Exposing the NSA’s Mass Surveillance of Americans | Cyberwar

leaked documents reveal the scope of the nsa's mass surveillance program we cannot prevent terrorist attacks or cyber threats without some capability to penetrate digital Communications others Unmasked A unit called tailored access operations I don't need Mass surveillance I need you to break into that guy's computer their mission is to get the ungettable if you want to hack into systems lawfully the only game in town is the government their targets are secret they are very important actually tracking down people who are then subsequently killed and there's almost nothing they can't hack the National Security Agency is one of the world's largest intelligence agencies headquartered in Fort me Maryland the nsa's Mandate is to collect foreign intelligence after 911 George W bush authorized the NSA to collect even more including American Communications to and from foreign targets good morning this is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security this program shocked an NSA senior executive named Thomas Drake Drake is a decorated veteran who blew the whistle on nsa's activities to the Press he barely escaped 35 years in jail after being charged under the Espionage Act a law first written in 1917 Mr Drake hi Ben yeah the National Security Agency is focused on foreign intelligence it was formed in 1952 people don't realize it was not formed by an act of Congress it was literally sign signed uh into existence by The Stroke of a secret presidential pen in fact the joke was it was no such agency or never say anything you never even referenced the actual name people who used to work there oh I work at DOD now I accelerate forward internet explodes you have this rapid transition from analog to digital and the explosion of data became exponential what do you think is the easiest way to deal with it just suck it all so but what happened after 9/11 was it NSA should do better here's where you have culture and secret meeting itself realizing it fail but can't admit it failed it had not prevented the next Pearl Harbor and now NSA is literally Unleashed it's Unleashed on an extraordinary scale a scale we have never seen in US history or the world all means necessary to confront the threat who cares about the Constitution who cares about law who cares about the rights of us persons hey if you've done nothing wrong I even heard this then you should it shouldn't matter and the Mantra was just get the data collect it all so we can know it all collect it all so we can know it all Drake inspired another NSA worker to sound the alarm this afternoon the guardian newspapers revealed the name of their Source in 2013 Edward Snowden leaked tens of thousands of classified NSA documents the first to get published was a secret court order forcing Verizon to Fork over the call data of millions of us customers the next big leak was a PowerPoint presentation about a program called prism the NSA boasted that prism gave them direct access to emails video chats and more from some of America's biggest tech companies the media was obsessed with Snowden and the leaks but few people noticed information hidden in the documents about a top secret NSA unit called Tao or Taylor ESS operations until the German magazine Dar Spiegel revealed more about it than ever before jur Schindler is the Magazine's award-winning National Security reporter yeah you can call them the highly skilled plumbers of the NSA who are able to to get into every sort of pipe what they are doing is getting the ungettable they're like the special forces of the NSA essentially yeah Special Hecker Force I mean the whole NSA is a special force uh but but those are the the highly skilled handymen who who create certain kind of tools um to to infiltrate manipulate and sabotage every kind of digital device you might think of what's the relationship between tailored access operations by the NSA and their Mass surveillance I mean to explain it easily I would say that mass surveillance is like going into the to the ocean with a huge fishing net and to to draw everything out with whatever you you find and uh what what the tailored access operation units are doing is like using the Harpoon to find special targets and the the fishes they really need so that that might be the the difference so it's like U going hand in hand and ta is pretty good at it they're extremely good at it yes the Snowden leaks revealed more about tailor access operations but a lot is still unknown I wanted to talk to someone who knows the NSA from the inside an Air Force veteran and former NSA exact named John Harbaugh John Harbaugh ni to meet you John please come in let's see this place route 9B yeah why why that name by the way so root is system level access 9B is heximal for 911 ah so it's a it's a nod to the fact that the next uh 911 event is most likely going to be cyber related route 9B which has defense contracts aims to hunt and pursue adversaries in side a client's Network this is where we do all of our hunt operations what we call it for our clients so so what this is showing you is is what the operator sees while they're doing their op right so there'll be Windows of time where they're actually active inside the client's Network pursuing the adversary and this was really driven by our experiences in the