The Reason Obama Capitulated on the (Phone) Dragnet

/7 Comments/in /by

This will be a bit of a contrary take on what I believe to be the reasons for President Obama’s capitulation on the dragnet, announcing support today for a plan to outsource the first query in the dragnetting process to the telecoms.

It goes back to the claims — rolled out in February — that the NSA has only been getting 20 to 30% of the call data in the US. Those reports were always silent or sketchy on several items:

  • The claims were always silent that they applied only to Section 215, and did not account for the vast amount of data, including US person cell data, collected under EO 12333.
  • The claims were sketchy about the timing of the claim, especially in light of known collection of cell data in 2010 and 2011, showing that at that point NSA had no legal restrictions on accepting such data.
  • The claims were silent about why, in both sworn court declarations and statements to Congress, Administration officials said the collection (sometimes modified by Section 215, often, especially in court declarations, not) was comprehensive.

Here’s what I think lies behind those claims.

We know that as recently as September 1, 2011, the NSA believed it had the legal authority to collect cell location data under Section 215, because they were doing just that. Congress apparently did not respond well to learning, belatedly, that the government was collecting location data in a secret interpretation of a secret interpretation. Nevertheless, it appears the government still believed it had that authority — though was reevaluating it — on January 31, 2012, when Ron Wyden asked James Clapper about it — invoking the “secret law” we know to be Section 215 — during his yearly grilling of Clapper in the Global Threat hearing.

Wyden: Director Clapper, as you know the Supreme Court ruled last week that it was unconstitutional for federal agents to attach a GPS tracking device to an individual’s car and monitor their movements 24/7 without a warrant. Because the Chair was being very gracious, I want to do this briefly. Can you tell me as of now what you believe this means for the intelligence community, number 1, and 2, would you be willing to commit this morning to giving me an unclassified response with respect to what you believe the law authorizes. This goes to the point that you and I have talked, Sir, about in the past, the question of secret law, I strongly feel that the laws and their interpretations must be public. And then of course the important work that all of you’re doing we very often have to keep that classified in order to protect secrets and the well-being of your capable staff. So just two parts, 1, what you think the law means as of now, and will you commit to giving me an unclassified answer on the point of what you believe the law actually authorizes.

Clapper: Sir, the judgment rendered was, as you stated, was in a law enforcement context. We are now examining, and the lawyers are, what are the potential implications for intelligence, you know, foreign or domestic. So, that reading is of great interest to us. And I’m sure we can share it with you. [looks around for confirmation] One more point I need to make, though. In all of this, we will–we have and will continue to abide by the Fourth Amendment. [my emphasis]

Unsurprisingly, as far as I know, Clapper never gave Wyden an unclassified answer.

Nevertheless, since then the government has come to believe it cannot accept cell data under Section 215. Perhaps in 2012 as part of the review Clapper said was ongoing, the government decided the Jones decision made their collection of the cell location of every cell phone in the US illegal or at least problematic. Maybe, in one of the 7 Primary orders DOJ is still withholding from 2011 to 2013, the FISC decided Jones made it illegal to accept data that included cell location. It may be that a February 24, 2013 FISC opinion — not a primary order but one that significantly reinterpreted Section 215 — did so. Certainly, by July 19, 2013, when Claire Eagan prohibited it explicitly in a primary order, it became illegal for the government to accept cell location data.

That much is clear, though: until at least 2011, DOJ believed accepting cell location under Section 215 was legal. At least by July 19, 2013, FISC made it clear that would not be legal.

That, I believe, is where the problems accepting cell phone data as part of Section 215 come from (though this doesn’t affect EO 12333 data at all, and NSA surely still gets much of what it wants via EO 12333). Theresa Shea has explicitly said in sworn declarations that the NSA only gets existing business records. As William Ockham and Mindrayge have helped me understand, unless a telecom makes it own daily record of all the calls carried on its network — which we know AT&T does in the Hemisphere program, funded by the White House Drug Czar — then the business ecords the phone company will have are its SS7 routing records. And that’s going to include cell phone records. And those include location data for cell phones.

Now, it may be that the telecoms chose not to scan out this information for the government. It may be that after the program got exposed they chose to do the bare minimum, and the cell restrictions allowed them to limit what they turned over (something similar may have happened with VOIP calls carried across their networks). It may be that Verizon and even AT&T chose to only provide that kind of data via EO 12333 program that, because they are voluntary, get paid at a much higher rate. In any case, I have very little doubt that NSA got the phone records from Verizon, just not via Section 215.

But I’m increasingly sure the conflict between Section 215’s limit to existing business record and the limits imposed on Section 215 via whatever means was the source of the “problem” that led NSA to only get 30% of phone records [via the Section 215 program, which is different than saying they only got 30% of all records from US calls].

And a key feature of both the President’s sketchy program…

  • the companies would be compelled by court order to provide technical assistance to ensure that the records can be queried and that results are transmitted to the government in a usable format and in a timely manner.

