Keith Alexander’s Dinner Theater

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A bunch of people have been discussing Stanford Professor Jennifer Granick’s account of a dinner she had with NSA Director and CyberComander Keith Alexander. The main storyline describes how, three weeks ago, Lying Keith promised Granick that seeing the Primary Order for the Section 215 dragnet would make her more comfortable with the program.

It didn’t work out how Lying Keith might have liked.

I had a chance to read the Primary Order the next day, and rather than reassure, it raised substantial concerns.  First, it did not set forth any legal basis for the phone record collection, which Christopher Sprigman and I have argued is illegal.  Second, it confirmed that the FISA court does not monitor compliance with its limitations on the collection program, a problem that, according to a former FISA court judge, is endemic to NSA surveillance programs.

If that weren’t already enough, seeing the FISA Court order released earlier this week, with its revelation that — at least until 2009 — the safeguards on the dragnet program never functioned at all, really ruined Alexander’s efforts to make her feel better.

I remembered our conversation about the Primary Order yesterday while reading the newly declassified FISA court opinion that tangentially raised the phone records surveillance program.  According to the court in 2011, NSA was flagrantly disregarding the dictates of the Primary Order anyway:

[T]he Court concluded that its authorization of NSA’s bulk acquisition of telephone call detail records … in the so-called “big business records” matter “ha[d] been premised on a flawed depiction of how the NSA uses [the acquired] metadata” and that “[t]his misperception by the FISC existed from the inception of its authorized collection in May 2006, buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions and despite a government-devised and Court-mandated oversight regime.” … Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard for querying.  The Court concluded that this requirement has been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.” (Footnote 14)

How does a good man sit across you from the dinner table and assure you the government is properly constrained, when in reality it lies and disregards even the most anemic purported safeguards?

Granick is far more polite than I am — because my conclusion here would be “a good man doesn’t spin you like this.”

But there’s one further bit of spin she doesn’t mention explicitly. Alexander — as he has done repeatedly since Snowden’s documents started leaking — pretended this was all about terrorism.

I have no doubt that Gen. Alexander loves this country as much as I do, or that his primary motivation is to protect our nation from terrorist attacks. “Never again,” he said over dinner.

[snip]

The General seemed convinced that if only I knew what he knew, I would agree with him. He urged me to visit Pakistan, so that I would better understand the dangers America faces.  I responded that one of my longest-standing friends has relatives there and visits regularly, maybe she would take me.  I did not miss his point, and he did not miss mine.

I’m not saying this isn’t, partly, about terrorism. But if that’s all he’s doing, Alexander can roll up his CyberCommand, all the programs targeting Iran, and more generalized cyberdefense: the things that, until these leaks, were considered more urgent issues. Once again, Alexander wants to use terror terror terror to justify a dragnet that (for the content side) targets far more broadly than just terror.

I asked Granick about this, and she said Alexander said “surprisingly little” about cybersecurity — perhaps just a comment about the applying the rules of armed conflict to cyberwar.

As with his audience at BlackHat, Alexander here was talking to someone that Stanford considers an expert on cybercrime and cybersecurity. All differences of opinion about the phone dragnet aside, he should have spent his dinner with Granick discussing ways to accomplish the objectives of cybersecurity most effectively.

[A]s we go into cyber and look at–for cyber in the future, we’ve got to have this debate with our country. How are we going to protect the nation in cyberspace?

… Alexander claimed when speaking to a group that stood to get rich off of cybersecurity.

And yet, once again, when presented an opportunity to have that debate with one of the experts he needs to win over, Alexander cowered from the debate.

NSA Has a Database Problem

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Back in 2009 when the government released what we now know is a FISA Court of Review decision ordering Yahoo to cooperate in PRISM, I questioned a passage of the decision that relied on the government’s claim that it doesn’t keep a database of incidentally collected conversations involving US persons.

In this post, I just want to point to a passage that deserves more scrutiny:

The government assures us that it does not maintain a database of incidentally collected information from non-targeted United States persons, and there is no evidence to the contrary. On these facts, incidentally collected communications of non-targeted United States persons do not violate the Fourth Amendment.(26)

To translate, if the government collects information from a US citizen (here or abroad), a legal permanent US resident, a predominantly US organization, or a US corporation in the course of collecting information on someone it is specifically targeting, it it claims it does not keep that in a database (I’ll come back and parse this in a second). In other words, if the government has a tap on your local falafel joint because suspected terrorists live off their falafels, and you happen to call in a take out order, it does not that have in a database.