government space does it look like this in Fort me this is better your bio it says something like you were the director of a super Elite cyber operation Yeah so basically what what that's about is what we've tried to recreate here so my time inside the organization I had the pleasure and the and the fortune to be asked to run a team of about eight individuals and that team was focused on the most challenging problems in cyber was that tailored access operations so so you know there is there there is elements of that space right because if you're in cyber and you do all of cyber then you're doing all of those types of things mhm and so the bosses could come in and say we have a significant National event I need you guys to be able to do this in the next 12 hours I could walk into that space and say hey guys I need five minutes I would give them what we would call the op order this is what we need to achieve we need we need to achieve it the next 12 24 48 hours and I could walk away and I KN I knew when I came back no matter what time of day how long they were working on it they would get done and it was it was that kind of again it was that kind of teamwork teamwork that really Drew people and it's a very similar thing to the special ops Community right and it does sound like a a military chain of command yeah I mean NSA is a very military organization to build a team like Tao the NSA has to hire highly skilled hackers so how does it head hunt them to find out I asked Chris seoan he's a privacy activist with the American civil liberties Union who are they and where where's the NSA recruiting them from the government wants people who can get a security clients more so than ever particularly you know after Snowden and after uh uh Chelsea Manning they want people who who they know or are going to play by the rules they want people who cannot easily be blackmailed so I think you know NSA tries to recruit the best and brightest from computer science programs around the country and in particular computer security programs like Carnegie melan that have probably the most sophisticated offensive cyber security programs in Academia in the United States and their students are are heavily recruited both by NSA but also you know by Silicon Valley they're competing for the same people so they're competing for the same people and the problem that NSA has is they can't pay the same kind of money right they're not going to be able to offer the smoothies and massages and and sort of perks of life that Google and Facebook can but they have something that those companies don't what they have is a monopoly on violence right in the same way that if you want to like repel out of helicopters and shoot people in the head you want to you go join the Special Forces if you want to hack into systems lawfully the only game in town is the the government and in in many other walks of life you would be you would be a criminal you would be a stalker you'd be a bad person but when you go to NSA suddenly you get to wrap yourself on the flag and do it for king and country if Tao can legally do things no one else can who are they hacking and why not much is known about who tailored access operations hacks but the Snowden leaks reveal one major Target Osama Bin Laden Tao hacked into the mobile phones of Al qada operatives in the hunt for bin Laden as reported by The Washington Post the unit's work also led to the capture of 40 insurgents in Afghanistan Ryan Gallagher is an investigative reporter at The Intercept where he has covered the role of surveillance in the ongoing war on terror how did Tao and how does Tao fit into the war on terror well they are very important I mean people don't necessarily think of surveillance even as a as a thing being integral to what the military is doing on the ground but it is it's absolutely vital what the tailored axis guys are doing for instance is because they're so skilled at actually you know breaking into systems and going after like what they would refer to as hard targets people who are elusive or you know skilled like dodging surveillance they are very important actually tracking down people who are then subsequently killed or captured in past years probably rendered and through the um the black sits program that was going on through the Bush Administration so they are very um entwined with these physical kind of kinetic they call it operations on the ground so are they basically the Commandos of the NSA you could put it like that yeah I mean they're kind of it's may be sort of glorifying them a little bit but I mean essentially these guys are just sort of like geeky nerds do can to do that sort of Commando type role they're facilitating um military operations on the ground by hacking into targets they're actually directly you know able to track people who are then like killed and say a drone strike so what they do yeah it's it is like kind of Commando work but they are also um you know providing assistance on the ground to real Commando types who are out there try to kill people in the hunt for bin Laden Tao reportedly used what the unit calls impl spy devices installed in Mobile phones or other Hardware implants are just some of the tools that appear in elak document called the ant catalog which lists other spy gear at Tao's disposal security researchers Michael Osman Joe