Spy agency has Google-style capability to search all communications

Paul Joseph Watson

Infowars.com

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The National Security Agency is storing all electronic communications and analyzing them in real time, according to former NSA employee turned whistleblower William Binney, who warns that the federal agency has a Google-style capability to search all conversations for keywords.

Since 2008, the NSA has had the legal power to intercept all phone calls, emails and text messages sent by American citizens without probable cause. However, although long suspected, the agency has never admitted that it is analyzing the content of such messages, conceding only that persons, dates and locations are part of the snooping process.

However, in a recent sworn declaration to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Binney, a former NSA employee with the signals intelligence agency within the DoD, divulges that the federal agency, “has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email.”

Using as many as twenty data intercept centers throughout the United States which can each store an almost unimaginable quantity of information, Binney notes that, “The sheer size of that capacity indicates that the NSA is not filtering personal electronic communications such as email before storage but is, in fact, storing all that they are collecting.”

Binney also points to FBI Director Robert Mueller’s 2011 admission that the FBI, with the aid of the NSA and DoD, had “put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails as well as … and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”

Binney said he quit the NSA in 2001 because “the individual liberties preserved in the U.S. Constitution were no longer a consideration,” after 9/11.

Binney’s revelations coalesce with the fact that, according to many privacy experts, the NSA has been intercepting and recording all electronic communications across the entire world since at least the early 1990’s.

In 1999, the Australian government admitted that they were part of an NSA-led global intercept and surveillance program called Echelon in alliance with the US and Britain that could listen to “every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission,” on the planet.

In addition, a 2001 European Parliament report stated that “within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted” by the NSA.

Under the Clinton Administration Echelon certainly turned its attention to citizens of countries around the globe and monitored millions of calls and other communications.

Echelon expert Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the agency was monitoring “everything from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATMs.”

Last month the NSA refused to provide details of its clandestine spying program, ironically arguing that to do so would violate the privacy of American citizens.

When Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall of the intelligence oversight committee asked that the NSA provide a rough estimate as to how many U.S. citizens have had their communications monitored under the expanded Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the federal agency refused to provide the figure because it would “further violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

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