Turbulence (NSA)
Turbulence is a United States  National Security Agency (NSA) information-technology project started c. 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 cyberwarfare capabilities, like injecting malware into remote computers. The U.S. Congress criticized the project in 2007 for having similar bureaucratic problems as the Trailblazer Project. Criticism 
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." Link to Trailblazer 
Trailblazer, the predecessor of Turbulence, had been cancelled in 2006 after a congressional investigation and a Defense Department's Inspector General's report found it over budget, wasteful, and ineffective. One of the Trailblazer whistleblowers who helped with the inspector-general report, Thomas Andrews Drake, was later charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for allegedly retaining five documents in his home. Two of those documents were about Turbulence; his defense pointed out that one of these documents was clearly marked "UNCLASSIFIED" and the other was declassified shortly after his indictment. Thomas Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a computer on June 10, 2011, and was sentenced to one year probation. Programs 
Turbulence includes nine core programs, of which names are known:
 TURMOIL
 Turmoil is involved in the process of decrypting communications. TUTELAGE
 TRAFFICTHIEF
 According to an XKeyscore presentation, TRAFFICTHIEF is a database of  "Meta-data from a subset of tasked strong-selectors"  According to the XKeyscore presentation, an example of a strong selector is an email address. In other words, it would be a database of the metadata associated with names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., that the intelligence services are specifically targeting. Marc Ambinder gives what he calls an educated guess: "raw SIGINT viewer for data analysis." See also 

 ECHELON
 DCSNet
 Red Hook
 Stellar Wind
 Thinthread 
 William Binney
 Mark Klein
 Edward Snowden
 Thomas Tamm
 Russ Tice

References

External links 
 Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
 Democracy Now interview with whistleblower William Binney

2005 establishments in the United States
2000s disestablishments in the United States
National Security Agency
Projects established in 2005
Espionage projects
Cancelled projects