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Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson Thinks It Scandalous that Lawyer of Hacking Victim Talks to FBI about Hack

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In the never-ending scandal industry of Republican members of Congress trying to make a huge deal out of the fucking Steele dossier, Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson is demanding that Christopher Wray provide more information (including on the John Doe investigations into Scott Walker’s corruption in WI). Johnson never went to such lengths to obtain information from the FBI during the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing, but I guess he has different priorities.

Among the things he’s demanding are details of a conversation that Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann had with then FBI General Counsel James Baker.

According to public reports, former FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Michael Sussman, [sic] an attorney with the Perkins Coie law firm, which retained Fusion GPS in 2016 to research allegations about then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, author of the Steele dossier–and Mr. Sussman allegedly provided the FBI with information “related to Russian interference in the election, hacking and possible Trump connections.”

The John Solomon piece that has gotten Ron Johnson all hot and bothered about this contact says that Sussmann gave Baker some materials on Russian hacking and possible Trump connections with it.

Baker identified lawyer Michael Sussman, [sic] a former DOJ lawyer, as the Perkins Coie attorney who reached out to him and said the firm gave him documents and a thumb drive related to Russian interference in the election, hacking and possible Trump connections.

Michael Sussmann has been publicly identified as the person that helped the DNC respond to the Russian hack since June 14, 2016, the day the hack first became public.

Chief executive Amy Dacey got a call from her operations chief saying that their information technology team had noticed some unusual network activity.

“It’s never a call any executive wants to get, but the IT team knew something was awry,” ­Dacey said. And they knew it was serious enough that they wanted experts to investigate.

That evening, she spoke with Michael Sussmann, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coie in Washington. Soon after, Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who handled computer crime cases, called Henry, whom he has known for many years.

His role in helping the DNC help respond to the hack was further described by the NYT’s magnum opus on it.

No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Dacey, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr. Brown and Michael Sussmann, a former cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles D.N.C. political matters.

“Three most important questions,” Mr. Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?”

Mr. Sussmann instructed his clients not to use D.N.C. email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the D.N.C. was on to them.

“You only get one chance to raise the drawbridge,” Mr. Sussmann said. “If the adversaries know you are aware of their presence, they will take steps to burrow in, or erase the logs that show they were present.”

The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said.

The NYT even describes Sussmann and DNC executives meeting with “senior F.B.I. officials” — a description that would fit the FBI’s General Counsel, Baker, whom Sussman would have known from when they worked on national security cases at DOJ together.

The D.N.C. executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior F.B.I. officials in mid-June, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor. Among the early requests at that meeting, according to participants: that the federal government make a quick “attribution” formally blaming actors with ties to Russian government for the attack to make clear that it was not routine hacking but foreign espionage.

“You have a presidential election underway here and you know that the Russians have hacked into the D.N.C.,” Mr. Sussmann said, recalling the message to the F.B.I. “We need to tell the American public that. And soon.”

In other words, there has been public reporting for years that Sussmann spoke to the FBI, reporting that even explains why he was involved — because he was the guy with experience working on cybersecurity. But in spite of that, the Chair of one of the committees most centrally involved in cybersecurity is now suggesting that victims of nation-state hacking and their lawyers should not talk to the FBI about that hacking.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Did the FBI Have a Chance to Fix Their Lies about Encryption in 2016?

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The WaPo reports that the FBI has been presenting grossly inflated numbers describing how many devices it can’t open because of encryption. The error stems, the FBI claims, to a “programming” error that actually sounds like an analytical error: the double or triple counting of the same encrypted phones.

Over a period of seven months, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray cited the inflated figure as the most compelling evidence for the need to address what the FBI calls “Going Dark” — the spread of encrypted software that can block investigators’ access to digital data even with a court order.

The FBI first became aware of the miscount about a month ago and still does not have an accurate count of how many encrypted phones they received as part of criminal investigationslast year, officials said. Last week, one internal estimate put the correct number of locked phones at 1,200, though officials expect that number to change as they launch a new audit, which could take weeks to complete, according to people familiar with the work.

“The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,’’ the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.

I find the April 2016 failed test suspicious.

To know why, consider this bit of history. Back in 2015, in the wake of Apple making encryption standard, Jim Comey and Sally Yates made a big pitch for back doors. But when Al Franken asked them, they admitted the FBI didn’t actually know how big the problem is.

Over an hour and a quarter into the SJC hearing, Al Franken asked for actual data demonstrating how big of a problem encryption really is. Yates replied that the government doesn’t track this data because once an agency discovers they’re targeting a device with unbreakable encryption, they use other means of targeting. (Which seems to suggest the agencies have other means to pursue the targets, but Yates didn’t acknowledge that.) So the agencies simply don’t count how many times they run into encryption problems. “I don’t have good enough numbers yet,” Comey admitted when asked again at the later hearing about why FBI can’t demonstrate this need with real data.

Nevertheless, in spite of Congress’ request for real numbers in July 2015, in January 2016 — just as some at FBI were trying to create an excuse to force Apple to open Syen Rizwan Farook’s phone — Comey and Yates admitted they still hadn’t started tracking numbers.

Around January 26, 2016 (that’s the date shown for document creation in the PDF) — significantly, right as FBI was prepping to go after Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone, but before it had done so — Comey and Yates finally answered the Questions for the Record submitted after the hearing. After claiming, in a response to a Grassley question on smart phones, “the data on the majority of the devices seized in the United States may no longer be accessible to law enforcement even with a court order or search warrant,” Comey then explained that they do not have the kind of statistical information Cy Vance claims to keep on phones they can’t access, explaining (over five months after promising to track such things),

As with the “data-in-motion” problem, the FBI is working on improving enterprise-wide quantitative data collection to better explain the “data-at-rest” problem.”

[snip]

As noted above, the FBI is currently working on improving enterprise-wide quantitative data collection to better understand and explain the “data at rest” problem. This process includes adopting new business processes to help track when devices are encountered that cannot be decrypted, and when we believe leads have been lost or investigations impeded because of our inability to obtain data.

[snip]

We agree that the FBI must institute better methods to measure these challenges when they occur.

[snip]

The FBI is working to identify new mechanisms to better capture and convey the challenges encountered with lawful access to both data-in-motion and data-at =-rest.