And the RuppRoge Fake Fix…

(h)(1)(A) immediately provide the Government with records, whether existing or created in the future, in the format specified by the Government

[snip]

(h)(2) The Government may provide any information, facilities, or assistance necessary to aid an electronic communications service provider in complying with a directive issued pursuant to paragraph (1).

Is that the government gets to dictate what format they get records in here, which they couldn’t do under Section 215. That means, among other things, they can dictate that the telecoms strip out any location data before it gets to NSA, meaning NSA would remain compliant with whatever secret orders have made the collection of cell location in bulk illegal.

Remember, too, that both of these programs will have an alert feature. In spite of getting an alert system to replace the one deemed illegal in 2009 approved on November 8 2012, the government has not yet gotten that alert function working for what are described as technical reasons.

The Court understands that to date NSA has not implemented, and for the duration of this authorization will not as a technical matter be in a position to implement, the automated query process authorized by prior orders of this Court for analytical purposes. Accordingly, this amendment to the Primary Order authorizes the use of this automated query process for development and testing purposes only. No query results from such testing shall be made available for analytic purposes. Use of this automated query process for analytical purposes requires further order of this Court.

It’s possible that, simply doing the alert on exclusively legally authorized data (as opposed to data mixing EO 12333 and FISC data) solves the technical problems that had stymied NSA from rolling out the alert system they have been trying to replace for 5 years. It’s possible that because NSA was getting its comprehensive coverage of US calls via different authorities, it could not comply with the FISC’s legal limits on the alert system. But we know there will be an alert function if either of these bills are passed.

The point is, here, too, outsourcing the initial query process solves a legal-technical problem the government has been struggling with for years.

The Obama plan is an improvement over the status quo (though I do have grave concerns about its applicability in non-terrorist contexts, and my concerns about what the government does with the data of tens to hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans remain).

But don’t be fooled. Obama’s doing this as much because it’s the easiest way to solve legal and technical problems that have long existed because the government chose to apply a law that was entirely inapt to the function they wanted to use it for.

Shockers! A more privacy protective solution also happens to provide the best technical and legal solution to the problem at hand.

Update: Forgot to add that, assuming I’m right, this will be a pressure point that Members of Congress will know about but we won’t get to talk about. That is, a significant subset of Congress will know that unless they do something drastic, like threatening legal penalties or specifically defunding any dragnetting, the Executive will continue to do this one way or another, whether it’s under a hybrid of Section 215 and EO 12333 collection, or under this new program. That is, it will be a selling point to people like Adam Schiff (who advocated taking the call records out of government hands but who has also backed these proposals) that this could bring all US intelligence collection under the oversight of the FISC (it won’t, really, especially without a very strong exclusivity provision that prohibits using other means, which the Administration will refuse because it would make a lot of what it does overseas illegal). This is the same tension that won the support of moderates during the FISA Amendments Act, a hope to resolve real separation of powers concerns with an imperfect law. So long as the Leahy-Sensenbrenner supporters remain firm on their demands for more reforms, we may be able to make this a less imperfect law. But understand that some members of Congress will view passing this law as a way to impose oversight over a practice (the EO 12333 collection of US phone records) that has none.

Update: Verizon has released this telling statement.

This week Congressmen Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) released the “End Bulk Collection Act of 2014”, which would end bulk collection of data related to electronic communications. The White House also announced that it is proposing an approach to end bulk collection. We applaud these proposals to end Section 215 bulk collection, but feel that it is critical to get the details of this important effort right. So at this early point in the process, we propose this basic principle that should guide the effort: the reformed collection process should not require companies to store data for longer than, or in formats that differ from, what they already do for business purposes. If Verizon receives a valid request for business records, we will respond in a timely way, but companies should not be required to create, analyze or retain records for reasons other than business purposes. [my emphasis]

It’s telling, first of all, because Verizon still doesn’t want to have to fuss with anything but their business records. That says it has been unwilling to do so, in the past, which, in my schema, totally explains why the government couldn’t get Verizon cell records using Section 215. (I have wondered whether this was a newfound complaint, since they got exposed whereas AT&T did not; and even in spite of Randal Milch’s denial, I still do wonder whether the Verizon-Vodaphone split hasn’t freed them of some data compliance obligations.)

Just as importantly, Verizon doesn’t want to analyze any of this data. As I have pointed out, someone is going to have to do high volume number analysis, because otherwise the number of US person records turned over will be inappropriately large but small enough it will be a significant privacy violation to do it at that point (for some things, it requires access to the raw data).

I’m unclear whether the RuppRuge Fake Fix plan of offering assistance (that is, having NSA onsite) fixes this, because NSA could do this analysis at Verizon.

