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When FBI Director Jim Comey Ate 20 Journalists for Lunch, NSL Edition

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Yesterday, charismatic FBI Director Jim Comey had what was alternately described as a “lunchtime interview” and a “roundtable” with a bunch of journalists. (See NYT, ABC, AFP, NPR, McClatchy, HuffPo, LAT, WSJ, Politico, AP)

Where he proceeded to eat them for lunch.

While he addressed many topics, it appears one of his key goals was to lobby to keep National Security Letter authority as is rather than adopt the NSA Review Group’s recommended changes.

Here’s how Politico described it (I don’t mean to pick on Josh Gerstein; his was one of the most thorough reports of what Comey said, even in spite of writing one of the single bylined stories; the outlets above all published some version of this story.)

“The national security letter is not only among the most highly regulated things the FBI does, but a very important building block tool of our national security investigations,” Comey said. “What worries me about their suggestion that we impose a judicial procedure on NSLs, is that it would actually make it harder for us to do national security investigations than bank fraud investigations.”

Comey said applying to a judge for a letter to track down an internet user who made a post indicating an interest in carrying out a terrorist bombing would take days or perhaps weeks, even if more judges were added to the court.

“Being able to do it in a reasonably expeditious way is really important to our investigations. So one of my worries about the proposal in the review group is it would add or introduce a delay,” he said. The director did say he believed there was merit to the review panel’s suggestion that such national security letters not come with a permanent bar on the recipient discussing the order with anyone other than legal counsel.

“We ought to be able to work something out that adopts a nondisclosure regime that is more acceptable to a broader array of folks than the one we have now,” he said.

Comey acknowledged that the FBI process for issuing such letters was too lax several years ago, but insisted it has since been fixed and is now rigorous and heavily audited. “No doubt the process for NSLs was broken in some ways six years ago or longer. It is not broken today. And so I don’t know why we would make natioanls [sic] security investigations harder in that respect than criminal investigations,” he said. He also said doing so would likely encourage his agents to go through prosecutors to get a grand jury subpoena instead—a process that doesn’t require the same number of approvals. [my emphasis]

Here’s the problem with this (aside from the hilarious claims that a program with no external oversight is the most “highly regulated” thing the FBI does, as bolded).

The journalists all, without an exception I’ve found, permitted Comey to misrepresent the Review Group’s two recommendations pertaining to National Security Letters (though HuffPo did include additional reporting noting that two of the Review Group members were Comey’s law professors and he thinks their emphasis is on gag orders preventing recipients from discussing the orders).

I described what the Review Group’s NSL recommendations were here (Julian Sanchez also did a good post).

But to understand why this is important enough for me to be an asshole over, it helps to see Review Group Recommendation 1, affecting the Section 215 dragnet, next to Review Group Recommendation 2, affecting NSLs.

Recommendation 1

We recommend that section 215 should be amended to authorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a section 215 order compelling a third party to disclose otherwise private information about particular individuals only if [it  finds that

(1)] the government has reasonable grounds to believe that the particular information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation intended to protect “against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities” and

(2) like a subpoena, the order is reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.

 

Recommendation 2

We recommend that statutes that authorize the issuance of National Security Letters should be amended to permit the issuance of National Security Letters only upon a judicial finding that:

(1) the government has reasonable grounds to believe that the particular information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation intended to protect “against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities” and

(2) like a subpoena, the order is reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.

[punctuation and spacing altered in brackets]

That is, Recommendation 1 (affecting Section 215) and Recommendation 2 (affecting NSLs) are — in the clauses changing the standard of review to eliminate bulk collection — substantively exactly the same. And while the NSLs require judicial review to get to any enforceable of standard of review — which is definitely one huge proposed change to the NSLs — viewed together like this, it is clear that at least as significant a goal of the Review Group is to end bulk collection under any authority.

Particularly when you consider Recommendation 3, which recommends real minimization procedures for NSLs.

The Review Group recommended judicial review of NSLs, sure. But it also recommended either preventing or (given the likelihood this has been going on) eliminating  bulk collection.

