Posts

How FISA Dockets (Appear To) Work and Why Snowden Likely Got Few or No PayPal Documents

/12 Comments/in , , /by

Because Bill Binney made an observation about the high docket number of the phone dragnet order released this year, Sibel Edmonds has decided that Glenn Greenwald is hiding a bunch of Edward Snowden documents to protect Pierre Omidyar showing PayPal cooperated with NSA.

Here’s what Binney said, according to him.

Unfortunately, Sibel attributes some of her words to me. I do not know that PAYPAL is involved – only that financial data is being used by NSA. And, based on the “BR” number 13/80 on the Verizon court order to give records to NSA, I estimated that this program involved 78 companies. These would include: telecom’s, internet service providers, banks/finance/credit cards, travel, plus others. So, there’s a lot of business data being collected by NSA and the FBI. In the future, if I am to be quoted, I will have to I will have to insist on a pre-publication review. [my emphasis]

Now, like Peter Kofod, I don’t doubt that PayPal gives a ton of data to the national security state (more on what probably happens below).

But Binney’s comment appears to be based on a misunderstanding of how the FISA docket numbering works (though not one that changes his observation that “there’s a lot of business data being collected by NSA and the FBI”): that each docket pertains to a different company.

Given the filings we’ve seen from voluminous years — particularly 2009 — it is clear that DOJ uses one docket for all providers on a particular order. For example, 3 of the 4 docket numbers used for the phone dragnet in 2009 were 08-13, 09-06, and 09-13. For the entire 3 month period the primary order covers, all the orders and correspondence related to that primary order bears the original docket number. Even in the case where Judge Walton cut off and then resumed production (see 09-13 above) from just one provider got handled in that docketing system. The now public FISC docket appears to continue this practice, with BR 13-109 and BR 13-158 including all the correspondence on a particular order (in addition, there are the Misc dockets for lawsuits, and the 2007 docket tied to Protect America Act for the Yahoo challenge).

And over the years, the list of providers included on the dockets appears to have gotten much longer. Here’s the redacted list of providers from the original 2006 order:

Screen shot 2013-12-13 at 7.51.09 PM

Here’s the redacted list of providers from the most recent order:

Screen shot 2013-12-13 at 7.54.25 PM

 

The additional providers are probably smaller providers, as well as VOIP providers.

So just 4 and on rare occasions 5 of the Section 215 (“BR”) docket numbers in any given year (and, for the life of the program, just 4 of the PR/TT docket numbers) covered all the providers.

But that may, in fact, mean far more companies are getting Section 215 orders, even bulk orders. As I laid out in this post, the numbers of Section 215 orders have gone up in the last several years (Julian Sanchez has speculated that previously some of this collection was done via National Security Letter, which is a pretty good bet).

Section 215 orders

And as they’ve gone up, the FISA Court has been modifying far more orders — it modified 86% of the orders in 2011. It has been modifying orders to add minimization procedures (it modified 176 orders in 2011 to add minimization requirements). Given that you only need to have significant minimization procedures if you’re getting a lot of innocent people’s data, and given that these orders would also be on a 90-day cycle, that may mean there were 44 bulk collection programs in 2011.

But, as Binney said, that’s going to include a lot of different kinds of companies. We know they’ve used Section 215 to collect precursor chemical purchase records. They likely cover credit cards records, other financial records, gun purchases, health and medical records, and other computer records. There have even been questions about using Section 215 to collect URL search terms.

PayPal is one possible or even likely recipient of these, but only one out of a bunch. Read more →

In Naming Its Man of the Year, Time Proves It Doesn’t Even READ the News

/15 Comments/in , /by

I’m probably fairly lonely among my crowd to be satisfied that Time picked Pope Francis over Edward Snowden to be Person of the Year. Not only do I prefer that the focus remain on the reporting on NSA than revert back to caricatures like Time creates of Snowden as a “Dark Prophet” reading Dostoevsky. The Pope’s criticism of — above all — inequality may have as much or more impact on people around the globe as Snowden’s criticism of the surveillance state.

Would that both the Catholic Church and the United States live up to the idealist claims they purport to espouse.