DOJ’s Multiple Authorities for Destroying Evidence

/5 Comments/in , /by

It seems like aeons ago, but just a week ago, EFF and DOJ had a court hearing over preserving evidence in the EFF lawsuits (Shubert, Jewel, and First Unitarian Church v. NSA). As I noted in two posts, a week ago Monday DOJ surprised EFF with the news that it had been following its own preservation plan, which it had submitted ex parte to Vaughn Walker, rather than the order Walker subsequently imposed. As a result, it has been aging off data in those programs (notably the PATRIOT-authorized Internet and phone dragnets) authorized by law, as opposed to what it termed Presidential authorization. DOJ’s behavior makes it clear that it is  trying to justify treating some data differently by claiming it was collected under different authorities.

Remember, there are at least five different legal regimes involved in the metadata dragnet:

  • EO 12333 authority for data going back to at least 1998
  • Stellar Wind authority lasting until 2004, 2006, and 2007 for different practices
  • PATRIOT-authorized authorities for Internet (until 2011) and phone records (until RuppRoge or something else passes)
  • SPCMA, which is a subset of EO 12333 authority that conducts potentially problematic contact chaining integrating US person Internet metadata
  • Five Eyes, which is EO 12333, but may involve GCHQ equities or, especially, ownership of the data

At the hearing and in their motions, EFF argued that their existing suits are not limited to any particular program (they didn’t name all these authorities, but they could have). Rather, they are about the act of dragnetting, regardless of what authority (so they’ll still be live suits after RuppRoge passes, for example).

EFF appears to have at least partly convinced Judge Jeffrey White, because on Friday he largely sided with EFF, extending the preservation order and — best as I can tell — endorsing EFF’s argument that their suits cover the act of dragnetting, rather than just the Stellar Wind, FISA Amendments Act, or phone and Internet dragnets.

With that as background, I want to look at a few things from the transcript of last Wednesday’s hearing. Read more →

The RuppRoge Fake Dragnet Fix, As Introduced: Does It Include Keith Alexander’s Quid Pro Quo?

/11 Comments/in , /by

This post is going to be a general review on the contents of the actual records collection part of the RuppRoge Fake Dragnet Fix, which starts on page 15, though I confess I’m particularly interested in what other uses — besides the phone dragnet — it will be put to.

First, note that this bill applies to “electronic communication service providers,” not telecoms. In addition, it uses neither the language of Toll Records from National Security Letters nor Dialing, Addressing, Routing, or Signalling from Pen Registers. Instead, it uses “records created as a result of communications of an individual or facility.” Also remember that FISC has, in the past, interpreted “facility” to mean “entire telecom switch.” This language might permit a lot of things, but I suspect that one of them is another attempt to end run content collection restrictions on Internet metadata — the same problem behind the hospital confrontation and the Internet dragnet shutdown in 2009. I look forward to legal analysis on whether this successfully provides an out.

The facility language is also troubling in association with the foreign power language of the bill (which already is a vast expansion beyond the terrorism-only targeting of the phone dragnet). Because you could have a telecom switch in contact with a suspected agent of a foreign power and still get a great deal of data, much of it on innocent people. The limitation (at b1B) to querying with “specific identifiers or selection terms’ then becomes far less meaningful.

Then add two details from section h, covering the directives the government gives the providers. The government requires the data in the format they want. Section 215 required existing business records, which may have provided providers a way to be obstinate about how they delivered the data (and this may have led to the government’s problems with the cell phone data). But it also says this (in the paragraph providing for compensation I wrote about here):

The Government may provide any information, facilities, or assistance necessary to aid an electronic communications service provider in complying with a directive

Remember, one month ago, Keith Alexander said he’d be willing to trade a phone dragnet fix for what amounts to the ability to partner with industry on cybersecurity. The limits on this bill to electronic communication service providers means it’s not precisely what Alexander wanted (I understand him to want that kind of broad partnership across industries). Still, the endorsement of the government basically going to camp out at a provider makes me wonder if there isn’t some of that. Note, that also may answer my question about when and where NSA would conduct the pizza joint analysis, which would mean there’d still be NSA techs (or contractors) rifling through raw data, but they’d be doing it at the telecoms’ location.

The First Amendment restriction appears more limited than it is in the Section 215 context, though I suspect RuppRoge simply reflects the reality of what NSA is doing now. Both say you can’t investigate an American solely for First Amendment views, but RuppRoge says you can’t get the information for an investigation of an American. Given that RuppRoge eliminates any requirement that this collection be tied to an investigation, it would make it very easy to query a US person selector based on First Amendment issues in the guise of collecting information for another reason. But again, I suspect that’s what the NSA is doing in practice in any case.

Note, too, that RuppRoge borrows the “significant purpose” language from FISA, meaning the government can have a domestic law enforcement goal to getting these records.

