When we talk the serious conspiracies, those that pass the schizoabsurd, lizardman-constant filter, so skepticism toward the official accounts of certain pivotal events, a common wisdom is quickly invoked: It would take too many people, and someone would talk.
Would they?
On March 8, 1971, Smokin' Joe Frazier fought Muhammad Ali in the Fight of the Century. Both were undefeated -- 26-0 with 23 knockouts for Frazier, 31-0 with 25 knockouts for Ali. Past the biggest fight, it was considered the biggest sporting event ever up to that point. Madison Square Garden made a million at the gate; 2.5 million tickets were sold for closed-circuit pay-per-view venues; in London where it was broadcast at midnight, 90,000 tickets were sold. They went 15 rounds and Smokin' Joe won by unanimous decision, though Ali would go on to the win their next two bouts. While everyone was watching that fight, less than 100 miles away 8 members of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Bureau office in a Philadelphia suburb called Media. The documents they found revealed the existence of the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program: COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO started in 1956, its stated goal was undermining communist activity in the United States and much can be said on that, but I think most relevant is socialism and communism already had a popularity in the States at the turn of the century and after World War 1 and the Russian Revolution they had a real presence in American academia. I doubt a man so circumspect as J. Edgar Hoover was unaware of decades of fomenting communist thought and the subsequent infiltration into power of white communists. I imagine his black book had quite a few names Joseph McCarthy would have been very interested in seeing. Nevertheless, it went on, COINTELPRO worked against the Communist Party of the US, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, and also the KKK. "Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally." MLK arrived and Hoover quickly identified him and singled him out, bugging his home and hotel rooms, and then using the audio from the bugs to threaten King, saying he should kill himself. I have a singular hatred for communism and MLK was a socialist but he had committed no crime, there was no legal basis for the FBI's considerable efforts against him. RFK signed off on a month of watching MLK, Hoover just kept it running.
On the militant side, COINTELPRO efforts, if not wholly responsible for the schism in the Nation of Islam that saw Malcolm X break away, sharply accelerated the deterioration of the relationship between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad that culminated in NOI members killing Malcolm.
As an aside, the FBI was apparently concerned with and dedicated to preventing the rise of a "Messiah-like figure" who would unify black militants. I find this curious. At the time the demographics of the US were 88% white, 10% black, 4% hispanics of any race, those are stark lines. Had there been black militancy and an actual armed conflict, they would have been put down hard and America of the 60s, certainly the South as popularly portrayed, surely had the racial animus to back mass expulsion or if not that, death squads. Right? Hoover was no integrationist. I notice I'm confused. Alas.
For these, for the buggings, for the creation of inflammatory documents, we have an FBI that had no problem serially and severely breaking the law, at stoking hostilities, overlooking murders they effectually encouraged, and with MLK, just outright telling the guy "kill yourself or else." They didn't bother with that for Fred Hampton, they just had him killed. Maybe this seems tame now, my how we've fallen.
The CIA had something of their own version of COINTELPRO established under LBJ and expanded by Nixon, Operation MHCHAOS. They also had something older and in the same window as COINTELPRO: Project MKUltra. "MK" from the internal staff rating, the CIA's version of military MOS, involved in the project, and "Ultra" likely from the extremely high secrecy around the project. I expect most here have the gist: starting in the 50s, the CIA dosed the unknowing with various psychoactive substances alongside research into brainwashing, psychological torture and general manipulation of thought. MKUltra was the successor to the CIA's Project Artichoke, which was itself likely a successor to Nazi research from scientists procured through Operation Paperclip. What we know is horrifying, and we don't know a lot, because amidst Watergate, CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MKUltra files. A small number survived. What brought it to light wasn't even anything out of the project itself, it was Seymour Hersh reporting on MHCHAOS in the New York Times. His piece resulted in the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, and it was under those the existence of MKUltra was revealed.
Ted Kennedy, on the Senate floor in 1977:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations."