But reading the profile Time did of Snowden, I can’t help but suspect they picked the Pope out of either fear or ignorance about what Snowden actually revealed. Consider this paragraph, which introduces a section on the lies NSA has told.

The NSA, for its part, has always prided itself on being different from the intelligence services of authoritarian regimes, and it has long collected far less information on Americans than it could. The programs Snowden revealed in U.S. ­surveillance agencies, at least since the 1970s, are subject to a strict, regularly audited system of checks and balances and a complex set of rules that restrict the circumstances under which the data gathered on Americans can be reviewed. As a general rule, a court order is still expected to review the content of American phone calls and e-mail ­messages. Unclassified talking points sent home with NSA employees for Thanksgiving put it this way: “The NSA performs its mission the right way—­lawful, compliant and in a way that protects civil liberties and privacy.” Indeed, none of the Snowden disclosures published to date have revealed any ongoing programs that clearly violate current law, at least in a way that any court has so far identified. Parts of all three branches of government had been briefed and had given their approval.

It’s full of bullshit. There’s the claim that NSA collects far less on Americans than it could. Does that account for the fact that, in the Internet dragnet and upstream collection programs, it collected far more than it was authorized to? Those same programs prove that surveillance can go on for (in the case of the Internet dragnet) 5 years before anyone realizes it has been violating the law — not exactly the definition of a regularly audited system. And, with its claim that “all three branches of government have been briefed,” Time must have missed Dianne Feinstein’s admission that the stunning sweep of the programs conducted under EO 12333 (which also collect US person data) don’t get close scrutiny from her committee (and none from the FISA Court).

But this claim most pisses me off:

As a general rule, a court order is still expected to review the content of American phone calls and e-mail ­messages.

Journalistic outlet Time must have missed where NSA’s General Counsel Raj De, in a public hearing, testified that NSA doesn’t even need Reasonable Articulable Suspicion — much less a court order — to read the content of Americans’ data collected incidentally under the FISA Amendment Act’s broad sweep, to say nothing of the even greater collection of data swept up under 12333. To support this demonstrably false claim, Time then points to the similarly false talking points the NSA sent home at Thanksgiving. It points to the NSA’s talking points just two paragraphs before Time lays out how often NSA has lied, both describing the government as actively misleading…

At the time Snowden went public, the American people had not just been kept in the dark; they had actively been misled about the actions of their government.

And then describing the specific lies of Keith Alexander and James Clapper.

The NSA lies, and lies often. But Time points to the NSA’s own lies to support its bad reporting.

At the same time, Time dances around the many things the US does that make us less secure. For example, it gives credence to the nonsense claim that Snowden singlehandedly prevented us from pressuring China into stopping hacking of us.

While in Hong Kong, Snowden gave an interview and documents to the South China Morning Post describing NSA spying on Chinese universities, a disclosure that frustrated American attempts to embarrass China into reducing its industrial-espionage efforts against U.S. firms.

This repeats the anachronistic claims and silence about US cyberwar that Kurt Eichenwald made in Newsweek.

And Time says Bullrun — a program that involves inserting vulnerabilities into code — “decodes encrypted messages to defeat network security,” which also minimizes the dangerous implications of NSA’s hacking.

If Time had actually read the news, rather than wax romantic about Russian literature, it might report that NSA in fact does collect vast amounts of and can the read incidentally collected content of most Americans. It might describe the several times NSA has been found to be violating the law, for years at a time. It might explain that many of these programs, because they operate solely under the President’s authority, might never get court review without Snowden’s leaks. And Time might bother to tell readers that, in some ways at least, the NSA makes us less safe because it prioritizes offensive cyberattacks (and not just on China) over keeping American networks safe.

As I said, I could have been happy about either a Pope Francis or an Edward Snowden selection. But as it is, Time might better call their scheme “Caricature of the Year,” because at least in their Snowden profile, they’re not actually presenting the news.

Home Affairs Committee MPs Worry about Minimization Procedures — of Newspaper, not Spy Service

/7 Comments/in , /by

I just finished watching Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s testimony before the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, which the Guardian live-blogged here. My overall impression is that, whatever else has happened to America’s former colonial overlords, Brits still maintain the ability to be utter blowhards while maintaining a facade of politeness far better than, say, our blowhards on the House Intelligence Committee.