There are reasons to doubt this claim.

In the rest of the post, I showed how a response from Michaels Mukasey and McConnell to Russ Feingold’s efforts to protect US person incidental collection during the FISA Amendments Act had made it clear having access to this incidentally collected data was part of the point, meaning the government’s reassurances to the FISCR must have been delicate dodges in one way or another. (Feingold’s Amendments would have prevented 3 years of Fourth Amendment violative collection, by the way.)

Did the court ask only about a database consisting entirely of incidentally collected information? Did they ask whether the government keeps incidentally collected information in its existing databases (that is, it doesn’t have a database devoted solely to incidental data, but neither does it pull the incidental data out of its existing database)? Or, as bmaz reminds me below but that I originally omitted, is the government having one or more contractors maintain such a database? Or is the government, rather, using an expansive definition of targeting, suggesting that anyone who buys falafels from the same place that suspected terrorist does then, in turn, becomes targeted?

McConnell and Mukasey’s objections to Feingold’s amendments make sense only in a situation in which all this information gets dumped into a database that is exposed to data mining. So it’s hard to resolve their objections with this claim–as described by the FISA Appeals Court.

Which is part of the reason I’m so intrigued by this passage of John Bates’ October 3, 2011 decision ruling some of NSA’s collection and retention practices violated the Fourth Amendment. In a footnote amending a passage explaining why the retention of entirely US person communications with the permissive minimization procedures the government had proposed is a problem, Bates points back to that earlier comment.

The Court of Review plaining limited its holding regarding incidental collection to the facts before it. See In re Directives at 30 (“On these facts, incidentally collected communications of non-targeted United States persons do not violate the Fourth Amendment.” (emphasis added). The dispute in In re Directives involved the acquisition by NSA of discrete to/from communications from an Internet Service Provider, not NSA’s upstream collection of Internet transactions. Accordingly, the Court of Review had occasion to consider NSA’s acquisition of MCTs (or even “about” communications, for that matter). Furthermore, the Court of Review noted that “[t]he government assures us that it does not maintain a database of incidentally collected information from non-targeted United States persons, and there is no evidence to the contrary.” Id. Here, however, the government proposes measures that will allow NSA to retain non-target United States person information in its databases for at least five years.

Ultimately, Bates’ approval for the government to query on US person identifiers on existing incidentally collected Section 702 material (see pages 22-23) show that he hasn’t really thought through what happens to US person incidental collection; he actually has a shocking (arguably mis-) understanding of how permissive the existing minimization rules are, and therefore how invasive his authorization for searching on incidentally collected information will actually be.

But his complaint with the proposed minimization procedures shows what he believes they should be.

The measures proposed by the government for MCTs, however, largely dispense with the requirement of prompt disposition upon initial review by an analyst. Rather than attempting to identify and segregate information “not relevant to the authorized purpose of the acquisition” or to destroy such information promptly following acquisition, NSA’s proposed handling of MCTs tends to maximize the retention of such information, including information of or concerning United States persons with no direct connection to any target.

As Bates tells it, so long as he’s paying close attention to an issue, the government should ideally destroy any US person data it collects that is not relevant to the authorized purpose of the acquisition. (His suggestion to segregate it actually endorses Russ Feingold’s fix from 2008.)

But the minimization rules clearly allow the government to keep such data (after this opinion, they made an exception only for the multiple communication transactions in question, but not even for the other search identifiers involving entirely domestic communication so long as that’s the only communication in the packet).

All the government has to do, for the vast majority of the data it collects, is say it might have a foreign intelligence or crime or encryption or technical data or threat to property purpose, and it keeps it for 5 years.

In a database.

Back when the FISCR used this language, it allowed the government the dodge that, so long as it didn’t have a database dedicated to solely US person communications incidentally, it was all good. But the language Bates used should make all the US person information sitting in databases for 5 year periods (which Bates seems not to understand) problematic.

