Clapper’s Claim that FBI Cannot Count Back Door Searches for Technical Reasons Probably Bullshit

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I wanted to explain why I think it’s such a big deal that James Clapper specifically highlighted the carve out for transparency reporting on FBI’s back door searches in Leahy’s version of Freedom Act’s in his letter supporting the bill.

As I described, the bill requires reporting on back door searches, but then exempts the FBI from that reporting.

But that’s not the part of the bill that disturbs me the most. It’s this language:

‘(3) FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.—

Subparagraphs (B)(iv), (B)(v), (D)(iii), (E)(iii), and (E)(iv) of paragraph (1) of subsection (b) shall not apply to information or records held by, or queries conducted by, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The language refers, in part,  to requirements that the government report to Congress:

(B) the total number of orders issued pursuant to section 702 and a good faith estimate of—

(iv) the number of search terms that included information concerning a United States person that were used to query any database of the contents of electronic communications or wire communications obtained through the use of an order issued pursuant to section 702; and

(v) the number of search queries initiated by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States whose search terms included information concerning a United States person in any database of noncontents information relating to electronic communications or wire communications that were obtained through the use of an order issued pursuant to section 702;

These are back door searches on US person identifiers of Section 702 collected data — both content (iv) and metadata (v).

In other words, after having required the government to report how many back door searches of US person data it conducts, the bill then exempts the FBI.

In his letter, Clapper says,

[W]e are comfortable with the transparency provisions in this bill because, among other things, they recognize the technical limitations on our ability to report certain types of information.

FBI back door searches are the most obvious limit on transparency guidelines, and FBI told PCLOB they couldn’t count them for technical reasons.

So effectively, Clapper is suggesting that Congress has recognized that FBI is incapable — for technical reasons — of counting how often it conducts back door searches.

That technical claim is almost certainly bullshit.

As a reminder, here’s what the government told PCLOB about FBI’s back door searches.

Because they are not identified as such in FBI systems, the FBI does not track the number of queries using U.S. person identifiers. The number of such queries, however, is substantial for two reasons.

First, the FBI stores electronic data obtained from traditional FISA electronic surveillance and physical searches, which often target U.S. persons, in the same repositories as the FBI stores Section 702–acquired data, which cannot be acquired through the intentional targeting of U.S. persons. As such, FBI agents and analysts who query data using the identifiers of their U.S. person traditional FISA targets will also simultaneously query Section 702–acquired data.

Second, whenever the FBI opens a new national security investigation or assessment, FBI personnel will query previously acquired information from a variety of sources, including Section 702, for information relevant to the investigation or assessment. With some frequency, FBI personnel will also query this data, including Section 702–acquired information, in the course of criminal investigations and assessments that are unrelated to national security efforts. In the case of an assessment, an assessment may be initiated “to detect, obtain information about, or prevent or protect against federal crimes or threats to the national security or to collect foreign intelligence information.”254 If the agent or analyst conducting these queries has had the training required for access to unminimized Section 702–acquired data, any results from the Section 702 data would be returned in these queries. If an agent or analyst does not have access to unminimized Section 702–acquired data — typically because this agent or analyst is assigned to non-national security criminal matters only — the agent or analyst would not be able to view the unminimized data, but would be notified that data responsive to the query exists and could request that an agent or analyst with the proper training and access to review the unminimized Section 702–acquired data.

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The Holder-Clapper Letter Ought to Make You Worry about Leahy’s USA Freedom

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As the press is reporting right now, James “Too Cute by Half” Clapper and Eric Holder have written Patrick Leahy a letter endorsing his version of the dragnet reform bill. Reports claim this shows that Clapper supports reform.

Consider me unimpressed.

To understand why, it helps to understand what this letter was once supposed to do. According to a Senate source who is skeptical this reform does enough, it was supposed to provide language that would endorse civil libertarians’ understanding of key terms of the bill. I’m not sure if the letter is still supposed to do that work — if it is not, that is a story unto itself. But the language in this letter doesn’t make any commitments on the key points of concern.

As an initial matter, I was told this letter would include language making it clear that the “connection chaining” language I’ve been so concerned about would limit contact chaining to actual calls made. The letter doesn’t address connection chaining at all. Huh. How about that?

Here’s what Clapper’s letter says about the prospective call detail record (CDR) collection:

The bill also provides a mechanism to obtain telephone metadata records in order to identify potential contacts of suspected terrorists inside the United States. The Intelligence Community believes that, based on communications providers’ existing practices in retaining metadata, the bill will retain the essential operational capabilities of the existing bulk telephone metadata program while eliminating bulk collection.