Grassley specifically asked Yates about the Wiretap report. She admitted that DOJ was still not collecting the information it promised to back in July.

The Wiretap Report only reflects the number of criminal applications that are sought, and not the many instances in which an investigator is dissuaded from pursuing a court order by the knowledge that the information obtained will be encrypted and unreadable. That is, the Wiretap Report does not include statistics on cases in which the investigator does not pursue an interception order because the provider has asserted that an intercept solution does not exist. Obtaining a wiretap order in criminal investigations is extremely resource-intensive as it requires a huge investment in agent and attorney time, and the review process is extensive. It is not prudent for agents and prosecutors to devote resources to this task if they know in advance the targeted communications cannot be intercepted. The Wiretap Report, which applies solely to approved wiretaps, records only those extremely rare instances where agents and prosecutors obtain a wiretap order and are surprised when encryption prevents the court-ordered interception. It is also important to note that the Wiretap Report does not include data for wiretaps authorized as part of national security investigations.

These two answers lay out why the numbers in the Wiretap Report are of limited value in assessing how big a problem encryption is.

Significantly, Comey and Yates offered these answers in response to a Chuck Grassley question about whether they believed, as the corrupt Cy Vance had claimed in Senate testimony, that “71% of all mobile devices examined…may be outside the reach of a warrant.”

The number FBI is now trying to correct was “more than half,” inching right up towards that 71% Vance floated years ago. In other words, this faulty methodology got them to where they needed to go.

I find that all the more suspicious given something that happened later in 2016. As soon as Jim Comey started providing numbers in August 2016, back when they showed 13% of phones could not be accessed, I asked how FBI came up with the number. At the time, a spox admitted that the number included more than encrypted phones — it also included deleted or destroyed phones.

It is a reflection of data on the number of times over the course of each quarter this year that the FBI or one of our law enforcement partners (federal, state, local, or tribal) has sought assistance from FBI digital forensic examiners with respect to accessing data on various mobile devices where the device is locked, data was deleted or encrypted, the hardware was damaged, or there were other challenges with accessing the data. I am not able to break that down by crime type.

That is, in September 2016, five months after FBI failed to find their flawed methodology, an FBI spox told me the number used was not an accurate count of how many phones couldn’t be accessed because of encryption.

When then FBI General Counsel James Baker used the same 13% a few months later, claiming all were encrypted, I checked back. The same spox said the number at that point was just encrypted phones.

It is true that damaged devices are provided to CART and RCFL for FBI assistance, but the 886 devices in FY16 that the FBI was not able to access (which is the number that GC Baker provided last week), does not include those damaged devices. It includes only those devices for which we encountered a password we were not able to bypass.

Now, it’s possible that the methodological problem I identified in 2016 — that their “Going Dark” number actually included phones they couldn’t access for entirely different reasons — was a different problem than the one just identified a month ago (just before Baker retired). Certainly, it doesn’t sound like the same problem (though as I reminded someone from DOJ’s IG some time ago, the forensics labs sending in these numbers have a history of unreliable numbers). That said, given the proliferation of chat apps with disappearing messages that amount to “destroyed” evidence — which under the flawed methodology used in 2016 would be counted as an encryption problem — it could be.

Still, what I identified in September 2016 was a methodological problem. It should have triggered a closer look at the time.

Instead, the FBI has been lying about how bad the Going Dark problem is for another year and a half.

On McCabe’s Firing

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Update: 8/28/19: I just re-read this amid discussion that Andrew McCabe may be fired. Much of this I stand by. I was right about the import of Mike Flynn already pleading guilty, I stand by my comments about Michael Horowitz and think the IG Report is damning, though in his lawsuit, McCabe credibly argues it was no developed in the normal fashion. I was right that McCabe would not be a big witness in any obstruction investigation; I was wrong that Comey wouldn’t be. But I want to admit that obstruction did end up being what Mueller effectively issued an impeachment referral for. That said, there was obstruction in both the Stone and Manafort threads of any interactions with Russia. 

I’m going to refrain from making any conclusions about Andy McCabe’s firing until we have the Inspector General Report that underlies it. For now (update: I’ve now cleaned this up post-Yoga class), keep the following details in mind:

Michael Horowitz is a very good Inspector General

The allegations that McCabe lacked candor in discussions about his communications with Devlin Barrett all arise out of an investigation Democrats demanded in response to FBI’s treatment of the investigation into Hillary Clinton. It is being led by DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. Horowitz was nominated by Barack Obama and confirmed while Democrats still had the majority, in 2012.

I’ve never seen anything in Horowitz’ work that suggests he is influenced by politics, though he has shown an ability to protect his own department’s authority, in part by cultivating Congress. Of significant note, he fought with FBI to get the information his investigators needed to do the job, but was thwarted, extending into Jim Comey’s tenure (as I laid out in a fucking prescient post written on November 3, 2016).

As I’ve long covered, in 2010, the FBI started balking at the Inspector General’s proper investigative demands. Among other things, the FBI refused to provide information on grand jury investigations unless some top official in FBI said that it would help the FBI if the IG obtained it. In addition, the FBI (and DEA) have responded to requests very selectively, pulling investigations they don’t want to be reviewed. In 2014, the IG asked OLC for a memo on whether it should be able to get the information it needs to do its job. Last year, OLC basically responded, Nope, can’t have the stuff you need to exercise proper oversight of the FBI.

DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has been trying for some time to get Congress to affirmatively authorize his office (and IGs generally, because the problem exists at other agencies) to receive the information he needs to do his job. But thus far — probably because Jim Comey used to be known as the world’s biggest Boy Scout — Congress has failed to do so.

I care about how FBI’s misconduct affects the election (thus far, polling suggests it hasn’t done so, though polls are getting closer as Republican Gary Johnson supporters move back to supporting the GOP nominee, as almost always happens with third party candidates). But I care even more about how fucked up the FBI is. Even if Comey is ousted, I can’t think of a likely candidate that could actually fix the problems at FBI. One of the few entities that I think might be able to do something about the stench at FBI is the IG.

Except the FBI has spent 6 years making sure the IG can’t fully review its conduct.

So while I don’t think he’d be motivated by politics, he has had a running fight with top FBI officials about their willingness to subject FBI to scrutiny for the entirety of the Comey tenure.