Those who really wanted to attack Rusbridger and the Guardian, though, appear to have no sense of irony.

They latched not primarily on the Guardian’s publication of news about the NSA-GCHQ dragnet, which several MPs agreed showed the spy services had too few limits. Rather, MPs like Keith Vaz and Mark Reckless suggested Rusbridger had broken the law by sending 50,000 files to the NYT without first redacting the names of GCHQ’s spies. From the Guardian liveblog:

Has he communicated information contrary to the Terrorism Act?

Rusbridger says the government has known for many months that the material Snowden leaked included names of security people at the NSA andGCHQ and he told the cabinet secretary in July that the Guardian was sharing with the NYT. Self-evidently they work in New York. Rusbridger holds up the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright, a former MI5 agent, and recalls the ridiculous sight of the UK trying to stop publication of something being published elsewhere in the world. That was the point of giving the files to the NYT – to avoid a similar situation.

You have I think admitted a criminal offence there, Reckless says. Should Rushbridger be prosecuted?

Admittedly, this was mostly an attempt to intimidate Rusbridger (and he said as much).

But it was also a query about whether the Guardian used adequate minimization procedures before sharing bulk data collected in the course of reporting.

To one question, Rusbridger admitted he hadn’t gone through all 50,000 documents before handing them to the NYT, but he knew the NYT would also protect the names of any spies.

He effectively was taking precisely the same stance on minimization that GCHQ and NSA adopt with their bulk collection. The services share unminimized bulk collected data back and forth with each other. They agree (though sometimes let each other ignore that agreement) to minimize the data of British or US subjects before using that data in finished intelligence reports, the equivalent of a newspaper’s publication.

Pass on the data in bulk, with the understanding none of it will be published with the legally protected identities unmasked (unless needed to understand the intelligence, the spy services allow). That is the practice used by both the Guardian with NYT and GCHQ with NSA.

Spy overseers have repeatedly pointed to minimization procedures as an adequate protection for the privacy of their citizens, to hide information unless it was necessary. Usually, they ignore the danger of having those identities tied to the data in secret archives somewhere.

But at least MPs Vaz and Reckless admit, without meaning to do so, that such minimization procedures might not adequately protect sensitive identities.

But as Rusbridger quipped (and has quipped, elsewhere), the only one who is known to have lost control of data here was the NSA, not the newspapers.

Stealing US Person Data Overseas: A Fox Source and Method

/2 Comments/in /by

Catherine Herridge, one of Fox’s national security journalists, is usually fairly credible.

But yesterday, she gave House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers an opportunity to claim evidence suggested Edward Snowden had help — without providing any evidence.

The evidence surrounding the case of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggests he did not act alone when he downloaded some 200,000 documents, according to the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee.

“We know he did some things capability-wise that was beyond his capabilities. Which means he used someone else’s help to try and steal things from the United States, the people of the United States. Classified information, information we use to keep America safe,”  Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told Fox News.  [my emphasis]

To Herridge’s credit, she balances Rogers’ evidence-free claim with Glenn Greenwald’s statement noting that Rogers and others keep making such claims but have never provided any evidence.

That’s when things go south quickly. Herridge claims that a review of the Snowden leaks “shows the majority of the leaks since June now deal with sources, methods and surveillance overseas.”

A review of the NSA leaks by Fox News shows the majority of the leaks since June now deal with sources, methods and surveillance activities overseas, rather than the privacy rights of American citizens.

Now, perhaps she conducted a strict count, including every report on the extensiveness of NSA spying on various countries, to come up with this assertion.

But I find it bizarre that, less than a week after the report that NSA has been spying on the smut habits of 6 non-terrorists, including one US person, she deems this spying not to infringe on the privacy rights of American citizens (though we admittedly don’t know whether the US person is a permanent resident or a citizen).

More importantly, Herridge seems to dismiss the bulk of the recent reports — on deeply concerning dragnets overseas that don’t discriminate on US person data — because they happen overseas.