It’s good news the IC is not asking for data retention requirements — but you ought to ask why, given that the most important provider, Verizon, has told the Senate Intelligence Committee that it only keeps billing records — not CDRs — for 18 months.

Note, however, that Clapper doesn’t use CDR language here — he uses “metadata,” which is actually broader — potentially far broader — than CDRs as defined by the bill. We know, for example, that the IC considers location data metadata — and James Cole told Mark Warner they might ask for hybrid orders to get location data. We know from the ICREACH documents that the IC admits it uses a different definition of metadata than the FISA Court does (the IC’s definition of metadata not only includes content, but also substantive information about people). We know that providers store customer things-that-count-as-metadata on their clouds, indefinitely. Adopting metadata here, in short, may back off the otherwise limited definition of CDR, which is one of the bills laudable limiting factors.

The letter’s claim to end bulk collection does nothing to reflect that the IC’s definition of bulk — anything without a discriminator — has nothing to do with the common English definition of it; it certainly doesn’t promise to end the English language definition of bulk. Moreover, it only promises to limit bulk collection to the “greatest extent practicable.”

[T]he bill permits collection under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act using a specific selection term that narrowly limits the scope of the tangible things sought to the greatest extent reasonably practicable, consistent with the purposes for seeking the tangible things. Recognizing that the terms enumerated in the statute may not always meet operational needs, the bill permits the use of other terms, provided there are court-approved minimization procedures that prohibit the dissemination and require the destruction within a reasonable period of time of any information that has not been determined to satisfy certain specific requirements.

That “reasonably practicable” language is a direct quote from the bill. It adds nothing, and given that Bob Litt refuses to limit FBI back door searches because it’s not practicable, what the IC means by practicable could very easily encompass gross privacy violations — ones that have already been approved by FISC! And remember–the IC can use corporate persons as selection terms.

Then the letter all but admits it will use selection terms that violate this principle, but points to the minimization procedures required by the law to rationalize that. As I’ve pointed out, there’s no reason to believe the minimization procedures will be any more stringent than what the FISC currently requires — and there’s at least some reason to suspect they might be weaker than current minimization procedures. (And remember, the retention requirements for the CDR authority almost certainly broadens permitted dissemination to foreign intelligence purpose, which might lead to a similar broadening of it elsewhere under the authority.)

The transparency paragraph includes this language.

the transparency provisions  in this bill … among other things, [] recognize the technical limitations on our ability to report certain types of information.

This is James Clapper saying quite clearly to anyone willing to listen that he sees this bill — which explicitly carves out FBI back door searches from any transparency reporting — as Congressional endorsement of the idea that we should never demand the number of FBI back door searches. This language, by itself, ought to make the bill toxic.

Congratulations NGOs. You’re backing the idea that the FBI should be able to use 702 and 12333 collected information in criminal contexts with zero oversight or accountability.

Finally, Clapper’s letter makes it clear that Leahy’s bill will do nothing to stop ex parte communication between the Executive and FISC. And he even points to John Bates’ ridiculous letter (huh, now we have a better sense of who put Bates up to that!) to warn he’ll carve out even more.

We believe that the appointment of an amicus in selected cases, as appropriate, need not interfere with important aspects of the FISA process, including the process of ex parte consultation between the Court and the government. We are also aware of the concerns that the Administrative Offices of the U.S. Courts expressed in a recent letter, and we look forward to working with you and your colleagues to address these concerns.

Especially after we learned Bates single-handedly rewrote PATRIOT last year to make it okay to spy on Americans for their protected speech, we should do nothing to accommodate Bates’ wishes, especially since he didn’t speak with the authority of his position. The FISC, as Bates envisions it, doesn’t resemble a real court at all.

In short, there’s one piece of good news in this letter — that the IC won’t ask for data retention requirements — and a whole lot of reason to be even more skeptical of the bill.

“What Else Haven’t You Let Us Know?” 2nd Circuit Asks DOJ

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Well into today’s argument over ACLU v. Clapper, the ACLU’s challenge to the government’s phone dragnet, one of the judges — Robert Sack — pointed out the discussion we’re having all stems from documents the government was forced to release after the Edward Snowden leaks.

It was itself telling — not least because DOJ Civil Division AAG Stuart Delery at times proclaimed not to know the answers to the questions the judges posed, questions I know the answer to. For example, Delery claimed, at first, not to know of instances when the FISA Court ruled more harshly than the government; and when he ultimately did admit to those instances, he didn’t admit that some of them involved systematic abuses. He also dodged questions about whether the government could get financial records, which we know they do (and James Cole has testified they could).