And yet a room full of — in some cases — very good journalists allowed the FBI Director to criticize what they all reported as the Review Group’s recommendation that NSL’s undergo judicial review without even mentioning he misrepresented the recommendation, addressing only a fraction of what the Review Group recommended.

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Maybe Jim Comey Killed Off the Nation’s Premier Law Enforcement Agency?

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Update: The change went into effect on July 1, 2013, so before Comey’s coronation.

I’ve been tracking the FBI’s embrace of its national security/intelligence role (with a consequent inattention to bank crimes, in particular) for years — notably with this post on its self-congratulation a decade after 9/11. (See also this post, this post, and this one.)

So regular readers will be unsurprised by Foreign Policy’s report that the FBI’s boilerplate fact sheet now hails its primary function to be national security.

But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers.

But I am a bit interested in the question FP goes onto ask: when did this happen. It appears to have happened during the summer.

“What happened in the last year that changed?” asked Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer.

McClanahan noticed the change last month while reviewing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the agency. The FBI fact sheet accompanies every FOIA response and highlights a variety of facts about the agency. After noticing the change, McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” he said. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”

What FP doesn’t answer is why this happened.

But one possibility is the arrival of Jim Comey.

Comey didn’t take over as FBI DIrector until September 4, 2013. But his confirmation hearing (more of a coronation, really) was on July 9; his confirmation vote was on July 29. So he had plenty of time to complete the FBI’s rebranding as a domestic spy agency rather than its premier domestic law enforcement agency before he officially took over.

I checked his confirmation hearing coronation, to see if he announced this rebranding. I’ve been unable to find a formal statement (!!). And while later in the hearing he talked about balancing the intelligence side with the law enforcement side (the FBI itself emphasized this part of the hearing), what apparently extemporaneous statement he did give focused on the FBI’s transition under Robert Mueller to an intelligence agency. (This is my transcription of the non-family part, which took up half of the statement; it starts around 42:30.)

If I’m confirmed for this position I will follow a great American, one who has been clear-eyed about the threat facing our country, especially the metastasizing terrorist threat, the cyber-threat, that poses a risk to our secrets, to our commerce, to our people, and most ominously, to the networks we depend upon as our lifeblood. I know he has changed the FBI, as the Chairman and the Ranking Member described, in fundamental and crucial ways. I know that this will be a hard job. I’m sure that things will go wrong and I will make mistakes. What I pledge to you though is to follow Bob Mueller’s example of staring hard at those mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and getting better as a result of those mistakes. His legacy of candor and straight-forwardness and integrity is one that I pledge to continue. I also know that the FBI is and must be an independent entity in the life of America. It cannot be associated with any party or any interest or any group. It has to be seen as the good guys and good gals in this country. The FBI is and must be about finding the facts and only the facts in a fair, thorough, and objective way, and to do that with a rock-solid commitment to our Constitution and to our laws. That culture of commitment to law and resistance to any jeopardy of independence is at the core of the FBI. I know it is deep inside FBI Agents. Those values are the things that I love about the FBI.

It wouldn’t be surprising that a guy with roots in NY who was prosecuting terrorism even before 9/11 would adopt this focus. Nor do I, thus far, have reason to believe he won’t be better at going after banksters than Mueller was (and Obama has finally shifted some focus to it).

But I do hope — given his appeal to independence — he realizes that making the FBI a domestic intelligence agency does make the FBI a partisan institution, because it de-emphasizes a threat every bit as serious as terrorists and cybercriminals: the banksters.

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Fat Al Gore Menaces the Homeland and Homeland Security Experts Don’t Care

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Six days ago, Fat Al Gore (my shorthand for climate change) attacked the Philippines, killing as many 10,000 and leaving 250,000 homeless.

It was Fat Al Gore’s most successful attack thus far.

With Fat Al Gore’s growing success in mind, consider these data points.

Senate Homeland Security Committee doesn’t recognize Fat Al Gore as a threat

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is holding a hearing on “Threats to the Homeland.” It is focused almost entirely on what witnesses describe a dispersed Al Qaeda threat (which doesn’t have the ability to attack in the US), self-radicalized extremists who don’t have the ability to conduct large-scale attacks, and cybersecurity (though Carl Levin did bring up corporate anonymity as a threat, and Republicans brought up Benghazi, which isn’t the “Homeland” at all; also, Ron Johnson leaked that Secret Service officers have proven unable to keep their dick in their pants in 17 countries).

