Did OLC Rule Americans Have Voluntarily Allowed NSA to Collect Their Communications Domestically?

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Some weeks ago, I waded into a discussion between Charlie Savage and Ben Wittes to suggest that a still-secret OLC opinion Ron Wyden mentioned back in January might serve as the basis for collecting US person communications at the phone switches.

In his letter to John Brennan in January asking for a slew of things, Ron Wyden mentioned two opinions that may be the still-secret legal analysis mentioned by Savage.

Third, over two years ago, Senator Feingold and I wrote to the Attorney General regarding two classified opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, including an opinion that interprets common commercial service agreements. We asked the Attorney General to declassify both of these opinions, and to revoke the opinion pertaining to commercial service agreements. Last summer, I repeated the request, and noted that the opinion regarding commercial service agreements has direct relevance to ongoing congressional debates regarding cybersecurity legislation. The Justice Department still has not responded to these letters.

The opinions would have to pre-date January 14, 2011, because Feingold and Wyden requested the opinions before that date.

The reason I think the service agreements one may be relevant is because the opinions Ben cites focus on whether government users have given consent for EINSTEIN surveillance; in his article on it Bradbury focuses on whether the government could accomplish something similar with critical infrastructure networks.

I suspect this opinion — whatever question it addresses — makes the case that Americans have given NSA voluntary permission to collect US person communications from certain (I’m not sure which ones) switches.

Whatever it says, though, Ron Wyden just asked for the opinion again.

Over the last few years I have written multiple letters to Attorney General Holder regarding a particular opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that interprets common commercial service agreements. I have said that I believe that this opinion is inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law, and that it needs to be both withdrawn and declassified. Despite multiple follow-ups from my staff I still have not received a response to any of these letters. Can you tell me when I can expect a response?

The biggest reason public understanding of the law would matter, after all, is if OLC were interpreting it to reflect voluntary consent for collection of data that the public didn’t realize they had given. And we know NSA wants to — if it is not already — scan communications for malicious code in the name of cybersecurity on critical infrastructure networks the same way it is doing on government networks.

Remember, this is one of 4 questions Wyden would have asked had DiFi allowed an elected Senator to ask questions rather than an NSA apologist to appear. Wyden had apparently alerted Keith Alexander to what those questions were.

Heck, this is even a question aplogist Ben Wittes has expressed an interest in. For once it is his questions, in addition to members of Congress, that are not getting answered.

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Dianne Feinstein Gives NSA Apologist Ben Wittes More “Oversight” Time than Ron Wyden

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Screen shot 2013-09-26 at 5.01.04 PMThe Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on NSA changes just finished.

It was about what you’d expect: Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss claimed they were making changes that don’t amount to much, at least four Senators filibustered themselves so they wouldn’t have to ask any questions (and therefore betray ignorance).

And of course, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to ask questions.

The problem is, Dianne Feinstein had already deviated from normal Senate policy by giving Senators just 5 minutes to ask questions (that is the practice in the House, which is why House hearings are so much more stupid than Senate ones, generally).

Which meant that when Ron Wyden asked his first question — about geolocation — General Keith Alexander knew he could filibuster. As he did.

Now with respect to questions, let me start with you Director Alexander, and, as you all know, I will notify you in advance so that there won’t be any surprise about the types of issues we are going to get into. And Director Alexander, Senators Udall, Heinrich and I and about two dozen other senators have asked in the past whether the NSA has ever collected or made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site information in bulk. What would be your response to that?

Gen. Keith Alexander (Alexander): Senator, on July 25, Director Clapper provided a non-classified written response to this question amongst others, as well as a classified supplement with additional detail. Allow me to reaffirm what was stated in that unclassified response. Under section 215, NSA is not receiving cell-site location data and has no current plans to do so. As you know, I indicated to this committee on October 20, 2011, that I would notify Congress of NSA’s intent to obtain cell-site location data prior to any such plans being put in place. As you may also be aware, —

Wyden: General, if I might. I think we’re all familiar with it. That’s not the question I’m asking. Respectfully, I’m asking, has the NSA ever collected or ever made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site information. That was the question and we, respectfully General, have still not gotten an answer to it. Could you give me an answer to that?