Not least, the phone dragnet database, which — after all — includes the records of 310 million people even while only 12 people’s data has proved useful in thwarting terrorist plots.

Update: Fixed the last sentence to describe what the Section 215 dragnet has yielded so far.

Advocate of Secret Infiltration, Cass Sunstein, on Obama’s “Committee To Make Us Trust the Dragnet”

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ABC reports that, along with former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, former Homeland Security Czar Richard Clarke, and former Obama special assistant for economic policy Peter Swire, the White House (or James Clapper — who knows at this point) has picked Cass Sunstein for its Review Committee on NSA programs.

Frankly, a lot of people are investing misplaced confidence that Richard Clarke will make this committee useful. While he’s good on a lot of issues, he’s as hawkish on cybersecurity as anyone else in this country. And as I keep pointing out, these programs are really about cybersecurity. Richard Clarke is not going to do a damned thing to rein in a program that increasingly serves to surveil US Internet data to protect against cyberthreats.

But Sunstein? Really?

As Glenn Greenwald (yeah — that Glenn; did they really think no one would raise this point?) reported back in 2010, Sunstein wrote a paper in 2008 advocating very creepy stealth measures against “conspiracy theories.”

In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”

And remember, a big mandate for this committee is not to review the programs to see if we can make them more privacy-protective, but simply to increase our trust in them. Which goes to the core of what Sunstein was talking about in his paper: using covert government propaganda to, in this case, better sell covert government spying.

Well, if Obama and Clapper’s rollout hadn’t already discredited this committee, Sunstein’s selection sure does.

Read more →

DNI’s Latest “I Con” Speak: “Sift Through and Have Unfettered Access To”

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The Director of National Intelligence, after having repeatedly refused to answer any questions about the WSJ’s big scoop in yesterday’s conference call, has released a new document pretending to debunk stories based on the WSJ (though not the WSJ itself). It reads, in part,

Press reports based on an article published in today’s Wall Street Journal mischaracterize aspects of NSA’s activities conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA does not sift through and have unfettered access to 75% of the United States’ online communications.

The following are the facts:

  • Media reports based upon the recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article regarding NSA’s foreign intelligence activities provide an inaccurate and misleading picture of NSA’s collection programs, but especially with respect to NSA’s use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
  • The reports leave readers with the impression that NSA is sifting through as much as 75% of the United States’ online communications, which is simply not true.
  • In its foreign intelligence mission, and using all its authorities, NSA “touches” about 1.6%, and analysts only look at 0.00004%, of the world’s internet traffic.

Obviously, the government partly obscures its answer by presenting the global numbers when trying to debunk US numbers.

But more importantly, it builds a gigantic straw man with its “sift through and have unfettered access to” language. That’s not what the WSJ said (which is why DNI shifts its accusation).

The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.

[snip]

The surveillance system is built on relationships with telecommunications carriers that together cover about 75% of U.S. Internet communications.

The NSA doesn’t do all the sifting. The telecoms Americans are paying every month do the first sift (which means part of that 75% of US Internet traffic is inaccessible to the NSA).

But see what DNI doesn’t ever do? Refute the WSJ.

Which I assume means we can take as confirmation that the government and its pseudo-private partners the telecoms do, in fact, sift through 75% of US Internet traffic.

NSA’s “Presumption of Regularity”

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As you’ve probably heard, the most striking part of the October 3, 2011 FISA opinion finding NSA’s collection violated the Fourth Amendment is Footnote 14.

The Court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.

In March, 2009, the Court concluded that its authorization of NSA’s bulk acquisition of telephone call detail records from [redacted] in the so-called “big business records” matter “ha[d] been premised on a flawed description of how the NSA uses [the acquired] metadata,” and that “[t]his misperception by the FISC existed from the inception of its authorized collection in May 2006, buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions, and despite a government-devised and Court-mandated oversight regime.” Docket [redacted] Contrary to the governent’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been “so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.” Id.

Two more entirely redacted substantial misrepresentations follow.