McCabe has suggested that the investigation into him was “accelerated” only after he testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he would corroborate Jim Comey’s version of his firing.

I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.

I’m not sure this timeline bears out (the investigation was supposed to be done last year, but actually got extended into this year). The statement stops short of saying that he was targeted because his testimony — presumably already delivered to Robert Mueller by the time of his HPSCI testimony — corroborated Comey’s.

What we’ve seen of the other personnel moves as a result of this investigation — the reassignment of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for texts that really did raise conflict issues (to say nothing of operational security problems), and the reassignment of James Baker — seem reasonable. McCabe’s firing was reviewed by a whole bunch of people who have been around DOJ a long time.

So it’s possible the underlying claim has merit. It’s also possible that McCabe is getting the same punishment that a line agent would get if he did not answer the IG honestly.

Trump’s comments matter

Obviously, all that cannot be taken out of context of Trump’s own statements and Jeff Sessions’ efforts to keep his job.

We will get these details in upcoming days, and almost all the details will come from people who’ve got a big stake in the process.

Michael Bromwich — McCabe’s lawyer — says they didn’t get a review of the allegations against McCabe until very recently, and were still trying to contest the firing two days ago (as was publicly reported). I find his claim that this was “cleaved off” from the larger investigation unconvincing: so were Strzok and Page, but that was done to preserve the integrity of the Mueller investigation, and Chris Wray had said publicly that he wanted to act on problems as they found them. Bromwich curiously is not saying that McCabe’s firing violates any agreement McCabe made when he took leave to await retirement.

Undoubtedly, Jeff Sessions did this in the most cowardly way possible. While I think it’s likely, I’m not 100% convinced that the timing was anything other than trying to make a real decision rather than let the retirement make it.

There’s no evidence, yet, that McCabe will lose all his pension

It has been said for over a month that McCabe was just waiting out his birthday so he could “get” his pension. That was so he could start drawing on it immediately. Josh Gerstein laid out the best thing I’ve seen on the implications (as well as what limited legal recourse McCabe has).

The financial stakes for McCabe could be significant. If he had made it to his 50th birthday on Sunday while still in federal service, he would have been eligible to begin drawing a full pension immediately under provisions that apply to federal law enforcement officers, said Kimberly Berry, a lawyer in Arlington, Virginia, who specializes in federal retirement issues.

Berry disputed reports, however, that McCabe would lose his pension altogether.

“He doesn’t lose his retirement,” she said. “It’s not all thrown out in the garbage.“

Even after his dismissal, McCabe will probably be eligible to begin collecting his pension at about age 57, although he would likely lose access to federal health coverage and would probably get a smaller pension than if he stayed on the federal payroll, experts said.

There have been claims McCabe could get hired by a member of Congress for a week so he can start drawing on it. But I’ve heard the finances aren’t even the issue, it’s the principle, which if you want to be a martyr, being fired works better.

This will have a far smaller impact on the Mueller probe than Comey-McCabe loyalists and John Dowd lay out

McCabe and others have suggested that there has been a successful effort to retaliate against Comey’s three corroborating witnesses, though that is least convincing with regards to Jim Rybicki, who was replaced as happens as a matter of course every time a new FBI Director comes in.

But the Comey-McCabe loyalists make far too much of their role in the Mueller probe, making themselves the central actors in the drama. Yes, if their credibility is hurt it does do some damage to any obstruction charges against Trump, which, as I keep repeating, will not be the primary thrust of any charges against Trump. Mueller is investigating Trump for a conspiracy with Russians; the obstruction is just the act that led to his appointment as Special Counsel and with that, a much more thorough investigation. Contrary to what you’re hearing, little we’ve seen thus far is fruit of the decisions Comey and his people made. While all were involved in the decision to charge Mike Flynn, he has already pled guilty and started spilling his guts to Mueller. There’s no reason to believe McCabe or Comey are direct witnesses in the conspiracy charges that will be filed against people close to Trump, if not against Trump himself.

For all those reasons, John Dowd’s claim that McCabe’s firing should end the investigation is equally unavailing.

I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.

I mean, if this really is Dowd’s impression of why his client is being investigated, I almost feel sorry for Trump.

But the truth is the dossier has always been a distraction. The obstruction charge was probably used to distract Trump (and his NYT stenographers) while Mueller’s team collected the far more serious evidence on the conspiracy charges, though events of this week may well add to the conspiracy charges. And Comey didn’t manufacture any investigation; if anything, his people were not aggressive enough in the months he oversaw the investigation, particularly as it pertains to George Papadopoulos.

So if Dowd thinks McCabe’s firing will affect the core of the evidence Mueller has already developed (and, I suspect, started hanging on a sealed magnet indictment), he is likely to be very disappointed.

Regardless of the merits of the McCabe firing, it (and the related shit storm) may give Rosenstein and Mueller more time to work. It’s not clear they need that much more time to put together the conspiracy charges that are sitting right beneath the surface.

Finally — and I’m about to do a post on this — the far more important news from yesterday is that Facebook is cutting off Cambridge Analytica for violating its agreements about data use. That may well lead to some far more important changes, changes that Trump has less ability to politicize.

On Jim Baker’s Non-Prosecution for Leaking

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The WaPo provides details on something that right wing propagandists had used to slam FBI General Counsel Jim Baker (who, the article notes, is being reassigned within FBI). The leak investigation into Baker must pertain to the Yahoo scan.

For months, Baker had become caught up in what some law enforcement officials considered a particularly frustrating probe of a leak involving the FBI, the National Security Agency and stories that appeared about a year ago involving surveillance techniques for a particular email provider, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some NSA officials were concerned that too much had been revealed about a classified program in an effort to correct a prior report, these people said.

“Jim was distressed about it but was confident he hadn’t leaked anything’’ and would be cleared, one U.S. official said.

A respected veteran prosecutor was assigned to the case, but people close to the matter said the investigation had petered out recently and charges were not expected to be filed.

The leak probe frustrated some law enforcement officials, who said officials were caught up in it only because they had tried to prevent misinformation about surveillance capabilities from spreading among the public and lawmakers. Others said the very existence of the investigation was mostly due to a disagreement between two agencies, according to people familiar with the matter.

