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As Snowden Leak Anniversary Approaches, Intelligence Community Prepares to Declare Victory

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As June 5 approaches — and with it the one year anniversary of the first reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks — the privacy community is calling supporters to redouble efforts to improve the NSA “reform bill,” which I call the USA Freedumber Act, in the Senate.

I explained here why the Senate is unlikely to improve USA Freedumber in any meaningful way. The votes just aren’t there — not even in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ominously, Dianne Feinstein just scheduled an NSA hearing for Thursday afternoon, when most of the privacy community will be out rallying the troops.

Unless the surveillance community finds some way to defeat USA Freedumber, the intelligence community will soon be toasting themselves that they used the cover of Edward Snowden’s disclosures to expand surveillance. The “Edward Snowden Put the NSA in Your Smartphone Act,” they might call it.

To prevent that, the privacy community needs to find a way to defeat USA Freedumber. It’s not enough, in my opinion, to point to the judicial review codified by USA Freedumber to accede to letting this pass. Not only doesn’t USA Freedumber end what most normal people call, “bulk collection,” but it expands collection in a number of ways.

That’s true, in part, because of the way the bill defines “bulk collection.” USA Freedumber only considers something “bulk collection” if it collects all of some kind of data (so, all phone data in the US). If NSA limits collection at all — selecting to collect all the phone records from Area Code 202, for example — it no longer qualifies as bulk collection under the Intel Community definition used in the bill, no matter how broadly they’re collecting.

Here’s a post where I lay that out.

To make things worse, the last version of the House bill changed the term “selection term” to make it very broad: including “entities,” “addresses,” and “devices” among the things that count as a single target, all of which invite mass targeting. I was always skeptical about “specific selection term” serving as the limiting factor in the bill; key language about how the FISC currently understands “selection term” remains classified. But I do know that Zoe Lofgren and others in the House kept saying that under the current definition of the bill the government could collect all records in, say, my Area Code 202 example. And if that’s possible, it means the phone dragnet under this “reform” may be little more targeted than upstream Section 702 collection currently is, which has telecoms sniff through up to 75% of US Internet traffic.

But it’s not just that the bill doesn’t deliver what its boosters claim it does.

There are 4 other ways that the bill makes the status quo worse, as I show in this post:

  • The move to telecoms codifies changes in the chaining process that will almost certainly expand the universe of data being analyzed — potentially significantly
  • In three ways, the bill would permit the use of phone chaining for purposes beyond counterterrorism, which isn’t currently permitted
  • The bill weakens the minimization procedures on upstream Section 702 collection imposed by FISC Judge John Bates in 2011, making it easier for the government to collect and keep domestic content domestically
  • The bill moves the authority to set minimization procedures for Pen Registers from FISC to the Attorney General (and weakens them significantly), thus eliminating the tool John Bates used to shut down illegal content-as-metadata collection

In my opinion, these changes mean the NSA will be able to do much of what they were doing in 2009, before what were then called abuses — but under this bill would be legalized — were discovered. That, plus they’re likely to expand the dragnet beyond terrorism targets.

For a year, privacy advocates have believed we’d get reform in response to Snowden’s leaks. For too long, advocates treated HR 3361 as positive reform.

But unless we defeat USA Freedumber, the Intelligence Community will have used the event of Snowden’s leaks as an opportunity to expand the dragnet.

Snowden: “A Classified Executive Order”

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NSA Authorities TimelineYesterday, I noted that the subject of Edward Snowden’s emailed question to NSA’s Office of General Counsel pertained to one of the under-reported themes of his leaks, the way NSA uses EO 12333 to collect data on Americans that either clearly was or might have been covered by stricter laws passed by Congress. I also noted how unbelievably shitty the NSA training programs released to ACLU and EFF are, particularly the way seemingly outdated documents that remain in effect appear to allow spying on Americans prohibited by statute.

I’d like to return to the precise language Snowden used to refer to this email exchange (and a thus-far unreleased exchange he claims to have had with NSA’s Compliance folks).

Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. 

I suggested yesterday that this was likely a conflict over whether EO 12333 superseded laws passed by Congress, including but not limited to FISA.

But note: Snowden says he asked about a “classified” EO.

EO 12333 is unclassified.

So there are two possibilities. First, that there’s a classified EO — one that remains classified  — that we don’t know about, one Congress may not even be fully cognizant of (on the premise that this EO supersedes the law).

That’s possible. But EO 12333 is the only EO referenced in USSID 18’s list of references.

USSID 18 References

The other possibility is far more interesting.

