but if it happens
at all, it's an abusive power. UM. The the guy
Daniel so love and is um why Privacy Matters? Article?
He makes the point that even if you do have
nothing to hide or whatever, if everybody has a dossier,
(34:17):
if everybody has some sort of file, and if you
ever do decide to say speak out against tyranny or
or um the the E p A or whatever, they
can say, Hey, we've got this proublemaker over here, what
file do you have on them? And all of this stuff,
whether it's in context or not, can all be pieced
(34:39):
together to look however they want it to look. And
all of a sudden you suddenly lose your conviction, Like
that's at the n s A is at the least
in danger of having so much information that it can't
possibly keep track of everything. At worst, it's setting up
the foundation for a tyrannical government that, by its very
(35:04):
definition in nature and the capability that it has, can't
be anything but tyrannical. Even if it tried not to
be tyrannical, it couldn't with this capability. Yeah, and and
they literally like will install something called fiber opic optic
splitters at communications hubs. Has to be under the compliance
(35:26):
of of the of these companies. Like they're breaking in
there and doing it. There's no way. This is a
revelation that came up before Snowdon. There was a guy
by the last name of Klein who was an a
T and T engineer in San Francisco, and he found this.
This is in the United States of secrets. He found
this cable going up from one of the I guess
(35:47):
main routers of Core's that going yeah, And he went
and looked on the schematics and he's like, wait, there's
not supposed to be a room above there, but they're
a cable going to a room that's not on the
blueprints for this building. So we started looking. What he
found was the splitter that you were talking about, where
it takes the If the communication line is a beam
of light on a fiber optic cable, it uses a
(36:09):
mirror to make a copy of it and split it
in two, and one goes to the intended recipient, the
other goes to the n s A And that could
be your information or your life, or your phone, call,
your email, whatever. How about this. They will intercept hardware
like a router UH servers and and retrofit them to
(36:35):
serve their purposes, factory seal it and send it right
back to be sold. YEA. So it is pre pre
bugged for your convenience, right, they reroute it from the
distribution chain without the person who ordered it from like
Hewlett Packard or whoever, knowing that it was intercepted by
the n s A and bugged. Well. And because of
all of this stuff, there's some people that call Edward
(36:55):
Snowden a hero. Some people call them um Benedict Arnold
and a big fat trader that should never be allowed
back in the country. Um. If he hadn't come out
and said the stuff, it would probably all still be
going on in secret, don't you imagine for sure? I
don't think they would have self reported. No, no, they
(37:16):
definitely would not have. I think we're in total agreement
on that. So you know, it's up to listeners out
there to decide how you feel about what this guy did. Chuck. Um.
There's some other stuff that the n s A did,
apparently under the auspices of the FISA Court one of
the UM. So it's it's tasked with eavesdropping on like
enemies of the state. It's also cracker jack at getting
(37:40):
economic and diplomatic information to people like the Department of Energy,
the Department of Agriculture, the ambassadors to the U n UM,
people who deal with the EU. All of these people
are bugged by the n s A. And we've just
recently found out, and they've just recently found out and
are not very happy about it, and order to give
the US information superiority in negotiations. Yeah, that's what I
(38:05):
was talking about earlier, Like basically using it for political
gain has nothing to do with spying on terrorists exactly.
It's information superiority. That's the stated aim of the n
s A. There's another one too that really like before
the Internet companies were feeling um frustrated that they weren't
(38:26):
allowed to talk about the seven O two warrant requests,
that section seven O two that comes from and and
because in addition to having to give the government this information,
you also can't talk about it at all. There's a
gag order associated with it. So the Internet companies couldn't
say anything in their defense about this, but they were
still they were frustrated. But then they felt um like
(38:51):
a thief had gotten to broken into their houses because
they found out about this program called Muscular, and Muscular
went around the Internet companies and went directly to the
fiber optic line between Google servers and Yahoo servers and
just tapped in and sucked it right out of there
and apparently decrypted it fairly easily. Um, so they're getting
(39:12):
information with the complicity of the internet companies and behind
the Internet company's backs. That was a huge surprise. So
there's basically like, we have no allegiance whatsoever except to
our information collections. Yeah, it seems like there are no
rules and safeguards and checks and balances at all. I'm
(39:32):
interested to see what happens in the coming years. I
would my guess is that Snowdon's revelations will become obsolete
and unimportant and that things will kind of go back
to normal. I hope they never become unimportant. I hope
what you're saying isn't right. I know that initially feared
to him, as he said, the worst thing that could
(39:54):
happen is that if he did this, he took all
these risks and and exposed all this and nobody cared.
That clearly didn't happen. But you know, there's this second
potential problem, which is that eventually people just become fatigued
from all of this exposure to all all this information
that you're just like Okay, I get it. I'm my
(40:16):
life is not my own. I can't take worrying about
this anymore. So I'm just gonna detach and not care
that I hope doesn't happen. I think the vast majority
of people don't care. That's crazy to me. Like again, yeah,
I agree with you. You You can feel about Stone however
you feel. But the concept of being snooped on regardless
(40:39):
of your political affiliation or anything like that, it's not
supposed to be that way here. That transcends like anything,
like how do you not care? At least? That's crazy
to me. Uh, there's just like this would be an
eighteen hour episode if we went in all the stuff
the n s A did. So we'll say, if if
you like this, go look up the required reading um
(41:00):
and you'll find plenty of other stuff out there on
everything you want to know about the N s A.