The story that the government had obtained authority to scan all of Yahoo’s emails for some signature tied to either a foreign government or a terrorist organization (or most likely, Iran, which the US considers both) was first broken by Reuters, which claimed the scan happened under Section 702. But as I laid out here, Charlie Savage (who has written an entire billion page book on such matters) reported, more plausibly, that it was done under a targeted FISA order. Not only did the discrepancy in stories raise concerns about how Section 702 was being applied, but it led a lot of surveillance critics who had heretofore not understood things they were lobbying about to newly examine what the term “facility” meant.

From the context, it seems likely that Baker was trying to correct initial reports that the scan occurred under Section 702, which probably had a salutary effect on this year’s debate; no one has raised questions about that Yahoo scan (though surveillance critics have proven that they didn’t internalize the lesson  of the exchange to learn that the government has long interpreted facility more broadly than they understood).

If all that’s right, the spooks should be happy that Baker corrected the record. Heck, Baker could probably point to my work for proof that the definition of “facility” was actually known to people he hasn’t ever spoken with.

[S]tarting in 2004 and expanded in 2010, “facility” — the things targeted under FISA — no longer were required to tie to an individual user or even a location exclusively used by targeted users.

When Kollar-Kotelly authorized the Internet dragnet, she distinguished what she was approving, which did not require probable cause, from content surveillance, where probable cause was required. That is, she tried to imagine that the differing standards of surveillance would prevent her order from being expanded to the collection of content. But in 2007, when FISC was looking for a way to authorize Stellar Wind collection — which was the collection on accounts identified through metadata analysis — Roger Vinson, piggybacking Kollar-Kotelly’s decision on top of the Roving Wiretap provision, did just that. That’s where “upstream” content collection got approved. From this point forward, the probable cause tied to a wiretap target was freed from a known identity, and instead could be tied to probable cause that the facility itself was used by a target.

There are several steps between how we got from there to the Yahoo order that we don’t have full visibility on (which is why PCLOB should have insisted on having that discussion publicly). There’s nothing in the public record that shows John Bates knew NSA was searching on non-email or Internet messaging strings by the time he wrote his 2011 opinion deeming any collection of a communication with a given selector in it to be intentional collection. But he — or FISC institutionally — would have learned that fact within the next year, when NSA and FBI tried to obtain a cyber certificate. (That may be what the 2012 upstream violation pertained to; see this post and this post for some of what Congress may have learned in 2012.) Nor is there anything in the 2012 Congressional debate that shows Congress was told about that fact.

One thing is clear from NSA’s internal cyber certificate discussions: by 2011, NSA was already relying on this broader sense of “facility” to refer to a signature of any kind that could be associated with a targeted user.

The point, however, is that sometime in the wake of the 2011 John Bates opinion on upstream, FISC must have learned more about how NSA was really using the term. It’s not clear how much of Congress has been told.

The leap from that — scanning on telephone switches for a given target’s known “facility” — to the Yahoo scan is not that far. In his 2010 opinion reauthorizing the Internet dragnet, Bates watered down the distinction between content and metadata by stripping protection for content-as-metadata that is also used for routing purposes. There may be some legal language authorizing the progression from packets to actual emails (though there’s nothing that is unredacted in any Bates opinion that leads me to believe he fully understood the distinction). In any case, FISCR has already been blowing up the distinction between content and metadata, so it’s not clear that the Yahoo request was that far out of the norm for what FISC has approved.

Which is not to say that the Yahoo scan would withstand scrutiny in a real court unaware of the FISC precedents (including the ones we haven’t yet seen). It’s just to say we started down this path 12 years ago, and the concept of “facilities” has evolved such that a search for a non-email signature counts as acceptable to the FISC.

Of course, the better option is to stop playing word games and explain to everyone what facility actually means, and point out that that interpretation has been in place since 2007.

All that said, this is yet another example where a cherished government official can engage in behavior that others go to prison for. As I’ve pointed out, for example, the Jeffrey Sterling case codified the precedent that someone can go to prison for four minutes and 11 seconds of phone conversations during which you provide unclassified tips about classified information they know.

The Fourth Circuit just codified the principle that you can go to prison for four minutes and 11 seconds of phone calls during which you tell a reporter to go find out classified details you know about.

That’s probably pretty close to what Baker got investigated for. Obviously, doing so as a General Counsel is a different function than as a whistleblower. And whatever conversations Baker had probably took place in DC, so outside of the Fourth Circuit where that precedent stands.

I have no doubt that non-prosecution, if I’ve gotten the facts of the case correct, is the correct decision. But so should it be for others in similar situations, others treated differently because they’re not part of the FBI.

More importantly, the government’s so-called transparency should be such that experts like the surveillance critics who didn’t know how facility is used don’t have to get leaks to understand basic facts about the surveillance they discuss.

Is FBI Still Fluffing Its Encryption Numbers?

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Note: All the big civil liberties groups are fundraising “bigly” off of the election of Trump. If you are donating to them and are able, please consider supporting this work as well.  

Update: I went back to the FBI spox who originally told me that the 13% number cited in August included damaged phones, to clarify that this more recent one did. It does not. Here’s what he said:

It is true that damaged devices are provided to CART and RCFL for FBI assistance, but the 886 devices in FY16 that the FBI was not able to access (which is the number that GC Baker provided last week), does not include those damaged devices. It includes only those devices for which we encountered a password we were not able to bypass.

“[T]he data on the vast majority of the devices seized in the United States may no longer be accessible to law enforcement even with a court order or search warrant,” FBI Director Jim Comey wrote in a response to a question from Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley in January. Grassley had asked whether Comey agreed with New York District Attorney’s Cy Vance’s estimate — made in Senate testimony the previous July — that “when smartphone encryption is fully deployed by Apple and Google, 71% of all mobile devices examined…may be outside the reach of a warrant.”

In Comey’s very next answer, however, he admitted the FBI was still trying to quantify the problem. “FBI is currently working on improving enterprise-wide quantitative data collection to better understand and explain the ‘data at rest’ problem.” Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had promised to come up with real data at the July 2015 hearing.

Since that time, FBI has publicly created the impression they had real numbers on encryption.

In a speech at the end of August, Jim Comey claimed that the FBI had been unable to open 650 of the 5,000 devices it got in its forensics centers (remember, the fiscal year starts on October 1).