None of the three witnesses even mentioned climate change in their testimony.

Obama’s Chief of Staff threatened to “kill” Steven Chu for admitting islands would disappear because of climate change

Meanwhile, the lead anecdote of this mostly interesting (but in parts obviously bullshit) profile of how Obama disempowered his cabinet ministers tells how Rahm went ballistic because Steven Chu (whose energy initiative created a bunch of jobs) publicly admitted that some islands will disappear because of climate change.

In April 2009, Chu joined Obama’s entourage for one of the administration’s first overseas trips, to Trinidad and Tobago for a Summit of the Americas focused on economic development. Chu was not scheduled to address the media, but reporters kept bugging Josh Earnest, a young staffer, who sheepishly approached his boss, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with the ask. “No way,” Gibbs told him.

“Come on,” Earnest said. “The guy came all the way down here. Why don’t we just have him talk about all the stuff he’s doing?”

Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater—which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. “I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans, and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes,” Chu said. “This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. … The island states … some of them will disappear.”

Earnest slunk backstage. “OK, we’ll never do that again,” he said as Gibbs glared. A phone rang. It was White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel calling Messina to snarl, “If you don’t kill [Chu], I’m going to.”

Much later the story notes that Heather Zichal is on her way out too.

Even blue-chip West Wingers such as economic adviser Gene Sperling and climate czar Heather Zichal are heading for the exits.

Washington insiders applaud fracking while ignoring climate change

Meanwhile, also as part of its big new magazine spread, Politico has two related pieces on DC insiders views.

There’s this “Real Game Changers” piece capturing the “big forces they see shaking up U.S. politics.” David Petraeus talks about “the ongoing energy revolution in the U.S.” Jeb Bush promises, “With natural gas as an exponentially growing source, we can re-industrialize.” And while several thinkers describe the problem of economic inequality, only Al Gore talks about Fat Al Gore.

Carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels is changing our climate and transforming our world. From more destructive and more frequent climate-related extreme weather events, floods and droughts, melting ice and rising sea levels, to climate refugees, crop failure, higher asthma rates and water scarcity, the consequences are profound. As citizens, we’re already paying the high costs. Billions of dollars to clean up after extreme weather events. Rising insurance bills. Lives lost.

Meanwhile, former respectable energy historian turned shill Daniel Yergin congratulates America on being almost energy independent.

Here’s his only mention of the word “climate.”

In a major climate speech this past June, he declared, “We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.”

Yes, we’re going to fight climate change by burning carbon (gas) instead of carbon (coal).

To be fair to the DC elite, the reason we’re embracing fracking is to give ourselves space to ditch the terrorist funding Saudis. So there is a real national security purpose to it.

But of course, it’s a purpose that addresses a far less urgent threat than that terrorist Fat Al Gore, who just killed 10,000 people.

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ACLU to Jim Comey: Welcome. Now Fix This.

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Jim Comey has officially been in charge of the FBI for less than two weeks.

Today, in honor of Constitution Day, the ACLU just released a report showing how the FBI’s expanded mandate since 9/11 has led to Constitutional abuses.

Most of the details of the report have been reported here in depth. But the Big Data section includes some details I haven’t covered. It explains:

FBI collects Suspicious Activities Reports that duplicate — but lower the standard for — an existing database

Another major problem is that eGuardian effectively competes with another federal government SAR. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 established the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) to serve as the conduit for terrorism-related information sharing between state and local law enforcement and the federal government.114 A March 2013 Government Accountability Office report found that though the two programs share information between them, eGuardian uses a lower evidentiary threshold for inclusion of SARs, which creates risks and privacy problems.