These days, it's all out there about all two percent
of it. You can also learn more about the N
s A by typing N say into the search bar
how stuff works dot com, and that will bring up
this fine article. Since I said search parts time for
a listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this a bit on
(41:25):
trickling down. Um, hey, guys, wanted to write in with
a clarification on the episode and trickle down economics. At
one point, you guys use an example of someone working.
Do not think it is so worth it to get
a promotion so it could put push you into a
higher tax bracket and thus you're barely bringing home any
more money. I had to write in because of someone
who loves maths. I absolutely hate to see this misperception
(41:49):
of how our taxes work. I've heard people I work
with claim the same thing, thinking that getting a five
bonus could push them over a line and all of
a sudden it would bring they would bring home less
money than before. I want to stay for the record,
I know this. We were just giving a different example
that wasn't fully fleshed out. Uh, this is completely wrong
based on how the tax structure works. Even if you
(42:10):
make one million dollars a year, the first nine thousand
will be based at ten um, the next twenty eight
thousand will be based the next at fifty two, and
so on. I think you guys know this since you
kind of allude to it in other places, but I
was hoping you can make it perfectly clear. So those
people who might be mistaken realizing that making more will
(42:31):
never push all of your income into a higher tax bracket. Uh,
if you make, for example, thirty six thou dollars, you
will be in that fifteen percent bracket, and if you
get a raised to forty dollars and the bracket, you
will only be paying on the above that bracket line.
The same is true of Josh's claim of the richest
(42:51):
people in the US used to pay. True, but they
only paid on the amount over the previous bracket. Right.
But let's say the previous bracket in half a million
and then the next million dollars or no, you made
another half a million and it was tax. That's a
disincentive to work. That's what we were saying, Like, Yeah,
(43:13):
I think we could have been clear on how it works,
though I'm sure we could have. UM. Anyways, thanks what
you do, and that is from charity. Thanks a lot
of charity for clarifying. I appreciate it. UM. If you
have a clarification for us for anything we want to
hear from you, you can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
(43:33):
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and,
as always, join us at our home on the web.
Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this
and thousands of other topics, Is it how Stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry with
her stories she makes up and this is w should know.
(00:23):
Uh yeah, we have a Jerry story, but not for
this one. For the oven we're recording and spoiler coming up?
What's the spoiler? Like, he just gave a spoiler about
a spoiler that Jerry has a personal story relating to
the second of the two shows we're reporting today. Not
much of a spoiler, but people love any nugget from Jerry.
(00:44):
They're like, oh my god, what is it, right, especially
when she talks Yeah, um Chuck. Yes. So if we
weren't on any sort of watch list before, after researching
yesterday and today for this episode, we most decidedly are
some kind of red list. Yeah, if that's the highest list,
I would guess we're probably on it. Yeah. I don't
(01:06):
know if that's the highest, but it's a list that
we're probably on, or at least on the same list
as Glenn Greenwald, who I think is a righteous dude.
Did you read his book? Right? Uh huh yeah, yeah,
Oh thanks for bringing that up. I think that we
should point out a few pieces of required reading slash
viewing for this one. If if, if this episode like
strikes your fancy, read Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to
(01:29):
Hide awesome, like all sorts of new revelations in there,
and like his take on the media and how um
it's just a great read. Have you read it? You should?
I will. Um. You should also read why Privacy Matters
even if you have Nothing to Hide, which is an
article by Daniel J. Solov in the Chronicle for Higher
(01:50):
Education that is a must read because I think that's
a lot of people's argument is that, well, you know,
if you're known to terrorists, and what do you care exactly?
It does matter? He dim all, it's just that argument. Well,
it's not an argument, um, And then argument and then
you should also watch parts one and two I think
they're both online of the United States of Secrets, which
is a front Line. I haven't seen that documentary. It's amazing. Yeah,
(02:14):
it's so good. And Frontline, which is always good. Yeah,
it's just like a great nonfiction magazine article. But for
your eyes come to life. Yeah, thanks man. So, um,
was there anything in here that you didn't really know
about the n S A well, yeah, I mean I
(02:35):
imagine we'll cover it in this order, which is a
little bit about the organization and then all the scary
things that they do. Um. But yeah, I mean I
read a lot of uh Edward Snowden's revelations, but there
were so many. Um, I think you have to read
a book. Yeah. I mean when we were researching this,
(02:55):
there were things like that I didn't know about. And
it's such an ongoing, like ever evolving story too, that
like if if I was reading an article and it
was from longer than a year ago, you know, it
was virtually useless because that was Priest Noden revelations. And
then even the stuff that came out in like June two,
it's they seem so naive. Now it's just like, oh,
(03:18):
the n S as admitted to this. Oh, and it
turns out that they were totally lying, but so now
they've admitted to this, and then you know, it just
kept expanding and every time like they were just just
admitting just the barest minimum. And then there was another
revelation and it just showed that whatever they admitted to
could be magnified times a thousand or whatever. Yeah, I
(03:38):
listen to an NPR thing on just the the policing
of the police essentially, or the policing of the n
s A, and how it's virtually impossible because their whole
deal is two and I guess this is the beginning
of what they do. It's not only do they try
and crack codes and intercept messages, but they're also charge
(04:00):
with safeguarding their own and a lot of the government
agency's own, uh important information. So the police and organization
like that. It's just it's an exercise and futility because
their job is to avoid that. Yeah, they encrypt and decrypt. Yeah,
so it's tough and there's no checks and balances. It
seems like it's scary. Yeah, they're supposed to be. But
(04:20):
we'll talk about that in a minute. So let's talk
n say, the whole thing came about in h under
Harry Truman that stood for nothing. Yeah, And I want
to go ahead and point out now I'm not gonna
get to opinion aated, but I don't feel that there
should not be something like the n s A because
they serve a valuable you know service. Um, But you
(04:45):
have to do in the right ways, sure, and I
don't think they are right. And that's the last thing
I'm going to say opinion life. Everything else will be
just fact. I just don't want this to come across
as like poopooing, like they should shut them down forever. Well, yeah,
I think you just overtly said you don't feel that way.