Now perhaps it’s because she’s doing a flyby on this reporting, and is unfamiliar with the evidence that that collection went overseas at precisely the time similar collection was deemed illegal within the US. Perhaps she’s not considering what it means that NSA steals from Google and Yahoo’s cables overseas in addition to the legally sanctioned spying they’re doing via PRISM. Perhaps she hasn’t reflected on the fact that, when NSA spies on US persons overseas, they get far less protection under EO 12333, no FISC oversight, and almost no Congressional oversight, than they would under FISA Amendments Act.

Perhaps she hasn’t thought through all the ways that this overseas spying may be a far bigger privacy violation than the spying it does in the US, not to mention evidence of NSA’s ongoing refusal to abide by the laws protecting Internet content.

And all that’s before you consider the secondary disclosures — such as the RAS-free searches of Americans’ data via back door searches — that we’re getting because of earlier Snowden leaks.

So perhaps there is a way to count all this up and dismiss worries about US privacy. But real reporting on it says recent leaks provide more cause for concern than most of the early ones.

 

China Rivaling British in Crackdown on Critical Journalism

/4 Comments/in /by

The American press is (rightly) outraged by the news that Chinese officials showed up unannounced to “inspect” Bloomberg’s Chinese bureaus.

In what appears to be a conspicuous show of displeasure, Chinese authorities conducted unannounced “inspections” at Bloomberg News bureaus in Beijing and Shanghai in the final days of November, Fortune has learned. The visits followed media reports that Bloomberg cancelled a year-long investigation on financial ties between a Chinese billionaire and government officials.

[snip]

Details of the inspections, conducted on the same day at the news bureaus in Beijing and Shanghai, are sketchy. It’s unclear how many officials were present or what government agency they represented. Different sources say, variously, that the visits were characterized as “security inspections” or “safety inspections.” But journalists inside Bloomberg view the appearance by civil government officials (they weren’t police) as an act of intimidation—precisely the reaction Bloomberg was eager to avoid.

And David Cameron told his Chinese hosts he was unhappy that Bloomberg reporter Robert Hutton was excluded from a joint press conference with him and Li Keqiang.

Downing Street has protested to the Chinese authorities about a “completely inappropriate” decision to bar a British journalist from a press conference in Beijing with David Cameron and his Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang.

No 10 raised “deep concerns” on two occasions with Chinese officials after the foreign ministry excluded Robert Hutton, a political journalist with the US wire service Bloomberg, from the event at the Great Hall of the People on Monday.

Really, though, Cameron might have instead offered the Chinese tips about how satisfying it is to force a transnational journalistic outlet to destroy its hard drives with a power drill when shadowy figures show up in the name of “security.” For all the outrage directed at China, after all, the UK is not above aggressive censorship of damning information about its own government.

While the home of the Magna Carta chooses to use such persecution when a newspaper threatens to expose that it is really a surveillance state, the “Communist” leaders in China need to squelch stories of their own enrichment and corruption. But both are engaged in a similar paranoid suppression of news stories that goes to the heart of the fictions mobilized to rationalize their rule.

Which makes it rather telling that the Chinese example is getting so much more attention.

January 8, 2007 and NSA’s Sloppy Bureaucracy

/10 Comments/in /by

I’m going to do a post on all the Section 215 documents the Most Transparent Administration Evah™ didn’t turn over in its fit of feigned transparency. But first I want to clarify something about timing.

There are 7 documents in the ACLU Vaughn Index “dated” January 8, 2007. There is an 8th in the EFF Vaughn Index (see document 3). There are 4 documents on ACLU’s site linking all the NSA documents released bearing that date, one of which was released by Edward Snowden.

But at least some (and probably all) of these documents were not written on January 8, 2007.

For example, this document, an “interim competency test” for the phone dragnet, must date to sometime after March 2009, because it describes restrictions in place only between that month and September 2009. Document 3 in EFF’s Vaughn Index (which was not released) refers to the June 25, 2009 End-to-End report (it may be an earlier version of this report, but I suspect it describes some rejection on the part of FISC of some activity).

The date January 8, 2007 actually refers to the date of the policy on classification governing the documents in question. (That policy superseded one dated November 23, 2004, and it was superseded on November 16, 2012.)