It was all the more telling, however, given that two of the judges on the panel — Gerard Lynch and Sack — had ruled against the government in Amnesty v. Clapper, ACLU’s challenge to the Section 702 program. As you’ll recall, to get SCOTUS to overturn that ruling, DOJ lied to the Supreme Court about what kind of notice it gave to defendants under Section 702. Snowden’s leaks led to a change in DOJ’s notice policy to actually come closer — but not actually match –what DOJ had claimed before SCOTUS (they’re still not giving notice to all defendants). At one point, Lynch said something like, “We weren’t as familiar [with 702] as the Supreme Court thought we should have been.”

These judges have reason to be skeptical about DOJ’s claims about their own surveillance programs. Which is probably why Sack asked (after 1:36), “That’s what you’ve let us know. What else haven’t you let us know?”

Much of the hearing went like I expected. ACLU’s Alex Abdo argued both that the court has the authority to overturn the dragnet based on statutory grounds, but also that it’s not reasonable and therefore constitutional. He used Obama’s decision to change the program to argue that the Administration recognizes that the program, as currently constituted, is not reasonable. To support an argument the program is reasonable, DOJ’s Delery claimed Congress had ratified it by reauthorizing it twice. On rebuttal, Abdo noted that Congress had never seen the legal basis (because there was none, until 2013) before they allegedly “ratified” the program.

Delery’s arguments were even weaker than I had expected. He argued that the courts can’t intrude here because the political branches had worked out reasonable limits for this program, pointing to the minimization procedures required by the statute. Except that — as he admitted later — the FISA Court had largely influenced the minimization procedures for the program. If a Court set the minimization procedures that make it reasonable, then can’t a court rule on whether that’s a proper balance?

Not to mention, the statute only requires FBI have minimization procedures, not NSA, so the minimization procedures in the statute are proof the government is actually using the statute with an agency Congress did not envision using it.

Abdo returned to the centrality of minimization procedures in his closing words. He noted that if, as the government claims, Section 215 is authorized by Smith v. Maryland, then, minimization procedures are constitutionally superfluous.

The minimization procedures that the government relies on would be constitutionally superfluous if Smith governed this case. They could collect the records without any of those protections in place. They could store all of them indefinitely. They could query them for any reason or no reason at all. And they could build the dossiers that they disclaim building in this case with no constitutional restrictions. A final point is that the government tries to explain why it’s only asking for a narrow ruling from this court. But the legal theories that it advances are a roadmap to a world in which the government routinely collects vast quantities of information about Americans who have done absolutely nothing wrong. I don’t think that’s the world that Congress envisioned when it enacted Section 215. And it’s certainly not the world that the framers envisioned when they crafted the Fourth Amendment.

But that would bring us to the scenario laid out by Judge Lynch (see from 59:00 to 1:06:50), in which the government could get anything held by a third party about everyone just because it could. The same argument applies to bank records and credit card records, Lynch walked Delery through the implications patiently.

… You can collect everything there is to know about everybody and have it all in one big government cloud.

[snip]

I just don’t understand an argument as to what’s so special about telephone records that makes them so valuable, so uniquely interactive or whatever, that the same arguments you’re making don’t apply to every record in the hands of a third party business entity of every American’s everything.

As far as we know, the government has already done this with financial records, in part under Section 215, which is one of the reasons Obama won’t back off this challenge; even under USA Freedom, the government can continue to obtain Western Union’s records. Add in the EO 12333 collections, and the government is well on its way to the nightmarish scenario both Lynch and Abdo laid out.

In any case, Judge Lynch (more likely his clerks) seems to have done his homework. He seems to have a sense not only where this could go, but where it already has. And while he repeatedly talked about narrow rulings — if I had to guess, I think he might prefer to rule the “relevant” interpretation Bates-stamped by the FISA Court unconstitutional than ruling the entire program so — he gets that this program is a constitutional atrocity.

The question is whether he can write a ruling that will withstand SCOTUS review, this time.

ICREACH and FBI’s PRTT Program

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I’ll have a more substantive post about what we learn about NSA’s broader dragnet from the Intercept’s ICREACH story.

But for the moment I want to reiterate a point I made the other day. ICREACH is important not just because it makes NSA data available to CIA and FBI. But also because it makes CIA and FBI data available for the metadata analysis the NSA conducts.

The documents describe that to include things like clandestine intelligence and flight information.

But there’s one other program that ought to be of particular concern with regards to NSA’s programs. As I laid out here, FBI had a Pen Register/Trap and Trace “program” that shared information with the NSA at least until February 2012, several months after NSA had ended its PRTT Internet dragnet program.