Harry Truman, Harry S. Truman and the st for nothing,
(05:06):
that's right. Um, he created the n s A basically two, um,
try to get electronic information eavesdropping on other countries and
do some encryption. So basically from the beginning, the NSA
has had the same dual mission that it has today. Yeah.
Officially that's called signets, which, um, everyone loves the acronyms
(05:28):
and these intelligence agencies and military signal intelligence. That's the
eaves dropping part. Yeah. And then information assurance, which is
you know, trying to assure them all that their information
is safe, so safeguarding and by encrypting it. Yeah. So
they've been doing that since the beginning. The thing is is,
since even though they've been around since nineteen fifty two,
(05:48):
they haven't been publicly acknowledged as existing until the mid seventies.
Thanks to the Church Committee hearings which sussed out all
sorts of intelligence community to abuses like the CIA experimenting
on unsuspecting Americans with LSD and what the n s
A was up tune. Until that point, it was just
(06:09):
outright denied that the n s A even existed. Yeah,
and uh, a lot of people might think the CIA
is the same thing, But n s A is generally
just intelligence, and c i A is acting on that
intelligence exactly out in the field. And I say, their
hold up in some room somewhere, and they've been keeping
in locks locks step over the years, well especially since
(06:31):
two thousand one. I shouldn't say over the years, but
really since two thousand one, they've been kind of symbiotically
growing with the Internet, um and as a result they
become incredibly more prominent as far as the seventeen agencies
tasked with gathering and collecting and analyzing intelligence for the
executive branch go um, maybe even more so than the
(06:55):
CIA these days, because their job, what they do, fits
so nicely into the expansion of the Internet. Like basically
they can do their job just by tapping into the Internet.
And they've spent the last decade or so figuring out
how to do that more efficiently. They love the Internet
and to gather as much stuff as possible. It's that's right.
(07:15):
It's basically like they used to have to and I'm
not saying it's not hard work, but now basically they said, well,
every all the information we need for the most part
is now gathered in one big corral exactly called online. Yeah,
and everybody just just tell your friend whatever you want.
It's secret. Uh, you know, share what you like on Facebook.
(07:35):
We can't put it together with all the other data
and can create a complete profile on you and know
you better than your mother. That's why number stations, buddy. Yeah,
it's gonna go back to the past. I wonder I
could see it. I mean, I'm surely bad people realize
that the internet is not a safe way to do
business anymore. Yeah, but there's such a reliance on that
(07:58):
kind of communication that it's on. I mean, have we
passed the point in our return where it's like it's
just people just don't talk on the phone about stuff
like that anymore. People don't talk on the phone anymore, right,
or they don't talk over email anymore. Yeah, you know, alright,
So the n s a works alongside the something called
the c SS, the Central Security Service, and they are
(08:20):
basically the military side that does the same thing that
the n s A does. Right, So, from what I understand,
as of two thousand thirteen, there was thirty thousand military
personnel as part of the n s A, So maybe
that's what makes up the c s S, and then
sixty thousand and seventy thousand contractors working for the n
(08:42):
s A. So basically there's like ninety hundred thousand people
who work for the n s A. Yeah, and that
contractor's number maybe going down because, Um, one of the
fears that the government now has because Edward Snowden was
a contractor, is that we've got way too many civilian
contractors working uh for us. Maybe. So the thing is
is Snowdon was portrayed as a low level, a Booze
(09:04):
Allen contractor. And did you watch that interview with him
on NBC I think a couple of months ago. It
was the only American interview he's given to this point.
Didn't he basically said, actually didn't even basically said. He said,
I'm a spy. I'm a highly trained spy. This whole
thing where they're saying like I was a low level contractor.
(09:26):
He's like, that's not true. He said, I've been working
undercover in a foreign country for the c I A.
I've worked undercover for in a foreign country for the
N s A. So the whole idea that just some
low level contractor had access to all this stuff is
not correct. He was like a pretty high level spy. Yes,
supposedly they're not interested in him anymore, although I don't
(09:46):
buy it. I don't buy that. They came out like
literally two days ago and said, you know what, as
time goes on here, his information is less and less relevant.
