TIA (aka Topsail) unveiled: the real scope of the NSA's domestic spying program

USA Today just went to print with some alarming new details on the NSA's citizen surveillance activities, and I've put together a few more pieces that show more revelations will probably come out. What USA Today has uncovered is, it appears, one piece of a larger program that's identical to the infamous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program that Congress has tried to nix multiple times over the years and that lives on under the codename Topsail. The program was transferred from its original home at DARPA to the NSA, and has been active for years.

Communications metadata and The Big Database in the Sky
The new USA Today article reveals that the NSA has been collecting and archiving "transactional information" on all domestic calls made within the US—who called whom, when, from where, etc. The transactional data is acquired from cooperating telcos (AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, but not Qwest) and fed it into a massive database so that the NSA can analyze the collected calling patterns for clues as to possible terrorist activity. Contrary to what the government has publicly claimed about the NSA's massive signals intelligence (SIGINT) vacuum, there is no requirement here that one end of the call be located in a foreign country; we're talking about calls between me and my grandmother, and in fact about every call I've ever made over the past few years.

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

Link Here