The secrecy behind the FBI’s PRTT orders on behalf of NSA

PRTT1

Finally, there’s a series of entries on the classification guide for FISA programs leaked by Edward Snowden.

These entries show that FBI obtained counterterrorism information using PRTTs for NSA — which was considered Secret.

But that the FBI PR/TT program – which seems different than these individual orders — was considered TS/SI/NOFORN.

PRTT2

If you compare these entries with the rest of the classification guide, you see that this information — the fact that NSA gets PRTT information from FBI (in addition to information from Pen Registers, which seems to be treated differently at the Secret level)  – is treated with the same degree of secrecy as the actual targeting information or raw collected data on all other programs.

This is considered one of the most sensitive secrets in the whole FISA package.

PRTT3

Even minimized PRTT data is considered TS/SCI.

PRTT4

Now, it is true that this establishes an exact parallel with the BR FISA program (which the classification guide makes clear NSA obtained directly). So it may be attributable to the fact that the existence of the programs themselves was considered a highly sensitive secret.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe this just reflects paranoia about the way NSA was secretly relying on the PATRIOT Act to conduct massive dragnet programs.

Except there’s the date.

This classification guide was updated on February 7, 2012 — over a month after NSA shut down the PRTT program. Also, over a month after — according to Theresa Shea — the NSA destroyed all the data it had obtained under PRTT. (Note, her language seems to make clear that this was the NSA’s program, not the FBI’s.)

That is, over a month after the NSA ended its PRTT program and destroyed the data from it (at least according to sworn declarations before a court), the NSA’s classification guide referred to an FBI PRTT program that it considered one of its most sensitive secrets. And seemed to consider active.

I have no idea what this program entailed — and no one else has even picked up on this detail. It’s possible NSA’s Internet dragnet just moved under the FBI’s control. It’s possible (this is my current operative wildarseguess) that FBI’s PRTT program collects location data; the Bureau uses PRTT orders to get individualized location data, after all.

Whatever it is, though, the existence of ICREACH would make that data available to NSA in a form it could use to include it in contact chaining of metadata (which may be why it figures so prominently in NSA’s classification guide). And note: FBI’s minimization procedures are far more lenient than NSA’s, so whatever this data is, NSA may be able to do more with it given that FBI collected it.

And as with a number of other things, even the Pat Leahy version of USA Freedom would weaken protections for PRTT data.

ICREACH and the 2009 Phone Violations

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The Intercept has an article on ICREACH, the middleware NSA implemented between 2005 and 2007 to permit greater sharing of metadata with its IC partners. The article makes this claim.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

I’m fairly certain that is inaccurate.

As I reported on February 6 (at a time when I technically had been hired by the Intercept but not to “report” for them), the circa January 4, 2008 phone dragnet primary order for the first time revealed that the 215 data had been combined with other data “for the purposes of analytical efficiency.”

The Court understands that for the purposes of analytical efficiency a copy of meta data obtained pursuant to the Court’s Orders in this matter will be stored in the same database with data obtained pursuant to other NSA authorities and data provided to NSA from other sources. Access to such records shall be strictly limited in accordance with the procedures set forth in paragraphs A – G.

This happened just after ICREACH got generally rolled out in late 2007.

Given the violations “discovered” in 2009, given that NSA used federated queries with Section 215 and PRTT Internet dragnet data at least as late as 2012, I’m fairly certain that the 215 (and PRTT) repositories were made accessible to a more general interface via ICREACH (which one of the documents describes as middleware) at that point. As I’ve been explaining patiently for over 6 months, the Section 215 phone dragnet we’ve been arguing about is just one small part of the more  general dragnet.

That doesn’t mean FBI and DEA and CIA had access to the raw Section 215 metadata (though it ought to raise questions, especially with regards to the Internet dragnet data, for reasons I’ll return to). As far as we know, those agencies only got direct access to FISC-authorized phone and Internet dragnet query results, not raw data.

The documents released by the Intercept make it clear other Agencies’ analysts would need PKI to log into ICREACH. And that’s how — at least after the 2009 phone violations — NSA restricted phone dragnet access to limited numbers of analysts (even while John Bates made the PRTT Internet dragnet data accessible to just about all NSA analysts in 2010). In other words, what the interface did (again, after the 2009 violations anyway) was to ensure that only those with PKI permitting access to the FISC-authorized data could get in and — this was another addition added in 2009 — could only conduct queries using identifiers approved under the more narrow permissions tied to the FISC data. But those NSA analysts who qualified definitely had access to both FISC-authorized and EO 12333 authorized data from the same one-step shop, and for at least a year the FISC-authorized dragnets got subjected to the automatic processes implemented for EO 12333.  That was the problem (or one major source of the problem): FISC-authorized phone and Internet data was being exposed to the processes permitted with EO 12333 data but not permitted with FISC data.

