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The Common Commercial Services OLC Memo and Zombie CISPA

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Some time last summer, Ron Wyden wrote Attorney General Holder, asking him (for the second time) to declassify and revoke an OLC opinion pertaining to common commercial service agreements. He said at the time the opinion “ha[d] direct relevance to ongoing congressional debates regarding cybersecurity legislation.”

That request would presumably have been made after President Obama’s April 25, 2012 veto threat of CISPA, but at a time when several proposed Cybersecurity bills, with different information sharing structures, were floating around Congress.

Wyden asked for the declassification and withdrawal of the memo again this January as part of his laundry list of requests in advance of John Brennan’s confirmation. Then, after having been silent about this request for 8 months (at least in public), Wyden asked again on September 26.

It appears that Wyden had intended to ask the question of one of the witnesses at an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing (perhaps Deputy Attorney General James Cole), but — having had warning of his questions (because he sent them to the witnesses in advance) — Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins ensured there would not be a second round of questions.

As it happens, Wyden made the request for the memo two days after DiFi told The Hill she was preparing to advance her version of CISPA, and the day after Keith Alexander started calling for cybersecurity legislation again.

In a brief interview with The Hill in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, Feinstein said she has prepared a draft bill and plans to move it forward.

The legislation would be the Senate’s counterpart to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA, which cleared the House in April.

CISPA would remove legal barriers that prevent companies from sharing information with each other and the government about cyber attacks. It would also allow the government to share more information with the private sector.

Since then, Alexander has pitched new cybersecurity legislation in an “interview” with the NYT, admitting he needs to be more open about his places for cybersecurity.

Now, the Executive Branch’s unwillingness to actually share the law as it interprets it with us mere citizens prevents us from understanding precisely what relationship this OLC memo has with proposed cybersecurity legislation — but Wyden made it clear in January that it does have one. But here are some things we might surmise about the memo:

  • The Administration is currently relying on this memo. If it weren’t using it, after all, it wouldn’t need to be revoked. That means that since at least January 14, 2011 (before which date Wyden and Russ Feingold first asked it be revoked), the Administration has had a secret interpretation of law relating in some way to cybersecurity.
  • The interpretation would surprise us. As Wyden notes, “this opinion is inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law” (he doesn’t say what that law is, but I’ll hazard a guess and say it pertains to information sharing). It’s likely, then, that some form of online provider has been sharing cyber-intelligence with the federal government under some strained interpretation of our privacy protections (and, probably, some kind of Attorney General assurances everything’s cool).

Let’s use the lesson we learned during the FISA Amendments Act where the telecoms were clambering for the legislation and the retroactive immunity, but the Internet companies were grateful for “clarity,” but explicitly opposed to retroactive immunity. When we learned the telecoms had been turning over the Internet companies metadata and content, this all made more sense. The Internet Companies wanted the telecoms to be punished for stealing their data.

In this case, in the first round of CISPA (which had broad immunity protections), Facebook and Microsoft were supporters. But in this go-around (which has still generous but somewhat more limited immunity), the big supporters consist of:

  • Telecoms (AT&T, Verizon; interestingly, Sprint did not sign a letter of support)
  • Broadband and other backbone providers (Boeing, Cisco, Comcast, TimeWarner, USTelecom)
  • Banks and financial transfer
  • Power grid operators and other utilities

Now, who knows with which of these entities the government is already relying on this common commercial services memo, which of our providers we believe have made some assurances to us but in fact they’ve made entirely different ones.

But I will say the presence of the telecoms, again, angling for immunity for information sharing, along with their analogues the broadband providers does raise questions. Especially considering Verizon Exec’s trash talking about consumer-centric Internet companies that don’t prioritize national security.

Stratton said that he appreciated that “consumer-centric IT firms” such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft needed to “grandstand a bit, and wave their arms and protest loudly so as not to offend the sensibility of their customers.”