As I noted, the documents laying out the core regulations governing NSA conflict badly, largely because many of the documents are very dated, and have been (or should have been) superseded by recent laws (like the FISA Amendments Act) and court decisions (like John Bates’ 2011 ruling on upstream collection).

Of particular interest is NSA/CSS Policy 1-23 (starting at PDF 110). That policy is interesting, first of all, because it was first issued on March 11, 2004 by Michael Hayden. That is, this policy dates to the very day when Michael Hayden agreed to continue the illegal wiretap program even as half of DOJ threatened to quit.

The policy was updated twice, once to make what were considered minor adjustments in policy in 2007, and once in 2009 to incorporate FISA Amendments Act changes. Thus, the policy at least purports to fully incorporate FAA. The 2009 reissue — and its classified annex — is considered among the signature authorizing milestones according to a timeline leaked by Snowden, above, and the only one that mentions a classified annex.

But — as I noted yesterday — the policy still relies on (and incorporates) a classified annex to EO 12333 that was written in 1988 (though the document itself bears the March 11, 2004 date). Read more →

USA Freedumber Will Not Get Better in the “Prosecutors” Committee

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Having been badly outmaneuvered on USA Freedumber — what was sold as reform but is in my opinion an expansion of spying in several ways — in the House, civil liberties groups are promising a real fight in the Senate.

“This is going to be the fight of the summer,” vowed Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.

If advocates are able to change the House bill’s language to prohibit NSA agents from collecting large quantities of data, “then that’s a win,” he added.

“The bill still is not ideal even with those changes, but that would be an improvement,” Rottman said.

[snip]

“We were of course very disappointed at the weakening of the bill,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. “Right now we really are turning our attention to the Senate to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

[snip]

One factor working in the reformers’ favor is the strong support of Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

Unlike House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who only came to support the bill after negotiations to produce a manager’s amendment, Leahy was the lead Senate sponsor of the USA Freedom Act.

The fact that Leahy controls the committee gavel means he should be able to guide the bill through when it comes up for discussion next month, advocates said.

“The fact that he is the chairman and it’s his bill and this is an issue that he has been passionate about for many years” is comforting, Greene said.

I hope they prove me wrong. But claims this will get better in the Senate seem to ignore the recent history of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s involvement in surveillance bills, not to mention the likely vote counts.

It is true Pat Leahy wants real reform. And he has a few allies on SJC. But in recent years, every surveillance-related bill that came through SJC has been watered down when Dianne Feinstein offered an alternative (which Leahy sometimes adopted as a manager’s amendment, perhaps realizing he didn’t have the votes). After DiFi offered reform, Sheldon Whitehouse (who a number of less sophisticated SJC members look to as a guide on these issues) enthusiastically embraced it, and everyone fell into line. Often, a Republican comes in and offers a “bipartisan reform” (meaning conservative Republicans joining with the Deep State) that further guts the bill.

This is how the Administration (shacking up with Jeff Sessions) defeated an effort to rein in Section 215 and Pen Registers in 2009.

This is how DiFi defeated an effort to close the backdoor loophole in 2012.

As this was happening in 2009, Russ Feingold called out SJC for acting as if it were the “Prosecutors Committee,” rather than the Judiciary Committee.

(Note, in both of those cases as well as on the original passage of Section 702, I understood fairly clearly what the efforts to stymie reform would do, up to 4 years before those programs were publicly revealed; I’ve got a pretty good record on this front!)

And if you don’t believe this is going to happen again, tell me why this whip count is wrong:

Screen shot 2014-05-26 at 5.18.49 PM

If my read here is right, the best case scenario — short of convincing Sheldon Whitehouse some of what the government wants to do is unconstitutional, which John Bates has already ruled that it is — is relying on people like Ted Cruz (whose posturing on civil liberties is often no more than that) and Jeff Flake (who was great on these issues in the House but has been silent and absent throughout this entire debate). And that’s all to reach a 9-9 tie in SJC.

Which shouldn’t be surprising. Had Leahy had the votes to move USA Freedom Act through SJC, he would have done so in October.

That was the entire point of starting in the House: because there was such a large number of people (albeit, for the  most part without gavels) supporting real reform in the House. But because reformers (starting with John Conyers and Jerry Nadler) uncritically accepted a bad compromise and then let it be gutted, that leverage was squandered.

Right now, we’re looking at a bill that outsources an expanded phone dragnet to the telecoms (with some advantages and some drawbacks), but along the way resets other programs to what they were before the FISC reined them in from 2009 to 2011. That’s the starting point. With a vote count that leaves us susceptible to further corruption of the bill along the way.