If I’m correct, the inclusion of FISC-approved data in ICREACH led to (or exacerbated) FISC-approved data being treated as EO 12333 data for at least a year. That is, it led to the violations that included (among other things) 3,000 US persons being watchlisted without First Amendment review.

I will have more about what the Intercept documents show later (as well as some thoughts on what the structure of ICREACH might suggest about the NSA’s technical problems with the phone dragnet). They answer a number of questions about the metadata dragnet I’ve been posing for months.

Update: Adding that the point of this sharing is two-way. Not only does NSA share huge amounts of metadata with FBI and CIA, but NSA can contact chain its own metadata with non-metadata from the other agencies (documents mention things like passenger data and clandestine collection). That is, while I don’t think FBI and CIA had access to raw BR FISA data (at least not after 2009), I do think NSA was chaining on more than BR FISA.

PCLOB Member Rachel Brand Asked NSA General Counsel to Help Her Dissent from PCLOB

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Let me say straight out: Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board member Rachel Brand is no slouch. She’s very smart and very accomplished.

All that said, I am rather intrigued by the way she consulted NSA General Counsel Raj De several times — as illustrated by these emails Jason Leopold liberated from PCLOB —  as she worked on her dissent to the Democratic PCLOB members’ conclusion that the Section 215 dragnet is illegal.

On January 6, Brand emailed De. “Do you have a couple minutes to talk about a PCLOB matter today or tomorrow?” They scheduled some time to talk at midday the next day — though a request from Keith Alexander appears to have forced De to delay. Nevertheless, by 1:30 on January 7, it appears De and Brand spoke, because De forwarded two things: I Con the Record’s press release announcing the FISA Court had reauthorized the dragnet even after Judge Richard Leon ruled it unconstitutional (De makes no mention in his email, but the order had considered Leon’s ruling before reauthorizing the program), and the GPO transcript of Robert Mueller’s claim in a June 2013 House Judiciary Committee hearing that the dragnet would have prevented 9/11.

Ten days later, on January 17, Brand was emailing De again, after having seen each other that morning (that was the morning President Obama announced his own reforms to the dragnet, so it may have been in that context). She sent NSA’s General Counsel a paragraph, with one sentence highlighted, asking if it was accurate. He responded with “some suggestions for accuracy for your consideration … Feel free to give a call if you want to discuss, or would like more detail.”

Then, over that weekend, Brand and De exchanged the following emails:

Saturday, January 18, 12:31: Brand sends “the current draft of my separate statement” stating she wants “to be sure there is nothing factually or legally inaccurate in it;” she says it is currently 5 pages and tells De she needs to give PCLOB Chair David Medine the final by Sunday night

Saturday, January 18, 2:11: De responds, “happy to”

Sunday, January 19, 10:51: De responds, saying, “not that you need or want my validation, but for what’s [sic] it is worth it really reads quite well.” De then provides 3 “additional factual details” which “might fit in if you wanted to use them;” those bullets are redacted

Sunday, January 19, 3:47: Brand replies, stating that Beth (Elisebeth Collins Cook, the other Republican on PCLOB) “explicitly makes the first two in her separate statement” and that she’s “trying to keep this short, so have to forego making every available point”

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Behold, John Brennan’s Scary Memo!

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Brennan with TortureI’ve been writing for a long time about the “Scary Memos” the government used to justify its dragnet.

As the Joint IG Report described, they started in tandem with George Bush’s illegal wiretap program, and were written before each 45-day reauthorization to argue the threat to the US was serious enough to dismiss any Fourth Amendment concerns that the President was wiretapping Americans domestically.

Jack Goldsmith relied on one for his May 6, 2004 memo reauthorizing some — but not all — of the dragnet.

Yesterday, James Clapper’s office released the Scary Memo included in the FISA Court application to authorize the Internet dragnet just two months later, on July 14, 2004.

ODNI calls it the Tenet Declaration — indeed it is signed by him (which, given that he left government on July 11, 2004 and that final FISC applications tend to be submitted days before their approval, may suggest signing this Scary Memo was among the very last things he did as CIA Director).

Yet the Memo would have been written by the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, then headed by John Brennan.

Much of the Scary Memo describes a “possible imminent threat” that DOJ plans to counter by,

seeking authority from this Court [redacted] to install and use pen register and trap and trace devices to support FBI investigations to identify [redacted], in the United States and abroad, by obtaining the metadata regarding their electronic communications.