The Government Accountability Office found that “many fusion centers have decided not to automatically share all of their ISE-SARs with eGuardian” because eGuardian doesn’t meet ISE standards.115 One fusion center said it would never provide SARs to eGuardian because of the fusion center’s privacy policy.116 The Government Accountability Office also found that the two systems “have overlapping goals and offer duplicative services.”117

FBI will soon have the equivalent of 20 pieces of intelligence on every American — and they share this broadly

An FBI budget request for fiscal year 2008 said the FBI had amassed databases containing 1.5 billion records, and two members of Congress described documents predicting the FBI would have 6 billion records by 2012, which they said would represent “20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States.”119

[snip]

According to a 2012 Systems of Records Notice covering all FBI data warehouses, the information in these systems can be shared broadly, even with foreign entities and private companies, and for a multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement purposes.133

There’s far more in the report, chronicling the slow creep of abusive FBI techniques since 9/11.

Sadly, given that this has all been treated as legal, I doubt that Comey will do anything about it, even with ACLU’s demonstration that the dragnet has led FBI to miss real crimes.

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DOJ Responds to Non-Intell Committee Member of Opposition Party, But Not Intell Committee Member of President’s Party

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On June 20, Rand Paul started seeking more information about how the FBI used drones. On July 9, he sent a second letter to find out about the FBI’s use of drones. After placing a hold on Jim Comey’s nomination to be FBI Director, Paul got results, with an unclassified letter admitting FBI had used drones 10 times, and a classified letter that presumably provided more detail. While Paul wasn’t satisfied with that information — he sent a follow-up asking when the FBI considers drones to impinge on reasonable expectations of privacy — he at least did get a letter. He released his hold and voted against Comey’s nomination.

Compare that to Ron Wyden, a member of the Intelligence Committee and of the President’s own party.

After meeting with Comey on July 18, Wyden sent Comey (care of DOJ’s Legislative Affairs Office) a letter on July 22 asking:

  • Whether the program that led to the hospital confrontation was the Internet metadata program and whether his concerns about it had been adequately address
  • Whether the Comey was satisfied with the way the government carried out surveillance activities during his tenure as Deputy Attorney General or whether he wished he had done more to rein them in
  • Whether the 2001 AUMF allowed the President to collect communications of Americans inside the US without a warrant
  • Whether collection of Americans’ phone record has any impact on their privacy and whether it is justified even if does not provide unique value
  • Whether he commits to giving a straight answer about how much evidence the FBI needs to track geolocation

DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs wrote Wyden back on July 29, basically saying, “Mr. Comey is not in a position to respond to the additional questions in your letter” in part because he “is not able to determine whether your questions implicate information that remains classified.”

Of course, several of these questions go to Comey’s fitness to be FBI Director and pertain to activities he knows better than anyone else. Others ask about his belief, something that doesn’t require classified information to share.

Wyden voted “present” for Comey’s nomination.

Mind you, Wyden didn’t wait as long as Paul before he got a far less responsive response. And he didn’t place a hold on Comey’s nomination (though given the almost unanimous support for Comey, a hold really wouldn’t have done much to delay the nomination).

Still, Wyden asked Comey questions that go far more directly to Comey’s own qualifications to be FBI Director. He asked Comey questions that he, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, should be able to get answers on.

And he got squat.

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FBI Retirees Warn against Jim Comey, Torture, and Indefinite Detention

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When one of the unions that represent FBI Agents floated a trial balloon supporting Mike Rogers to be FBI Director, it got a lot more press attention than the unlikelihood of their request merited.

Let’s see whether this letter — from 5 retired FBI Agents — gets similar press attention. It raises concerns about two parts of Jim Comey’s past: his concurrence with a May 10, 2005 memo authorizing (among other things) torture — which I wrote about here — and his support for the indefinite detention of Jose Padilla.

However, the public record also shows that Mr. Comey concurred with a May 10, 2005 Office of Legal Counsel opinion that justified those same enhanced interrogation techniques for use individually. These techniques include cramped confinement, wallstanding, water dousing, extended sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, all of which constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in contravention of domestic and international law. Further, Mr. Comey vigorously defended the Bush administration’s decision to hold Jose Padilla, a United States citizen apprehended on U.S. soil, indefinitely without charge or trial for years in a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

Among the signatories is Jack Cloonan, a former member of the Osama bin Laden team who watched as CIA started interrupting successful interrogations to subject the detainee to torture instead. I’d be surprised, too, if he didn’t know Comey from the Southern District of NY days.