Edward Snowden risked his freedom to try to rein in the dragnet, and instead, as of right now it looks like Congress will expand it.

Update: I’ve moved Richard Blumenthal into the “pro reform” category based on this statement after the passage of USA Freedumber. Thanks to Katherine Hawkins for alerting me to the statement.

Two History Lessons in the Fourth Amendment

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I’ve known the story of James Otis’ fight against Writs of Assistance and its role in the establishment of our Fourth Amendment. But I really liked this telling of the story in the BoGlo.

[T]he Fourth Amendment can be traced to a neighborhood that has long regarded outsiders with skepticism. It was in the North End that simmering public resentment against searches found a test case in 1766, when an imperious British official squared off against a proud homeowner who insisted that his modest dwelling was, indeed, his castle.

[snip]

Those with long memories remembered that the original Puritans had fled England at a time when royal officers searched their dwellings for Puritan Bibles and other signs of independent thinking. They knew the phrase “a man’s home is his castle,” linked to an English lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, who had inspired the first generation of New Englanders—and whose own home had been ransacked by English authorities near the end of his life.

The English, tightening the clamps on their vast empire, were stepping up their systems of enforcement in the 1750s and 1760s. The British were certain that they had the right to enter houses to enforce the law— how else could they run an empire? All known governments asserted this power, and much precedent supported it.

In a celebrated court case in 1761, an up-and-coming lawyer, James Otis, attacked the Writs of Assistance in a speech that soon became famous. In a small chamber inside the Old State House, he held his audience spellbound, speaking for hours as he drew on ancient English law to skewer the English. In insisting on “the freedom of one’s house,” he was inventing an argument as much as he was citing precedent—the Magna Carta, designed by 13th-century barons, was a long way from the problems of a Boston homeowner in 1761, and the law was vaguer on these points that Otis cared to admit. But as he hammered away at British arrogance, he expressed an idea about the importance of privacy with deep roots in New England’s rocky soil.

The story’s useful not just for the way the arguments attributed to the British at the time — all governments assert the power to enter homes at will, and how could you run an empire without that authority? — resonate with the arguments made about surveillance now.

But because of the stark contrast it offers with a different story of our founding, one told by John Yoo in an October 2001 OLC memo authorizing the government to use military force in times of emergency within the US. The whole memo is worth reading, but Yoo situated an undefinable authority to respond to exigencies in the Executive, pointing to things like the Shay’s Rebellion and this language from an Alexander Hamilton Federalist paper.

As they understood it, the Constitution amply provided the federal Government with the authority to respond to such exigencies. “There are certain emergencies of nations in which expedients that in the ordinary state of things ought to be forborne become essential to the public weal. And the government, from the possibility of such emergencies, ought ever to have the option of making use of them.” The Federalist No. 36, at 191 (Alexander Hamilton). Because “the circumstances which may affect the public safety are [not] reducible within certain determinate limits, .. . it must be admitted, as a necessary consequence that there can be no limitation of that authority which is to provide for the defense and protection of the community in any matter essential to its efficacy.” Id. No. 23, at 122 (Alexander Hamilton). As the nature and frequency of these emergencies could not be predicted, so too the Framers did not try to enumerate all of the powers necessary in response. Rather, they assumed that the national government would possess a broad authority to take action to meet any emergency. The federal Government is to possess “an indefinite power of providing for emergencies as they might arise.” Id. No. 34, at 175 (Alexander Hamilton). Events leading up to the Federal Convention, such as Shay’s Rebellion, clearly demonstrated the need for a central government that could use military force domestically.

I’m most interested in what Yoo did with this argument. Having decided the President had the authority to use the military within the US, Yoo argued that military operations included searches.

Our forces must be free to “seize” enemy personnel or “search” enemy quarters, papers and messages without having to show “probable cause” before a neutral magistrate, and even without having to demonstrate that their actions were constitutionally “reasonable.” They must be free to use any means necessary to defeat the enemy’s forces, even if their efforts might cause collateral damage to United States persons.

[snip]

The view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations against terrorists makes eminent sense. Consider, for example, a case in which a military commander, authorized to use force domestically, received information that, although credible, did not amount to probable cause, that a terrorist group had concealed a weapon of mass destruction in an apartment building. In order to prevent a disaster in which hundreds or thousands of lives would be lost, the commander should be able to immediately seize and secure the entire building, evacuate and search the premises, and detain, search, and interrogate everyone found inside. If done by the police for ordinary law enforcement purposes, such actions most likely would be held to violate the Fourth Amendment. See Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85 (1979) (Fourth Amendment violated by evidence search of all persons who are found on compact premises subject to search warrant, even when police have a reasonable belief that such persons are connected with drug trafficking and may be concealing contraband). To subject the military to the warrant and probable cause requirement that the courts impose on the police would make essential military operations such as this utterly impossible.