“This is a more important issue than that which is generated in a press release. This is a matter of national security.”

After all, the telecoms have a history of willingly cooperating with the government, even if it bypassed the protections offered by Internet companies, even if it violated the law. Have they been joined by big broadband?

Well, DOJ could clear all this up by revoking and releasing the memo. Until they do, though, my wildarsed guess is that those operating the Toobz in the country — the telecom and broadband companies — have already started sharing consumers’ data that a plain reading of the law seemingly wouldn’t permit them to do.

NSA’s Section 702 Success: 150 Gigs of Defense Contractor Data Protected

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Screen shot 2013-10-21 at 9.59.11 AMOver four months ago, I noted that the most impressive success touted in James Clapper’s fact sheet on Section 702 pertained to cybersecurity, not terrorism.

Communications collected under Section 702 have provided significant and unique intelligence regarding potential cyber threats to the United States, including specific potential network computer attacks. This insight has led to successful efforts to mitigate these threats.

Le Monde, as part of its package on US spying on France, published yet another version of the PRISM slide presentation, including this slide (and 2 others that haven’t been published before; h/t Koen Rouwhorst).

While I’m not sure we’re yet looking at the complete PRISM slideset, at least as it stands, this slide tells the sole success story in the presentation. It describes how, on December 14, 2012, the NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center alerted the FBI to an implant on a Defense contractor’s network. The FBI and the contractor managed to take action that same day to prevent the exfiltration of 150G of data.

And thus using upstream collection (the slide cites Stormbrew), the NSA managed to do something equivalent to stopping China from getting yet another module of data on the F-35 development to go along with all the other data it has stolen.

While I’m glad the NSA prevented yet more tax dollars to be wasted on secrets China (or someone like them) was going to steal anyway, I am rather interested that this gets touted internally as Section 702’s big success story.

After all, Keith Alexander has been chanting terror terror terror terror for the last four months. It turns out — as I’ve been saying all along — it’s not about the 54 mostly overseas plots Section 702 has helped to thwart, it’s about cybersecurity.

Moreover, it doesn’t involve someone’s personal communications access via PRISM. It involves upstream collection (this also suggests when NSA describes searching for “selectors” in upstream collection, it searches on more than just emails and phone numbers, as it has previously suggested).

Again, this success is in no way a bad thing–kudos to the NSA for catching this.

It just highlights how we’re being sold a dragnet to protect against hackers based on fear of terrorists.

Update: In a Guardian post today, I argue Obama should use the replacement of Keith Alexander as an opportunity to break up NSA.

Metaphorically, the NSA has pursued its search for intelligence by partly disabling the locks to all our front doors. Having thus left us exposed, it demands the authority to be able to enter our homes to look around and see if those disabled locks have allowed any nasty types to get in.

Given the way the NSA’s data retention procedures have gone beyond the letter of the law to allow them to keep Americans’ data if it presents a threat to property (rather than just a threat of bodily harm), while the NSA is looking for nasty types, they might also make sure you don’t have any music or movies for which you don’t have a receipt. Thus it has happened that, in the name of preventing invaders, the NSA has itself invaded

Does This Provide Insight into Obama’s Relative Silence?

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The US Ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, went on the Beeb and declined to criticize Edward Snowden.

Asked if he shared the UK security services’ concerns about the threat to national security from the leaks, he said he wanted to focus on the “importance of having this debate about what the trade-offs are between security and privacy, between transparency and secrecy, and to do so in a way that protects whistleblowers – which is different, by the way, from wholesale releasing of information, hundreds of thousands of documents”.

This is a remarkable statement from someone at the heart of what must be touchy relations between the NSA and GCHQ and the US and Brits more generally (if complaints about prior US leaks serve as predictor).

