Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU (pronounced DEE-too) ~ Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work: This obscure FBI unit does the domestic surveillance that no other intelligence agency can touch.

BY SHANE HARRIS | NOVEMBER 21, 2013

With every fresh leak, the world learns more about the U.S. National Security Agency's massive and controversial surveillance apparatus.

Lost in the commotion has been the story of the NSA's indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that, even for a surveillance agency, keeps a low profile.

When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It's the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA's Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States' biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States' biggest intelligence agency.

It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies -- an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

The heart of the FBI's signals intelligence activities is an obscure organization called the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU (pronounced DEE-too). The handful of news articles that mentioned it prior to revelations of NSA surveillance this summer did so mostly in passing. It has barely been discussed in congressional testimony.

An NSA PowerPoint presentation given to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hints at DITU's pivotal role in the NSA's Prism system -- it appears as a nondescript box on a flowchart showing how the NSA "task[s]" information to be collected, which is then gathered and delivered by the DITU.

But interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, as well as technology industry representatives, reveal that the unit is the FBI's equivalent of the National Security Agency and the primary liaison between the spy agency and many of America's most important technology companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple.

The DITU is located in a sprawling compound at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, home of the FBI's training academy and the bureau's Operational Technology Division, which runs all the FBI's technical intelligence collection, processing, and reporting. Its motto: "Vigilance Through Technology." The DITU is responsible for intercepting telephone calls and emails of terrorists and foreign intelligence targets inside the United States. According to a senior Justice Department official, the NSA could not do its job without the DITU's help.

The unit works closely with the "big three" U.S. telecommunications companies -- AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint -- to ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA's ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables.

For Prism, the DITU maintains the surveillance equipment that captures what the NSA wants from U.S. technology companies, including archived emails, chat-room sessions, social media posts, and Internet phone calls. The unit then transmits that information to the NSA, where it's routed into other parts of the agency for analysis and used in reports.

After Prism was disclosed in the Washington Post and the Guardian, some technology company executives claimed they knew nothing about a collection program run by the NSA. And that may have been true. The companies would likely have interacted only with officials from the DITU and others in the FBI and the Justice Department, said sources who have worked with the unit to implement surveillance orders.

>>   http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131125/02515925349/how-fbi-actually-does-much-nsas-spying-is-keeping-that-quiet.shtml

>> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/21/the_obscure_fbi_team_that_does_the_nsa_dirty_work

[SIDEBAR:  The Bush Crime Family has been in charge of making the American REALITY, in joint partnerships with the ROTHSCHILDS & ROCKEFELLERS, ET AL.

We have the CULTIVATION OF THE CULT and IT is, a collective of the brainwashed and propagandized and worse - the experimented on human population that has done the greatest Humpty Dump ever.  THANKS TO THE FAMILIES that can be traced in their ZILLIONS of U$ZioCon$ off-shore booty of the SUPER PIRATES.  Teaching United States Citizens' that money sovereignty isn't a right in 2013, this is really something.  HOW MANY 'LAWYERS' does it take to vitiate the U.S. Constitution?  Ask the BRITISH ACCREDITED REGISTRY ~B.A.R.~ how many pay dues to the FINANCIAL PAEDOPHILIA?!]   .. TO BE,

... TO BE CONTINUED  ~ GMO AMERICANS' ARE INTENTIONAL PROTOPLASM TO BLUBBER MORE READILY IN THE RECYCLING OF THE AGENDA 21 GREEN MACHINE/S