Alexander: We did. We sent that — as you’re also aware I expressly reaffirmed this commitment to the committee on June 25, 2013. Finally, in the most recent and now declassified opinion renewing this program, the FISA court made clear in footnote number five that notice to the court in a briefing would be required if the government were to seek production of cell-site location information as part of the bulk production of call detail records. Additional details were also provided in the classified supplement to Director Clapper’s July 25th response to this question. So what I don’t want to do, Senator, is put out in an unclassified forum anything that’s classified there so I’m reading to you exactly. So we sent both of these to you. I saw what Director Clapper sent and I agree with it.

Wyden: General, if you’re responding to my question by not answering it because you think that’s a classified matter that is certainly your right. We will continue to explore that because I believe this is something the American people have a right to know whether the NSA has ever collected or made plans to collect cell-site information. I understand your answer. I’ll have additional questions on the next round. Thank you, Madam Chair. [my emphasis]

Wyden deferred his further questions to the second round.

But when the first round ended, DiFi said they didn’t have time for a second one, because they had to move onto the two non-governmental witnesses, Ben Wittes and Tim Edgar. Wyden tried to just ask his questions quickly, but Susan Collins objected.

Wittes — who recently admitted that he is an NSA apologist, according to the dictionary definition of the term — had an unfettered (and unsworn) opportunity to read his statement, which seemed to take up far more than the 5 minutes Wyden got to exercise oversight (the entire statement, with admittedly long footnotes, was 13 pages, though I’m not certain he read it all).

Effectively, then, Wittes’ mere presence served as a means to silence people asking real questions about NSA. DiFi claimed she had invited James Clapper and Keith Alexander to set the facts straight, but then made sure they’d be able to filibuster any effort to liberate a stray fact or two.

Next time he accuses Congress of being NAKED!, I do hope he remembers that his very presence has been used to prevent elected members of Congress from asking the questions Wittes is so sure the government is forthcoming in answering.

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NSA Bids to Expand Power Domestically to Track Chinese (!?) Terrorists

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While all sane people are trying to rein in NSA’s authority, the Gang of Four plans to use today’s parade of liars to expand NSA’s authority.

In explaining the need for this expanded authority, Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers claimed to the AP this is about terrorists.

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told The Associated Press that her committee is drafting a bill that would amend the law’s Section 702 provision, which authorizes targeting non-Americans outside the U.S., to allow uninterrupted spying on a suspect for “a limited period of time after the NSA learns the target has traveled to the United States, so the government may obtain a court order based on probable cause.”

“Logically, someone under NSA surveillance, such as a terrorist, may present more interest to the government if they are inside the United States,” but the surveillance can be temporarily stopped while the NSA or FBI builds its case to permit uninterrupted spying, Feinstein said.

[snip]

“I call it the terrorist lottery loophole,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, D-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “If you can find your way from a foreign country where we have reasonable suspicion that you are … a terrorist … and get to the United States, under a current rule, they need to turn it off and do a complicated handoff” to the FBI.

But further down, Rogers make it clear that this measure is designed to address the roamer problem that was revealed in an internal NSA audit earlier this year.

“It’s a foreign phone, it’s pinging off foreign networks,” Rogers said. “The suspect may turn it off. The suspect gets here. Now all of the sudden, the next thing they know, they (the NSA) are picking it up, but it’s in Brooklyn. … But they’ve been listening to it for two days. They have to turn it off, and then report it as an incident.”

We know from that audit report that this roamer problem actually declined during the period in question (though it did rise for Section 702 authority), contrary to NSA attempts to attribute the rise in violations to it. In addition, at least at that time, the problem primarily arose from Chinese targets entering the US, not Middle Eastern terrorists (the breakdown of violations from NSA’s geographical focus areas seems to support this). Indeed, the NSA made the embarrassingly false claim that the increase (which was actually a decrease) of roaming incidents was just about Chinese New Year.

The increase [sic] in incidents reported for 1QCY12 was due to an increase in the number of reported Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) roamer1 incidents, which may be attributed to an increase in Chinese travel to visit friends and family for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday.

So apparently we’re now beset by hordes of Chinese terrorists visiting the US for Chinese New Year we knew nothing about.

