On February 14, 1967, Ramparts magazine published an interview with a former NSA operative, named, as we now know, Perry Fellowock. The article detailed, for the first time, the most secret workings of the National Security Agency, the most secretive American spying agency; an agency which accounts for 90% of all "hard" US intelligence. (full article here: http://jya.com/nsa-elint.htm)

We learn for example that NSA knows the call signs for every Soviet airplane, the numbers on the side of each plane, the name of the pilot in command; the precise longitude and latitude of every nuclear submarine; the whereabouts of nearly every Soviet VIP; the location of every Soviet missile base; every army division, battalion and company -- its weaponry, commander and deployment. Routinely the NSA monitors all Soviet military, diplomatic and commercial radio traffic, including Soviet Air Defense, Tactical Air and KGB forces. (It was the NSA that found Che Guevara in Bolivia through radio communications intercept and analysis.) NSA cryptologic experts seek to break every Soviet code and do so with remarkable success, Soviet scrambler and computer-generated signals being nearly as vulnerable as ordinary voice and manual morse radio transmissions.

The most interesting and relevant section though comes here:

Q. So far we've been talking about various kinds of sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering. What about tapping of ground communications?

A. I'm not sure on the extent of this, but I know that the NSA mission in the Moscow embassy has done some tapping there. Of course all trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific telephone calls to or from the U.S. are tapped.

Every conversation, personal, commercial, whatever, is automatically intercepted and recorded on tapes. Most of them no one ever listens to, and after being held available for a few weeks, are erased. They'll run a random sort through all the tapes, listening to a certain number to determine if there is anything in them of interest to our government worth holding on to and transcribing. Also, certain telephone conversations are routinely listened to as soon as possible. These will be the ones that are made by people doing an inordinate amount of calling overseas, or are otherwise tapped for special interest.

Doubters will point out that there are now billions of transatlantic calls, with a like number of emails. It's true, but cluster computing is the answer. The NSA has literally acres of cluster computers, which are easily capable of capturing and analyzing those data. It's easy, think Google. Type in your address, view your house from space, check out those posts you made to usenet back in 84. If Google can do it NSA can and does do it. Fort Meade where NSA is headquartered, recently got in trouble with the locals because they were using up all the power in the local grid and causing brownouts. Echelon is real, carnivore never went away they just changed its name.

Data mining looks for connections in all that data, and based on that analysis the software can identify networks of association with great accuracy. Emails, text messages and the like are monitored for key words, key addresses, countries, et al and compared to the other data bases. If the analysis says "terrorist network" those calls, and emails will get flagged for higher scrutiny. The problem, in a habea corpus frei America, is that there are false positives and the victim winds up on the no fly list, or worse rendered.

Sorry bout that in my earlier post I said Perry Fellwock, it is Winslow Peck, former NSA analyst.

Yeah, right. One source reports something and the CIA runs with it, Powell goes to the UN, and America goes to war. The Drogin's convoluted, twisted and obfuscatory explanations remind me of Rosemary Woods going into extreme contortions to show how she "accidently" erased 18 minutes of tape.

There was nothing accidental about this war. The decision to go was made at the highest levels - prior to 9/11. The rest was just the intelligence apparatchiks, hangers on, and shills in the media (Judith Miller comes to mind) spinning and lying. There was plenty of evidence prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq that they had no WMD, and as the writer admits, nothing remotely credible proving he did. This was was not accidental in any way.

Put this piece down as yet another attempt to exculpate the cheney/bush junta and to sell books, lots of books, based on a lie, on disinfo. Include me out.

I am unable to speak intelligently about the math behind encryption, but I do surmise that if you were "foolish" enough to send an encrypted message, especially to a "suspicious" target (such as your brother in law in Tehran) you would be flagged. They don't need to "decode" to decide you are a person of interest.

However if you really want to send a message that they will never understand, simply email in Arabic! Didn't the FBI fire it's Arabic translators as being too unreliable (read Arab) or too gay?

As an earlier anonymous posted submitted, Echelon is real, they are listening and they have been doing it since Nixon at least. So that means all your Presidents are "guilty" and that is why there will never ever be an "investigation".

The only thing the fourth amendment guarantees in America anymore is lots of articles and conversation about privacy - something that has ceased to exist in America decades ago. What's happening now is they are taking the cloak off. "Yeah, we are listening! What are going to do about it? Huh? Warrants? We don't need no stinkin warrants!"