RuppRoge then lays out an elaborate certification/directive system that is (as I guessed) modeled on the FISA Amendments Act, but written to be even more Byzantine in the bill. It works the same, though: the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence submit broad certifications to the FISC, which reviews whether they comply with the general requirements in the bill. It can also get emergency orders (though for some reason here, as elsewhere, RuppRoge have decided to invent new words from the standard ones), though the language is less about emergency and more about timely acquisition of data. Ultimately, there is judicial review, after the fact, except that like FAA, the review is programmatic, not identifier specific. Significantly, the records the government has to keep only need to comply with selection procedures (which are the new name for targeting procedures) “at the time the directive was issued,” which would seem to eliminate any need to detask over a year if you discover the target isn’t actually in contact with an agent of a foreign power. Also, in the clause permitting the FISC to order data be destroyed if the directives were improper, the description talks about halting production of “records,” but destruction of “information.” That might be more protective (including the destruction of reports based on data) or it might not (requiring only the finished reports be destroyed). Interestingly, this section includes no language affirmatively permitting alert systems, though RuppRoge have made it clear that’s what they intend with the year long certifications. In addition, those year long certifications might be used in conjunction with a year long PRISM order to first search a provider for metadata, then immediately task on content (which would be useful in a cybersecurity context).

The bill also changed the language of minimization procedures, which they call “civil liberties and privacy protection procedures.” Interestingly, the procedures differ from the standard in Section 215, including both a generalized privacy protection and one limiting receipt and dissmenation of “records associated with a specific person.” These might actually be more protective than those in Section 215, or they might not, given that the identifying information (at b1D) excludes things like phone number or email which clearly identify a specific person, but get no protection (this identifying information hearkens back, at least in part, to debates about whether the dragnet minimization procedures complied with requirement for them in law on this point). In other words, it may provide people more protection, but given the NSA’s claim that they can’t get identify from a phone number, they likely don’t consider that data to be protected at all.

I can’t help believing much of this bill was written with cases like Lavabit and the presumed Credo NSL challenges in mind, as it uses language disdainful of legal challenges.

If the judge determines that such petition consists of claims, defenses, or other legal contentions that are not warranted by existing law or consists of a frivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law, the judge shall immediately deny such petition and affirm the directive or any part of the directive that is the subject of the such petition and order the recipient to comply with the directive or any part of it.

This seems to completely rule out any constitutional challenge to this law from providers.  Though the bill even allows for emergency acquisition while FISC is reviewing a certification, suggesting RuppRoge don’t want the FISC to make any through either. So if this bill were to pass, you can be sure it will remain in place indefinitely.

A Key Part of RuppRoge’s Fake Dragnet Fix Reform: Pay the Telecoms

/4 Comments/in , , /by

Here’s an interesting “reform” in the RuppRoge’s Fake Dragnet Fix. It pays the telecoms.

COMPENSATION AND ASSISTANCE.–The Government shall compensate, at the prevailing rate, an electronic communications service provider for providing records in accordance with directives issued pursuant to [their bill].

Section 215 does not include such a payment provision. And while the first two phone dragnet orders included provision for such payments, that was probably illegal.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the government has found some way to pay the telecoms, either through added payments for AT&T’s Hemisphere program or gifts in kind. (Though given the timing of DOJ’s suit against Sprint for over-billing, I do wonder whether the government is retaliating for something.) Telecoms don’t spy for free, so I’m sure they’ve been getting paid, illegally, for the last 8 years of dragnet spying they’ve been doing.

But the lack of such provision in Section 215 should have limited the scope of the dragnet. It should have required that requests be so narrow no telecom was going to send big bills to the government every month. And it presumably made the telecoms (well, except for AT&T, which never met a spying request it didn’t love) less willing to interpret orders from the government expansively.

The inclusion of such a compensation clause in the RuppRoge “reform” makes it even more likely this dragnet will expand with the now well-oiled willingness of the telecoms to go above and beyond the letter of the request.

Which is presumably just how the NSA wants it to be.

The Other Problem with the Obama Proposal: Who Does the Pizza Joint Review?

/13 Comments/in /by

I’m sure I’ll spend all day discussing the various proposals to “fix” the dragnet.

I’ve already shown why the House Intelligence bill is not an improvement and should not be discussed by credible people as one.

And on Twitter and briefly in that piece, I described two problems that aren’t addressed at all in either of these proposals, including President Obama’s plan laid out by Charlie Savage.

  • The Reasonable Articulable Suspicion standard is still far too lenient, allowing the government to engage in a broad digital stop-and-frisk system
  • Once supplied to NSA, it will presumably subject tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people to the full array of NSA’s tradecraft

Finally, though, there’s one other problem, which directly affects how many people get subjected to such analytical tradecraft, a problem identified by no other person than … Barack Obama.

Relying solely on the records of multiple providers, for example, could require companies to alter their procedures in ways that raise new privacy concerns.

I suspect one of those privacy concerns, as I laid out in this post, is the necessity to make analytical judgments about what high volume numbers distort the chaining system.

Someone needs to go in and take out such high volume numbers — which include voice mail access numbers, telemarketers, and pizza joints — otherwise almost everyone is two degrees of separation from everyone else.