I raise this partly to clear up fairly widespread confusion (confusion that started with DOJ and ODNI’s actions, but which has extended to a number of journalists).

But also because it betrays a real bureaucratic sloppiness on the part of NSA.

The documents mis-identified as January 8, 2007 documents are largely training manuals and guidelines, as well as some less formal Congressional notice. Some of the other training manuals and guidelines are not dated at all (even the documents that are effectively drafts should have version control on them). This is surprising in any bureaucracy the size of NSA, but particularly given that many of these documents play a key role in legal compliance. (To its credit, what appears to be the most recent training program released, which is actually a story-board for a multi-module training program, is dated.)

While I suspect NSA accomplishes some of this version control via online file management (meaning that an analyst who goes to the file for “dragnet training” will only have access to the most up-to-date version), there still remains the risk that employees won’t follow new restrictions because they’re operating from outdated documents and can’t easily determine which is newest.

It also, of course, makes it harder — for both us and, in all probability (given that these documents were all in possession of DOJ), DOJ — to determine whether NSA was providing the training it assured the FISA Court it was providing (and all that’s before you consider how utterly crappy most of these materials are from a training perspective).

Consider the irony: for at least some of its documentation, NSA takes more care to date the policy guiding its classification than to date its legal validity.

Bob Woodward and Monopoly Journalism

/19 Comments/in /by

[youtube]QK8nTyS0ehs[/youtube]

There’s an absurd debate going on about whether, by hiring Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (who are the only journalists who have a full set of the documents Edward Snowden leaked), Pierre Omidyar has obtained a “monopoly” over NSA’s secrets. As to the substance of the debate: if Omidyar did set out to monopolize the NSA’s secrets, he’s a failure of a billionaire monopolist, given that since he and Greenwald first joined forces, a slew of other outlets have been publishing Omidyar’s monopoly with no apparent compensation to him.

Bad billionaire monopolist!

That said, I’m rather stunned that Bob Woodward — both his history as the previously quintessential “journalist” and his comments about the Snowden leaks specifically — has only received passing mention in this debate. Greenwald mentioned him to deflect claims that his practice with Snowden was any different from what Woodward has done across his career.

Or let’s take the revered-in-DC Bob Woodward, who has become America’s richest journalist by writing book after book over the last decade that has spilled many of America’s most sensitive secrets fed to him by top US government officials. In fact, his books are so filled withvital and sensitive secrets that Osama bin Laden personally recommended that they be read. Shall we accuse Woodward of selling US secrets to his publisher and profiteering off of them, and suggest he be prosecuted?

But what Woodward does is different, and he explicitly stated it would have been different if he were sitting on Snowden’s stash.

I would have said to [Snowden], let’s not reveal who you are. Let’s make you a protected source, and give me time with this data and let’s sort it out and present it in a coherent way. I think people are confused about whether it’s illegal, whether it’s bad, whether it’s bad policy.

That is, it’s not just that (as Dave Weinberger observes) there are many options besides Greenwald and Poitras these days.

Before the Web, the charge that Greenwald is monopolizing the information wouldn’t even have made sense because there wasn’t an alternative. Yes, he might have turned the entire cache over to The Guardian or the New York Times, but then would those newspapers look like monopolists? No, they’d look like journalists, like stewards. Now there are options. Snowden could have posted the cache openly on a Web site. He could have created a torrent so that they circulate forever. He could have given them to Wikileaks curate. He could have sent them to 100 newspapers simultaneously. He could have posted them in encrypted form and have given the key to the Dalai Lama or Jon Stewart. There are no end of options.

But Snowden didn’t. Snowden wanted the information curated, and redacted when appropriate. He trusted his hand-picked journalists more than any newspaper to figure out what “appropriate” means.

It’s that the notion of stewardship has changed — which, if Woodward is the model, previously meant a former intelligence operative would sit on the information for years, hiding both the information and the source, long enough for him to expose selected details through the actions of Important People, told in an omniscient voice.

Curiously, both Weinberger and Woodward talk of confusion not having this omniscient narrator causes.

That the charge that Glenn Greenwald is monopolizing or privatizing the Snowden information is even comprehensible to us is evidence of just how thoroughly the Web is changing our defaults and our concepts. Many of our core models are broken. We are confused.