We believe in the FBI that we need a conversation. If at the end of the day the American people say, “You know what, we’re okay with that portion of the room being dark. We’re okay with”—to use one example—“the FBI, in the first 10 months of this year, getting 5,000 devices from state and local law enforcement and asked for assistance in opening them, and in 650 of those devices being unable to open those devices.” That’s criminals not caught, that’s evidence not found, that’s sentences that are far, far shorter for pedophiles and others because judges can’t see the true scope of their activity.

That left the impression that encryption thwarted the FBI in 13% of all cases.

According to Kevin Bankston, FBI General Counsel just provided an equivalent number at a National Academy of the Sciences working group on encryption (Baker only said these were inaccessible — he did not claim that was because of encryption, though that was the context of the number).

Interesting data point: Baker says over FY 2016, of 6814 mobile devices submitted by fed/state/local to FBI’s [Computer Analysis Response Teams and Regional Computer Forensic Laboratories for analysis 2095 of them req’d passcodes, defeated passcodes in 1210 cases, unable to (presumably due to crypto?) in 886 (885?) cases.

That reflects the same 13% failure rate.

I asked the FBI in September where they got this number. And at least at that point, the 13% was not a measure of how often encryption thwarted the FBI. A spokesperson told me,

It is a reflection of data on the number of times over the course of each quarter this year that the FBI or one of our law enforcement partners (federal, state, local, or tribal) has sought assistance from FBI digital forensic examiners with respect to accessing data on various mobile devices where the device is locked, data was deleted or encrypted, the hardware was damaged, or there were other challenges with accessing the data. I am not able to break that down by crime type.

In the San Bernardino case, for example, the FBI may not have been able to access 66% of the phones it seized from the culprits (there are actually varying reports on this). But in the end, encryption accounted for none of those phones being inaccessible: physical destruction accounted for all of it.

So unless the FBI, after I asked in early September, went back and recalculated their quarterly numbers (I’ve got a question in to clarify this point), then the FBI is presenting a false claim about encryption.

There’s More to the SPCMA Document

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Long time readers likely know I’ve been obsessed with the decision, which as far as we currently know started in 2007 after Alberto Gonzales and (since returned as FBI General Counsel) James Baker left DOJ, to let DOD chain through US person identifiers on metadata collected under EO 12333, what gets described as Special Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis, or SPCMA. Here’s a post that describes it at more length.

We first learned about SPCMA in June 2013, when the Guardian published a 16-page document pertaining to the approval process that had been leaked by Edward Snowden. That document consisted of:

  • A ten page memo dated November 20, 2007, from Assistant Attorney General for National Security Ken Wainstein and Acting OLC Head Steve Bradbury, analyzing the legality of SPCMA and recommending approval of the change.
  • Appendix A, consisting of a cover sheet and a two-page approval memo signed by Robert Gates on October 19, 2007 and Michael Mukasey on January 3, 2008. As I noted in this post, the signature line had to be altered after the fact to indicate Mukasey was signing it, suggesting that then Acting Attorney General Peter Keisler had refused.
  • Appendix B, a September 28, 2006 memo written to Office of Intelligence and Policy head James Baker (this was the predecessor to the NSD at DOJ) by NSA’s General Counsel Vito Potenza requesting he approve what became SPCMA (Baker did not approve it).

Though it is not included in what Snowden leaked, the memo describes a third Appendix, Appendix C:

On July 20, 2004, the General Counsel of CIA wrote to the General Counsel of NSA and to the Counsel for Intelligence Policy asking that CIA receive from NSA United States communications metadata that NSA does not currently provide to CIA. The letter from CIA is attached at Tab C.

The government has not released an official version of the packet such as it got leaked by Snowden. However, it did release Appendix A, the approval memo, in Fall 2014 as part of the declassification of the Yahoo challenge to the Protect America Act. As I laid out in this post, the government not only got this document approved after the passage of PAA and while Yahoo was challenging orders received under it, but DOJ tried to hide it from FISC Judge Reggie Walton. They only handed it over — though without the context of the approval memo that made it clear it was about contact chaining including Americans — after he had scolded DOJ several times about not handing over all the documentation related to PAA.

DOJ did not submit the procedures to FISC in a February 20, 2008 collection of documents they submitted after being ordered to by Judge Walton after he caught them hiding other materials; they did not submit them until March 14, 2008.

So to sum up: We have 16 pages (the memo and two of three appendices) thanks to Edward Snowden, and we have an official copy of just the 2-page approval memo, released on the context of the Yahoo declassification.

I lay all this out because this entry, in the National Security Division Vaughn Index provided to ACLU last month, is undoubtedly this same memo.

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The date is the same, the description is almost the same. The only difference is that the withheld document has 20 pages, as compared to the 16 pages that Snowden gave us.

From that I conclude that the 2004 CIA memo is four pages long (three, plus a cover sheet). Note the date: squarely during the period when spooks were trying to put discontinued parts of Stellar Wind under some kind of legal authority.

Here’s how the NSA declared Exemptions 1 and 3 over this document.

56. NSD fully withheld Document 4 on its Vaughn index in part because the release of any portion of that document would disclose classified information about functions or activities of NSA. The document is a 20-page document dated 20 November 2007 and is described as NSD Legal Memo on Amending DoD Procedures and Accompanying Documentation.” This document. including its full title, was withheld in full under Exemption 1 and Exemption 3. I have reviewed the information withheld and determined that the information is currently and properly classified at the SECRET level in accordance with EO 13526 because the release of this information could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security. The information withheld pertains to intelligence activities, intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology. or the vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems or projects relating to the national security and therefore meets the criteria for classification set for in Sections 1.4(c) and 1.4(g) of EO 13526. The harm to national security of releasing any portion of this document and the reasons that no portion of this document can be released without disclosing classified information cannot be fully described on the public record. As a result my ex parte. in camera classified declaration more fully explains why this document was withheld in full.

57. The information withheld in N 0 Document 4 also relates to a “function of the National Security Agency” 50 U.S.C. § 3605. Indeed. this information relates to one of NSA’s primary functions, its SIGINT mission. Any disclosure of the withheld information would reveal NSA ·s capabilities and the tradecraft used to carry out this vital mission. Further. revealing these details would disclose “information with respect to lNSA ‘s] activities” in furtherance of its SIGINT mission. 50 U .. C. § 3605. Therefore. the information withheld is also protected from release by statute and is exempt from release based on FOIA Exemption 3. 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3).