Footnote 32 reveals how, after NSA did a review of the communications the FISC ultimately found to violate the Fourth Amendment, the FISC caught it in downplaying the number of affected communications. After it sent the NSA back to new analysis, the problem grew from 2,000 to 10,000 a year to 48,000 to 56,000 a year. I guess the FISC found, like I have, that you can’t trust the biggest math organization in the world to do basic math.

Yet in spite of the fact that this opinion lists three substantial misrepresentations the NSA had made in recent history and caught the NSA in bad math, here’s how it decided it could trust the government’s assurances that it didn’t use this abusive communication to target non-targeted people.

Therefore, the Court has no reason to believe that NSA, by acquiring the Internet transactions containing multiple communications, is targeting anyone other than the user of the selected tasked selector. See United States v. Chemical Found., Inc., 272 U.S. 1, 14-15 (1926) (“The presumption of regularity supports the official acts of public officers, and, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, courts presume that they have properly discharged their official duties.”).

I’m not surprised FISC invoked this (especially not surprised that John Bates, who can be very deferential, did). It is the law.

But (as the case of Adnan Latif showed) we keep extending the presumption of regularity to the government in spite of abundant evidence we shouldn’t.

Olympic Fact-Checking of the NSA

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One of the disclosures from yesterday’s WSJ blockbuster that shocked a lot of people was that the NSA and FBI collected all the email and phone communications from Salt Lake City around the time of the 2002 Olympics.

For the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, officials say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event. It monitored the content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.

At first I wasn’t all that interested. After all, the relationship was discussed in the 2009 Draft NSA IG Report.

But now I am. (Thanks to David Waldman for convincing me to look back at the IG Report.)

Compare what the WSJ reported with what the IG Report says:

2002: In early 2002, NSA SSO personnel met with the Senior Vice President of Government Systems and other employees from COMPANY E. Under the authority of the PSP, NSA asked COMPANY E to provide call detail records (CDR) in support of security for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. On 11 February 2002, the company’s CEO agreed to cooperate with NSA. On 19 February 2002, COMPANY E submitted a written proposal that discussed methods it could use to regularly replicate call record information stored in a COMPANY E facility and potentially forward the same information to NSA. Discussions with COMPANY E continued in 2003. However, the COMPANY E General Counsel ultimately decided not to support NSA.

It goes on to say that Michael Hayden sent two letters to Company E, which I have always presumed was Qwest.

There are a number of discrepancies here:

  • WSJ says both FBI and NSA were involved; NSA IG (which, of course, was reporting exclusively on NSA’s role) described only NSA involvement
  • NSA IG said NSA discussed only call records with (presumably) Qwest; WSJ says call and Internet content were also involved
  • NSA IG dates discussions to February 11; the Olympics started on February 8 and went through February 24
  • NSA IG says discussions continued into 2003, which would be longer than the 6 month period the WSJ discussed

Now, several things may be going on here. It may be that FBI initiated this production, and after it started NSA tried to institutionalize it (effectively using the Olympics as an excuse to get Qwest involved in ongoing production like AT&T and Verizon were). It could be Company E is not Qwest at all (though that would raise questions about why NSA IG ignored Qwest’s reported involvement altogether). It may be that NSA IG is incorrect–there are other examples where their details don’t make sense, and my inclination is to suspect they’re spinning the Qwest negotiations. It may be that NSA IG is obscuring the start date of this — 6 months prior to the Olympics would be August 2001, before 9/11 purportedly authorized this larger collection (remember: WSJ reported that this production from AT&T started in the 1990s). It may be that WSJ’s sources are unclear about how this was done and in what time frame.

And consider that neither of these stories jive with Joseph Nacchio’s story. He says he was approached about doing warrantless surveillance on February 27, 2001. That time frame would make utmost sense to plan for the Olympics. But if it were true, it would also make Nacchio’s other claims — that the company and then he was prosecuted for not cooperating — more interesting. (Note, too, that the NSA IG Report doesn’t acknowledge that Nacchio was replaced as CEO during the period when, it claims, NSA was still discussing cooperation.)

None of it makes sense. But the apparent acknowledgment to WSJ that this did go on — and at a greater level of intrusiveness and earlier than the NSA IG lets on — sure merits new attention on Nacchio’s claims the government punished him for not cooperating in February 2001. It also merits new attention to the IG Reports produced in 2009; to what degree is the entire report a whitewash of much earlier, much more problematic domestic surveillance NSA didn’t want to disclose (ultimately, because they ordered this report) to Congress?