Cheney’s people did try, unsuccessfully, to use this memo to justify using force in Lackawanna, NY to search for suspected terrorists.

But it was actually used: as foundation for the illegal wiretap program (which, given that it amounted to the NSA invading the stored communications of Americans without a warrant, fundamentally amounted to the deployment of the military domestically). The memo was not withdrawn until after the FISA Amendments Act established a different basis for the dragnet.

The BoGlo tribute to James Otis only underscored how much we’ve colonized our own country, insisting on the authority to conduct such searches because how else can you run an empire!

USA Freedumb Act: The Timing

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A number of people have expressed appreciation for this analysis: if you find this useful, please consider donating to support my work. 

I’m going to do a series of more finished posts on the “compromised” version of Jim Sensenbrenner’s USA Freedom Act, which I hereby dub the USA Freedumb Act (thanks to Fake John Schindler for the suggestion), because so many of the reforms have been gutted. Here’s the initially proposed bill. Here’s my working thread on USA Freedumb.

You will hear a great many respectable people making positive comments about this bill, comments they normally would not make. That’s because of the carefully crafted timing.

As you recall, Mike Rogers originally got the House Parliamentarian to rule that the bill could go through the House Intelligence Committee. And his bill, which I affectionately call “RuppRoge” after Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger and Scooby Doo’s “Rut Roh” phase, is genuinely shitty. Not only does it put the NSA onsite at providers and extend call records collection beyond terrorism applications, but it also extends such collection beyond call records generally. It is likely an attempt to get the US back into the Internet dragnet business. Shitty bill.

That said, in key ways RuppRoge is very similar to USA Freedumb. Both “limit” bulk collection by limiting collection to selectors (Freedumb does so across the board, including for NSLs, whereas RuppRoge does so for sensitive Business Records, call records, and Internet metadata). Both propose a similarly (IMO) flimsy FISC advocate. Both propose laughably weak FISC transparency measures. Both will include compensation and immunity for providers they don’t currently have.

Aside from three areas where RuppRoge is better — it forces agencies to update their EO 12333 proposals, doesn’t extend the PATRIOT Act, and provides a (not very useful) way to challenge certificates, all the way up to SCOTUS — and three where it is far worse — it develops more Insider Threat measures, it applies for uses beyond terrorism and beyond call records, and doesn’t include new (but now circumscribed) IG reporting  — they’re not all that different. [Correction: USA Freedumb ALSO applies beyond terrorism.]

They’re differently shitty, but both are pretty shitty.

The reason why otherwise respectable people are welcoming the shitty Freedumb bill, however, is that it gives House Judiciary Committee — with a number of real reformers on it — first pass on this bill. It’s a jurisdictional issue. It puts the jurisdiction for surveillance bills back where it belongs, at the Judiciary Committee.

Oh, by the way, one of the more extensive (in terms of text) real changes in Freedumb is it finally includes the House Judiciary Committee, along with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senate Judiciary Committee, among the committees that get certain kinds of reporting. Jurisdiction. (No, I can’t explain to you why it wasn’t included in the first place in 2008, and no, I can’t explain why that detail is not better known.) It gives everyone on HJC a tiny reason to support the bill, because they’ll finally get the reporting they should have gotten in 2008.

The House Intelligence Committee will consider RuppRoge the day after HJC considers Freedumb, Thursday. Which has elicited hasty (overly hasty, IMO) statements of support for Freedumb, as a way to head off the shitty RuppRoge.

Effectively, the National Security State has managed to put two differently shitty bills before Congress and forced reformers to choose. Freedumb is the better (as in less horrible) bill, and it might get better in Committee. But it’s not a runaway call. And the haste has prevented anyone from really figuring out what a central change to both programs means, which limits collection to selectors, which could be defined in very broad terms (and about which — you’ll have to take my word for now — the NSA has lied in public comments).

One more timing issue that I suspect explains the sudden activity surrounding “reform.” The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is due to release a report on Section 702 in the next month or so (its comment period for the report closed on April 11). Given the comments of David Medine, James Dempsey, and Patricia Wald at hearings, I strongly suspect PCLOB will recommend reforms — at least — to back door searches, and possibly to upstream collection. Both are items which were gutted as USA Freedom became Freedumb. (In addition, two aspects that would have expanded PCLOB’s authorities — giving it a role in picking the FISC advocate and giving it subpoena power — have been removed.) So in the same way that President Obama rushed to reaffirm NSA’s unified structure, in which the Information Assurance Division and Cybercommand functions are unified with the more general NSA spying function, before his handpicked Review Group recommended they be split, this seems to be a rush to pre-empt any recommendations PCLOB makes.