The government asserted secrecy over the title of an already (and officially) released document in a recent EFF challenge, so this would not be the first time the government claimed the title of an already released document was secret to prevent nasty civil liberties groups from confirming that a FOIAed document was the same as a previously known one.

In NSD’s declaration, Bradley Weigmann indicated that “the vast majority” of the document pertained to attorney-client privilege.

NSD Document 17, the vast majority of a certain memorandum in NSD Document 4, and an email message in NSD Document 31 are protected by the attorney-client privilege. These documents discuss legal issues pertaining to an NSA program, set forth legal advice prepared by NSD lawyers for other attorneys to assist those other attorneys in representing the Government, and were sought by a decision-maker for the Government to obtain legal advice on questions of law and indeed reflect such advice. As such, NSD Document 17, the vast majority of a certain memorandum in NSD Document 4, and an email message in NSD Document 31 are protected from disclosure under the attorney-client privilege.

More interestingly, by referring to “an NSA program” it seemed to tie this document with this 2003 OIPR memo.

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And this November 12, 2013 email (written during a period in the aftermath of the Snowden releases as the government was trying to decide how to respond to various FOIAs as well as Yahoo’s request to unseal its challenge, not to mention after ACLU submitted this FOIA, which was actually submitted before the first Snowden leaks).

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Note, NSD won’t tell us what date in 2003 someone at OIPR (already headed by James Baker, one of the few people briefed on Stellar Wind) wrote about “an NSA program” that appears to be tied the chaining on US person metadata.

I have long believed one of the known but still as yet undescribed modifications to Stellar Wind (there is still at least one, though I believe there are two) enacted after the hospital confrontation in 2004 has to have been either at CIA or DOD, because it doesn’t appear in the unredacted NSA IG Report Snowden gave us. Here, we see CIA unsuccessfully asking for US person metadata at the time everyone was re-establishing Stellar Wind under more legal cover. Assuming NSA document 4 is this memo, the only thing the government is withholding that we haven’t seen yet is the CIA memo. I have a lot more suspicions about this program, too, that I still need to write up.

But I suspect they’re hiding these documents from us — and just as importantly, from the FISA Court — to prevent us from putting the various details of how US person metadata has been used over time. Or rather, to prevent us from laying out how the point of these foreign-targeted surveillance programs is to spy on Americans.

ACLU has already told the government they’re challenging the withholding of these documents.

Silencing Whistleblowers, 12 Years Later

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As reported by Zoe Tillman, Thomas Tamm, the first whistleblower to go to Eric Lichtblau with reports of Stellar Wind, is being investigated for ethical violations by the DC Bar. The complaint alleges he failed to report that people within DOJ were violating their legal obligations to superiors, up to and including the Attorney General, and that he took confidences of his client (which the complaint defines as DOJ) to the press.

The question, of course, is why the Bar is pursuing this now, years after Tamm’s actions became public. Tillman describes the complaint as having had some kind of virgin birth, from Bar members reading the news accounts rather than someone complaining.

D.C. Disciplinary Counsel Wallace Shipp Jr. declined to comment on the charges against Tamm. The ethics case was opened in 2009, but the charges weren’t filed until late December. The disciplinary counsel’s office has working in recent years to clear a backlog of old cases.

Shipp said the disciplinary counsel’s office launched the investigation after reading about Tamm’s case in news reports. It was opened under the office’s name, which generally means there is no outside complainant.

That’s a funny explanation, given that the complaint doesn’t reference the press reports, most notably Michael Isikoff’s 2008 report on Tamm’s whistleblowing, which describes Tamm going to two of his superiors (though not, admittedly, all the way to Attorney General Ashcroft).

It’s unclear to what extent Tamm’s office was aware of the origins of some of the information it was getting. But Tamm was puzzled by the unusual procedures—which sidestepped the normal FISA process—for requesting wiretaps on cases that involved program intelligence. He began pushing his supervisors to explain what was going on. Tamm says he found the whole thing especially curious since there was nothing in the special “program” wiretap requests that seemed any different from all the others. They looked and read the same. It seemed to Tamm there was a reason for this: the intelligence that came from the program was being disguised. He didn’t understand why. But whenever Tamm would ask questions about this within OIPR, “nobody wanted to talk about it.”

At one point, Tamm says, he approached Lisa Farabee, a senior counsel in OIPR who reviewed his work, and asked her directly, “Do you know what the program is?” According to Tamm, she replied: “Don’t even go there,” and then added, “I assume what they are doing is illegal.” Tamm says his immediate thought was, “I’m a law-enforcement officer and I’m participating in something that is illegal?” A few weeks later Tamm bumped into Mark Bradley, the deputy OIPR counsel, who told him the office had run into trouble with Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the chief judge on the FISA court. Bradley seemed nervous, Tamm says. Kollar-Kotelly had raised objections to the special program wiretaps, and “the A.G.-only cases are being shut down,” Bradley told Tamm. He then added, “This may be [a time] the attorney general gets indicted,” according to Tamm. (Told of Tamm’s account, Justice spokesman Boyd said that Farabee and Bradley “have no comment for your story.”)

Compare that version with how the complaint describes Tamm doing precisely what the complaint says he failed to do.

Respondent learned that these applications involved special intelligence obtained from something referred to as “the program.” When he inquired about “the program” of other members of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, he was told by his colleagues that it was probably illegal.

Isikoff describes Tamm going to two of his superiors, “a senior counsel in OIPR who reviewed his work,” and “the deputy OIPR counsel,” the former of one of whom is the one who told him “I assume what they are doing is illegal.” The complaint rewrites that story — what ostensibly is the source of the complaint — and turns these superiors into “colleagues.”

Mind you, according to this story, there is one superior within OIPR to whom Tamm didn’t go: Counsel James Baker. He was the guy who was laundering applications to the FISC in ways Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found unacceptable.

Baker, of course, is currently the General Counsel of FBI, someone who reviews a slew of applications for larger programs, including those that go to FISC.

So 12 years after Tamm leaked DOJ’s secrets to the NYT, he is being investigated by the Bar because he didn’t go to the right superiors with his complaints, one of who just happens to be the FBI General Counsel.