The letter suggests that Comey might not guard the FBI’s legacy as nobly as Robert Mueller (!) did.

The FBI, while not a perfect institution, has a proud history of dealing with terrorism suspects in accordance with the law. When other agencies and departments resorted to “enhanced interrogation” techniques, FBI Director Mueller directed FBI agents not to participate and in many cases FBI agents were pulled from the field where there were concerns about complicity with unlawful interrogation approaches. To date, the FBI has played a role in prosecuting within the civilian criminal justice system nearly 500 international terrorism cases–often leading to substantial periods of incarceration—

without having to resort to indefinite detention. Even Jose Padilla was ultimately given a trial in a civilian court, despite claims by Mr. Comey that prosecuting Padilla or otherwise affording him traditional due process protections would compromise national security.

They also tied Comey’s confirmation process to the declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report.

The Agents ask only that Comey “reject” the May 10, 2005 OLC memo. Me, I’d like the Senate to demand a full explanation for the circumstances of it. The memo was retroactive to cover someone who had already been tortured (though of course probably served to authorize Abu Faraj al-Libi’s torture, among others). At the very least the Senate Judiciary Committee could demand that Comey explain the circumstances of that retroactive approval.

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Alberto Gonzales and Internet Data Mining

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I was going to leave this speculation well enough alone. But George W Bush decided to interrupt his dog painting to defend Obama’s surveillance dragnet.

Bush also defended the surveillance program, which began during his administration after 9/11, saying the programs guarantee civil liberties are protected.

“I put the program in place to protect the country and one of the certainties is civil liberties were guaranteed,” Bush said.

So here goes.

In his book, Jack Goldsmith describes Alberto Gonzales siding against David Addington in a debate just once, only to have George Bush override the then White House Counsel.

Addington’s hard-line nonaccommodation stance always prevailed when the lawyers met to discuss legal policy issues in Alberto Gonzales’ office. During these meetings, Gonzales himself would sit quietly in his wing chair, occasionally asking questions but mostly listening as the querulous Addington did battle with whomever was seeking to “go soft.” It was Gonzales’ responsibility to determine what to advise the president after the lawyers had kicked the legal policy matters around. But I only knew him to disagree with Addington once, on an issue I cannot discuss, and on that issue the president overruled Gonzales and sided with the Addington position. [my emphasis]

The issue Goldsmith could not discuss could be torture or prisoner transfers or something entirely unknown, but the data mining at the heart of the hospital confrontation is clearly one candidate.

There’s no overt evidence Gonzales tried to do the right thing on the illegal surveillance program. After all, even after Bush agreed to put the program right on March 12, 2004, Gonzales still objected to Goldsmith and Jim Comey’s first advice on the program. After Goldsmith laid out his initial advice on March 15, Gonzales wrote a memo saying,

Your memorandum appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the President’s expectations regarding the conduct of the Department of Justice. While the President was, and remains, interested in any thoughts the Department of Justice may have on alternative ways to achieve effectively the goals of the activities authorized by the Presidential Authorization of March 11, 2004, the President has addressed definitively for the Executive Branch in the Presidential Authorization the interpretation of the law.

This led Comey to write up his resignation letter on March 16. “[A]lthough I believe this has been one of [DOJ’s] finest hours, we have been unable to right that wrong.” Three days later, Bush modified his March 11 Authorization, directing NSA to stop collecting Internet metadata within a week.

Of course, three months later, the Administration resumed collection of Internet metadata using the FISC PR/TT order. That was within days of Goldsmith’s departure, though he had announced his departure a month earlier and Comey, obviously, stuck around for over a year longer.

So still no evidence the Internet data mining was the issue on which Gonzales tried to stand up to Addington.