For two of these functions, I assume the telecoms can do the task as easily as the NSA. (The dirty secret is they conduct the same kind of 3-degrees analysis as the government does!) They know what their own (and reseller phone companies) voice mail access numbers are, after all, and surely they track the telemarketer spam that weighs down their system.

It’s the pizza joints that have me — that always have me — worried.

Pizza joints absolutely distort the contact chaining system. Keith Alexander learned this when the contact chaining he was doing — and he used to claim he had mapped out all the evil people tied to Iraq — showed everyone to be guilty because they frequented the same pizza joints.

When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA’s turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

“He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy,” says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. “Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops.”

Nevertheless, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a tie through a pizza joint can be a very important tie through a pizza joint, as I believe Gerry’s Italian Kitchen was in the case of the Tsarnaev brothers. If NSA purged the pizza joint in that case, they may have eliminated some of the most important evidence tying the brothers (or at least Tamerlan) to the Waltham murder in 2011.

So who, under this new system, will do the pizza joint analysis?

If the phone companies do it (which I doubt, because of cases like the Tsarnaevs), it will mean even more intensive data mining of customer data while it remains in their hands.

If the NSA does it, it means a lot more totally innocent people will have their data turned over to NSA to do as they wish.

Don’t get me wrong. The Obama proposal is an improvement off the status quo. But for these reasons, including the pizza joint problem, it still doesn’t comply with the Fourth or First Amendments.

NSA Bids to Expand Spying in Guise of “Fixing” Phone Dragnet

/8 Comments/in , , /by

Dutch Ruppersberger has provided Siobhan Gorman with details of his plan to “fix” the dragnet — including repeating the laughable claim that the “dragnet” (which she again doesn’t distinguish as solely the Section 215 data that makes up a small part of the larger dragnet) doesn’t include cell data.

Only, predictably, it’s not a “fix” of the phone dragnet at all, except insofar as NSA appears to be bidding to use it to do all the things they want to do with domestic dragnets but haven’t been able to do legally. Rather, it appears to be an attempt to outsource to telecoms some of the things the NSA hasn’t been able to do legally since 2009.

For example, there’s the alert system that Reggie Walton shut down in 2009.

As I reported back in February, the NSA reportedly has never succeeded in replacing that alert system, either for technical or legal reasons or both.

NSA reportedly can’t get its automated chaining program to work. In the motion to amend, footnote 12 — which modifies part of some entirely redacted paragraphs describing its new automated alert approved back in 2012 — reads:

The Court understands that to date NSA has not implemented, and for the duration of this authorization will not as a technical matter be in a position to implement, the automated query process authorized by prior orders of this Court for analytical purposes. Accordingly, this amendment to the Primary Order authorizes the use of this automated query process for development and testing purposes only. No query results from such testing shall be made available for analytic purposes. Use of this automated query process for analytical purposes requires further order of this Court.

PCLOB describes this automated alert this way.

In 2012, the FISA court approved a new and automated method of performing queries, one that is associated with a new infrastructure implemented by the NSA to process its calling records.68 The essence of this new process is that, instead of waiting for individual analysts to perform manual queries of particular selection terms that have been RAS approved, the NSA’s database periodically performs queries on all RAS-approved seed terms, up to three hops away from the approved seeds. The database places the results of these queries together in a repository called the “corporate store.”

It has been 15 months since FISC approved this alert, but NSA still can’t get it working.

I suspect this is the root of the stories claiming NSA can only access 30% of US phone records.

As described by WSJ, this automated system will be built into the orders NSA provides telecoms; once a selector has been provided to the telecoms, they will keep automatically alerting on it.

Under the new bill, a phone company would search its databases for a phone number under an individual “directive” it would receive from the government. It would send the NSA a list of numbers called from that phone number, and possibly lists of phone numbers those numbers had called. A directive also could order a phone company to search its database for such calls as future records come in. [my emphasis]

This would, presumably, mean NSA still ends up with a corporate store, a collection of people against whom the NSA has absolutely not a shred of non-contact evidence, against whom they can use all their analytical toys, including searching of content.

Note, too, that this program uses the word “directive,” not query. Directive comes from the PRISM program, where the NSA gives providers generalized descriptions and from there have broad leeway to add new selectors. Until I hear differently, I’ll assume the same is true here: that this actually involves less individualized review before engaging in 2 degrees of Osama bin Laden.

The legislation seems ripe for inclusion of querying of Internet data (another area where the NSA could never do what it wanted to legally after 2009), given that it ties this program to “banning” (US collection of, but Gorman doesn’t say that either, maintaining her consistency in totally ignoring that EO 12333 collection makes up the greater part of bulk programs) Internet bulk data collection.

The bill from Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) and his Democratic counterpart, Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D., Md.), would ban so-called bulk collection of phone, email and Internet records by the government, according to congressional aides familiar with the negotiations. [my emphasis]

Call me crazy, but I’m betting there’s a way they’ll spin this to add in Internet chaining with this “fix.”

