Enemy of the State was made in 1998 and stars Gene Hackman, Lisa Bonet, Regina King, Will Smith, Jack Black, Jon Voight, and Jason Lee. This all-star cast stars in a film that performed well in its time, yet seems all the more relevant, intelligent, and interesting today. Edward Snowden didn't say too much that this movie didn't exactly say! It's pretty mind-blowing how intelligent and well-informed script-writers were.
NSA News | Nationial Security State Programs
ThinThread
ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security
Agency (NSA) pursued during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article
in The Baltimore Sun. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated
analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program
was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to
the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence
authority. The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the
director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called
Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that
protected the privacy of U.S. citizens.
ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which
lacked the privacy protections. A consortium led by Science Applications
International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop
Trailblazer in 2002.
ThinThread at Wikipedia
NSA - Trailblazer
Trailblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program
intended to develop a capability to analyze data carried on communications
networks like the Internet. It was intended to track entities using
communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail. It ran over budget,
failed to accomplish critical goals, and was cancelled.
NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staffer Diane Roark complained to
the Department of Defense's Inspector General (IG) about waste, fraud, and
abuse in the program, and the fact that a successful operating prototype
existed, ThinThread, but was ignored when the Trailblazer program was
launched.
Trailblazer Project - Wikipedia
NSA - Turbulence
Turbulence is a National Security Agency (NSA) Information Technology
project started circa 2005. It was developed in small, inexpensive "test"
pieces rather than one grand plan like its failed predecessor, the
Trailblazer Project. It also includes offensive cyber-warfare capabilities,
like injecting malware into remote computers. Congress criticized Turbulence
in 2007 for having similar bureaucratic problems as Trailblazer.
According to Siobhan Gorman in a 2007 Baltimore Sun article, "The conclusion
in Congress, two former government officials said, was that Turbulence was
over budget, not delivering and poorly led, and that there was little or no
strategy to pull it all together."
Turbulence (NSA) - Wikipedia
NSA - Stellar Wind
Stellar Wind was the open secret code name for four surveillance programs by
the United States National Security Agency (NSA) during the presidency of
George W. Bush and revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times reporters
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. The operation was approved by President
George W. Bush shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Stellar Wind
was succeeded during the presidency of Barack Obama by four major lines of
intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable
of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications.
The program's activities involved data mining of a large database of the
communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, phone
conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity. William Binney,
a retired Technical Leader with the NSA, discussed some of the architectural
and operational elements of the program at the 2012 Chaos Communication
Congress.
Stellar Wind - Wikipedia
NSA - Total Information Awareness (Poindexter)
The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together
several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information
technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to
U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).
This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and
store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including
personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical
records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search
warrant. This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious
activities, connections between individuals, and "threats". Additionally,
the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that
could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other
methods.
Information Awareness Office - Wikipedia