NSA “SIGINT Strategy” paper targeted “anyone, anytime, anywhere”

The NSA just can’t get a break these days. The latest Snowden paper revelation shows the spy agency speaking plainly last year about pursuing unlimited vision of the digital world. The top secret paper, entitled “SIGINT Strategy” (SIGINT being Spy for “signals intelligence”) was distributed internally Feb. 23, 2012.

The paper expressed a plan to pursue increasingly broader legal authority to intercept and gather all digital traffic information on a bulk basis for the purpose of fighting “adversaries.” It spoke of the benefits of working with private industry–either through their cooperation or secretly–to gather data. It mentioned setting up “front” companies to act as servers, thus dispensing with the need to infiltrate existing companies. The timeline focused on the years 2012-2016.

Notably, the paper was peppered with some oddly commercialized language. To wit:

We will constantly strive to improve our knowledge, our people, our technology, and our products. Through innovation and personalization, we will advance the SIGINT system. Our customers and stakeholders can rely on us to provide timely, high quality products and services, because we never stop innovating and improving, and we never give up!

We must proactively position ourselves to dominate that environment across discovery, access, exploitation, analysis, collaboration and in the products and services we provide.

Presumably, the terms customers and stakeholders refer to agencies within the US government, while products and services implies crime fighting, but it doesn’t help the NSA sound any less creepy.

In addition to SIGINT Strategy, the New York Times reports that the NSA paper speaks with an eye to coordinating various NSA projects like “Treasure Map” and “Packaged Goods”, which together would map the entire Internet on a daily basis. A related NSA slide presentation said that the agency has “13 covered servers in unwitting data centers around the globe.” Locations include Germany, Poland, Denmark, South Africa, Taiwan, Russia, China and Singapore.

SOURCE: New York Times