Note, too, Gorman makes no mention of location data, in spite of having tied that to her claims that NSA only collects 20% of data. Particularly given that AT&T’s Hemisphere program provides location data, we should assume this program could too, which would present a very broad expansion on the status quo.

And finally, note that neither the passage I quoted above on directives to providers, nor this passage specifies what kind of investigations this would be tied to (though they are honest that they want to do away with the fig leaf of this being tied to investigations at all).

The House intelligence committee bill doesn’t require a request be part of an ongoing investigation, Mr. Ruppersberger said, because intelligence probes aim to uncover what should be investigated, not what already is under investigation.

Again, the word “directive” in the PRISM context also provides the government the ability to secretly pass new areas of queries — having expanded at least from counterterrorism to counterproliferation and cybersecurity uses. So absent some very restrictive language, I would assume that’s what would happen here: NSA would pass it in the name of terrorism, but then use it primarily for cybersecurity and counterintelligence, which the NSA considers bigger threats these days.

And that last suspicion? That’s precisely what Keith Alexander said he planned to do with this “fix,” presumably during the period when he was crafting this “fix” with NSA’s local Congressman: throw civil libertarians a sop but getting instead an expansion of his cybersecurity authorities.

Update: Here’s Spencer on HPSCI, confirming it’s as shitty as I expected.

And here’s Charlie Savage on Obama’s alternative.

It would:

  • Keep Section 215 in place, though perhaps with limits on whether it can be used in this narrow application
  • Enact the same alert-based system and feed into the corporate store, just as the HPSCI proposal would
  • Include judicial review like they have now (presumably including automatic approval for FISA targets)

Obama’s is far better than HPSCI (though this seems to be part of a bad cop-good cop plan, and the devil remains in the details). But there are still some very serious concerns.

Bob Litt and Rachel Brand Redefine “Incidental”

/7 Comments/in /by

Sometimes, especially with PCLOB, there’s an exchange that I wildly imagine (emphasis on imagine–I’m not saying this is actually the case) is intended solely for my benefit.

Such is the case with an exchange at last week’s PCLOB hearing.

PCLOB Board Member Rachel Brand was trying — as she seemed to be doing exclusively with her questioning — to cue the government witnesses to pitch descriptions of programs in such a way as to make them less troubling. So she walked them through how NSA keeps upstream about collection for a shorter period than it keeps PRISM data. This gave NSA General Counsel Raj De an opportunity to make it sound like NSA, out of the generosity of its own heart, decided to throw out data sooner, and also gave him the opportunity to claim that collection FISC Judge John Bates found to be intentional collection of US person data was actually incidentally collected data.

MS. BRAND: Okay. So you said in an earlier round of questioning that upstream, collection from upstream is retained for a shorter period of time than collection from PRISM and you said that the reason for that distinction is that there’s a potentially greater privacy concern with respect to upstream collection. Can you elaborate on why, whether the additional privacy concerns that pertain to upstream.

MR. DE: Sure. And a lot of this is laid out in this court opinion that’s now public. This is from the fall of 2011. I think because of the nature of abouts collections, which we have discussed, there is potentially a greater likelihood of implicating incidental U.S. person communication or inadvertently collecting wholly domestic communications that therefore must need to be purged.

And for a variety of circumstances the court evaluated the minimization procedures we had in place and as a consequence of that evaluation the government put forth a shorter retention period to be sure that the court could reach comfort with the compliance of those procedures with the Fourth Amendment. And so two years was one element of the revised procedures that are now public.

It’s a nice benign way of describing how NSA got busted for violating the Fourth Amendment, and the FISC’s only response was to force the NSA to violate it for 2 years of retention rather than for 5 years.

From there, Brand invited the witnesses an opportunity to redefine the word “incidental” so it also includes this practice, which Bates judged to be intentional. ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt rose to the challenge of Orwellianism.

MS. BRAND: Okay. I want to use the word incidental collection there again, and your definition earlier seemed to be that by incidental you mean, by incidental U.S. person collection you mean that the person on the other end of the phone from the non-U.S. person abroad is a U.S. person. That’s your definition, right? Is there another definition that you’re aware of? Because you seem to be — okay. I think there’s been some frustration with the use the term incidental in that context because it’s not accidental, it’s intentional. It’s actually unavoidable. And so I just wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same page, that by incidental you mean not accidental, not unintentional, but this is actually what we’re doing.

MR. LITT: It is incidental to the collection on the target. It is not accidental, it is not inadvertent. Incidental is the appropriate term for it.

And by thus redefining incidental, Bob Litt gets to pretend that intentional wiretapping Americans in the US is not a violation of the laws — including Section 702 — prohibiting the intentional wiretapping of Americans in the US.

Does FBI EVER Age Off Its Section 702 Data?

/3 Comments/in /by

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has released the transcript of the first panel from its hearing on Wednesday.

And while I was concerned by the following exchange — between Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann and PCLOB Chair David Medine — in real time, I find it even more troubling on second pass.