Moreover, it might vocalize some of the reluctance on President Obama’s part to aggressively defend the NSA’s violation of laws authorizing surveillance.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe Obama welcomes any real debate. The conduct James Clapper’s Committee to Make Us Love the Dragnet makes that all too clear. Rather, I suspect Obama believes he can win the debate, and convince us all that we need an even bigger dragnet. (Which might explain the inclusion of Cass Sunstein on the Committee to Make Us Love the Dragnet.)

I suspect Obama, having been convinced by partial briefings the dragnet is great for America, also believes he can persuade the rest of us (who aren’t stuck in his partial briefing bubble) to love it too.

Certainly, his Ambassador to Britain seems to have been permitted to adopt the same stance.

The NSA Hides Its Domestic Collection by Refusing to Count It

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In his speech at Cato last week Ron Wyden made it clear that when he asked Keith Alexander and James Clapper in advance of the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act for the number of Americans’ communications that had been collected under Section 702, he meant to elicit the estimates John Bates made in his October 3, 2011 opinion.

I spent much of 2012 asking the NSA and the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] whether anyone had done an estimate of how many American communications had been collected under section 702. The ODNI and the NSA insisted that such an estimate was impossible, but what they failed to tell the public was that the Fisa court had already done one.

Bates had the NSA conduct a manual review of a statistical subsection of 50,440 transactions collected via upstream collection between January and June 2011. (Note, it appears Bates may have had to raise dire warnings with “top DOJ officials” on July 8, 2011 before he got such a review.) He then annualized the results and estimated that the NSA was collecting up to 56,000 communications of Americans each year, made up of 46,000 communications consisting entirely of an American’s communication (Single Communication Transactions), and 10,000 in which their communication got included in a Multiple Communication Transaction swept up in the search.

Given what we’ve learned about the 2011 confrontation, Wyden’s serial requests for this information take on added importance for two reasons.

Administration never disclosed its domestic collection to the most Members of Congress

First, because the Administration very pointedly did not inform the bulk of Congress that NSA had been — and had been allowed to continue — collecting purely domestic communications from telecom switches. Neither the February 9, 2012 statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee nor the May 4, 2012 notice to Congress provided any indication that this violation involved collecting domestic communications (the December 8, 2011 statement to the House Intelligence Committee did, and both Committees, presumably as well as the Judiciary Committees, received the opinion itself, which makes that clear). It’s also not clear whether any of these notices included any mention of the SCTs, those single communication transactions involving just a US person communication.

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“Folksy and Firm” Flummoxes Fancy NYT Journalists

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Less than 10 days ago, Keith Alexander admitted to Patrick Leahy that the single solitary case in which the phone dragnet proved critical was that of Basaaly Moalin. But that was not an attack. Rather, it was an effort to send money to al-Shabaab (and others) because they were protecting Somalia against a US backed Ethiopian invasion.

And yet two crack “journalists” used this as the lead of their “interview” with Alexander with not a hint of pushback.

The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview that to prevent terrorist attacks he saw no effective alternative to the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of telephone and other electronic metadata from Americans.

The phone dragnet has never — never! — been more than one tool in preventing any attack, and yet Alexander gets to imply, unchallenged, it is critical going forward.

Instead of actual reporting, we get platitudes like this.

General Alexander was by turns folksy and firm in the interview. But he was unapologetic about the agency’s strict culture of secrecy and unabashed in describing its importance to defending the nation.

That culture is embodied by two installations that greet visitors to Fort Meade. One is a wall to honor N.S.A. personnel killed on overseas missions. The other is a tribute to the Enigma program, the code-breaking success that helped speed the end of World War II and led to the creation of the N.S.A. The intelligence community kept Enigma secret for three decades.

The only thing remotely resembling a challenge came when these “reporters” note Alexander’s claim to have willingly shut down the Internet metadata program (which the NSA has largely kept secret, in spite of having been disclosed) ignores NSA claims it (like the phone dragnet now, purportedly) was critical.

But he said the agency had not told its story well. As an example, he said, the agency itself killed a program in 2011 that collected the metadata of about 1 percent of all of the e-mails sent in the United States. “We terminated it,” he said. “It was not operationally relevant to what we needed.”