There’s one more problem with the claim that they will allow the NSA (or maybe the FBI) to track GSM phones without a warrant domestically. The Gang of Four claims the amended law would allow the NSA to continue tracking that GSM phone for “a limited period of time after the NSA learns the target has traveled to the United States.”

But the entire reason the roamer problem exists is because NSA only gets updates on location quarterly, so unless they learn about these Chinese terrorists’ travel by some content data, they don’t even know the phone is in the US. Read more →

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Why Isn’t the NSA Evaluating Why It Didn’t Have Chechen Intelligence on Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

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As I noted last week, four Inspectors General are conducting (an indefinitely delayed) review of their Agencies’ handing of intelligence in advance of the Boston Marathon attack. But just four Agencies are involved:

  • Intelligence Community
  • CIA
  • DOJ
  • DHS

That is, the NSA’s Inspector General is not participating in the review.

And while I understand that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s domestic communications could not have been collected by NSA (and presumably none of the people from Dagestan and Chechnya with whom he had contact were selected as identifiers for the Section 215 dragnet), he still allegedly had contacts while in Russia with fairly prominent extremists. And there are two reasons why NSA might have collected Chechen contacts of Tamerlan’s: both because extremists in Chechnya have ties to al Qaeda (indeed, a number of them are and were fighting in Syria), and because Chechen mobsters have ties to the mobs being targeted under Obama’s Transnational Criminal Organization initiative.

So did the NSA have anything on the Chechens Tamerlan allegedly met with? In any case, wouldn’t it be worth a review of what they have and what they might have had?

Apparently not, at least according to the IC.

There is precedent for protecting the NSA from such retroactive scrutiny. Recall that the 9/11 Commission barely touched what files the NSA might have had.

[T]he 9/11 Commission, which went out of business in 2004, failed to conduct a thorough inspection of the government’s most important library of raw intelligence on al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot. And nobody appears to have inspected that intelligence since.

The archives, maintained by the National Security Agency at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, were reviewed—in a cursory fashion—only in the final days of the commission’s investigation, and then only because of last-minute staff complaints that the NSA’s vast database was being ignored.

Throughout its investigation, staffers complained, the commission’s leaders were fixated on what could be found in the terrorism files of the CIA and the FBI, the two big targets for criticism in the panel’s final report, and largely ignored the NSA, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency.

[snip]

“It’s always been frightening to me to consider what is still at the NSA, whatever we never had time to see,” said a former commission staff member, who now works elsewhere in the federal government and is barred from speaking to the press for attribution. “It’s kind of shocking to me that no one has tried to get back in there since. We certainly didn’t see everything at NSA.”

And I can imagine why, particularly after Edward Snowden started leaking, the NSA might not want to check whether it had data it simply missed. How embarrassing if it had to admit that it missed a terrorist because its haystack has gotten too big?

Still, given the allegations about Tamerlan’s entirely foreign associates, I’m not convinced the NSA would have collected nothing.

Keith Alexander today claimed NSA used the Section 215 database in the wake of the Boston Marathon attack (though how they claimed the allegedly self-radicalized Tsarnaev’s had ties to Al Qaeda, I don’t know) to chase down potential associates in NYC.

“We did use [Section] 215,” he said, referring to the Patriot Act provision that the government has claimed a federal court has agreed gives it the authority to collect data on practically all calls made in the United States. “We used it to support the FBI in their investigation.”

So the NSA was involved in the investigation, at least.

So can’t we have a teensy review to see if it did, and if our target selection in Chechnya and Dagestan and appropriate?

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Senate Intelligence Committee Open Hearings: A Platform for Liars

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Pentagon Papers era NYT Counsel James Goodale has a piece in the Guardian attracting a lot of attention. In it, he says the first step to reform NSA is to fire the liars.

The NSA has lied to the Congress, the courts, and perhaps even to the president himself, but no one seems to care.

The Director of National Intelligence James R Clapper admitted he lied to Congress about the NSA metadata collection program. He said the NSA had no such program – and then added that that was the least “untruthful” remark he could make. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, lied in 2012 that the NSA does not hold data on US citizens, and repeated similar misstatements, under oath, to Congress about the program:

We’re not authorized to do it [data collection on US citizens], nor do we do it.