But let’s jump ahead to the circumstances of Alberto Gonzales’ resignation in August 2007. At the time, his sudden and confusing resignation was attributed to the multiple scandals embroiling him — chiefly the US Attorney firing scandal, but also Gonzales’ Clapper-like lies about the illegal wiretap program before the Senate a month earlier. But for some reason, Gonzales did not benefit from the kind of sinecure every other former Bush official — even James Comey, who went to Lockheed — enjoyed upon departure, which you would have thought he’d get after lying to protect the President.

Then, a year after Gonzales’ departure, we learned that in the weeks before he resigned, White House Counsel Fred Fielding had narced him out for storing a bunch of Top Secret CYA documents in a briefcase in his closet. Read more →

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The 2009 Draft NSA IG Report Makes No Mention of One Illegal Practice

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The 2009 Draft NSA IG Report released by the Guardian last week — and related reporting from Barton Gellman — seem to clarify and confirm what I’ve long maintained (12/19/05; 7/29/07; 7/30/07): that one part of the illegal wiretap program that Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey found “illegal” in 2004 was data-mining of Americans.

Eight days later on 19 March 2004, the President rescinded the authority to collect bulk Internet metadata and gave NSA one week to stop collection and block access to previously collected bulk Internet metadata. NSA did so on 26 March 2004. To close the resulting collection gap, DoJ and NSA immediately began efforts to recreate this authority in what became the PR/TT order.

Mind you, this bulk collection resumed after Colleen Kollar-Kotelly signed an order permitting NSA to collect the same data under a Pen Register/Trap & Trace order on July 14, 2004.

The FISC signed the first PR/TT order on 14 July 2004. ALthough NSA lost access to the bulk metadata from 26 March 2004 until the order was signed, the order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk Internet metadata that it had under the PSP, except that it specified the datalinks from which NSA could collect, and it limited the number of people that could access the data.

Indeed, we know the program was expanded again in 2007, to get 2 degrees of separation deep into US person Internet data. The Obama Administration claims it ended this in 2011, though there are also indications it simply got moved under a new shell.

Mystery solved, Scoob!

Not so fast.

It appears the bulk Internet metadata collection and mining is just one of two practices that Goldsmith and Comey forced Bush to at least temporarily halt in 2004. But the second one is not mentioned at all in the NSA IG Report.

I first noted that Bush made two modifications to the program in this post, where I noted that 6 pages (11-17) of Jack Goldsmith’s May 6, 2004 OLC opinion on the program described plural modifications made in March and one other month in 2004 (I correctly surmised that they had actually shifted parts of the program under parts of the PATRIOT Act, and that they had narrowed the scope somewhat, though over-optimistically didn’t realize that still included warrantless collection of known domestic content).

But there’s actually a far better authority than Goldsmith’s heavily redacted opinion that confirms Bush made two modifications to the program in this period.

Dick Cheney.

When his office disclosed to Patrick Leahy in 2007 what documents it had regarding authorizations for the illegal wiretap program, it listed two modifications to the program: the one on March 19 described in detail in the NSA IG Report, plus one on April 2.

[Cheney Counsel Shannen] Coffin’s letter indicates that Bush signed memos amending the program on March 19 and April 2 of that year.

But there’s no hint of a second modification in the NSA IG Report.

That could mean several things. It could mean the April 2 modification didn’t involve the NSA at all (and so might appear in a one of the other Agency IG Reports at the time — say, DNI — or might have been completed by an Agency, like some other part of DOD, that didn’t complete an IG Report). It could mean that part of the program was eliminated entirely on April 2, 2004. Or it could mean that in an effort to downplay illegality of the program, the IG simply didn’t want to talk about the worst prior practice eliminated in the wake of the hospital confrontation.

Goldsmith’s opinion does seem to indicate, however, that the modification pertained to an issue similar to the bulk metadata collection. He introduces that section, describing both modifications, by saying “it is necessary to understand some background concerning how the NSA accomplishes the collection activity authorized under” the program.

That may still pertain to the kind of data mining they were doing with the Internet metadata. After all, the fix of moving Internet metadata collection under the PR/TT order only eliminated the legal problem that the telecoms were basically permitting the government to steal Microsoft and Yahoo Internet content from their equipment. There still may have been a legal problem with the kind of data mining they were doing (perhaps arising out of Congress’ efforts in that year’s NDAA to prohibit funding for Total Information Awareness).