GOP Brought in Guy Who Authorized Dragnet to Talk Dragnets

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I’m far more alarmed by this tidbit in the latest report on the fight over USA F-ReDux than many who are commenting on it.

McConnell’s presser came following Senate lunches, during which former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who served under George W. Bush, briefed Republicans on the importance of the surveillance authorities. While defending the NSA’s phone-records dragnet, Mukasey did say a recent federal appeals court deeming the program illegal could complicate McConnell’s efforts to renew the Patriot Act without changes, given the legal uncertainty that could result, according to two senators present.

“He did recommend some acknowledgment of the decision so that it is addressed in the legislation,” Sen. John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, said.

The Republicans sat down to talk about dragnet surveillance and they brought in Michael Mukasey, who not only presided over the expansion of Stellar Wind in the form of FISA Amendments Act, but authorized SPCMA after some previous DOJ officials appear to have refused to.

SPCMA, you’ll recall, is the authority to contact chain on US-person metadata collected under EO 12333 that current FBI General Counsel James Baker refused to authorize in an earlier position at DOJ in 2006 but which Mukasey signed in early 2008 (and DOJ then promptly hid from FISC as it was considering whether the contact chaining that provided particularly under PRISM was constitutionally sound). The actual authorization for it languished for several months, half-signed, before Mukasey signed it in the early part of his tenure as Attorney General.

There is reason to believe SPCMA — that is, Internet data collected overseas, in addition to telephone metadata — is where a lot of the Internet chaining currently occurs, with almost none of the controls (or subject limitations) that existed under the PATRIOT-Authorized Internet dragnet. There is also reason to believe that USA F-ReDux envisions the government federating queries of metadata collected under its new Call Detail Record function with SPCMA data. Finally, I suspect that the Second Circuit decision on Section 215 may have repercussions for SPCMA as well.

In other words, I find it fairly alarming that GOP brought in Michael Mukasey and his advice was to make a nod to the Second Circuit even while talking about why the authorities — plural — were important.

Which is to say I don’t think his acknowledgment that Courts are Courts is very comforting, given that he appears to recommend sustaining existing “surveillance authorities” in current bulk form.

Did the Second Circuit Decision ALSO Blow Up SPCMA?

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In a post on last week’s Second Circuit opinion finding NSA’s Section 215 phone dragnet unlawful, Faiza Patel observed that the government may have problems with the court’s ruling that a seizure of metadata can constitute an injury. She points to DOD directive 5240.1-R as a rule that may be impacted.

Second, as Jennifer Daskal explained last Friday, “collection matters.” The Second Circuit rejected the government’s contention that there was no cognizable injury until plaintiffs’ phone records were actually analyzed and reviewed. It ruled that collection is properly analyzed as “seizure,” which if unlawful constitutes a separate injury from the “search” that takes place when records are analyzed either by a human being or a computer.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, in Fourth Amendment cases the analysis of standing is intertwined with the merits question of whether there has been an invasion of a protected privacy interest. Thus, the Second Circuit’s position on collection could have serious implications for other government programs beyond the standing question.

[snip]

Another set of programs for which “collection matters” are those conducted under Executive Order 12,333. Department of Defense directive 5240.1-R, which sets out procedures for intelligence activities that affect U.S. persons, states:

Information shall be considered as “collected” only when it has been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component in the course of his official duties … Data acquired by electronic means is “collected” only when it has been processed into intelligible form. (Emphasis added.)

Although the directive does not explain what constitutes an “intelligible form” of electronic data, another regulation (USSID 18) states that information becomes “intelligible” and is therefore “collected” when a NSA analyst “intentional[ly] task[s] or select[s]” a communication of interest for “inclusion in a report or retention as a file record.” This is a critical distinction because protections for US persons under Executive Order 12,333, Presidential Policy Directive 28, and subsidiary regulations are triggered when information is “collected” per the government’s definition.

All the caveats about not being a lawyer, I think there’s a subset of practices under 5240.1-R that may be particularly acutely affected: SPCMA, the authority that the NSA uses to contact (and, presumably, connection) chain on US person metadata collected overseas.

As I pointed out here, OIPR (during a period when it was headed by current FBI General Counsel James Baker) originally informally advised that NSA had to stop chaining when it hit a US person. But then, a rather suspiciously short period after Baker left in 2007, Steven Bradbury and Ken Wainstein came up with a theory whereby such data did not count as an acquisition — because it had already been collected — and therefore could be chained through.

The fourth definition of electronic surveillance involves “the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication …. ” 50 U.S.C. § 1802(f)(2). “Wire communication” is, in turn, defined as “any communication while it is being carried by a wire, cable, or other like connection furnished or operated by any person engaged as a common carrier …. ” !d. § 1801 (1). The data that the NSA wishes to analyze already resides in its databases. The proposed analysis thus does not involve the acquisition of a communication “while it is being carried” by a connection furnished or operated by a common carrier. (S//SI)

[snip]

The current DOD procedures and their Classified Annex may be read to restrict NSA’s ability to conduct the desired communications metadata analysis, at least with respect to metadata associated with United States persons. In particular, this analysis may fall within the procedures’ definitions of, and thus restrictions on, the “interception” and “selection” of communications.

Accordingly, the Supplemental Procedures that would govern NSA’s analysis of communications metadata expressly state that the DOD Procedures and the Classified Annex do not apply to the analysis of communications metadata. Specifically, the Supplemental Procedures would clarify that “contact chaining and other metadata analysis do not qualify as the ‘interception’ or ‘selection’ of communications, nor do they qualify as ‘us[ing] a selection term,’ including using a selection term ‘intended to intercept a communication on the basis of. .. [some] aspect of the content of the communication.” Once approved, the Supplemental Procedures will clarify that the communications metadata analysis the NSA wishes to conduct is not restricted by the DOD procedures and their Classified Annex. (S//SI)

As I’ve previously explained, it works out to a kind of virgin birth, all to avoid the actual seizure moment that would implicate EO 12333.

That virgin birth theory led to this paragraph in supplemental procedures that amend 5240.1-R to treat metadata analysis (it doesn’t say it here, but it means, of US persons) as something other than an interception.