That's now, that's true, And they said, so we honestly,
he's because he's trying to cut it the to get
back to the US and now or at least it
may change. But now they're saying, I don't really care
(10:07):
a right, stay over there in Russia, like you're you're,
you're the stuff you have as old news by now, right,
And I mean through such a wrench in the works
that they may have to just go back and start
from scratch. I'm sure they'd just like to get their
hands on them, though, And even if they're not having
to start from scratch. It seems to be that the
capabilities of the n s A are evolving so quick that, Yeah,
(10:29):
the snapshot that he provided from what April two thirteen
is you know, now it's more than a year old.
Who knows how much it's changed. So you're right, like
this is getting less and less relevant as it goes on. Yeah,
what's scary is that you just referred to close to
two million documents as a snapshot, and that's true, that
is just a small portion. Yeah, what's going on if
(10:49):
you're watching the NSA though, UM and a lot of
people are now more than ever. Uh, they appear to
be continuing to expand and expand expand. Like they've got
this data center in UM Salt Lake City that we
just opened, and it, Chuckers is capable of storing data
in the range of zetta bytes z e t t
(11:10):
a bytes. How many terabytes is that? I don't know
how many terabytes it is, but it's one six tillion bytes.
Zeros consider this on the low end estimate, So they
can store at least one sex tillion bytes of data
in this place in Salt Lake City. There are on
(11:33):
the low end, ten sex tillion stars in the entire
visible universe. That's a lot of data that they just
build a house for out in Salt Lake City. So
they don't appear to be slow in the role at all. No,
and they in fact hired UM in two thousand eleven,
two thousand twelve about thirty new employees UM. And this
(11:53):
article very just sweetly points out if you want to
go work for the n s A, you don't even
have to be a computer made year. You can major
in music and history and still engage in cryptanalysis. Right.
So that's good to know, right, because I mean, if
you think about it, they sometimes they use more than
just key codes. Like if somebody wanted decrypt your number
(12:14):
station key, they would have to be familiar with what
was it to Kill a mocking Bird? That was that
the book we use. Yeah, yeah, so you would want
to hire like a lip major or something like that
to to crack too, crypt analyze something like that. So
it makes sense. Yeah. Plus they train them that you're
not expected to come into the n s A as
a uh securities encryption expert. They will send you to
(12:37):
school and class right to teach you how to do
this stuff. That's right, And then you have to meet
certain requirements. They also have internships for students. That's right,
and that crazy. Can you imagine just interning at the
n s A for the summer, Yeah, and not being
killed afterwards. Um. Some of the victories over the years
with the n s A, like the Cuban Missile crisis,
(13:00):
we should note because of sigint again signals intelligence. Um,
we realized that the Russians were not just installing uh well,
we discovered they were installing nuclear warheads and they just
weren't vacationing in Cuba. And we also found out from
sigints from the n s A is that the Russians
(13:21):
had taken over the controls of the Cuban missile system.
So Russia installed nuclear warheads and had the key had
Yeah in Cuba pointed right here at the US. But
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the n s A also
diffused the whole thing by eavesdropping and finding some sort
(13:42):
of transmission among I think the Russian Navy that showed
that Russia was not going to challenge this quarantine the
US had put around Cuba, which was kind of like
the new line in the sand that Kennedy had drawn. Yeah,
perhaps avoided nuclear war thanks to them to tell agents.
So they have delivered the goods before. They sure have.
(14:03):
They were under fired after nine eleven for not delivering
the goods Um, and I remember Um famously said, you know,
we had some communications that there was something big going down.
They had like thirty of them, and to specifically mentioned
September eleven, right, but we didn't know what it was
or where it was. And Um, it's kind of hard
to throw a dragnet over the country and they didn't
(14:26):
even know it was going to be in the country supposedly. Yeah,
there's a guy in the UM United States of Secrets
who was one of the n s A analysts who
like missed nine eleven, like one of the guys, and
he is a wreck. Oh I'm sure he's just weeping,
like sobbing the whole interview. It's really tough to watch
(14:48):
because guys is gonna go to his grave like every
day just hating himself for it's really Sam that is sad. Um.
They since nine eleven, a lot of changes have taken place.
Obviously we'll get to the online aspects, but it's just
a different deal these days. The people that you're looking
for able to hide and plain sight and they're operating. Um.
(15:11):
Best case scenario, they're operating in a cell of you know,
a dozen people that you might be able to track.
Worst case scenario, you've got a single person just acting
on their own, which is nearly impossible to uh to
kind of root that person out. You have to wait
and catch them in the act, which was the case
in Times Square with what was his name, uh Fazl Shazad.
(15:37):
I think that sounds Times Square bomber or would be bomber.
He was a lone wolf. The thing is a lot
of people criticize the n SAY for even having these
cases associated with their names because these cases were made
from regular old, um warranted police work, real police Yeah.
So UM, there's a lot of criticism that the n
(15:58):
s A really hasn't delivered the goods for many many years,
and that um one of the problems is that it's
drowning in data, like it missed the Boston bombers. Um,
it missed the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, like there
was these were even overseas targets. People like planning and plotting, well,
when you're tracking every cell phone call made in the
(16:21):
United States, you're bound to be a wash and data.
