The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of

[ramus]

The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/20/...heard-of-trump

ANOTHER LINK TO THE STORY:http://www.news.com.au/technology/in...b1156873900e30


The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of

On a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C.,
sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even Barack
Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized its name.
While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in Washington in May
2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job. “What do you [do]?”
the president inquired. “I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency,” the man answered. Obama appeared dumbfounded. “So, explain to me
exactly what this National Geospatial…” he said, unable to finish the name.
Eight years after that videotape aired, the NGA remains by far the most shadowy
member of the Big Five spy agencies, which include the CIA and the National
Security Agency.

Despite its lack of name recognition, the NGA’s headquarters is the
third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the CIA
headquarters and the U.S. Capitol.

Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four
football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In
2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional
buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce, with
3,000 employees already in the city.

The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is to
analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in the
Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has largely
kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United States,
according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been involved in
domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the CIA and the
NSA. However, there’s reason to believe that this will change under President
Donald Trump.

Throughout the long election campaign and into his first months as president,
Trump has pushed hard for weakening restraints on the intelligence agencies,
spending more money for defense, and getting tough on law and order. Given the
new president’s overwhelming focus on domestic security, it’s reasonable to
expect that Trump will use every tool available to maintain it, including
overhead vigilance.

In March 2016, the Pentagon released the results of an investigation initiated
by the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General to examine military
spy drones in the United States. The report, marked “For Official Use Only” and
partially redacted, revealed that the Pentagon used unarmed surveillance drones
over American soil on fewer than 20 occasions between 2006 and 2015. (Although
the report doesn’t identify the nature of the missions, another Pentagon
document lists 11 domestic drone operations that principally involved natural
disasters, search and rescue, and National Guard training.)

The investigation also quoted from an Air Force law review article pointing out
the growing concern that technology designed to spy on enemies abroad may soon
be turned around to spy on citizens at home. “As the nation winds down these
wars … assets become available to support other combatant command (COCOM) or
U.S. agencies, the appetite to use them in the domestic environment to collect
airborne imagery continues to grow.”

Although the report stated that all missions were conducted within full
compliance of the law, it pointedly noted that as of 2015 there were no
standardized federal statutes that “specifically address the employment of the
capability provided by a DoD UAS (unmanned aircraft system) if requested by
domestic civil authorities.” Instead, there is a Pentagon policy governing
reconnaissance drones that requires the secretary of defense to approve all such
domestic operations. Under these regulations, drones “may not conduct
surveillance on U.S. persons” unless permitted by law and approved by the
secretary. The policy also bans armed drones over the United States for anything
other than military training and weapons testing.

In 2016, unbeknownst to many city officials, police in Baltimore began
conducting persistent aerial surveillance using a system developed for military
use in Iraq.

Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky
drones have become.

Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky drones
have become. Among them is ARGUS-IS, the world’s highest-resolution camera with
1.8 billion pixels. Invisible from the ground at nearly four miles in the air,
it uses a technology known as “persistent stare” — the equivalent of 100
Predator drones peering down at a medium-size city at once — to track everything
that moves.

With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a time, it
would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously observe and
follow all outdoor human activity, night and day. It can zoom in on an object as
small as a stick of butter on a plate and store up to 1 million terabytes of
data a day. That capacity would allow analysts to look back in time over days,
weeks, or months. Technology is in the works to enable drones to remain aloft
for years at a time.

The Department of Homeland Security has been at these crossroads before. In
2007, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the department established an
agency to direct domestic spy satellite stakeouts and gave it a bland name: the
National Applications Office. But Congress, concerned about a “Big Brother in
the Sky,” cut off funding. In 2009, it was killed by the Obama administration.

Still, unlike domestic electronic surveillance by the NSA, which has been
closely scrutinized and subjected to legislation designed to protect civil
liberties, domestic overhead spying has escaped the attention of both Congress
and the public. The Trump administration may take advantage of that void.

Initiating a new age of “persistent surveillance,” Trump could use the spy
world’s overhead assets to target Muslims or members of Black Lives Matter. The
president has spoken in favor of increasing the scrutiny of mosques; aerial
assessment would allow him to track worshippers. Drones could aid in the mass
roundup of illegal immigrants intended for deportation, and Trump has said he
may send federal forces to Chicago to quell the violence. Drones could offer the
city the unblinking eye for 24/7 vigilance.

Of course, all that would require a significant expansion of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to analyze the domestic imagery. Before that can
happen, Trump, like Obama, has to discover there is such an agency.

* * * * *

Once again this agency could be used by Trump on us .. msm spin to discredit this administration won't they ever quit.... I have a new slogan: IT'S TRUMP'S FAULT .

[Carmody]

ECHELON (expanded, all grown up)

ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated on behalf of the five signatory nations to the UKUSA Security Agreement[1]—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.[2][3][4]


"First Rule in Government Spending: Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price."

-John Hurt, in 'Contact'

[Rocky_Shorz]

I always love when one of Avalon's long time members we never hear from steps forward with a mind blowing bit of info...

Can you imagine Bannon controlling this... :BangHeadOnTable:

A Goldman Sachs bloodlusting Warmonger that makes John McCain seem like a Sesame Street character.

Trump was ready to shut down NSA and CIA's surveillance on Americans until wormtongue whispered "We Need This"

Imagine looking through eyes that sees everyone as enemies, should be in a padded cell, instead he is leading the strongest nation in the world...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4J_RpGzvqss

[Fellow Aspirant]

Cool. Yet another 3-letter intelligence agency hiding in plain site. They have a huge presence on the web, including a FaceBook page, of all things. Yet they almost never make the "news".

B.

[ghostrider]

The thing I keep asking myself is , why the need to spend tons of resources to listen/watch/spy on people ??? We really need to get to the bottom of this... Find out the absolute truth ... is free speech , free thought that dangerous ???