Ultimately, these two shitty bills are destined to be merged in conference anyway, and reformers seem to have given up 75% of the field before we get started.

Which means just about the only “reform” we’ll get are actually tactical fixes to help the Security State deal with legal and technical issues they’ve been struggling with.

The USA Freedumb Act has become — with DiFi’s Fake FISA Fix and RuppRoge before it — the third fake reform since Edward Snowden’s leaks first got published. Wearing down the reformers seems to be working.

The Qazi Brothers: The Craziest Bit of Blatant Parallel Construction to Protect FAA

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On Monday, the government submitted unclassified and classified motions asking Magistrate Judge John O’Sullivan to reconsider his order that the government defend the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act in their case against Raees and Sheheryar Qazi, two Pakistani Americans charged with conspiring to use a WMD. While the government admits there was never a real plot, Raees was allegedly reaching out to al Qaeda and the FBI found batteries and Christmas lights in Sheheryar’s place, where Raees lived, which the government claims were to be used to make a bomb.

I’ll get into the long, ongoing dispute about the FAA in this case.

But before I do, note that in August 2013, over 8 months after the brothers had been arrested and 4 months after the older brother, Sheheryar, had demanded notice if the government had used FISA Amendments Act against him, the government obtained warrants; the government provided those warrants while handing over content obtained under a warrant from Yahoo and Hotmail, precisely the kind of content the government obtains under PRISM using Section 702 authority.

While I can’t know whether the government obtained warrants for content originally obtained under FAA, O’Sullivan permitted a constitutional challenge to FAA even without notice from the government that it had been used against the brothers (though last July the government did submit an response to Sheheryar’s challenge to FISA that discussed 3 different authorities; see section IB).

You do the math.

As I said, this challenge goes back some time, to April 2013, in the wake of both Dianne Feinstein’s naming of the brothers in a speech defending the reauthorization of the FAA and the Amnesty v. Clapper decision ruling that judged the plaintiffs didn’t have standing, but that defendants who did would be accorded the opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the law.

Of particular interest, after the government originally refused to give notice to the brothers on whether it had used FAA to get them, Sheheryar asked specifically whether the government used 702 information in the affidavit to obtain the content and physical search FISA warrants used against the brothers (probably targeted, as I said, at Raees). The government reacted particularly aggressively to that affidavit request, as if Sheheryar struck close to the bone.

Which brings us to the argument the government is now making to Sheheryar’s constitutional challenge. The government says that Sheheryar Qazi should not be able challenge the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act because it will not introduce any FAA-derived information against him at trial.

Thus, in order for a defendant to move to suppress FISA or FAA-obtained or derived evidence, the defendant must be: ( 1) “a person against whom evidence obtained or derived from” (2) “an electronic surveillance” [or physical search] (3) “to which he is an aggrieved person” (4) “is to be, or has been, introduced or otherwise used or disclosed” (5) in a “trial, hearing or other proceeding.”

[snip]

Because the government has not and does not intend to use or disclose in trial any evidence obtained or derived from FAA-authorized surveillance as to which Movant is an aggrieved person, Movant cannot demonstrate any sort of concrete, particularized and actual or imminent injury, much less an injury “fairly traceable” to the FAA. Movant also cannot possibly demonstrate that any resolution of the constitutionality of the FAA would redress any injury.

It says this even as it is working on a separate theory why Sheheryar’s brother, Raees, against whom the primary traditional FISA warrant was almost certainly targeted, cannot challenge FAA’s constitutionality, either. The government appears to be less sure that they can argue with a straight face that none of the evidence they’ll submit at trial against Raees derived from FAA.

But that motion is due after a May 9 hearing in which the judge will consider whether Sheheryar’s counsel, Ronald Chapman, must withdraw as counsel because he witnessed an alleged altercation between the brothers are two Marshals in a SCIF on April 8 (Chapman just submitted a statement that he has no conflict under FL Bar rules). That same day, April 8, Raees joined in his brother’s demand on the constitutionality of FAA, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the government argued Raees improperly joined his brother’s request because of that meeting.

The government suggests it may file additional charges against the brothers for the alleged altercation. At which point they’ll probably drop these flimsy terrorism charges, bust the brothers for assault, and avoid having to reveal the shell game by which they came to arrest the brothers in the first place.