NSA lawyers lied to secret Fisa court Judges John D Bates and Reggie B Walton. In recently released opinions, Bates said he had been lied to on three separate occasions and Walton said he had been lied to several times also.

But Clapper and Alexander have not been held in contempt of Congress. Nor have the Justice Department attorneys, who lied to Judges Walton and Bates, been disciplined.

And while he links to many of the best examples of James Clapper and Keith Alexander lying, he misses this.

In just its third open hearing this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has arranged the following witnesses for tomorrow’s hearing on NSA’s spying.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) today announced the committee will hold an open hearing to consider legislative changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to include the NSA call records program, on Thursday, September 26, at 2 p.m.

WHAT:  Public hearing on FISA, NSA call records

WHO:

Panel I

  • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
  • National Security AgencyDirector General Keith Alexander
  • Deputy Attorney General James Cole

Panel II

  • Ben Wittes, Brookings Institution
  • Tim Edgar, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

So DiFi’s idea of an “open hearing” is to invite two established liars. And for her non-governmental witnesses, one keeps declaring Congress NAKED! in the face of evidence the government lies to them, and the other tells fanciful stories about how much data NSA shares.

It’s like DiFi goes out of her way to find liars and their apologists to testify publicly.

That’s nothing new, though. Those other two open hearings? The Global Threat Assessment hearing where Clapper assured Ron Wyden the NSA didn’t collect data on millions of Americans. And the confirmation hearing for John Brennan, who once claimed the US had killed no civilians in an entire year of drone strikes (and, if his odd mouth gestures were the tell they appeared to be, he lied about leaks to journalists including on UndieBomb 2.0 in the hearing as well.)

It’s DiFi’s committee. And if she wants every single open hearing to serve as a platform for accomplished liars, I guess that’s her prerogative.

But observers should be clear that’s the purpose of the hearings.

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1,186 Days into IG Report Covering Dragnet, Leahy Calls for Another

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As I’ve been tracking, DOJ’s Inspector General Office — now led by Michael Horowitz — has been working on a report on the use of Section 215 and Pen Register/Trap and Trace authorities up through 2009 for 1,186 days, well over 3 years. We have yet to see that outsider review of all the problems the NSA admitted in 2009, 4 years ago, and so NSA’s incredible claim it was too stupid to know what it was doing has been accepted unquestioningly.

On Monday, Patrick Leahy and several other Senate Judiciary Committee Senators called on the Intelligence Committee Inspector General, Charles McCullough, to conduct a similar inquiry for the period since 2009.

Recently declassified documents appear to reveal numerous violations of law and policy in the implementation of these authorities, including what the FISA Court characterized as three “substantial misrepresentation[s]” to the Court.  These declassified documents also demonstrate that the implementation of these authorities involves several components of the Intelligence Community (IC), including the National Security Agency, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, among others.

We urge you to conduct comprehensive reviews of these authorities and provide a full accounting of how these authorities are being implemented across the Intelligence Community.  The IC Inspector General was created in 2010 for this very purpose.  Comprehensive and independent reviews by your office of the implementation of Sections 215 and 702 will fulfill a critical oversight role.  Providing a publicly available summary of the findings and conclusions of these reviews will help promote greater oversight, transparency, and public accountability.

In conducting such reviews, we encourage you to draw on the excellent work already done by the Inspectors General of several agencies, including the Department of Justice, in reviewing these authorities.  But only your office can bring to bear an IC-wide perspective that is critical to effective oversight of these programs.  The reviews previously conducted have been more narrowly focused – as might be expected – on a specific agency.

In particular, we urge you to review for calendar years 2010 through 2013:

  • the use and implementation of Section 215 and Section 702 authorities, including the manner in which information – and in particular, information about U.S. persons – is collected, retained, analyzed and disseminated;
  • applicable minimization procedures and other relevant procedures and guidelines, including whether they are consistent across agencies and the extent to which they protect the privacy rights of U.S. persons;
  • any improper or illegal use of the authorities or information collected pursuant to them; and
  • an examination of the effectiveness of the authorities as investigative and intelligence tools.

We’ll see how McCullough responds to this. My impression thus far has been that he is too close to the IC Agencies. Plus, he’s very busy conducting insider leak investigations.

But even though we’ve been waiting forever for the IG Report covering the earlier period, apparently Leahy has learned one thing from it. He gave McCullough a deadline this time.