And that's that's probably the most salient criticism. Like even
Glenn Greenwald agrees with you, like that, we don't need
to do away with the n s A. But the
problem is if you are doing what General Keith Alexander
who runs the show there wants, which is collect everything, um,
(16:43):
then you're a washing data. It's big data with the
capital being the capital D where you have so much
data you can't make sense of anything, you can't possibly
wade through it. And um when when you're in that situation,
you can easily have something that you need and just
pass right by. Yeah. So what Greenwalt says is we
(17:03):
should be targeting people but more effectively, Like, yes, use
the n s A capabilities, they're awesome, but put them
to good use. Don't. Don't just cast this wide net
across the entire world that doesn't do anything. Yeah. One
of the big controversies that we're going to get into
right after these messages has to do with UH warrants
and whether or not you should have to have a
(17:24):
warrant to UH collect information on someone. So we'll get
to that right after this. So Chuck, We've been talking
about the n s A, and um, did we even
say what it stood for? Surely we did, didn't we?
I don't think we did. Oh, it's the National Security
Agency and for many years it had a the nickname
(17:47):
no such agency because they were just so secretive. Yes, um.
And under under a law that was past as the
as part of the Church Committee hearings, UM, this thing
called the FISI Court was set up. And the FISI
Court was came out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA,
(18:10):
and it basically said the n s A, to do
its job, can go forth and eaves drop on everybody
outside of the U S. Please do that's that's your job.
But we understand that some of those people who you
need to keep an eye on actually come into the
US while we have a line drawn there. You guys
need to get a warrant. And since night, as far
(18:34):
as anybody knew, until about two thousand, two thousand two, Uh,
that's how the NSA operated. If you needed if you
wanted to uh listen in on someone's phone call inside
the US, you had to go to this court and
get a warrant. Eleven members and out of thirty four
(18:54):
thousand warrant applications between nineteen seventy all but eleven we're
path through. Yeah, so there was a fis A court,
but they approved ninety nine of warrants, right, So it
wasn't hard you wanted to. If you wanted to target somebody,
all you have to do is ask. There was a
rubber stamp just hovering right over the desk. You know.
(19:18):
I wonder what the deal was with those eleven They
just must have been agreedious. Um the paper boy, right,
the thing who like over charges. Yeah, like I want
to spy my paper boy in my milkman. Um. The
thing is is in two thousand two, a lot changed
(19:38):
as a result of nine eleven. It's part of the
USA Patriot Act and the name of that act. Um.
As part of the Patriot Act, the n s A
was given broader abilities to eavesdrop within the US. That's right.
So basically what happened was that, George Bush said, the
(20:00):
n s A can monitor international emails and phone calls
if they're generated within the US, as long as they're
going overseas and they're part of a targeted investigation warrant.
Without a warrant that's right. That's the key, UM, and
that happened in two thous two. The press actually knew
about this. The New York Times sat on it during
(20:21):
an election. Bushes re election and was roundly criticized once
they finally released it in two thousand five after he
was re elected. Um. But the point is that as
part of the Patriot Act and that this Bush Executive
Order UM, the n s A was allowed to start
paying attention to business records that the FEDS could get
(20:43):
from American companies, and they could eavesdrop on domestic initiated calls. Yeah,
and the business records. That was an expansion there. You
could always subpoena or get a warrant for business records,
but under the terms UM it expanded to was that
quote any tangible thing related to an investigation to obtain
(21:05):
foreign intelligence or protect against terrorism. So any tangible thing.
It's about as broad as it gets. You can basically
say anything, and uh, if it's not, hey, I want
to spy on my paper boy, then you can get
that warrant. But if you say I want to spy
on my paper boy and his name is Akbar, the
FISI Corpus probably be like Okay, here's two take two warrants. Well, yeah,
(21:30):
I got some stuff on that we'll get too later. Um. So,
as if that weren't expansive enough, I mean, having to
go get a warrant and having a nine seven percent
approval right then not having to get a warrant for
a lot more stuff. If that weren't enough. In two
thou eight, Barack Obama expanded it even further. Yeah, I
should say, reduced the obstacles between the n s A
(21:52):
and the information that seeks even further. He said that
he I think he signed an executive order that's that, Um,
you can monitor the communications between a U S National
and a foreign national if the foreign nationals a target
of an investigation. Before it was like, oh, there's an
American involved n SSAS out, maybe we'll tip off the
(22:15):
CIA or the FBI or something like that. But the
n s A is out. That was changed in two
thousand eight, yeah, and enacted for another five years through
uh this starting in December. Right. Yeah. It also did
something really really huge. The big one for the two
thousand and eight flies, the expansion, um, is that it
(22:37):
took away the need to get a warrant for bulk
communications collection as long as it was metadata, which meant
now that the n s A could go grab as
much data as it wanted, phone call records, email records,
all that stuff with the help of the phone companies.