Read more →

Dianne Feinstein Invokes Torture’s Covert Status on Declassification

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Five years ago, I reported (BREAKING) that the Bush Administration (aka Dick Cheney) made the torture program a Special Access Program in unusual fashion. Rather than CIA Director George Tenet make torture a SAP, as mandated by the Executive Order governing such things, unnamed people in the National Security Council did so.

Panetta tells a funny story about how (but not when) the torture program became a special access program.

Section 6.1(kk) of the Executive Order defines a “special access program” as “a program established for a special class of classified information that imposes safeguarding and access requirements that exceed those normally required for information at the same classification level.” Section 4.5 of the Order specifies the U.S. Government officials who may create a special access program. This section further provides that for special access programs pertaining to intelligence activities (including special activities, but not including military operations, strategic, and tactical programs), or intelligence sources or methods, this function shall be exercised by the Director of the CIA.

[snip]

Officials at the National Security Council, (NSC) determined that in light of the extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the United States and the senstivity of the activities contemplated in the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program, it was essential to limit access to the information in the program. NSC officials established a special access program governing access to information relating to the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program. As the executive agent for implementing the terrorist detention and interrogation program, the CIA is responsible for limiting access to such information in accordance with the NSC’s direction. [my emphasis]

See the funny bit? The first paragraph says the Director of the CIA “shall” “exercise” the function of creating special access programs pertaining to intelligence. But then the very next paragraph says “NSC officials established a special access program.” One paragraph says the Director of CIA has to do it, but the next paragraph admits someone else did it.

Since that time, I’ve asked experts in classification and they agree that something funky went down (note, too, that torture wasn’t a SAP at the very beginning).

I believe torture’s odd SAP status is one of the things that has implicated the Presidency, which the Obama Administration went to some lengths to cover up.

But it also should dictate the White House take the lead on declassification of the torture program.

Don’t take my word for it — take Dianne Feinstein’s word. In a letter to the White House, she invoked torture’s status as a “covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council” to call for the White House to lead declassification.

In a letter to the President dated April 7 and obtained by McClatchy, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called for swift action on the summary and the findings and conclusions of the report, which members voted last week to declassify. The summary, Feinstein said, should be released “quickly and with minimal redactions.”

“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.

Note, Dianne Feinstein has just formally confirmed the same detail the Obama Administration appealed to keep secret: torture was authorized by the President, not by OLC, not by George Tenet, not by John Rizzo. The President.

Which is why the President should take responsibility for releasing the report.

 

In Defending Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden Reminds that Michael Hayden Lied to Congress

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Like Harry Reid and Mark Udall, Ron Wyden has defended Dianne Feinstein against Michael Hayden’s suggestion that she’s too “emotional” to investigate torture.

But unlike Reid and Udall — who attack Hayden for being a sexist pig (though not in that language) — Wyden attacks Hayden for being a liar.

General Hayden’s suggestion that Chairman Feinstein was motivated by ‘emotion’ rather than a focus on the facts is simply outrageous. Over the past five years I watched Chairman Feinstein manage this investigation in an extremely thorough and professional manner, and the result is an extraordinarily detailed report based on millions of pages of internal CIA records, including operational cables, internal memos, and interview transcripts.

General Hayden unfortunately has a long history of misleading the American public – he did it on domestic surveillance when he was the head of the NSA, and he did it on torture when he was the CIA Director. The best way to correct this culture of misinformation is to give the American people a chance to review the facts for themselves, and I’ll be working with my colleagues and the administration to ensure that happens quickly.

Mind you, Wyden focuses on Hayden’s lies to the American people.

But it’s as good a time as any to recall the lies Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee on April 12, 2007, when he said the following:

While FBI and CIA continued unsuccessfully to try to glean information from Abu Zubaydah using established US Government interrogation techniques, all of those involved were mindful that the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks were still at large and, according to available intelligence reportedly, were actively working to attack the US Homeland again. CIA also knew from its intelligence holdings that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could help us track down al-Qa’ida leaders and prevent attacks. As a result, CIA began to develop its own interrogation program, keeping in mind at all times that any new interrogation techniques must comply with US law and US international obligations under the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

A handful of techniques were developed for potential use; these techniques are effective, safe, and do not violate applicable US laws or treaty obligations. In August 2002, CIA began using these few and lawful interrogation techniques in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. As stated by the President in his speech on 6 September 2006, “It became clear that he (Abu Zubaydah) had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures … the procedures were tough, and thy were safe, and lawful, and necessary.”

Prior to using any new technique on Abu Zubaydah, CIA sought and obtained from the Department of Justice an opinion confirming that none of these new techniques violated US statutes prohibiting torture or US obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture.