However, until it was killed, the N.S.A. had repeatedly defended that program as vital in reports to Congress.

The rest consists of more of the same kind of rebuttal by redefinition. The claim that NSA shares data with Israel is wrong, this “journalism” says, because “the probability of American content in the shared data was extremely small” (which of course says nothing about the way it would violate minimization procedures in any case). The claim that NSA launched 200 offensive cyberattacks in 2011 is wrong because many of those were actually other “electronic missions.” Besides, Alexander claims,

“I see no reason to use offensive tools unless you’re defending the country or in a state of war, or you want to achieve some really important thing for the good of the nation and others,” he said. [my link, for shits and giggles]

We are not now nor were we in 2006 when StuxNet started “in a state of war” with Iran, so how credible are any of these claims?

Mostly though, this appears to be an attempt, four months after highlighting the importance of PRISM against cyberattacks but then going utterly silent about that function, to reassert the importance of NSA’s hacking to prevent hacking.

Even there, though, Alexander presented dubious claims that got no challenge.

General Alexander said that confronting what he called the two biggest threats facing the United States — terrorism and cyberattacks — would require the application of expanded computer monitoring. In both cases, he said, he was open to much of that work being done by private industry, which he said could be more efficient than government.

In fact, he said, a direct government role in filtering Internet traffic into the United States, in an effort to stop destructive attacks on Wall Street, American banks and the theft of intellectual property, would be inefficient and ineffective.

“I think it leads people to the wrong conclusion, that we’re reading their e-mails and trying to listen to their phone calls,” he said.

The NSA already is filtering Internet traffic into the United States (and also searching on and reading incidentally collected Internet traffic without a warrant) under Section 702 certificates supporting counterterrorism, counterproliferation and … cyberattacks.

But nosiree, Alexander can’t envision doing what he’s already doing — and had been doing in a way that violated statute and the Fourth Amendment for three years already by 2011 — in the name of protecting the banksters who’ve gutted our economy. Only all of that — including the retention of US person data in the name of protecting property (presumably including intellectual property) is baked right into the NSA’s minimization procedures.

And that bit about violating Section 702 and the Fourth Amendment for over three years with a practice that was also baked into NSA’s minimization procedures? Here’s the claim the NYT’s crack journalists allow Alexander to end this charade with.

“We followed the law, we follow our policies, we self-report, we identify problems, we fix them,” he said. “And I think we do a great job, and we do, I think, more to protect people’s civil liberties and privacy than they’ll ever know.”

I Con the Record Admits All This Spying Also Serves Counterintelligence

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Screen shot 2013-10-04 at 6.02.34 PMJames Clapper has a statement up at I Con the Record trying to dismiss any concerns that the US is using the same kind of technologies as China uses against its people to crack Tor.

As per usual, Clapper complains that the stories don’t paint the Intelligence Community in the light they’d like to be described.

In particular, he complains that — notwithstanding the Guardian’s publication of NSA’s graphic suggesting every Tor communication hides a bearded terrorist — the stories haven’t emphasized the “very naughty” targets of this spying.

However, the articles fail to make clear that the Intelligence Community’s interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies.

But that complaint comes with a new admission, one that has been all but unmentioned since when, on June 10, Clapper’s most impressive PRISM success story pertained to cybersecurity. For the first time in quite a while, Clapper today acknowledged NSA uses this not only for counterterrorism and other foreign targets, but also counterintelligence.

The articles fail to mention that the Intelligence Community is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and that we operate within a strict legal framework that prohibits accessing information related to the innocent online activities of US citizens.

Within our lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries so that we can disrupt their plans and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans. [my emphasis]

The admission is important not just because Clapper and Keith Alexander have consistently been trying to hide the cybersecurity application of this. But because it makes clear that NSA requires no foreign nexus to target Tor communications.