There is no mention of NSA. There is no mention that the program operated without legal basis for the previous 2.5 years. And there’s a very curious redaction after “this Court;” perhaps CIA also made a show of having the President authorize it, so as to sustain a claim that all this could be conducted exclusively on Presidential authority?

After dropping mention of WMD — anthrax! fissile material! chemical weapons! — the Scary Memo admits it has no real details about this “possible imminent threat.”

[W]e have no specific information regarding the exact times, targets, or tactics for those planned attacks, we have gathered and continue to gather intelligence that leads us to believe that the next terrorist attack or attacks on US soil could be imminent.

[snip]

Reporting [redacted] does not provide specific information on the targets to be hit or methods to be used in the US attack or attacks.

But based on “detainee statements and [redacted] public statements since 9/11,” the Scary Memo lays out, CIA believes al Qaeda (curiously, sometimes they redact al Qaeda, sometimes they don’t) wants to target symbols of US power that would negatively impact the US economy and cause mass casualties and spread fear.

It took an “intelligence” agency to come up with that.

Based on that “intelligence,” it appears, but not on any solid evidence, CIA concludes that the Presidential conventions would make juicy targets for al Qaeda.

Attacks against or in the host cities for the Democratic and Republican Party conventions would be especially attractive to [redacted].

And because of that — because CIA’s “intelligence” has decided a terrorist group likes to launch attacks that cause terror and therefore must be targeting the Presidential conventions — the FBI (though of course it’s really the NSA) needs to hunt out “sleeper cells.”

Identifying and disrupting the North American-based cells involved in tactical planning offers the most direct path to stopping an attack or attacks against the US homeland. Numerous credible intelligence reports since 9/11 indicate [redacted] has “sleepers” in North America. We judge that these “sleepers” have been in North American, and the US in general, for much of the past two years. We base our judgment, in part, [redacted] as well as on information [redacted] that [redacted] had operatives here.

Before we get to what led CIA to suggest the US was targeted, step back and look at this intelligence for a moment. This report mentions detainee reporting twice. It redacts the name of what are probably detainees in several places. Indeed, several of the claims in this report appear to match those from the exactly contemporaneous document CIA did on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to justify its torture program, thus must come from him.

Yet, over a year after KSM had been allegedly rendered completely cooperative via waterboarding, CIA still did not know the answer to a question that KSM was probably one of the only people alive who could answer.

We continue to investigate whether the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui may have accelerated the timetable for the 9/11 attacks because he knew of al-Qa’ida’s intention to use commercial aircraft as weapons.

Nevertheless, they believed KSM was being totally straight up and forthcoming.

Note, too, the CIA relied on claims of sleeper cells that were then two years old, dating back to the time they were torturing Abu Zubaydah, whom we know did give “intelligence” about sleeper cells.

To be sure, we know CIA’s claims of a “possible imminent threat” in the US do not derive exclusively from CIA’s earlier torture (though CIA had claimed, just months earlier, that their best intelligence came from that source for the Inspector General’s report).

Less than 3 weeks after this Scary Memo was written, we’d begin to see public notice of this “possible imminent threat,” when Tom Ridge raised the threat level on August 1, 2004 because of an election year plot, purportedly in response to the capture of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in Pakistan on July 13 (which could only have been included in “the Tenet declaration” if Khan were secretly arrested and flipped earlier, because Tenet was no longer CIA Director on July 13). But what little basis the election year plot had in any reality dated back to the December 2003 British arrest and beating of Khan’s cousin, Babar Ahmed, which would lead to both Khan’s eventual capture as well as the British surveillance of Dhiren Barot as early as June 10 and the latter’s premature arrest on August 3. KSM’s nephew, Musaad Aruchi, was also handed over by Pakistan to CIA on June 12; best as I know, he remains among those permanently disappeared in CIA’s torture program. This would also lead to a new round of torture memos reauthorizing everything that had been approved in the August 1, 2002 Bybee Memo plus some.

The claims the US was a target derive, based on the reporting in the NYT, from Dhiren Barot. Barot apparently did want to launch a terrorist attack. Both KSM and Hambali had identified Barot during interrogations in 2003, and he had scouted out attack sites in the US in 2000 and 2001. But his active plots in 2004 were all focused on the UK. In 2007 the Brits reduced his sentence because his plots weren’t really all that active or realistic.

Which is to say this election plot — the Scary Plot that drives the Scary Memo that provided the excuse for rolling out (or rather, giving judicial approval for continuing) an Internet dragnet that would one day encompass all Americans — arose in significant part from 2003 torture-influenced interrogations that led to the real world detention of men who had contemplated attacking the US in 2000, but by 2004 were aspirationally plotting to attack the UK, not the US, as well as men who may have been plotting in Pakistan but were not in the US.