As CIA’s efforts to implement these authorities got underway in 2002, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, the Speaker and the minority leader of the House, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees were fully briefed on the interrogation procedures.

After the use of these techniques, Abu Zubaydah became one of our most important sources of intelligence on al-Qa’ida. [my emphasis]

The lies here include:

  • FBI was successful at getting intelligence from Abu Zubaydah
  • CIA never considered the Convention against Torture until after the CIA IG Report in 2004
  • CIA knew Abu Zubaydah had lied under torture in the past
  • CIA did not receive DOJ authorization before starting the torture, which started before August 1
  • CIA used techniques outside those approved by DOJ
  • Only the Gang of Four got briefed on Abu Zubaydah’s torture, and even then they were not fully briefed until February 2003

It is highly likely that Hayden knew that most of these were lies, but for most I can’t prove that. I also doubt Zubaydah had information on the whereabouts of al Qaeda’s leadership.

But as I showed in this post, I can prove that he did know only the Gang of Four got briefed on torture.

That’s because the day before Hayden testified at the SSCI hearing, in a memo addressed to him entitled “Information for 12 April SSCI Hearing,” CIA laid out all the briefings they had done on torture and rendition. And CIA’s own records–records Hayden received the day before he made these statements in preparation for the hearing–show that:

  • Tom Daschle, Senate Majority Leader from the time the torture began until the end of 2002, and Minority Leader until the end of 2004, was never briefed on the torture program.
  • Trent Lott, Senate Minority Leader until the end of 2003, was never briefed on the torture program while in leadership (though as a member of SSCI, he was briefed on the torture program on March 15, 2006).
  • Denny Hastert, Speaker of the House through the end of 2006, was not briefed on any aspect of the program until July 1, 2005.
  • Dick Gephardt, House Minority Leader through the end of 2003 (and therefore, through the worst torture) was never briefed on the program.
  • Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader from 2005 until 2007 and Senate Majority Leader thereafter, was not briefed until September 6, 2006, when Bush made the program public.
  • Though Nancy Pelosi had an (incomplete) briefing as House Intelligence Ranking Member in 2002, she did not have a briefing as House Minority Leader.
  • Just Bill Frist, who was first briefed in July 2004, seven months after he took over as Senate Majority Leader, was briefed in timely fashion at all.

The Intelligence Committee heads were briefed, however inadequately. But with the exception of Bill Frist, the CIA barely briefed Congressional Leadership at all.

I had forgotten how blatantly Hayden lied, in what would have been one of the earliest briefings for the full Committee after they first got read into the program.

But it’s clear he did lie. And he lied about information he had just been informed was a lie.

No wonder Hayden seems so desperate to defend his own manhood at this time.

He’s about to be exposed.

Update: While we’re talking about Michael Hayden lies, here’s my new favorite NSA lie, when he had Paul Wolfowitz tell Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that NSA wasn’t collecting content-as-metadata in the Internet dragnet program when they actually were.

The Court had specifically directed the government to explain whether this unauthorized collection involved the acquisition of information other than the approved Categories [redacted] Order at 7. In response, the Deputy Secretary of Defense [Paul Wolfowitz] stated that the “Director of NSA [Michael Hayden] has informed me that at no time did NSA collect any category of information … other than the [redacted] categories of meta data” approved in the [redacted] Opinion, but also note that NSA’s Inspector General [Joel Brenner] had not completed his assessment of this issue. [redacted] Decl. at 21.13 As discussed below, this assurance turned out to be untrue.

13 At a hearing on [redacted] Judge Kollar-Kotelly referred to this portion of the Deputy Secretary’s declaration and asked: “Can we conclude that there wasn’t content here?” [redacted] of NSA, replied, “There is not the physical possibility of our having [redacted] [my emphasis]

The Torture Apologists Raise Brennan’s Torture-Derived Scary Memos

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Some time in mid-2004, 8 high ranking National Security officials gave then presiding FISA Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly a briefing. Their goal was to convince her the then halted and now-discontinued Internet dragnet program was so important, and the terrorist threat against the US so great, she should write a shoddy legal opinion authorizing NSA to restart the program under the authority of the FISA Pen Register statute.

As part of the briefing, they replicated a process they had used for Bush’s illegal wiretap program: to have CIA’s analytical people write what they called a “scary memo” explaining why al Qaeda was so dangerous we had to continue that dragnet.