(22:58):
As long as it didn't content the text of the
email or it wasn't a voice recording of the phone call,
they didn't need to get a warrant for everybody's stuff. Now,
they still were supposed to when they found out that
and they had an American's information, they were supposed to
destroy it unless it was related to a cyber crime,
any crime at all, conceivably was related to some sort
(23:21):
of security issue or there's some other reason, then they
could keep it for five years, and then that could
be extended for another five years. And again this is
really broad stuff. So if they caught an American stuff,
they can conceivably hang onto it for five years, no problem. Yeah,
the problem here is twofold is not having a warrant
(23:43):
is shady enough, but to have the warrants not be
what they're supposed to be, which is an effective checks
and balances system. It sounds like the warrant system was
a joke anyway. So even even if they said, well,
we gotta have warrants again, it's acted that joke of
a system exactly. So either way, it's kind of like,
(24:04):
you know, a joke it is in the process, Yeah,
the joke being that there are any real checks and balances. Yes.
So what what came out over time over these Snowden
revelations because all this was secret, Um that that the
oversight that there was on the n s A after
(24:24):
two thousand and one was just peeled back more and
more and more, and there was barely any oversight to
begin with. And that at the same time they were
expanding their capabilities to And the third prong in this
trident of cloak and dagger ishness is um that they
also had the complicity of telecommunications and internet companies. Yeah,
(24:49):
with Operation Prism, which was another one of Snowdon's revelation.
They collect Internet information anything that you do on the Internet,
your search history, your file transfers, your emails, what you
do on Facebook. And like you said, it is with
the assistance of Apple and Facebook and Google and Yahoo. Uh.
(25:09):
I don't think they've admitted that though, right they have
said basically the company if the if the n s
A comes with a warrant A seven or two I
think is what it's called from a FISA court. They
hand it over. They don't like it, but they'll hand
it over. But yes, I don't think they ever have
publicly admitted and they've denied that they have allowed the
(25:31):
n s A free access into their servers. But what
the snowdon files have come out and said is there's
here's this process where the n s A, somebody, some
contractors somewhere, types into a computer that he wants this
guy's everything through PRISM, and then that request is routed
through the FBI. The FBI sends it out to these
(25:53):
companies who send back everything they've got on that person.
And then the FBI turns around and hands it back
to the n s A. And let's take between an
hour and a day, depending on who you ask, And
then you have everything on that person. You have photos,
you have their Snatchat stuff, you have their UM, dropbox stuff, Facebook, Twitter, everything,
(26:15):
you have all other stuff, their emails, their phone calls,
everything through PRISM. So how much the companies were complicit
or not is still at issue. Yeah, one of the
things snowden Um said to the Garden, I think The
Guardian was where he first dumped all this information. Right
the Guardian, in the Washington Post and the Post. Um
he said that I, sitting at my desk, could wire
(26:37):
tap anyone, uh, from you or your accountant to a
federal judge or even the president if I had their
personal email. Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
said that that's a lie and it is impossible for
him to do that. Um. But I guess we should
talk about the program x key score, which UM basically
(27:01):
makes it look like that's exactly what could happen like
through x key score. UM, it's supposedly the n s
as widest reaching system for collecting electronic data. You can
watch what people are doing in real time on their
Facebook page, on their Gmail account. Um. All that jazz.
(27:22):
And apparently, remember when we talked about in the is
My Is your Employer Spying on You? Episode? That you
could watch somebody while they were typing, even though they
hadn't saved the documentary something, and then they'd erase it
and then re type it a different way. This is
the impression I have is that that's what x key
score does. Again, um, without attaining a warrant or even
(27:42):
having to get your supervisor on board. Yeah, you can,
just you know, if you have the access to this program,
you can. Oh yeah, if you're the name the n
s A contractor, right, Um. And they're supposed to be
some sort of like approval process, but apparently that's not
really real either. Um. And then check. There's one other
that's kind of related to this. UM dropout JEEP is
(28:06):
a program where some somehow in iPhones there is a
software implant that's I don't the impression I have is
that it's in all iPhones and from anywhere in the world.
The n s A can turn your camera on, turn
your microphone on, and turn your iPhone this thing that
(28:29):
you interact with so intimately, um into a mole and
it eavesdrops on you. That's pretty scary. Stuff like that
makes you want not not want to like be yourself
in your own home if your phone is sitting there
like that's that's paranoia, and but it's well founded paranoia. Yeah,
(28:53):
all right, Well we'll get right after this mention is
we're gonna get a little bit into them. The non
argument that if you have nothing to hide, it's the
big deal. Okay, so the non argument, if you have
(29:13):
nothing to hide, then who cares? Um. One of the
problems is this, Uh, it depends what the n s
A considers. Well, first of all, they're just mining all
this uh like bulk material from everybody. Yeah. Can I
throw a couple of numbers out? In one month? In
(29:33):
two thousand thirteen, the n s A gathered in one
month a hundred and twenty four billion phone calls, the
whole call, not just metadata, which by the way, supposedly
gives a clearer picture of you and your behavior than
a phone call necessarily would. Um. And if three billion
of those phone calls were from the United States, that's
(29:56):
a lot. And that's a single month, three billion phone calls. Yeah,
and then let me give you one more number. There's
a from the Snowdon files. Um. Some journalists analyzed them,
and they analyze a hundred and sixty thousand emails and
I AM chats that the n s A collected were
from average Americans and they contained identifying, um details, intimate
(30:19):
details like just the stuff like you would share to
like your closest confidant. Um. The n s A had
and of it was just average Americans. Well, uh, remember
when we talked about Tour in our Deep Web episode,
UM it's an Internet anonymizer UM that allows you to
(30:41):
search the Internet supposedly anonymous. The n s A revealed
recently that they consider everybody that uses tour a potential extremist.