Which they couldn’t well require in any case, since the design of Tor ensures the government can’t know whether an encrypted message is a domestic or foreign communication.

Of course, once you include counterintelligence (and threats to property) as a valid excuse to keep encrypted communications indefinitely and even to compromise people’s computers (see slide 16), particularly in an environment where leaks of even unclassified information are treated as spying, then the distinction between “citizens” and “targets” crumbles.

The Scandal of Lying about “Thwarted” “Plots” Started 4 Years Ago

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As predicted, one big takeaway from yesterday’s NSA hearing (the other being the obviously partial disclosure about location tracking) is Keith Alexander’s admission that rather than 54 “plots” “thwarted” in the US thanks to the dragnet, only one or maybe two were. Here are some examples.

But they’re missing this real scandal about the government’s lies about the central importance of Section 215.

That scandal started 4 years ago, when an example the FBI now admits had limited import played a critical role in the reauthorization of Section 215 without limits on the dragnet authority.

First, note that even while Leahy got Alexander to back off his “54 plots” claim, the General still tried to insist Section 215 had been critical in two plots, not just one.

SEN. LEAHY: Let’s go into that discussion, because both of you have raised concerns that the media reports about the government surveillance programs have been incomplete, inaccurate, misleading or some combination of that. But I’m worried that we’re still getting inaccurate and incomplete statements from the administration.

For example, we have heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted by the use of Section 215 and/or Section 702 authorities. That’s plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress; we get it in statements. These weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all thwarted. The American people are getting left with an inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs.

Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and out of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S. Would you agree with that, yes or no?

DIR. ALEXANDER: Yes.

SEN. LEAHY: OK. In our last hearing, Deputy Director Inglis’ testimony stated that there’s only really one example of a case where, but for the use of Section 215, bulk phone records collection, terrorist activity was stopped. Is Mr. Inglis right?

DIR. ALEXANDER: He’s right. I believe he said two, Chairman; I may have that wrong, but I think he said two, and I would like to point out that it could only have applied in 13 cases because of the 54 terrorist plots or events, only 13 occurred in the U.S. Business Record FISA was only used in (12 of them ?).

SEN. LEAHY: I understand that, but what I worry about is that some of these statements that all is — all is well, and we have these overstatements of what’s going on — we’re talking about massive, massive, massive collection. We’re told we have to do that to protect us, and then statistics are rolled out that are not accurate. It doesn’t help with the credibility here in the Congress; doesn’t help with the credibility with us, Chairman, and it doesn’t help with the credibility with the — with the country. [my emphasis]

Here’s the transcript at I Con the Record from the previous hearing, where Inglis in fact testified that Section 215 was only critical in the Basaaly Moalin case (which was not a plot against the US but rather funding to defeat a US backed invasion of Somalia).

MR. INGLIS: There is an example amongst those 13 that comes close to a but-for example and that’s the case of Basaaly Moalin.

 

That is, in fact, Inglis said it had been critical in just one “plot.”

After he did, FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce piped in to note the phone dragnet also “played a role” by identifying a new phone number of a suspect we already knew about in the Najibullah Zazi case.

MR. JOYCE: I just want to relate to the homeland plots. So in Najibullah Zazi and the plot to bomb the New York subway system, Business Record 215 played a role; it identified specifically a number we did not previously know of a —

SEN. LEAHY: It was a — it was a critical role?

MR. JOYCE: What I’m saying — what it plays a —

SEN. LEAHY: (And was there ?) some undercover work that was — took place in there?

MR. JOYCE: Yes, there was some undercover work.

SEN. LEAHY: Yeah —

MR. JOYCE: What I’m saying is each tool plays a different role, Mr. Chairman. I’m not saying that it is the most important tool —

SEN. LEAHY: Wasn’t the FBI — wasn’t the FBI already aware of the individual in contact with Zazi?