Please proceed to administratively perform reviews of the implementation of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of FISA, and submit the reports no later than December 31, 2014.

If all goes well, this should provide a quasi-independent review of the programs before they get extended again in 2015.

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Further Implications of UndieBomb II Leaker Guilty Plea

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As you have likely heard by now, a former FBI agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking material about the second underwear bomb attempt to reporters in May of 2012. Charlie Savage of the New York Times has the primary rundown:

A former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking classified information to The Associated Press about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen last year, the Justice Department announced on Monday. Federal investigators said they identified him after obtaining phone logs of Associated Press reporters.

The retired agent, a former bomb technician named Donald Sachtleben, has agreed to serve 43 months in prison, the Justice Department said. The case brings to eight the number of leak-related prosecutions brought under President Obama’s administration; under all previous presidents, there were three such cases.

“This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation’s secrets and to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would wantonly ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information,” said Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, who was assigned to lead the investigation by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

In a twist, Mr. Sachtleben, 55, of Carmel, Ind., was already the subject of a separate F.B.I. investigation for distributing child pornography, and has separately agreed to plead guilty in that matter and serve 97 months. His total sentence for both sets of offenses, should the plea deal be accepted by a judge, is 140 months.

Here is the DOJ Press Release on the case.

Here is the information filed in SDIN (Southern District of Indiana). And here is the factual basis for the guilty plea on the child porn charges Sachtleben is also pleading guilty to.

So Sachtleben is the leaker, he’s going to plead guilty and this all has a nice beautiful bow on it! Yay! Except that there are several troubling issues presented by all this tidy wonderful case wrap up.

First off, the information on the leak charges refers only to “Reporter A”, “Reporter A’s news organization” and “another reporter from Reporter A’s news organization”. Now while the DOJ may be coy about the identities, it has long been clear that the “news organization” is the AP and “Reporter A” and “another reporter” are AP national security reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman (I’d hazard a guess probably in that order) and the subject article for the leak is this AP report from May 7, 2012.

What is notable about who the reporters are, and which story is involved, is that this is the exact matter that was the subject of the infamous AP phone records subpoenas that were incredibly broad – over 20 business and personal phone lines. These subpoenas, along with those in the US v. Steven Kim case collected against James Rosen and Fox News, caused a major uproar about the sanctity of First Amendment press and government intrusion thereon.

The issue here is that Attorney General Eric Holder and the DOJ, as a result of the uproar over the Read more →

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Say Hello To Our New Friends At Just Security

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Screen shot 2013-09-23 at 11.46.58 AMWe do a lot of things here at Emptywheel including occasionally, goofing off. But our primary focus has always been the intersection of security issues, law and politics. I think I can speak for Marcy and Jim, and I certainly do for myself, we would love it if that intersection were not so critical in today’s world. But, alas, it is absolutely critical and, for all the voices out there in the community, there are precious few that deep dive into the critical minutiae.

Today we welcome a new and important player in the field, the Just Security Blog. It has a truly all star and broad lineup of contributors (most all of whom are listed as “editors” of one fashion or another), including good friends such as Steve Vladeck, Daphne Eviatar, Hina Shamsi, Julian Sanchez, Sarah Knuckey and many other quality voices. It is an ambitious project, but one that, if the content already posted on their first day is any indication, will be quite well done. The home of Just Security is the New York University School of Law, so they will have ample resources and foundation from which to operate for the long run.

Ironically, it was little more than three years ago (September 1, 2010 actually) that the Lawfare Blog went live to much anticipation (well, at least from me). Whether you always agree with Ben Wittes, Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and their contributors or not, and I don’t always, they have done this field of interest a true service with their work product, and are a fantastic and constantly evolving resource. There is little question but that Just Security intends to occupy much of the same space, albeit it in a complimentary as opposed to confrontational manner. In fact, it was Ben Wittes who hosted the podcast with Steve Vladeck and Ryan Goodman that serves as the multi-media christening of Just Security.