In that two thousand and eight fives An Amendment Act,
one of the one of the exceptions for getting rid
of an Americans off is if it's encrypted. So if
(31:02):
you are using encryption stuff, that they can target it
and try their best to decrypt it just because it's encrypted. Yeah,
everybody that. In fact, if if you even visit tours website,
you're going to be put on the n s a's
red list supposedly just by visiting the site. And as
we pointed out in the Deep Web episode, not everyone
that uses tours on the deep Web is an extremist.
(31:25):
There's a lot of people that just like their privacy. Journalists, attorneys,
civil rights activists, regular schmos that don't want to be
spied on are now considered potential extremists because they don't
want to be spied on under this two thou eight
executive order by Obama. That's right, who else might be
(31:46):
looked at how about potential um someone you don't like
in politics. It was just released. Um. I think Greenwall
was who exposed this too, that five Americans were surveiled
under or this program without a warrant. One was a
Republican Party operative, one was a civil rights activists. A
(32:06):
few of them were professors. They were all Muslim. That's
no accident. Uh, just regular folks though nothing not extremists,
not terrorists. The Republican Party operative was a served in
the Navy. He's he's like a good dude and was
being spied on and um. In two thousand eleven, wire
dot Com revealed FBI training documents that said view all
(32:29):
Muslims as potential radicals and and say internal training document
UM as a placeholder for surveillance targets, uses the term
Mohammed raghead. And that's basically, if you're a Muslim and
you live in the United States or abroad, then you
are looked at as the enemy as far as the
NSA is concerned, or a potential enemy. Well, that was
(32:51):
the thing when all of this stuff started to come out,
Obama's administration was saying, like, we don't spy on Americans
were not like getting all of this inform nation on Americans.
It's not Americans, it's everybody else. And the internet companies
were like, um, like a good portion of our customer
base or overseas, and you're sitting here saying like, we
(33:11):
still target them, yeah, because their foreigners. It's it's so
yeah either way, it doesn't really dovetail with your point,
but you just chog my memory. What about spying on
your wife or your girlfriend. Surely no one would ever
use this capability to do something like that, right, it happens,
and they they have data that said they used a
(33:32):
warrantless surveillance on wives girlfriends would be girlfriends, uh and
abuse that spawned the intelligence communities term love ant instead
of sig NT. So some guy has the program open
xki stroke and he's like, Hey, I wonder if my
girlfriend's cheating on me or not even that, I just
(33:53):
want to spy on this person, this girl I want
to go out with. That's what And I'm not saying
that's happening all over the place, but if it happens
at all, it's an abusive power. UM. The the guy
Daniel so love and is um why Privacy Matters? Article?
He makes the point that even if you do have
nothing to hide or whatever, if everybody has a dossier,
(34:17):
if everybody has some sort of file, and if you
ever do decide to say speak out against tyranny or
or um the the E p A or whatever, they
can say, Hey, we've got this proublemaker over here, what
file do you have on them? And all of this stuff,
whether it's in context or not, can all be pieced
(34:39):
together to look however they want it to look. And
all of a sudden you suddenly lose your conviction, Like
that's at the n s A is at the least
in danger of having so much information that it can't
possibly keep track of everything. At worst, it's setting up
the foundation for a tyrannical government that, by its very
(35:04):
definition in nature and the capability that it has, can't
be anything but tyrannical. Even if it tried not to
be tyrannical, it couldn't with this capability. Yeah, and and
they literally like will install something called fiber opic optic
splitters at communications hubs. Has to be under the compliance
(35:26):
of of the of these companies. Like they're breaking in
there and doing it. There's no way. This is a
revelation that came up before Snowdon. There was a guy
by the last name of Klein who was an a
T and T engineer in San Francisco, and he found this.
This is in the United States of secrets. He found
this cable going up from one of the I guess
(35:47):
main routers of Core's that going yeah, And he went
and looked on the schematics and he's like, wait, there's
not supposed to be a room above there, but they're
a cable going to a room that's not on the
blueprints for this building. So we started looking. What he
found was the splitter that you were talking about, where
it takes the If the communication line is a beam
of light on a fiber optic cable, it uses a
(36:09):
mirror to make a copy of it and split it
in two, and one goes to the intended recipient, the
other goes to the n s A And that could
be your information or your life, or your phone, call,
your email, whatever. How about this. They will intercept hardware
like a router UH servers and and retrofit them to
(36:35):
serve their purposes, factory seal it and send it right
back to be sold. YEA. So it is pre pre
bugged for your convenience, right, they reroute it from the
distribution chain without the person who ordered it from like
Hewlett Packard or whoever, knowing that it was intercepted by
the n s A and bugged. Well. And because of
all of this stuff, there's some people that call Edward
(36:55):
Snowden a hero. Some people call them um Benedict Arnold
and a big fat trader that should never be allowed
back in the country. Um. If he hadn't come out
and said the stuff, it would probably all still be
going on in secret, don't you imagine for sure? I
don't think they would have self reported. No, no, they
(37:16):
definitely would not have. I think we're in total agreement
on that. So you know, it's up to listeners out
there to decide how you feel about what this guy did. Chuck. Um.