MR. MEDINE: And could you address why the minimization procedures make it a reasonable form of collection under the Fourth Amendment?

[snip]

MR. WIEGMANN: You have retention rules. I believe in some cases, for NSA for example, you have a five year retention limit on how long the information can be retained. And so these are procedures that the courts have found protect U.S. privacy and make the collection reasonable for Fourth Amendment purposes.

MR. MEDINE: And under the minimization procedures I understand that the agency, the NSA, FBI, the CIA have their own minimization procedures and they’re not the same with each other?

MR. WIEGMANN: That’s right.

MR. MEDINE: Can you address why that shouldn’t be a concern that this information is not being subjected to the same minimization standards?

MR. WIEGMANN: So each of them have their own minimization procedures based on their unique mission, and the court reviews each of those for CIA, FBI, NSA, and it’s found them all reasonable for each different agency. They’re slightly different based on the operational needs, but they’re similar.

MR. MEDINE: Would it make more sense then if the same set of minimization procedures apply across the board for this kind of information?

MR. WIEGMANN: I don’t think. Again, just to contrast, for example, FBI and NSA that are using information in different ways. The FBI has a little more latitude with respect to U.S. person information in terms of criminal activity and evidence of a crime than NSA, which doesn’t have that law enforcement mission. So I think it is important to have some differences between the agencies in terms of how they handle the information.

We know what the NSA minimization procedures look like. Not only do they permit dissemination use of US person data in more than the examples described by Wiegmann, they’re frightfully permissive on other points (such as the retention of data for technical database purposes, or the limits on Attorney-Client privilege). Moreover, they permit the retention of data because of a threat to property, a clear expansion on the legal requirements.

But from Wiegmann’s description, it sounds like FBI’s minimization procedures (which are used as a basis for National Counterterrorism Center’s minimization procedures) are worse. Worse because they permit FBI even more leeway to use FISA authorized data in criminal investigations.

And worse because it’s not clear whether there’s even any retention time limits. Indeed, if you watch the clip above, it might be more accurate to punctuate that data retention sentence this way:

You have retention rules, I believe, in some cases. For NSA, for example, you have a five year retention limit.

In any case, the comment seems to suggest that in other cases — like, perhaps, the FBI and derivatively NCTC — you don’t have temporal limits. That would be consistent with FBI’s retention of many kinds of investigative data forever. But it would mean a great deal of data involving innocent Americans collected without a warrant remains in the FBI’s hands forever.

And all that’s before you consider that FBI has always, since the passage of FISA Amendments Act (or at least the first certifications later that year), been permitted to conduct backdoor searches on incidentally collected data. So they may not only be keeping this data forever, but performing warrantless back door searches on it.

Judge Reggie Walton Is Pissed that Government Is Making Material Misstatements to FISC, Again

/11 Comments/in /by

FISA Court Chief Judge Reggie Walton just issued a rather unhappy order requiring the government to explain why it materially misstated the facts about whether any plaintiffs had protection orders that governed the phone dragnet.

Generally, he wants to know why the government didn’t tell him that EFF had protection orders in the Jewel and Shubert cases. More specifically, he wants to know why they didn’t tell him that — as I reported here — the EFF had asked the government how they could claim there was no protection order when they had one in their suits of the larger dragnet.

A review of the E-mail Correspondence indicates that as early as February 26, 2014, the day after the government filed its February 25 Motion, the plaintiffs in Jewel and First Unitarian indeed sought to clarify why the preservation orders in Jewel and Shubert were not referenced in that motion. E-mail Correspondence at 6-7. The Court’s review of the E-mail Correspondence suggests that the DOJ attorneys may have perceived the preservation orders in Jewel and Shubert to be immaterial to the February 25 Motion because the metadata at issue in those cases was collected under what DOJ referred to as the “President’s Surveillance Program” (i.e., collection pursuant to executive authority), as opposed to having been collected under Section 215 pursuant to FISC orders — a proposition with which plaintiffs’ counsel disagreed. Id at 4. As this Court noted in the March 12 Order and Opinion, it is ultimately up to the Northern District of California, rather than the FISC, to determine what BR metadata is relevant to the litigation pending before the court.

As the government is well aware, it has a heightened duty of candor to the Court in ex parte procedings. See MODEL RULES OF PROF’L CONDUCT R. 3.3(d) (2013). Regardless of the government’s perception of the materiality of the preservation orders in Jewel and Shubert to its February 25 Motion, the government was on notice, as of February 26, 2014, that the plaintiffs in Jewel and First Unitarian believed that orders issued by the District Court for the Northern District of California required the preservation of the FISA telephony metadata at issue in the government’s February 25 Motion. E-mail Correspondence at 6-7. The fact that the plaintiffs had this understanding of the preservation orders–even if the government had a contrary understanding–was material to the FISC’s consideration of the February 25 Motion. The materiality of that fact is evidenced by the Court’s statement, based on the information provided by the government in the February 25 Motion, that “there is no indication that nay of the plaintiffs have sought discovery of this information or made any effort to have it preserved.” March 7 Opinion and Order at 8-9.