Fitzpatrick and Dean Pierce decided to build some of these spy tools themselves the media kind of saw it and reported on bits and pieces of it and said oh look at this thing this is Magic and I think all of us looked at it and said oh yeah I know how I would do that yeah I know how to do that Joe recreated a graphics card that can see what's running on a computer's active memory and Dean rigged a phone so it picks up the mobile traffic in the area Mike reproduced ragem a tiny chip implanted in a computer video cable to reflect information via radar when this is installed I can point one antenna at it and that's transmitting a signal and then my other anten is also pointed at it and it's receiving the Reflection by measuring that reflection ction I can on my laptop recover information that's going over the cable and what I get is a video image a screen image uh from the target computer system and it this is an example of something where an implant is required getting an implant into a piece of Hardware like a video cable requires physical access but planting bugs into terrorist cell phones isn't the only thing Tao does some of their activity is jeopardized Internet Security at large one Snowden leak shows how Tao found a vulnerability a software bug and Mozilla Firefox Tao used the bug to try to identify some users also running an anonymizing software called tour not only did Tao need to be able to Monitor and hijack internet traffic to pull off its attack but hundreds of millions of Firefox users were left vulnerable to the software bug which has since been patched [Music] Claudia hacker Claudia GUI has helped expose Tao's activities that's try I met him in an old stazzy surveillance tower that still stands in what used to be Soviet controlled East Berlin a lot of the mass surveillance and B collection capability of the NSA is um empowered by some of the break-ins that to is able to do for example they would ask um too to break into some core uh parts of the of the internet infrastructure of the whole Global backbone you know from from an internet structure perspective when you connect from Germany to Google you move through a number of hops 10 15 noes that relay your message from Berlin to you know Hamburg and Frankfurt and then to who knows Netherlands wherever the cables are if the NSA is able to break into any one of these points then they're able to see you U communicating with Google when they're able to observe that they're also able to ey jacket so pretend like you're getting a response from Google while instead you're getting a response from the NSA none of this comes cheap claudo and I went inside to look through a Snowden leak known as the black budget the NSA spends more than $600 million a year for just the kind of offensive hacks Tao conducts yeah this is what it's being called the black budget and the trend that we see is that you know again the balance between how much it's invested in breaking things and how much it's invested in protecting things is uneven um you know part of the Mandate of intelligent Services is to keep the country secure at the same time from a technological perspective they're undermining the security of the country and like you said we all use the exact same internet once it's broken for one it's broken for all mhm so the question is is it worth it to break something and keep it broken for catching one or two terrorists that you probably could catch otherwise breaking into the internet or hacking into phones might make us all less secure so is teo's hacking really all that targeted to find out more about who Tao targets I met up with Robert M Lee he' been out of the military for only a week he was an Air Force cyber officer and also worked for an intelligence agency he won't confirm or deny that's the NSA okay how did you get into being a hacker so the Air Force has a wonderful program where it volunteers you to do and uh I joined the Air Force said Here I Am Lord what would you like me to do and they said go be a cyber guy so if you were to take Snowden slides completely seriously you'd think that it's all mass surveillance I actually for the first time ended up seeing slides that I had actually seen before in real life I was like holy like I've seen these ones but once you bring something into the intelligence Community it you don't delete files like everything is stored and so there was some files that like get translated out like their truth and they were just remnants of product pitches or something like that and so I think that you can't take all the slides seriously we also know that there is something called Tao in in the NSA what what is that team like what what are they doing yeah so I think when you look at Tao it's actually the thing that I think most of the community should be cool with right so I'm I'm actually a huge privacy Advocate I hate and ironically enough I hate the idea of any sort of mass surveillance from a perspective of Tao or whoever would be breaking into those networks that's targeted retained intelligence and so privacy Advocates should actually enjoy that they should say hey uh Mass surveillance sucks we need more targeted surveillance we need more targeted if you're going to do intelligence do the kind that you put resources into and have to think about and have to prioritize your own efforts it's not going to