Hundreds at least, maybe thousands of people were involved in MKUltra, and with universities performing tests on unwitting citizens it seems like it wasn't particularly compartmentalized. What brought it to light? It wasn't people on the inside blowing the whistle in the 50s or 60s or at the start of the 70s, and I doubt Helms was the only one who thought the American people wouldn't like the truth.
There's Iran-Contra. Oliver North & co. selling guns to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua: busted by an Iranian official leaking to Lebanese journalists. There's the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, something they've covered their tracks on well, "They knew it was happening" is good enough. There's also Operation Fast and Furious, though I wouldn't group it with the rest, it had interesting goals that might have worked, and those cartel guys don't really have problems getting guns so I don't see FF guns being found at shootings as the biggest pie on their face. But it's worth including because there were people within who objected and blew the whistle.
Then there's PRISM. You know it, Edward Snowden saw the NSA's backdoor to all internet communications, got the files to prove it, now he's a Russian citizen. PRISM is still around, it hasn't been reduced. They can still surveil whomever FISA says they can. The USA FREEDOM Act, the only attempt to limit its reach, moved data holding to the phone carriers; US citizen data of which the NSA can still access with ex parte FISC warrants, an entirely separate incredibly troublesome practice of the US government. PRISM is COINTELPRO and MHCHAOS in one, supersized, a dossier at a click for just about anyone, anywhere. It ranks among the very worst things done by the American government and nobody involved has said a fucking word except Edward Snowden.
What's the common factor?
In each scandal we have large numbers of people involved in such operations. In each scandal, save the exception that proves the rule, none of them came forward. Discovery happened by a lucky break-in, or investigation into a different debacle, or adversarial geopolitical interest.
A CIA official who knows his history knows they don't get caught because someone on the inside spills the beans. They get caught by leaving breadcrumbs for outside eyes. No breadcrumbs, no scandal.
There are smaller scandals, in terms of scope or gravity, not necessarily the height of office of those involved, where whistleblowers did come forward. It's not unheard of. But this is an evidenced rejection of the common wisdom that there is a limited and small number of people who can be involved in highly illegal and evil projects before someone says something. So: "It'd take too many people, and they'd talk"? No, sometimes they don't. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of people can scrape the abyss and go to their graves saying nothing.
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Notes -
Collecting emails is different from metadata. Collecting metadata is not the same as collecting content. You can object to the government collecting metadata too, but it is really not the same thing as "they are reading your emails."
It's not just "pinky swearing," it's heavily regulated and monitored, overseen by multiple internal and external oversight authorities. Now of course you can assume they just lie and hide things and do whatever they want "LOL at Congress and the OIG," but that requires believing a lot of things that fail the usual conspiracy theory reality checks, and if true you are already living in your imaginary dystopia.
The point is they did all of that. Captured all call metadata and collected emails.
Internal, maybe, though I tend to doubt it -- that's just pinky swearing. External, no, not really. Nobody's going in and auditing every search of the NSAs own records. We know they caught SOME people misusing it (e.g. LOVEINT), that's all. We also know about systematic misuse like DEA parallel construction.
Snowden claimed the NSA collected actual email content, but I'm not aware that any evidence has been provided for this, and Snowden said lots of things that weren't accurate. Collecting metadata was of dubious legality (hence the many commissions and oversight hearings set up afterwards), but collecting actual communications of US persons would be an unambiguous violation of the law and there would have been an absolute shitstorm. Forget what you see in the movies; if the NSA reads your email or listens to your phone calls, without a FISA warrant, someone's head is going to roll. Unless, again, you believe that what you see in the movies is real and federal employees just LOL at the six zillion mandatory trainings they all have to take on what they are allowed to do and what will get them fired/criminally charged.
Sure, you can dismiss every huge and very public internal and external organization that exists to say otherwise as a bunch of make-believe "pinky swearing" when in reality GS-9s are doing black helicopter Hollywood shit and loling at Congress. That just tells me you know nothing about how the government works.
People who get caught misusing it (especially in "LOVEINT" cases) - and they are almost always caught - lose their jobs and clearances, and sometimes get criminally charged.