After the terrorism analysts completed their portion of the memoranda, the DCI Chief of Staff added a paragraph at the end of the memoranda stating that the individuals and organizations involved in global terrorism (and discussed in the memoranda) possessed the capability and intention to’ undertake further terrorist attacks within the United States. The DCI Chief of Staff recalled that the paragraph was provided to him initially by a senior White House official. The paragraph included the DCI’s recommendation to the President that he authorize the NSA to conduct surveillance activities under the PSP. CIA Office of General Counsel (OGC) attorneys reviewed the draft threat assessment memoranda to determine whether they contained sufficient threat information and a compelling case for reauthorization of the PSP. [my emphasis]

As head of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (and later as head of the nascent National Counterterrorism Center), John Brennan oversaw that “scary memo.”

Last year, John Brennan admitted that he used information derived from the torture program (he calls it the detention and interrogation  program) for those “scary memos.”

Burr: I’m still not clear on whether you think the information from CIA interrogations saved lives.  Have you ever made a representation to a court, including the FISA court, about the type and importance of information learned from detainees including detainees in the CIA detention and interrogation program?

Brennan: Ahm, first of all, in the first part of your question, as to you’re not sure whether I believe that there has been information … I don’t know myself.

Burr: I said I wasn’t clear whether I understood, whether whether I was clear.

Brennan: And I’m not clear at this time either because I read a report that calls into question a lot of the information that I was provided earlier on, my impressions. Um. There, when I was in the government as the head of the national counterterrorism center I know that I had signed out a number of um affirmations related to the uh continuation of certain programs uh based on the analysis and intelligence that was available to analysts. I don’t know exactly what it was at the time, but we can take a look at that.

Burr: But the committee can assume that you had faith if you made that claim to a court or including the FISA court, you had faith in the documents in the information that was supplied to you to make that declaration.

Brennan: Absolutely. At the time if I had made any such affirmation, i would have had faith that the information I was provided was an accurate representation. [my emphasis]

We can imagine the kind of things Brennan might have used in his “scary memos” and that briefing to Kollar-Kotelly, on which the entire FISC-authorized dragnet .

Hassan Ghul — whom CIA tortured even after he provided critical information about Osama bin Laden’s courier — was already in custody, and given uncertainty about when his torture started, may have provided such information.

Read more →

Thanks to Dianne Feinstein and Mark Udall for Seeing Torture Report Through

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The Senate Intelligence Committee just voted 11-3 to release the torture report, with 3 ardent GOP critics voting to release the report.

McClatchy (as it has had throughout recent debates over this) has good coverage, including two new details:

  • CIA illegally detained 26 of 119 detainees (this may refer to CIA’s practice of ghosting detainees, and removing some illegally from Iraq, as well as the mistaken detention of people like Khalid el-Masri).
  • “The news media were manipulated with leaks that tended to blunt criticism of the agency.” (We knew that, but glad to see SSCI agrees).

A lot of people on the Senate Intelligence Committee deserve credit for making this happen. It started, after all, under Jay Rockefeller’s tenure.

But Dianne Feinstein and Mark Udall deserve particular attention. Feinstein persisted in this through a lot of opposition from Republicans on the committee. And she oversaw a great deal of work to get it done.

Her statement read, in part,

The report also points to major problems with CIA’s management of this program and its interactions with the White House, other parts of the executive branch and Congress. This is also deeply troubling and shows why oversight of intelligence agencies in a democratic nation is so important.

The release of this summary and conclusions in the near future shows that this nation admits its errors, as painful as they may be, and seeks to learn from them. It is now abundantly clear that, in an effort to prevent further terrorist attacks after 9/11 and bring those responsible to justice, the CIA made serious mistakes that haunt us to this day. We are acknowledging those mistakes, and we have a continuing responsibility to make sure nothing like this ever occurs again.

While I’m not satisfied simply with admitting error — democracy can’t work when rule of law doesn’t — she’s right that the intel agencies need adequate oversight.

Mark Udall, in the last year, has also made the report a particular focus, particularly with his relentless pressure on the White House, even in a tough reelection year. He repeated that pressure in his statement on the release.

“Following today’s historic vote, the president faces what I believe should be a straightforward question. He can defer declassification decisions to the CIA — which has demonstrated an inability to face the truth about this program — or pass this authority to the Director of National Intelligence or hold on to the redaction pen himself,” Udall added. “The president needs to understand that the CIA’s clear conflict of interest here requires that the White House step in and manage this process.”

Let’s hope Feinstein, Udall, and others persist in their efforts to fight back on what is sure to be CIA criticism of the report.

Update: As I noted earlier, Richard Burr was a yes vote, along with Saxby Chambliss and one other Republican in addition to Collins. Tom Coburn voted “present.”