Continued from:
NSA Utah Data Center Largest Spy Compound Ever – Part 1
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to
describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney
was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating
the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands
of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes
behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades
breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone
calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging
databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s
Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team
designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to
intercept international and foreign communications.
He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at
the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the
periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had
taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its
eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time
was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the
wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large,
windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just
international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic
flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far
beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed
by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney
says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of
the country and also on the East Coast.”
The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches.
To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency
also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in
locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a
back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three
105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from
Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote
Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek
station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.
The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched
its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution
setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going
to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the
way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.”
Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed
and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the
inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320
million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent
of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only
grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact
with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms
dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated
software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining
Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables
at the speed of light.
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of
Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in
Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations,
countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords,
and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion,
especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch
lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the
NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a
name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other
communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the
NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says.
“If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The
Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is
completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and
analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind
program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained
warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and
international billing records, detailed information about who called
whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than
2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New
Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly
expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic
eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of
five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.”
(Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not
comment on matters of national security.)
After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring
people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to
an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an
acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But
the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage
facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects
everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of
intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish
between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds,
“they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as
much as it can.
Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining
begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney
says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial
transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like
bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in,
the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s
life.
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and
in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before
and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in
the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were
thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver
to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were
included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their
families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.”
Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens
personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding
somebody’s diary,” she says.
In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.
But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the
practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US
citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for
political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political
enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar
protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact
prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.
Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade
officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a
court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant,
and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed
that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate
approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather
than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required
close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested
in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand
scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the
agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at
“between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”
When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration
might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional
concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried
to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the
attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were
given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place
where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and
forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey
totalitarian state,” he says.
There is still one technology preventing untrammeled
government access to private digital data: strong encryption.
Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial
institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their
messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For
years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption
Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt
data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and
256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web
browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its
use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a
so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one
combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take
longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of
trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (10
36).
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one
of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind
of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers
to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive
number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages
from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect
telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many
messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior
intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were
we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old
guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told
then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to
build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the
code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the
code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of
cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code
breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage
facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the
government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the
most powerful computer the world has ever known.
The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the
High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (10
15)
operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of
breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the
venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in
eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low,
scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends
sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the
“secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic
bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here,
what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not
far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of
Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret
war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the
weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.
In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of
Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for
multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there
would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific
work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could
pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a
separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked
on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of
three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive
undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.
Known as the Multiprogramming Research Facility, or Building 5300, the
$41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a
plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the
brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer
engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic
applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The
supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s
now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology
program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the
ex-NSA computer expert.
At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a
furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to
cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless,
the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a
warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.
Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an
even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another
former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The
NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was
much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis
and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In
other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to
actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The
code-breaking effort was up and running.
The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon
afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even
within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and
vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee
were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this
computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack
current public encryption.”
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of
Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a
trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use
the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA,
including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the
center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers.
“Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign
government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break
all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff
we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still
in there.”
The NSA believes it’s on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.
That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of
long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be
broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,”
he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an
indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former
official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that
is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal
domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA
in the past decade.
But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do
that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can
break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the
AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first
appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at
least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is
considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the
agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with
Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an
ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes
along.
But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak
Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next
goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (10
18) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (10
21) and yottaflop.
These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a
bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging
him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of
Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are
classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China
and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,”
the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now
with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K
Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A
system, with 2.57 petaflops.
But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To
secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA
has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000
square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge.
Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be
low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens
of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine,
possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between
circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in
2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,”
in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an
extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200
megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce
a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling
equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World
Trade Center towers.
In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded
in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade,
a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will
run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and
other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the
Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20
petaflops.
Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “
The Library of Babel,”
Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire
world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In
Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges
might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell
it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.
