10 Orwellian Moments Found in the Newly Leaked Private NSA NewslettersBy Jake Anderson The articles range in content from a veteran NSA agent nostalgically remembering when there was a beer machine in the cafeteria to the SIGINT director telling everyone the emotions he felt after a top Iraqi leader was killed. There are light-hearted entries an article about the origin of April Fools Day, a review of Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon, instructions for changing the font size in Netscape and Internet Explorer and arcane articles that are difficult to understand because of the agencys strange internal lexicon. Quite frankly, most of it is boring. But its an inside look at the human clockwork of one of the most mysterious agencies in the U.S. government. And every so often there is a gem, an illuminating missive straight from the heart of the NSAs secret files. After reading hundreds of them, here is my list of the most OrwellianSIDtoday NSA newsletters: 1. An interesting revelation that becomes clear early on is that employees of the Signals Intelligence Directorate speak in corporate lingo. As noted byPeter Maas in his article for the Intercept, intelligence reports are considered products and the government agencies requesting intelligence (CIA, DoD, etc.) are considered the customers. There is an entire division called Customer Relationship Directorate. And, perhaps most eerily, they have a category of products referred to as the Counterterrorism Product Line. Theres another unnerving line in a different SIDtoday article that says,Continue to be selfless in your efforts and think only of the payoff for the customer. 2. In an article entitled Generally Speaking: Iraq Worth All the Effort,Richard Quirk, the SIGINT Director, laments the problem of news coverage regarding the war. We are bombarded with negative news coverage that paints a cant win story, and I imagine that at some point many of us had a moment where we asked Is this really worth it? He answers his own question with a story about watching the Iraqi election coverage in 2005 and witnessing the birth of democracy there. He says it was a very emotional day for him: I think [the Iraqis] proved that exercising democratic freedom and being an active participant in the direction of government is part of human natureit clearly demonstrates that what we are doing in Iraq is very important, and absolutely necessary. Hell, I was almost crying at the end. 3. In the newsletter Generally Speaking: Driving History,Quirk again gets a little emotional. He says: Have you ever made a decision or performed an action and then stepped back and wonderedabout the historical significance of that decision or action? In the work we do, with our uniqueperspective on global events, it is often easy to feel like an observer of history, rather than aparticipant or an actor. So, we are often oblivious to the major roles we play in history. We may think we are all passengers on the Magic History Bus, but in reality we all have asteering wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake, and the actions and decisions we make every daydrive and steer history. Its reassuring to know that the agency that was covertly spying on us for a decade thinks of itself as a controlling force of history. 4. An interesting article from Christmas Eve 2003 is called Media Leaks Part II (repost),and it discusses protocol in the event of a media leak, or as the NSA calls it, cryptologic insecurities.In the post, the author states: Media leaks are rarely prosecuted. Why? Often because they are hard to prove, but in some cases officials are reluctant to prosecute for fear that the case will attract even more attention than the original disclosure. 5. There is an article from July 16, 2013, that explains the differences between Digital Network Exploitation, Digital Network Intelligence, and Computer Network Exploitation. I normally wouldnt bore you with this, but there is an interesting statement near the end: Our targets communications are increasingly buried by millions of non-target communications. Just a reminder of how much civilian snooping went on. 6. One of the most disturbing articles has to be SID Around the World: A TDY to Guantanamo Bay.The bulk of the article is about the mission of Joint Task Force (JTF)-GITMO in exploiting intelligence for the global war on terrorism and how screening detainees and Iraqi war crimes investigations plays into that. There is, of course, an immediate irony here in discussing war crimes during an invasion that broke the Geneva Convention. But the part I want to point out is the following passage offering travel tips to agents working in Guantanamo: Outside work, fun awaits and opportunities abound. Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA. Noexperience, no problem. Learn how to operate a boat in a weekend, become a certified open water scuba diver within weeks. If youve already mastered these skills, or once you do, the MWR marina rents boats from pontoon party boats to Carolina skiffs to ski boats to kayaksand recently theyve added sailboat rentals, too. The local dive shop has all the gear and tips to ensure a perfect outing. Surround all this water fun with a Tiki Bar and a Jerk House as wellas the Bayview Restaurant relaxing is easy. The agents were quite literally waterboarding during the week and water skiing on the weekend. 7. The FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW article is interesting from a numbers perspective. The information on these two special source-collecting programs sheds light on the incredible volume of emails and metadata the NSA processes. FAIRVIEW DNI access, for e-mail only, is now forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system at NSAW. FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW are also collecting metadata, or data about the network and the communications it carries. For September 2003 alone, FAIRVIEW captured several trillion metadata records of which more than 400 billion were selected for downstream processing or storage. This metadata will be used to enable the surgical collection of much smaller amounts of target-rich data which should extend beyond FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW to many other DNI accesses across NSA. 8. Its not really Orwellian, but a fun fact to note is that according to these documents, the NSA was obsessed with preventing leaks. A full decade before Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the agency went to great lengths to ensure protection. The ISI scanned 350 press items daily for cryptologic insecurities. They also maintained a database called FIRSTFRUIT with over 5,000 insecurity-related records. 9. The newsletter article about the Deep Target Knowledgeprogram states: A targets Information Space, related to the technology the target uses, is what produces SIGINT. But analysts should also understand their targets Conceptual Space, to get inside their heads and understand their cultural references. This style of thinking was actually very common in the Iraq War, as it was in the Vietnam War. In fact, as I wrote in a previous Anti-Media article,DARPAS culture-centric warfare program conscripted social scientists and anthropologists into the Iraq war as mercenaries. Their Human Terrain System sought honorable warfare by understanding the enemys culture. Its interesting to know that the NSA operates under a similar neo-colonial ethos. 10. The Intercepts most recent release of emails was accompanied with an article entitled, How the U.S. Spies on Medical Nonprofits and Health Defenses Worldwide, and its based on a series of SIDtoday articles. The articles show that the NSA collaborated with the Defense Intelligence Agency to extract medical SIGINT from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s. This article (10 Orwellian Moments Found in the Newly Leaked Private NSA Newsletters) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org. Wow top secret NSA newsletters. These arent Orwellian revelations, theyre boring writings of egg heads who wanted to be spies and secret agents when they grew up. and who knows when that might be. Gotta wonder why The Intercept, funded by NSA loving billionaire Omidyar, would release these leaks. Smoke and distraction? Still marveling over Greenwalds principle role with The Intercept given his slanted reporting on the States Secrets Privilege law undermined protection of legitimate NSA whistleblowers. Who needs Jason Bourne novels? Convoluted bizarro world. LOL Totally. Hackers release this! More hackers release some more. Yawn. Its all about programming people to believe there are super scary hackers hiding dark in basements, releasing mega-secret secrets.. and if you dont get the chip, theyll hack your bank account! Its pre-programming programming that sounds more like Double Secret Probation from the movie Animal House. I wish these clowns would grow up. America has become a nation of children in adult bodies. Were headed into the ditch at a terrific rate of speed. Just make sure and not be on the train when it derails. Going down is an individual selection, its not mandatory, not a given. Create your own timeline where you rise above it all and ride the thermals. Hmmm What has been amazing about all the leaks to date is how virtually none of them have been damaging to israel. What is equally amazing is the fact that the media has refused to draw the obvious conclusion that Israel is the one doing the leaking. Israel has had direct, unfetted access to all raw NSA intel and data for years. This is just another israeli op. NSA CIA MOSSAD ROTHSCHILDS! Follow the money, and add a paper clip [1945]. A bunch of psychopathic overgrown little boys playing spies and convincing themselves theyre saving the world by torturing people. 