That, plus vague references to claims that surely were torture derived, is what John Brennan appears to have laid out in his case for legally justifying a US dragnet.

You see, it’s actually John Brennan’s dragnet — it all goes back to his Scary Memo — and his role in it is presumably one of the reasons he doesn’t want us to know how many lies went into the CIA torture program.

Brennan’s Scary Memo provides yet more evidence how closely linked are torture and the surveillance of every American.

Adventures in Credulous NSA Journalism, Episode 2,524

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The Hill sees fit to quote NSA’s Compliance Officer John DeLong boasting that the NSA put in (one of) the reforms Obama announced the day he announced it — which (DeLong claimed) was proof that NSA’s compliance system works.

Earlier this year, Obama directed the NSA to get court approval before it searched a database of Americans’ phone records and limited those searches to people two “hops” away from a suspect.

DeLong said on Thursday that the changes were put into effect the same day that the president announced them.

“It helped to have a compliance program — a compliance workforce — that was already in place,” he said. That way, the agency was not operating “from a cold start.”

As I noted in January when commentators first started hailing what the Administration billed as a great change, it was instead presidential codification of a policy that had been in place since 2011.

I’m seeing a lot of enthusiasm about President Obama’s promise to limit the NSA to 2 hops on its phone dragnet.

Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three.

But it’s not that big of a limit.

As far back as 2011, the NSA had standardized on 2-hops, only permitting a 3rd with special approval. (See page 13.)

While the BR Order permits contact chaining for up to three hops, NSA has decided to limit contact chaining to only two hops away from the RAS-approved identifier without prior approval from your Division management to chain the third hop.

So in effect, Obama has replaced the NSA’s internal directive limiting the hops to 2 with his own directive (which can be pixie dusted with no notice) limiting the hops to 2.

What NSA’s ability to implement this change immediately shows is not the great performance of its compliance program, but rather the ability to do nothing while claiming a great victory over the status quo.

But don’t look for that to appear in most reporting on the NSA.

NSA’s Lawyers Missed “Virtually Every Record” over 25 Reviews

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As I’ve written before, the Internet dragnet did not get through the its first 90 day Primary Order before it violated the rules laid out by the FISA Court. In an effort to convince Judge Kollar-Kotelly they could conduct the dragnet according to her orders, NSA’s Office of General Counsel agreed to do spot checks of the data twice every 90-day authorization. That requirement stayed in place for the rest of the dragnet.

Which means between 2004 and 2009, OGC should have conducted over 25 spot checks of the data NSA obtained under the program.

And yet, in that entire time, OGC somehow never noticed that “virtually every record” NSA was taking in included data that it was not authorized to collect.

That’s one of the two crazy things about the Internet dragnet that this month’s document dump made clear. I explain them in this piece at The Week. The other is that, in an end-to-end report conducted from roughly March through September of 2009, NSA also didn’t find that virtually every record they had collected had broken the law.

Exhibit A is a comprehensive end-to-end report that the NSA conducted in late summer or early fall of 2009, which focused on the work the agency did in metadata collection and analysis to try and identify people emailing terrorist suspects.

The report described a number of violations that the NSA had cleaned up since the beginning of that year — including using automatic alerts that had not been authorized and giving the FBI and CIA direct access to a database of query results. It concluded the internet dragnet was in pretty good shape. “NSA has taken significant steps designed to eliminate the possibility of any future compliance issues,” the last line of the report read, “and to ensure that mechanisms are in place to detect and respond quickly if any were to occur.”

But just weeks later, the Department of Justice informed the FISA Court, which oversees the NSA program, that the NSA had been collecting impermissible categories of data — potentially including content — for all five years of the program’s existence.

[snip]

Judge John Bates, then head of FISC, emphasized that the NSA had missed the unauthorized data in its comprehensive report. He noted “the extraordinary fact that NSA’s end-to-end review overlooked unauthorized acquisitions that were documented in virtually every record of what was acquired.” Bates went on, “[I]t must be added that those responsible for conducting oversight at NSA failed to do so effectively.”

Nevertheless, Bates went on to vastly expand the program.

No wonder James Clapper’s office made those documents so hard to read. There is no way to read them and believe the NSA can be trusted to stay within the law.