MR. JOYCE: Yes, we were, but we were not aware of that specific telephone number, which NSA provided us. [my emphasis]

So, when pressed, Joyce admitted that Section 215 wasn’t critical to finding Adis Medunjanin, one of Zazi’s conspirators. (And if you read Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman’s Enemies Within, you see just how minor a role it played.)

That’s important, because the Administration’s use of Section 215 in the Zazi case was crucially important to the defeat of two efforts to rein in the dragnet in 2009.

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James Clapper Proves Inadequate Oversight by Refusing to Answer EO 12333 Questions

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The headlines from today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on NSA will no doubt be that Pat Leahy forced Keith Alexander to admit they’ve been lying about whether the 54 “plots” they “thwarted” were really “plots” or “thwarted” in the first place. Perhaps just two were.

More astute reporters might note that, in response to questions about the NYT’s report on the dossiers created in the course of foreign intelligence collection analysis, Keith Alexander offered several equivocations first claiming NYT got things wrong, then realizing that was a too broad claim. More interesting, he ultimately admitted that the NSA conducts some of this under Executive Order 12333 — the collection David Kris outlined in his paper.

There was even some follow-up on the NSA’s use of EO 12333, with James Clapper and Alexander claiming Congress had some oversight of that collection (in spite of Dianne Feinstein’s admission that they don’t get news of EO 12333 violations even when they involve Americans).

But the most telling exchange occurred between Amy Klobuchar, Keith Alexander, and James Clapper. (after 1:25) Klobuchar asked why they hadn’t told the Committee of the violations reported in an internal NSA review when they last appeared before the committee. After Alexander tried to filibuster (actually addressing the report in question and noting only ODNI and DOJ get those numbers, not FISC or Congress), Clapper interrupted and pretended she had asked about the LOVEINT incidents just reported to Charles Grassley. Clapper claimed those hadn’t been reported because they were 12333 violations.

Clapper: I think the answer to the question, Senator, was that the subject of the hearing was 215 and 702, and these 12 violations over 10 occurred under the foreign collection under the auspices of Executive Order 12333. [Sits back]

Klobuchar: I thought we were broadly asking questions and it would have been nice to have heard about it there but it’s behind us now.

But Clapper is absolutely incorrect. The review Klobuchar asked about reported 195 FISA violations. Of those, 20% were due diligence violations — of an analyst not following Standard Operating Procedures she has been trained on. 31% are what amount to insufficient intelligence (these are called “resource violations”), resulting in searches on targets who shouldn’t be targeted. A number of the incidents included not detasking someone quickly enough.

In other words, while this may (or may not) be minor, they are real violations of FISA authorities, the stuff that Congress and the Courts are supposed to oversee. And Clapper just blew off the question by saying they don’t have to disclose any violations pertaining to EO 12333 (even though a chunk of these violations weren’t EO 12333 violations).

Which of course demonstrates a further point. The Intelligence Community is basically refusing to discuss any EO 12333 violations and/or programs, even while it also picks up US person information at least incidentally.

And yet they claimed there was adequate oversight over those programs.

David Kris Outlines the Internet Dragnet Elephant

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Way back on page 64 (of 67) of former Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris’ paper “On the Bulk Collection of Tangible Things,” he invokes the elephant metaphor the President used to promise more NSA disclosures on multiple programs.

What I’m going to be pushing the IC to do is rather than have a trunk come out here and leg come out there and a tail come out there, let’s just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they’re looking at.

In keeping with the President’s direction, the Intelligence Community has released many new details about the bulk telephony metadata collection program, as described above. In addition, as also noted above, the FISC itself has released significant new information. The key remaining question is whether there will be additional, authorized releases concerning intelligence activity that has not been subject to prior, unauthorized releases. [my emphasis]

Kris uses the President’s elephant to ask whether they really will disclose their intelligence programs. He mentions just the phone dragnet (even though the Administration, in response to two FOIAs, also released information about their Section 702 upstream collection programs), even as he suggests the Administration might do well to admit to other programs before they are exposed by an Edward Snowden leak.