Woodward believes he should have had the opportunity to tell us what to think about the dragnet. Greenwald’s critics suspect Omidyar plans to tell us what to think about it (or keep it secret).

But the sheer confusion suggests any monopoly has already been thwarted.

The Cayman Islands Agrees to Share Tax Data with the Five Eyes Countries

/6 Comments/in , /by

Screen shot 2013-11-29 at 5.18.17 PMApparently, the people at Treasury don’t need to take advantage of the Black Friday sales. Instead, they’re at work and announcing that the Cayman Islands (and Costa Rica) will share information on US taxpayers with the IRS. The move comes after the Brits rolled out a similar agreement earlier this month.

I assume we’ll see other advanced countries demand similar agreements. But for the moment, just the NSA and GCHQ’s home countries will be able to learn which of their citizens are stashing money in one of the world’s most important tax havens (and one that has been important to Anglo-American financial dominance).

There are two submarine cables serving the Cayman Islands. One — Maya 1 — carries telecom traffic to Hollywood, FL. It is owned, in part, by NSA spy partners AT&T and Verizon. The other carries traffic to Jamaica. Another of the cables that serves Jamaica lands in Boca Raton. A third carries traffic to British Virgin Islands. From BVI, cables carry traffic directly to several other landing spots in the US, as well as — by way of Bermuda — Canada.

Earlier this year, someone leaked massive amounts of data on BVI’s tax shelter clients and habits (though curiously, no US persons were identified among the most prominent culprits). As far as I know, no one has ever discovered how that data got leaked, and there seems little concern from the powers that be about this leaker who, after all, was as audacious as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.

Now, I’m not saying that the US and UK were already stealing Cayman Islands’ data. I’m only saying that doing so would be perfectly within the known practices of America and Britain’s spy agencies.

Keith Alexander: The One General Obama Didn’t Fire

/5 Comments/in /by

Obama has developed a reputation for firing Generals (so much so the wingnuts have developed some conspiracy theories about it).

Most famously, of course, he fired Stanley McChrystal for insubordination. He ousted CENTCOM Commander James Mattis early because of dissent on Iran policy (what on retrospect, with the distance and this AP report, might have been opposition to the back channel discussions that led to this weekend’s interim nuclear deal). A slew of Generals have been fired for offenses including drinking, fucking (including sexual abuse), swearing, and cheating at poker, as well as abusing their positions (Hamm, Gaouette, Baker, Roberts, Sinclair, Giardina, Carry, Huntoon). Obama accepted then CIA Director David Petraeus’s resignation, ostensibly for fucking, too, but even before that kept refusing Petraeus the promotions he thought he deserved. Generals Gurganus and Sturdevant got fired for not sufficiently defending a big base in Afghanistan.

It’s that background that makes the premise of this WSJ piece on NSA so unconvincing. It presents the fact that General Keith Alexander offered — but Obama did not accept — his resignation as proof of how significantly the Snowden leaks have affected NSA.

Shortly after former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed himself in June as the source of leaked National Security Agency documents, the agency’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, offered to resign, according to a senior U.S. official.

The offer, which hasn’t previously been reported, was declined by the Obama administration. But it shows the degree to which Mr. Snowden’s revelations have shaken the NSA’s foundations—unlike any event in its six-decade history, including the blowback against domestic spying in the 1970s.

[snip]

When the leaks began, some top administration officials found their confidence in Gen. Alexander shaken because he presided over a grave security lapse, a former senior defense official said. But the officials also didn’t think his resignation would solve the security problem and were concerned that letting him leave would wrongly hand Mr. Snowden a win, the former defense official said.

Even before Edward Snowden started working for the NSA via Booz, Alexander had presided over — by his own provably exaggerated admission — the plunder of America via cybertheft.

Then, on top of that purportedly catastrophic failure, Snowden served to demonstrate how easy it was to walk away with details on some of NSA’s most sensitive ops.

And yet the guy who left the entire US Internet as well as NSA’s codebreaking exposed — as compared to a single base in Afghanistan — did not get fired for his failures.