There's some other stuff that the n s A did,
apparently under the auspices of the FISA Court one of
the UM. So it's it's tasked with eavesdropping on like
enemies of the state. It's also cracker jack at getting
(37:40):
economic and diplomatic information to people like the Department of Energy,
the Department of Agriculture, the ambassadors to the U n UM,
people who deal with the EU. All of these people
are bugged by the n s A. And we've just
recently found out, and they've just recently found out and
are not very happy about it, and order to give
the US information superiority in negotiations. Yeah, that's what I
(38:05):
was talking about earlier, Like basically using it for political
gain has nothing to do with spying on terrorists exactly.
It's information superiority. That's the stated aim of the n
s A. There's another one too that really like before
the Internet companies were feeling um frustrated that they weren't
(38:26):
allowed to talk about the seven O two warrant requests,
that section seven O two that comes from and and
because in addition to having to give the government this information,
you also can't talk about it at all. There's a
gag order associated with it. So the Internet companies couldn't
say anything in their defense about this, but they were
still they were frustrated. But then they felt um like
(38:51):
a thief had gotten to broken into their houses because
they found out about this program called Muscular, and Muscular
went around the Internet companies and went directly to the
fiber optic line between Google servers and Yahoo servers and
just tapped in and sucked it right out of there
and apparently decrypted it fairly easily. Um, so they're getting
(39:12):
information with the complicity of the internet companies and behind
the Internet company's backs. That was a huge surprise. So
there's basically like, we have no allegiance whatsoever except to
our information collections. Yeah, it seems like there are no
rules and safeguards and checks and balances at all. I'm
(39:32):
interested to see what happens in the coming years. I
would my guess is that Snowdon's revelations will become obsolete
and unimportant and that things will kind of go back
to normal. I hope they never become unimportant. I hope
what you're saying isn't right. I know that initially feared
to him, as he said, the worst thing that could
(39:54):
happen is that if he did this, he took all
these risks and and exposed all this and nobody cared.
That clearly didn't happen. But you know, there's this second
potential problem, which is that eventually people just become fatigued
from all of this exposure to all all this information
that you're just like Okay, I get it. I'm my
(40:16):
life is not my own. I can't take worrying about
this anymore. So I'm just gonna detach and not care
that I hope doesn't happen. I think the vast majority
of people don't care. That's crazy to me. Like again, yeah,
I agree with you. You You can feel about Stone however
you feel. But the concept of being snooped on regardless
(40:39):
of your political affiliation or anything like that, it's not
supposed to be that way here. That transcends like anything,
like how do you not care? At least? That's crazy
to me. Uh, there's just like this would be an
eighteen hour episode if we went in all the stuff
the n s A did. So we'll say, if if
you like this, go look up the required reading um
(41:00):
and you'll find plenty of other stuff out there on
everything you want to know about the N s A.
These days, it's all out there about all two percent
of it. You can also learn more about the N
s A by typing N say into the search bar
how stuff works dot com, and that will bring up
this fine article. Since I said search parts time for
a listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this a bit on
(41:25):
trickling down. Um, hey, guys, wanted to write in with
a clarification on the episode and trickle down economics. At
one point, you guys use an example of someone working.
Do not think it is so worth it to get
a promotion so it could put push you into a
higher tax bracket and thus you're barely bringing home any
more money. I had to write in because of someone
who loves maths. I absolutely hate to see this misperception
(41:49):
of how our taxes work. I've heard people I work
with claim the same thing, thinking that getting a five
bonus could push them over a line and all of
a sudden it would bring they would bring home less
money than before. I want to stay for the record,
I know this. We were just giving a different example
that wasn't fully fleshed out. Uh, this is completely wrong
based on how the tax structure works. Even if you
(42:10):
make one million dollars a year, the first nine thousand
will be based at ten um, the next twenty eight
thousand will be based the next at fifty two, and
so on. I think you guys know this since you
kind of allude to it in other places, but I
was hoping you can make it perfectly clear. So those
people who might be mistaken realizing that making more will
(42:31):
never push all of your income into a higher tax bracket. Uh,
if you make, for example, thirty six thou dollars, you
will be in that fifteen percent bracket, and if you
get a raised to forty dollars and the bracket, you
will only be paying on the above that bracket line.
The same is true of Josh's claim of the richest
(42:51):
people in the US used to pay. True, but they
only paid on the amount over the previous bracket. Right.
But let's say the previous bracket in half a million
and then the next million dollars or no, you made
another half a million and it was tax. That's a
disincentive to work. That's what we were saying, Like, Yeah,
(43:13):
I think we could have been clear on how it works,
though I'm sure we could have. UM. Anyways, thanks what
you do, and that is from charity. Thanks a lot
of charity for clarifying. I appreciate it. UM. If you
have a clarification for us for anything we want to
hear from you, you can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
(43:33):
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and,
as always, join us at our home on the web.
Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this
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