Orin Kerr (who is also a must read at Volokh conspiracy), somewhat tongue in cheek, tweeted that the cage match war was on between Lawfare and Just Security. That was pretty funny actually, but Orin made a more serious point in his welcome post today, and a point that I think will greatly interest the readers of Emptywheel:

Whereas Lawfare tend to have a center or center-right ideological orientation, for the most part, Just Security‘s editorial board suggests that it will have a progressive/liberal/civil libertarian voice.

From my understanding, and my knowledge of the people involved, I believe that to be very much the case. And that is a very good thing for us here, and the greater discussion on so much of our work.

So, say hello to our new friends at Just Security, bookmark them and give them a read. Follow them on Twitter. You will be better informed for having done so.

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Mike Rogers Continues to Thwart Fully Informed Representative Government

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Garance Franke-Ruta transcribes Justin Amash telling a remarkable story about another Mike Rogers’ attempt, back in August, to prevent elected representatives of American citizens from learning about details of the dragnet. After multiple tries, one of Amash’s colleagues finally won a game of 20 Questions with intelligence briefers.

And to show you how silly this whole thing gets, I had a colleague, one of my — I won’t say his name here, but he went to a number of classified briefings. And he asked a question and he never got a satisfactory answer. So he would just revise the question from briefing to briefing. By the time he got to to the third or fourth briefing he asked it in just the right way. He had figured out how to ask it in exactly the right way to get the answer he needed and of course, then they said, “Oh, you caught us. Yeah, we do do that.” Then we said, “Can you provide us with some more information?” and they said, “We’ll check, we’ll see if we can provide you with more information. We’ll see if we can provide you with a document” about this thing that he discovered.

And so we left that briefing and we said, “OK, we’re going to see something very interesting here.”

So when the Intelligence Community passed on this document to Intelligence Committee Chair Rogers to share with the victor of this particular game of 20 Questions and others, here’s how he distributed it. On August 3, he announced it would be available for 3 hours on August 4, on a Friday (when many members would already have left). He announced it on what Amash describes as a kind of spam folder.

They sent it through the “Dear Colleague” system. This is a system that, it’s almost like a spam folder, frankly. Read more →

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NSA Caught Illegally Spying on Americans and Keith Alexander’s Answer Is a Group Hug

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Kevin Gosztola had a superb post yesterday on a letter NSA Deputy Director John Inglis and DIRNSA Keith Alexander sent to family members of NSA employees to make them feel better about the dragnet. It’s a two page letter attempting to convince the family members of our SIGINT spies that their mission is noble and their actions within the scope of the law.

I’m particularly interested in the timing of it. As Kevin notes, the letter cites a typically obsequious post from Ben Wittes on how the Administration should have responded to WaPo’s disclosure of an internal review (just as one example, Ben claims to have read the report closely but somehow misses that 9 to 20% of violations consist of analysts breaking rules they know).

Inglis and Alexander write,

There are some in the media who are taking the time to actually study the leaked material, and they have drawn conclusions that are very different from those who are in it for a quick headline. One such legal scholar wrote that we should have made our case more forcefully by responding,

Shameful as it is that these documents were leaked, they actually should give the public great confidence both in NSA’s internal oversight mechanisms and in the executive and judicial oversight mechanisms outside the agency. They show no evidence of any intentional spying on Americans or abuse of civil liberties. They show a low rate of the sort of errors any complex system of technical collection will inevitably yield. They show robust compliance procedures on the part of the NSA.

We couldn’t agree more.

I wonder if NSA would like to send family members my way, given that I have taken even more time than Ben studying these revelations and find he’s frequently engaging in spin?

Hmm. Probably not.

But what’s most fascinating by this citation is the timing.

Ben wrote that post on August 18, in the midst of a slew of disclosures by WaPo and the Guardian.

But Inglis and Alexander wrote this letter on September 13 — last Friday — at the end of a month when all of the major US-based disclosures (save that NSA has deliberately made all of us more vulnerable to hackers) have come from the government. In the month leading up to this letter, we learned the NSA:

At the end of 2008, the NSA had authorized contact chaining off of 27,090 identifiers and analysts could go four hops deep into the data, which effectively would allow them to create a relationship map of the entire country. And they used it not just to find “terrorists,” but also people they could coerce to inform on targets.

A system the Stasi would envy!

And FISA Court judges had deemed some of the first and third practices illegal. One threatened criminal referral and the other even shut down at least part the program for a period.

Read more →

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