Whatever it is, one thing is clear. Even with the release of the unredacted Draft NSA IG Report, we still aren’t seeing all the details on what made the program so legally problematic.

Maybe it’s something the Senate Judiciary Committee might ask Jim Comey during his FBI Director confirmation hearing?

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The 14% Domestic Phone Content Collection under the Illegal Wiretap Program

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Screen shot 2013-06-29 at 7.04.51 AMThere’s something funny about the claims the NSC Draft IG Report makes.

On page 8, the report notes:

Domestic Collection. The wording of the first authorization could have been interpreted to allow domestic content collection where both communicants were located in the U.S. or were U.S. persons. General Hayden recalled that when the Counsel to the Vice President pointed this out, General Hayden told him that NSA would not collect domestic communications because 1) NSA was a foreign intelligence agency, 2) NSA infrastructure did not support domestic collection, and 3) his personal standard was so high that there would be no problem getting a FISC order for the domestic collection.

Starting in February 21, 2006, DOJ pushed to get a FISC order for PSP collection, in spite of NSA’s numerous reservations. As an interim solution, they changed the definition of “facility” from that of a specific number of email address “to encompass the gateway or cable head that foreign targets use for communications. Minimization and probable cause standards would then be applied.” After months of trying to finesse this, FISC signed two orders to accomplish this:

The Foreign Content Order

The Domestic Content Order

Remember, domestic content, to the NSA, is content in which both participants are in the US (though at this point NSA may have been distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens). And when they moved to a FISC order, they had a specific order for domestic content. And, as the chart on page 16 shows, 14% of the telephony content was domestic (it was only 2% for Internet, though its number for that collection, 19,000, sure looks awfully round).

Now, apparently, by 2007 when they went to a FISC order, there wasn’t that much domestic collection left.

The Domestic Content Order did not create a similar loss in collection [as the 73% loss on the Foreign Content side] because so few numbers were tasked at that time. It did, however, slow operations because of the documentation required, and it took considerably longer to task under the order than under the PSP. Over time, the scope of the Domestic Content Order gradually decreased to a single selector tasked for collection in January 2009. In January 2009, at NSA’s request, assumed responsibility for the Domestic Content Order and became the declarant before the FISC.

This says they still had these gateway facilities in place 17 months after PAA passed (and NSA likely dumped it off onto FBI at that point to clean up in anticipation of Obama taking over).

The original authorization might seem to authorize domestic collection. And when they shifted to FISC rather than Presidential authorization, it continued to include domestic collection, though not so much, apparently, as when the program started.

 

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Telecoms Versus the Toobz: The Source of the Legal Troubles

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In this important piece on overbroad surveillance programs under Presidents Bush and Obama, the WaPo reveals that the program James Comey almost resigned over in 2004 involved sucking Internet metadata off telecom switches owned by the telecoms.

Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.

At Bush’s direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.

For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.

This leads me to wonder whether legal leverage from the Internet providers — rather than any squeamishness about the law itself — caused the conflict.

Remember, in the fight over retroactive immunity in 2008, the industry group for the Internet providers — including Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google — argued against retroactive immunity.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) strongly opposes S. 2248, the “FISA Amendments Act of 2007,” as passed by the Senate on February 12, 2008. CCIA believes that this bill should not provide retroactive immunity to corporations that may have participated in violations of federal law. CCIA represents an industry that is called upon for cooperation and assistance in law enforcement. To act with speed in times of crisis, our industry needs clear rules, not vague promises that the U.S. Government can be relied upon to paper over Constitutional transgressions after the fact.

Given the WaPo’s report, this amounts to a demand that Congress allow the Internet companies to hold the telecoms accountable for helping the government seize their data.

As well they should have been able to. To a degree, these companies compete, and in the name of helping the government, the telecoms were helping themselves to Internet suppliers crown jewels.

Microsoft and Google versus AT&T and Verizon. Now that would have been an amusing lawsuit to watch. And probably a lot bigger worry for the people who use all of them to spy on us peons than we peons actually are.

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