The Government Uses the Dragnets for Detainee Proceedings

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In the middle of a discussion of how the NSA let FBI, CIA, and NCTC directly access the database of Internet query results in the report accompanying the Internet dragnet End-to-End report, a footnote describes searches NSA’s litigation support team conducts. (See page 12)

In addition to the above practices, NSA’s litigation support team conducts prudential searches in response to requests from Department of Justice or Department of Defense personnel in connection with criminal or detainee proceedings. The team does not perform queries of the PR/TT metadata. This practice of sharing information derived from PR/TT metadata was later specifically authorized. See Primary Order, Docket Number PR/TT [redacted] at 12-13. The Government respectfully submits that NSA’s historic practice of sharing of U.S. person identifying information in this manner before it was specifically authorized does not constitute non-compliance with the PR/TT Orders.

Keith Alexander’s declaration accompanying the E2E adds more detail. (See page 16)

The designated approving official does not make a determination to release information in response to requests by Department of Justice or Department of Defense personnel in connection with criminal or detainee proceedings. In the case of such requests, NSA’s Litigation Support Team conducts prudential, specific searches of databases that contain both previously disseminated reporting and related analyst notes. The team does not perform queries of the PR/TT metadata. NSA then provides that research to Department of Justice or Department of Defense personnel for their review in connection with criminal or detainee proceedings. This practice of sharing information derived from the PR/TT metadata is now specifically authorized. See Primary Order, Docket Number PR/TT [redacted] at 12-13.

Language approving searches of the corporate store conducted on behalf of DOJ and DOD does not appear (at least not at 12-13) in the early 2009 — probably March 2, 2009 — Internet dragnet primary order. But related language was included in the September 3, 2009 phone dragnet order (it does not appear in the July 8, 2009 phone dragnet order, so that appears to have been the first approval for it). Given the timing, the language might stem either from another notice of violation to the FISC (one the government has redacted thus far); or, it might be a response to recommendations made in the Joint IG Report on the illegal dragnet, which was released July 10, 2009, and which did discuss discovery problems.

But the language describing the Litigation Support Team searches is far less descriptive in the September 3, 2009 phone dragnet order.

Notwithstanding the above requirements, NSA may share information derived from the BR metadata, including U.S. person identifying information, with Executive Branch personnel in order to enable them to determine whether the information contains exculpatory or impeachment information or is otherwise discoverable in legal proceedings.

The E2E and Alexander’s declaration make two things more clear.

First, NSA can disseminate this information without declaring the information is related to counterterrorism (that’s the primary dissemination limitation discussed in this section), and of course, without masking US person information. That would at least permit the possibility this data gets used for non-counterterrorism purposes, but only when it should least be permitted to, for criminal prosecutions of Americans!

Remember, too, the government has explicitly said it uses the phone dragnet to identify potential informants. Having non-counterterrorism data available to coerce cooperation would make that easier.

The E2E and Alexander declaration also reveal that the Litigation Support Team conducts these searches not just for DOJ, but also for DOD on detainee matters.

That troubles me.

According to the NYT’s timeline, only 20 detainees arrived at Gitmo after these dragnets got started, and 14 of those were High Value Detainees who had been stashed elsewhere for years (as were the last batch arrived in 2004). None of the men still detained at Gitmo, at least, had been communicating with anyone outside of very closely monitored situations for years. None of the Internet dragnet data could capture them (because no historical data gets collected). And what phone data might include them — and remember, the phone dragnet was only supposed to include calls with one end in the US — would be very dated.

So what would DOD be using these dragnets for?

Perhaps the detainees in question weren’t Gitmo detainees but Bagram detainees. Plenty of them had been out communicating more recently in 2004 and 2006 and even 2009, and their conversations might have been picked up on an Internet dragnet (though I find it unlikely any were making phone calls to the US).

It’s possible the dragnet was used, in part, to track released detainees. Is dragnet contact chaining one of the things that goes into claims about “recidivist” detainees?

Finally, a more troubling possibility is that detainee attorneys’ contacts with possible witnesses got tracked. Is it possible, for example, that DOD tracked attorneys’ contacts with detainee family members in places like Yemen? Given allegations the government spied on detainees’ lawyers, that’s certainly plausible. Moreover, since NSA does not minimize contacts between attorneys and their client until the client has been indicted, and so few of the Gitmo detainees have been charged, it would be utterly consistent to use the dragnet to track lawyers’ efforts to defend Gitmo detainees. Have the dragnets been focused on attorneys all this time?

One thing is clear. There is not a single known case where DOJ or DOD have used the dragnets to provide exculpatory information to someone; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was unable to obtain discovery on dragnet information even after the government bragged about using the dragnet in his case.

Nevertheless, NSA has been sharing US person information without even having to attest it is counterterrorism related, outside of all the minimization procedures the government boasts about.