NSA Deletes Information In Lawsuit

Not surprising:

Since 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about certain of its surveillance efforts that came under legal attack following disclosures that President George W. Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping of international communications after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In addition, the agency has made a series of representations in court over the years about how it is complying with its duties.
However, the NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in a filing on Thursday night and another little-noticed submission last year that the agency did not preserve the content of internet communications intercepted between 2001 and 2007 under the program Bush ordered. To make matters worse, backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016, the NSA said.

“The NSA sincerely regrets its failure to prevent the deletion of this data,” NSA’s deputy director of capabilities, identified publicly as “Elizabeth B.,” wrote in a declaration filed in October. “NSA senior management is fully aware of this failure, and the Agency is committed to taking swift action to respond to the loss of this data.”

In the update Thursday, another NSA official said the data were deleted during a broad, housecleaning effort aimed at making space for incoming information.

I would be surprised if they didn’t do that.

Here is what I am wondering. What if the NSA facility in Oahu is a backup facility, where raw data is regularly dumped and stored in the event CONUS gets nuked? That might explain why Trump may have been interested in it.

A lot of surveillance these days appears to be run through cell phones. The wireless infrastructure is there and effective, and when running non-sworn-agents/informants as surveillance assets the cell phone is an easy to set up communication interface that they will already own. They may even have a special app they install on the phone to relay instructions to the asset, and allow observations of the target to be texted in real time. That may mean NSA has a record of many, if not all communications that are involved in running assets doing in-person surveillance, creating a running account of every operation.

On top of that, the upper eschelons ordering the surveillance are probably not going to run couriers between each other to transmit messages by mouth, or use messages handwritten on paper in invisible ink. They are probably going to use electronic technology to order the surveillance, plan the more illegal aspects of covering it up, plot the illegal objectives, and conduct other communications. Which means NSA will probably hoover that up into their database as well.

Now it may not be that difficult to access a live domestic NSA database to wipe data which could incriminate you. But what if that data is regularly bumped, before you wiped it, into a hardened backup facility in Oahu, which is not set up to be accessed and altered, except under specific conditions where it is designed to dump the backup all at once into a secure facility, as under conditions of nuclear war?

The data on everything illegal done to Trump and his people may be out there. I will bet it was kept in a backup somewhere, and I will bet Trump has the brilliant professionals working for him which have given him access to it.

Expect this House Memo to be a mere opening act. What comes after it will be where the real action begins, and that is what is going to shake things up. This could be a really exciting Presidency.

God bless the God Emperor, and keep him safe.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because you like the excitement