The government, upon learning this information, should have made the FISC aware of the preservation orders and of the plaintiffs’ understanding of their scopre, regardless of whether the plaintiffs had made a “specific request” that the FISC be so advised. Not only did the government fail to do so, but the E-mail Correspondence suggests that on February 28, 2014, the government sought to dissuade plaintiffs’ counsel from immediately raising this issue with the FISC or the Northern District of California. E-mail Correspondence at 5.

In a number of places, Walton provides an out for the government, suggesting they might just be stupid and not obstructing (those are my words, obviously). He even goes so far as to suggest that DOJ might have an internal communication problem between the Civil Division, which is litigating the EFF suits, and the National Security Division, which works with FISC.

But then he notes that both Civil AAG Stuart Delery and Acting NSD AAG John Carlin submitted the filings to him.

The government’s failure to inform the FISC of the plaintiffs’ understanding that the prior preservation orders require retention of Section 591 telephony metadata may have resulted from imperfect communication or coordination within the Department of Justice rather than from deliberate decision-making.4 Nonetheless, the Court expects the government to be far more attentive to its obligations in its practice before this Court.

4 Attorneys from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice participated in the E-Mail Correspondence with plaintiffs’ counsel. As a general matter, attorneys from the National Security Division represent the government before the FISC. The February 25 Motion, as well as the March 13 Response, were submitted by the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and the Acting Attorney General for the National Security Division.

Frankly, I hope Walton ultimately tries to learn why he wasn’t told about these protection orders in more detail years ago, when the government was deciding whether or not to destroy evidence of lawbreaking that Walton first identified in 2009. I also hope he gets to the bottom of why Deputy Attorney General James Cole had to intervene in this issue. But for now, I’m happy to see DOJ taken to the woodshed for misinforming the Court.

Update: Meanwhile, on the other coast, Judge Jeffrey White issued a protection order that is far broader than the government would prefer it to be. The government had implied that the First Unitarian Church suit only covered Section 215; earlier this week (I’ve got a post half written on it), EFF argued they’re challenging the dragnet, irrespective of what authorization the government used to collect it. Nothing in White’s order limits the protection order to Section 215 and this passage seems to encompass the larger dragnet.

Defendants’ searching of the telephone communications information of Plaintiffs is done without lawful authorization, probable cause, and/or individualized suspicion. It is done in violation of statutory and constitutional limitations and in excess of statutory and constitutional authority. Any judicial, administrative, or executive authorization (including any business records order issued pursuant to 50 U.S.C. § 1861) of the Associational Tracking Program or of the searching of the communications information of Plaintiffs is unlawful and invalid.

Update: fixed a typo in which I inadvertently said Walton caused rather than found the lawbreaking in 2009.

Former NSA General Counsel Robert Deitz, Who Rubber-Stamped Illegal Wiretap Program, Says All Felonies Should Be Prosecuted

/7 Comments/in , , /by

I’m watching a CUNY conference on sources and secrets, which currently has a panel including Bob Woodward, Jane Mayer, and former NSA General Counsel Robert Deitz.

When asked whether he could think of a leak that had been damaging, Deitz said the exposure of the illegal (he called it “special”) wiretap program had been damaging.

Then, in the context of prosecuting leaks, Deitz argued that all leaks should be prosecuted, because they involve a felony violation of an oath (that’s not always true, but I’ll just accept that Deitz believes all felonies should be prosecuted). He went on to say, “How is it you put a line around this felony and not prosecute it?”

According to the 2009 Draft NSA IG Report, Deitz, on September 20, 2001, suggested to Alberto Gonzales they should consider modifying FISA (which was then being modified as part of the PATRIOT Act); he appears to have gotten no answer. On October 5, 2001 — having asked but not been permitted to read the underlying OLC authorization for it (Addington read him a few lines over the phone), having not participated in the drafting of the Presidential Authorization for it, and having given it just one day of legal review — Deitz said a program violating the exclusivity provision of FISA was legal. On October 8, Deitz briefed the analysts who would carry out this illegal program.

Deitz’ subordinates provided the only oversight of the program at first. (Later in today’s program he claimed the line between domestic and foreign intelligence was rigorously maintained.) To his credit, Deitz ultimately fought to have the Inspector General read into the program after it had operated for some months.

This is a man who provided the legal fig leaf for a patently illegal program (though the IG Report provides no details of Deitz’ actions for the March to May 2004 timeframe, when the program was even more illegal). This is a man who showed awareness of the legally correct way to do this — include this expanded program in PATRIOT — but nevertheless accepted and participated in not doing so.

And he advocates prosecuting every felony.

Perhaps before he talks about prosecuting journalists and their sources, he should consider his own role in encouraging felonies?