Which is interesting, because Kris’ paper — in spite of his title and in spite of that reference to the phone dragnet — is really about what the government has declassified (the phone dragnet) as well as what the government has left partly hidden (the Internet dragnet and broader phone dragnet).

Kris discusses the PATRIOT-authorized Internet dragnet along with the phone dragnet

Kris, after all, provides the following facts about the PATRIOT-authorized Internet dragnet, citing the named sources:

  • Internet and telephony metadata was collected starting in 2001, until the 2004 hospital disagreement led to the former being moved to Pen Register/Trap & Trace authority in 2004, which was the first bulk order (“purported” NSA IG Report)
  • One company — which the “purported” IG report makes clear was an Internet one and is probably Yahoo — did not participate in the illegal wiretap program (“purported” NSA IG Report)
  • The Internet metadata collection ended in 2011 (an ODNI spokesperson in a Charlie Savage story)

Kris also points to four different Administration acknowledgements of the Internet metadata program. He refers to the 2009 and 2011 notice letters to Congress (though he focuses on the phone dragnet language in them), and the James Clapper response to Wyden and 25 other Senators. Perhaps most interestingly, Kris notes that government witness(es) have confirmed the program and the use of PR/TT to authorize it…

At a July 17, 2013 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, government witnesses confirmed the pen-trap bulk collection.

But unlike just about every other comment in a hearing cited in his paper, Kris doesn’t quote the exchange, which went like this.

SUZAN DELBENE: The public also now knows that the telephone metadata collection is under Section 215, the Business Records provision of FISA, and that allows for the collection of tangible things. But we’ve also seen reports of a now-defunct program collecting email metadata. With regard to the email metadata program that is no longer being operated, can you confirm that the authority used to collect that data was also Section 215?

GEN. COLE: It was not. It was the Pen Register Trap and Trace Authority under FISA, which is slightly different, but it amounts to the same kind of thing. It does not involve any content. It is, again, only to and from. It doesn’t involve, I believe, information about identity. It’s just email addresses. So it’s very similar, but not under the same provision.

REP. DELBENE: And could you have used Section 215 to collect that information?

GEN. COLE: It’s hard to tell. I’d have to take a look at that.

The transcript from this hearing is up at the I Con the Record site, so it’s unclear why Kris didn’t quote it.  Read more →

The People Who Work at Arthur Anderson NSA Are Such Nice People

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[youtube]uF40mZbrd7I[/youtube]

Back in 2001 or early 2002, I sat next to a lifetime Arthur Anderson accountant on a long plane ride. We talked about the Enron debacle and its ties to Anderson. She hadn’t worked the Enron account, and she insisted that Anderson itself was a highly ethical company — it was just the Enron account that was bad, she said. I gently raised the several other big accounting scandals Anderson starred in — Waste Management and Sunbeam both broke in 2001. But in her mind, that she and the people she worked with seemed like good people was all the proof she needed that Anderson was not a systematically unethical company.

That is, effectively, the defense that Bobby Chesney and Ben Wittes want to offer of the NSA after Chesney helped set up a special meeting of academics (plus Wittes) with the agency.

Our major takeaway concerns the dramatic disparity that separates the perception on the outside of what this agency does and NSA’s self-perception. To hear NSA folks talk about their compliance regime, for example, is to hear about an entirely different animal than the situation depicted in many new stories. To hear NSA folks discuss the relationship between encryption, cyber-security, and cyber offense is a different animal than to read news stories about how NSA breaks encryption. And so forth.  These conversations were all unclassified, but they vividly described a wide gap in understanding between NSA and the press, members of Congress, and the public regarding what the agency does and doesn’t do, how accountable and regulated it is, to what extent it complies with the law and how, and what the relevant law is.

That gap is unnecessary, or at least it need not be so wide. Read more →