Parallel construction is more gray - I know the EFF has a big beef with it, but I think the laws on whether it can be dismissed as unconstitutional are still pretty ambiguous. Likewise, most of the claims that it's actually happened have come from dubious sources (like Snowden). Let's assume it has actually happened and that we agree it's bad - that's still higher-ups playing with legal edge cases to target narco-traffickers and terrorists in a Constitutionally questionable manner. Not the scenarios you are cooking up where ordinary employees just spy on whoever they feel like and nobody ever gets audited or caught or held responsible. Basically every government system has all kinds of audit trails, especially those that can look at PII. If you think the NSA has carved out some exception for itself where they can do whatever they want without such restrictions and systems in place (especially after the post-Snowden congressional hearings) then all I can say is, again, you have no idea of how very different the operations of the government in the real world are from the Oliver Stone government of your imagination.
They absolutely collected the actual communications. And indexed it, through XKEYSCORE. What they claimed is they they wouldn't actually read it without the proper authorization. That's the pinky-swearing.
What things did they collect with the tap described in that article?
All of Google's inter-data-center communication.
How do you know that?
Can't find the Google stuff at the moment (nor the memo referred to by WaPo), but I DO find a document indicating they were taking entire email archives (metadata + text + attachments) from Yahoo.
https://archive.org/details/nsa-windstop-muscular-incenser/page/n1/mode/2up?q=muscular
...of which customers?
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Reading comprehension is important, as are details.
They collected metadata, and (theoretically) had the capability to collect actual emails (which, you know, if you actually care about the country having an intelligence agency, you would want them to be capable of doing). There is no evidence they did, in fact, collect actual email content, especially of US citizens. Saying they "could have" done that is like saying that the police "could" drag you out of your car at a traffic stop and beat you up for no reason. Which actually happens sometimes! Abuses of power exist, and there are mechanism in place to monitor, prevent and remediate that (I would argue, far more for federal agencies than for local police departments).
Yes, once again - if you assume they simply ignore every single law and policy and the Constitution, all the mandatory classes government employees take with dire consequences for misuse spelled out for them, if you assume the OIG sits in his office with his thumb up his ass, if you assume that every time DIRNSA gets hauled before Congress to answer questions he's bullshitting them - then sure, they're just "pinky swearing" and it's all make believe.
You don't have sufficient understanding of the topic and don't want to.
They collected metadata about phone calls. They collected EVERYTHING on their internet intercepts. Then they sorted it out later.
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As someone who used to be one of those GS-9s, this is a pretty accurate take.
The NSA in particular takes compliance very, very seriously out of the self-interest of not losing the legal authorities granted by congress and approved by the courts.
I was once tracking a foreign target for quite some time. And then I saw she was conversing with a family member about how to get a spouse a Green Card.
Uh oh.
Turns out this lady and her sister were born in the same small college town I was, and were looking to come to America with their husbands.
At that point, we had to either delete all the things related to this person, or jump through all the hoops necessary to justify continued efforts (which in theory was possible, since she was the employee of a foreign government). But we opted to just delete all the things given she wasn’t sufficiently high-ranking to justify the effort and was clearly trying to leave her job.
(I should point out that if a US Person contacts a valid intelligence target, those comms are going to be collected by default and retained if there’s a valid reason, without a warrant beforehand [though with a shit ton of other oversight and approval]. Just ask Mike Flynn.)
Not just a US person contacting a valid intelligence target. The NSA gets to go three hops from the target. So a US person contacting a valid target. A US person contacting the person in the previous sentence. And a US person contacting the person in the previous sentence. And of course that applies to all parties in the communication.
For metadata. In the 215 program. Not in other stuff. @SwordOfOccam is talking about the other stuff. Yet again, you actually have to get into the nitty gritty to have a proper complaint, but approximately two seconds after you get into any nitty gritty, it becomes immediately apparent that you don't have any of the facts correct.
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That is not a valid interpretation of standard procedures.
I believe you are conflating what I am talking about with metadata rules and some particular authority.
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