Read more →

How NSA Bypassed the Fourth Amendment for 3 Years

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On October 3, 2011, the FISA Court deemed some of the NSA’s collections to violate the Fourth Amendment. Since Ron Wyden first declassified vague outlines of that ruling a year ago, we’ve been trying to sort through precisely what practice that decision curtailed.

A new WSJ story not only expands on previous descriptions of the practice.

The systems operate like this: The NSA asks telecom companies to send it various streams of Internet traffic it believes most likely to contain foreign intelligence. This is the first cut of the data.

These requests don’t ask for all Internet traffic. Rather, they focus on certain areas of interest, according to a person familiar with the legal process. “It’s still a large amount of data, but not everything in the world,” this person says.

The second cut is done by NSA. It briefly copies the traffic and decides which communications to keep based on what it calls “strong selectors”—say, an email address, or a large block of computer addresses that correspond to an organization it is interested in. In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data.

But it reveals the illegal program continued for 3 years, during which the telecoms and NSA simply policed (or did not police) themselves.

For example, a recent Snowden document showed that the surveillance court ruled that the NSA had set up an unconstitutional collection effort. Officials say it was an unintentional mistake made in 2008 when it set filters on programs like these that monitor Internet traffic; NSA uncovered the inappropriate filtering in 2011 and reported it.

[snip]

Paul Kouroupas, a former executive at Global Crossing Ltd. and other telecom companies responsible for security and government affairs, says the checks and balances in the NSA programs depend on telecommunications companies and the government policing the system themselves. “There’s technically and physically nothing preventing a much broader surveillance,” he says.

The entire WSJ article (and an accompanying explainer) is actually quite polite to the NSA, suggesting that minimization protects Americans better than the plain letter of the procedures do, remaining silent about NSA’s refusal to count how many Americans get sucked up in this, and focusing on terrorism more than the other applications of this. That’s not meant as a criticism; they got the story out, after all!

Most of all, though, it doesn’t question the claim that NSA set the filters too broadly in 2008 unintentionally.

Remember, those filters got set in the wake of the FISA Amendments Act. The telecoms doing the initial pass had just gotten immunity. While I think it possible that one of the telecoms got cold feet and that led to the FISA Court’s discovery of a practice that had been going on 3 years, I’m highly skeptical that the timing of the immunity and the overly broad filters was randomly coincidental.

I think we’re getting closer and closer to the iceberg Ron Wyden and Mark Udall warned us about.

Both These Things Cannot Be True

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Last Friday, NSA’s Compliance Director John DeLong assured journalists the violations NSA reported in 2012 were “miniscule.” (I noted that the report showed some of the most sensitive violations primarily get found through audits and therefore their discovery depend in part on how many people are auditing.)

Today, as part of a story describing that NSA still doesn’t know what Edward Snowden took from NSA, MSNBC quotes a source saying NSA has stinky audit capabilities.

Another said that the NSA has a poor audit capability, which is frustrating efforts to complete a damage assessment.

(We’ve long known this about NSA’s financial auditing function, and there have long been signs they couldn’t audit data either, but apparently MSNBC’s source agree.)

For the past several months, various Intelligence officials have assured Congress and the public that it keeps US person data very carefully guarded, so only authorized people can access it.

Today, MSNBC reports NSA had (has?) poor data compartmentalization.

NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas.

Again, there have long been signs that non-analysts had untracked access to very sensitive data. Multiple sources agree — and possibly not just non-analysts.

While I’m really sympathetic for the people who are reportedly “overwhelmed” trying to figure out what Snowden took, we’re seeing precisely the same thing we saw with Bradley Manning: that it takes a giant black eye for intelligence agencies to even admit to gaping holes in their security and oversight.

And in NSA’s case, it proves most of their reassurances to be false.

If NSA Commits Database Query Violations, But Nobody Audits Them, Do They Really Happen?

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Barton Gellman, at the beginning of the worthwhile video above, addresses something I addressed here: the only way the government can claim they haven’t “abused” the rules governing NSA activities is by treating all abuse done in the name of the mission as a mistake.