be some dissident or accidentally picking up somebody else's Communications so who are Tao's targets I don't know exactly their targets right I wouldn't be able to speak about it anyway but I I would say that it would be asinine to assume that anything in our national policy of Interest isn't one of their targets right so if we say if the president says Global terrorism is something we're concerned with well then to is not doing their job like the government is not doing their job if they don't go after it anything that the president wakes up in the morning and says hey this is important to me anybody in the government who's not supporting his needs is not doing their job so I would just off virtue of that say the to has to be doing that stuff or they're incompetent and they're wasting taxpayer money you know so you can't have it both ways Rob made a pretty convincing case for the so-called targeted surveillance too conducts but investigative reporter Ryan Gallagher disagrees he says the problem is that the unit's methods aren't as targeted as they seem too is doing some of the most aggressive work that NS does um the traditional Le stropping where they're listening in on a a phone call just by like wiretapping a cable which they call kind of passive surveillance that's actually becoming almost secondary now to the active surveillance they call which is attacking and hacking systems and part of the reason for that is because increasingly networks and Technologies adopting encryption and so they can't listen to it by just tapping the kale because then they can't read it or listen to it it's just you know jargon going forward especially with the sort of boom and encryption you're going to see more and more of these hacking attacks to the point that it there may come a stage in the future where it is described as a mass surveillance uh kind of technique Tao's hacking skills may be in higher demand than ever before and while the group goes after terrorists that's not all they do how does Tao decide who to Target and are they really legitimate threats the elite unit has gone after Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters but the Snowden laks also revealed the group hacked into the president of Mexico's emails and workers at a Belgian telecommunications company were spied on by the British possibly with help from Tao generally there is consensus that mass surveillance is a bad thing while targeted surveillance is table uh because they go after very specific individuals or very specific groups however there's multiple things that you need to consider one is what makes a legitimate Target um you know ultimately the NSA only has to respond to somehow to the US government but they have no respect whatsoever towards forigners in so we had cases where you know they spied on UNICEF they spied on forain Ministries they spied on private companies energy companies and you know so what at that point makes it legitimate to hack directly and Target a certain organization we don't know one of the S documents that that came out about the Taylor dax's group is um one of the guys from within the unit is saying look we don't just do terrorism we do everything we do all operations we're here to support any operations I think it's one of the comic and misconceptions that the government has managed to build up around a lot of these Revelations so it's like don't worry about it we're only going after these extreme terrorist people who are you know we're trying to protect you and all that but that's kind of disingenuous because it's not at all just what they're doing they're doing a lot more than that ultimately it seems Tao maybe just one more tool in the nsa's mass surveillance Arsenal what happens in a mass surveillance regime you sweep up essentially everybody everybody by definition becomes a Target which means there's no target the problem is that when you do this in secet secret and you protect your your secret powers this usually doesn't end well in terms of History it just doesn't you know in 1984 the extraordinary George orell novel the only place Winston the only place he could go to out of sight was in the corner because that's where the surveillance cameras couldn't reach which meant what they knew where he was and remember people forget even in 1984 he didn't prevail he basically cried Uncle you can't fight them can't beat them join them you're a whistleblower you cried Uncle to some extent or you cried out yeah do you think it was worth it yeah history was at stake we know the nsa's elite hacking unit has helped capture terrorists but they've also targeted friendly nation states so who else have they gone after for now much of Tao's work remains shrouded in secrecy but privacy activists whistleblowers and others aren't giving up on the fight to know more and to live surveillance free

Channel: VICE News

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Keywords: Surveillance, spy, spionage, security risk, hacker, hack, cyber attack, cyber war, hacktivist, hackers, NSA, CIA, document leak, exposed, mass surveillance, Chelsea Manning, whistleblower, activist, cyber warfare, tech, tech news, united states, america, politics, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, film, short film, movies

Id: tYVm62oEyWA

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024