S//SI) For purposes of Procedure 5 of DoD Regulation 5240.1-R and the Classified Annex thereto contact chaining and other metadata analysis don’t qualify as the “interception” or “selection” of communications, nor do they qualify as “us[ing] a selection term,” including using a selection term “intended to intercept a communication on the basis of … [some] aspect of the content of the communication.”

I’m not sure, but Gerard Lynch’s opinion may pose real problems for this virgin birth theory. And oh, by the way, a lot of this data leads to data ending up in FBI’s hands which would be overseen by … James Baker, who may have had a problem with this argument in the past, even without the Second Circuit decision.

All of which is one way of saying that, in addition to creating some pressure on Congress to pass USA F-ReDux, this bill may have (though I await actual lawyers to consider this question) created far, far larger problems for SPCMA, which is understood to have been one of the places where the old domestic Internet dragnet went to (which might explain why Richard Burr was talking about Internet dragnets on the floor of the Senate the other day).

If so, the government has a far bigger headache than just the one created for the domestic phone metadata program.

The Loss of PRTT Minimization Review in USA F-ReDux

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As I noted earlier, the House Judiciary Committee just released a new version of USA Freedom Act, which I’ve dubbed USA F-ReDux. I’ll have a lot more to say about it, but I want to make two minor point about things that got taken out of Leahy’s bill from last year.

Section 215 Minimization

215 tracker

First, last year’s bill had minimization procedures tied to bulky Section 215 collection effectively requiring the government to destroy the data that had not been determined to be two hops from a target within a period of time.

(C) for orders in which the specific selection term does not specifically identify an individual, account, or personal device, procedures that prohibit the dissemination, and require the destruction within a reasonable time period (which time period shall be specified in the order), of any tangible thing or information therein that has not been determined to relate to a person who is—

(i) a subject of an authorized investigation;

(ii) a foreign power or a suspected agent of a foreign power;

(iii) reasonably likely to have information about the activities of—

(I) a subject of an authorized 21 investigation; or

(II) a suspected agent of a foreign power who is associated with a subject of an authorized investigation;

(iv) in contact with or known to—

(I) a subject of an authorized investigation; or

(II) a suspected agent of a foreign power who is associated with a subject of an authorized investigation,

Those minimization procedures resemble what we’ve seen from the minimization procedures FISC imposed on the phone dragnet, which probably means they also resemble what FISC was imposing in other cases. In the previous year (2013), FISC had imposed minimization procedures on almost 80% of all orders.

In other words, the clause basically required the government to do what the FISC was probably already forcing it to do in the majority of orders (which, in any case, permitted the government to keep, indefinitely, the records associated with people two hops out of someone whom the government had a traffic stop suspicion had ties to terror or spying).

Last year, however, the FISC modified fewer than 3% of orders, and at least one of those was probably a phone dragnet one. Perhaps the change means the government finally started complying with the requirement laid out in 2006 that it adopt minimization procedures (the impending Section 215 IG Report likely created an incentive to do that, as following the law on minimization was one of the recommendations Glenn Fine had made in 2008, so Michael Horowitz surely followed up on that recommendation; plus, the generally law-abiding James Baker assumed FBI’s General Counsel role in this period). Perhaps it means the government stopped making bulky collections (though that is unlikely). But for some reason, the number of orders on which the FISC imposed minimization procedures and a report back fell off a cliff.

And now the requirement that the government adopt minimization procedures for bulky collection is gone from the bill.

I might be alarmed by that, but this year’s bill does add a Rule of Construction clarifying that the FISA Court can impose additional minimization procedures on top of what the bill requires the government to adopt for Section 215. So it may be that if the FBI returns to its recidivist ways on minimization procedures, we’ll see the number of modified orders spike again.

PRTT “Privacy Procedures”

I’m more concerned about what happened on the Pen Register side.

Last year, the PRTT section added new “privacy” (not “minimization”) procedures.

IN GENERAL.—The Attorney General shall ensure that appropriate policies and procedures are in place to safeguard nonpublicly available information concerning United States persons that is collected through the use of a pen register or trap and trace device installed under this section. Such policies and procedures shall, to the maximum extent practicable and consistent with the need to protect national security, include privacy protections that apply to the collection, retention, and use of information concerning United States persons.

Compare how squishy those privacy procedures are to the required Section 215 minimization procedures FBI blew off for years.

A) specific procedures that are reasonably designed in light of the purpose and technique of an order for the production of tangible things, to minimize the retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of nonpublicly available information concerning unconsenting United States persons consistent with the need of the United States to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information;

(B) procedures that require that nonpublicly available information, which is not foreign intelligence information, as defined in section 1801 (e)(1) of this title, shall not be disseminated in a manner that identifies any United States person, without such person’s consent, unless such person’s identity is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance; and

Rather than requiring the procedures minimize the retention and dissemination, the bill required only that privacy protections be applied. And there was no requirement limiting dissemination of non-foreign intelligence data.

But at least there were privacy procedures, right? Baby steps?

Last year’s bill had, and this year’s bill retains, a Rule of Construction (like that added to Section 215) that notes nothing limits FISC’s power to impose additional minimization procedures.

(2) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.—Nothing in this subsection limits the authority of the court established under section 103(a) or of the Attorney General to impose additional privacy or minimization procedures with regard to the installation or use of a pen register or trap and trace device.

Which is all well and good, but FISC’s authority to do so with PRTT has no statutory basis, unlike Section 215. And during both the 2004 initial application for the Internet dragnet and John Bates’ 2010 reauthorization of it, the government made some fairly aggressive claims about FISC’s impotence to do anything but rubber stamp applications. So this Rule of Construction may not have the same weight as that in Section 215.

Which is why I worry that this section was removed from the bill.

(3) COMPLIANCE ASSESSMENT.—At or before the end of the period of time for which the installation and use of a pen register or trap and trace device is approved under an order or an extension under this section, the judge may assess compliance with the privacy procedures required by this subsection by reviewing the circumstances under which information concerning United States persons was collected, retained, or disseminated.

As the documents on the phone dragnet violations showed, unless FISC has and exercises the authority to ensure compliance with minimization procedures, the government will cheat (or, more charitably, not find systematic years-long violations staring them in the face). FISC seemed to recognize this when it imposed compliance reports on its minimization of Section 215 orders in recent years. But it won’t have statutory authority to review assessment with these already-squishy “privacy procedures.”

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