The President, like a lot of people who work for him, has a very narrow definition of two key words in that passage. One is “abuse” and the other is “inappropriately.” As the government depicts it — and this is language it’s using that it does not, frankly, explain.

Abuse — the only kind of abuse that exists would be if, say, an NSA employee were to stalk his ex-wife or spy on movie stars or something of that nature. If they are performing the mission that the NSA wants them to perform, and nevertheless overstep their legal authority, make unauthorized interceptions or searches or retentions or sharing of secret information, that is not abuse, that’s a mistake.

That’s how they get to pretend the 9% to 20% of violations in which a person does not follow the rules seemingly intentionally (these are distinct from human error and training violations) does not constitute an abuse.

With that in mind, I wanted to look more closely at what the audit report says about how errors are found, as shown primarily in this figure:

Screen shot 2013-08-20 at 10.21.25 AM

That looks pretty good on the face, with 64% of all violations found via automated alert, plus a few more — data flow analysis and traffic scanning — that involve technological review.

But this detail on the roamer problem (in which valid foreign targets continue to be targeted when they travel to the US) explains what that’s not all that impressive.  Read more →

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Q Why was the United States given a heads-up by the British government on this detention?

MR. EARNEST: Again, that heads-up was provided by the British government, so you can direct that question to them.

Q Right. But was this heads-up given before he was detained or before it went public that he was detained?

MR. EARNEST: Probably wouldn’t be a heads-up if they would have told us about it after they detained him.

Q So it’s fair to say they told you they were going to do this when they saw that he was on a manifest?

MR. EARNEST: I think that is an accurate interpretation of what a heads-up is.

Q Is this gentleman on some sort of watch list for the United States? Can you look that up?

MR. EARNEST: You’d have to check with the TSA because they maintain the watch list. And I don’t know if they’d tell you or not, but you can ask them.

Q If he’s on a watch list for the U.K., would it be safe to assume then that he’s been put on a watch list in the United States?

MR. EARNEST: The level of coordination between counterterrorism and law enforcement officials in the U.K. and counterterrorism and law enforcement officials in the United States is very good. But in terms of who is on different watch lists and how our actions and their actions are coordinated is not something I’m in a position to talk about from here.

Q Did the United States government — when given the heads-up, did the United States government express any hesitancy about the U.K. doing it — about the U.K. government doing this?

MR. EARNEST: Well, again, this is the British government making a decision based on British law, on British soil, about a British law enforcement action.

Q Did the United States, when given the heads-up, just said okay?

MR. EARNEST: They gave us a heads-up, and this is something that they did not do at our direction and it’s not something that we were involved with. This is a decision that they made on their own.

Q Did the United States discourage the action?

White House Deputy Spokesperson Josh Earnest wants you to know that the decision to detain Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was done by the British on their own.

Q Josh, you’ve talked about the Mubarak detention as being a Egyptian legal matter. You’ve talked about Morsi’s politically motivated detention. And then with regard to Mr. Greenwald’s partner, you called it a “mere law enforcement action.” Given that the White House has never been shy about criticizing detention policies overseas, do you have any concerns at all about the U.K.’s law enforcement actions in this case?

MR. EARNEST: Well, what I can say is I don’t have a specific reaction other than to observe to you that this is a decision that was made by the British government and not one that was made at the request or with the involvement of the United States government.

But he’s not going to tell you anything about the secret conversations the US have with the British.

MR. EARNEST: To be honest with you, Steve, I don’t have a way to characterize for you any of the conversations between the British government and the U.S. government on this matter other than to say that this is a decision that they made on their own and not at the request of the United States. But in terms of the kinds of classified, confidential conversations that are ongoing between the U.S. and our allies in Britain, I’m not able to characterize that for you.

Q But there are consultations on this matter taking place?

MR. EARNEST: I’m telling you I’m not able to provide any insight into those conversations at all.

Ah well, perhaps this “US security official,” rather bizarrely given anonymity to pass on this British thuggish comment, offers better insight into those conversations.

One U.S. security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government’s detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden’s materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks.

Josh Earnest may not want to admit to the close collaboration here, but American security officials sure seem privy to the message being sent.