Because that might wrongly hand Snowden a win, apparently.

That’s the real tell. The article provides new details on an effort to weigh the value of wiretapping elite targets. But the rest of the article quotes hawks like Dutch Ruppersberger and Mike Rogers complaining about the risk of big new controls that might end the Golden Age of SIGINT while — again — focusing almost exclusively on the wiretapping of elites (the article includes one paragraph predicting a compromise on the dragnet programs, not noting, of course, how much of the dragnet has already moved overseas).

Broad new controls, though, run the risk of overcorrecting, leaving the agency unable to respond to a future crisis, critics of the expected changes warn.

[snip]

Another change under consideration is placing a civilian in charge of the NSA for the first time after Gen. Alexander leaves next spring, as he has been planning to do. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is advocating internally for the change, according to current and former officials. Mr. Carter declined to comment.

“We’re getting clobbered, and we want a better story to tell than: ‘It’s under review, and everybody does it,’ ” the senior administration official said, speaking of the U.S. belief that other governments routinely electronic eavesdrop on foreign leaders.

There’s one more odd part of this story. It claims that after 9/11, the NSA was pilloried for its lapses leading up to the attack.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA was pilloried for missing clues of the plot. It reinvented itself as a terrorist-hunting machine, channeling its computing power to zero in on suspects any time they communicated.

That’s not what happened. The National Security establishment has repeatedly, falsely portrayed NSA’s failure to realize Khalid al-Mihdhar was calling an Al Qaeda line in Yemen and CIA’s failure to share information about Mihdhar’s travel. And none of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations address NSA (by the time of the report, the “wall” between intelligence and FBI, which otherwise would have been a recommendation, had been down for almost 3 years). But beyond that, no one has scrutinized NSA’s collections (in part because they include damning intercepts implicating the Saudis).

Moreover, the claim that this dragnet exists solely to “zero in on suspects any time they communicated” ignores the shift from terrorism to cybersecurity.

In short, while WSJ’s sources seem to be claiming catastrophe, the story they’re telling is business as usual.

Obama has fired Generals for failure to protect a single base, not to mention cheating at poker. He seems intent on keeping Alexander — at least to get through this scandal — precisely because he’s so good at cheating at (metaphorical) poker.

NSA Denies Their Existing Domestic Cyberdefensive Efforts, Again

/9 Comments/in , /by

James Risen and Laura Poitras have teamed up to analyze a 4-year plan the NSA wrote in 2012, in the wake of being told its collection of some US person content in the US was illegal. I’ll discuss the document itself in more depth later. But for the moment I want to look at the denials anonymous senior intelligence officials (SIOs) gave Risen and Poitras about their domestic cyberdefensive efforts.

As a reminder, since before 2008, the government has been collecting bulk Internet data from switches located in the US by searching on selectors in the content. Some of that collection searches on identifiers of people (for example, searching for people sharing Anwar al-Awlaki’s email in the body of a message). But the collection also searches on other identifiers not tied to people. This collection almost certainly includes code, in an effort to find malware and other signs of cyberattacks.

We know that’s true, in part, because the Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill not only restricts that bulk domestic collection to actually targeted people, but also because it limits such collection only to terrorism and counterproliferation, thereby silently prohibiting its use for cybersecurity. The bill gives NSA 6 months to stop doing these two things — collecting non-person selectors and doing so for cybersecurity — so it’s clear such collection is currently going on.

So in 2012, just months after John Bates told NSA that when it collected domestic communications using such searches, it was violating the Constitution (the NSA contemplated appealing that decision), the NSA said (among other things),

The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on NSA’s mission.

The document then laid out a plan to expand its involvement in cybersecurity, citing such goals as,

Integrate the SIGINT system into a national network of sensors which interactively sense, respond, and alert one another at machine speed

Cyberdefense and offense are not the only goals mapped out in this document. Much of it is geared towards cryptanalysis, which is crucial for many targets. But it only mentions “non-state actors” once (and does not mention terrorists specifically at all) amid a much heavier focus on cyberattacks and after a description of power moving from West to East (that is, to China).

Which is why the SIO denials to Risen and Poitras ring so hollow.

Read more →