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Minimization in the Age of Cyberwar

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I’d like to compare how the NSA talking point document released yesterday compares with a document Glenn Greenwald has or has seen, with respect to minimization under Section 702 (PRISM/FAA) collection. Remember PRISM allows the government to access Internet communications with little review of individual targeting decisions, and any American communications accessed with that foreign target communication is also viewed.

The NSA document says US person communications can only be disseminated (this includes getting shared with FBI) if it is necessary to understand the communication, and evidence of crime, or indicates a threat of death.

The dissemination of any information about U.S. persons is expressly prohibited unless it is necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance; is evidence of a crime; or indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm.

The Guardian document (which they did not publish) says US person communications — and note, these are entirely domestic communications — can be disseminated in two slightly different cases and a third unrelated one. The unrelated one permits US person communications to be disseminated if it contains “information necessary to understand or assess a communications security vulnerability.”

One typical example is a document submitted by the NSA in July 2009. In its first paragraph, it purports to set forth “minimization procedures” that “apply to the acquisition, retention, use, and dissemination of non-publicly available information concerning unconsenting United States persons that is acquired by targeting non-United States persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States in accordance with section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended.”

That document provides that “communications of or concerning United States persons that may be related to the authorized purpose of the acquisition may be forwarded to analytic personnel responsible for producing intelligence information from the collected data.” It also states that “such communications or information” – those from US citizens – “may be retained and disseminated” if it meets the guidelines set forth in the NSA’s procedures.

Those guidelines specifically address what the NSA does with what it calls “domestic communications”, defined as “communications in which the sender and all intended recipients are reasonably believed to be located in the United States at the time of acquisition”. The NSA expressly claims the right to store and even disseminate such domestic communication if: (1) “it is reasonably believed to contain significant foreign intelligence information”; (2) “the communication does not contain foreign intelligence information but is reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed”; or (3) “the communication is reasonably believed to contain technical data base information, as defined in Section 2(i), or information necessary to understand or assess a communications security vulnerability.” [my emphasis]

Now, this is not an apple to apple comparison. Indeed, this could very well be an apples to small rubber child’s ball comparison.

The NSA document purports to describe minimization as it occurs today. The Guardian one dates to July 2009, so may be out of date, for starters.

And by design, the NSA timeline focuses on terrorism examples because TERROR TERROR TERROR is very convincing to people who don’t want to think. Based on the mention of a “communications security vulnerability,” the Guardian one seems to be a 702 order describing minimization for a cybersecurity order.

If that’s true, though, it suggests two things. First, that hacking has been equated to terrorism as a crime adequate to disseminate US person communications with no warrant.

And this is where the difference in the standard on foreign intelligence gets interesting: the NSA document claims that only communications necessary to understand foreign intelligence merits dissemination. The Guardian document only need be “reasonably believed to contain significant foreign intelligence information” (though admittedly, that may be the language used in the first instance).

But again, this minimization order is 4 years old. The other day the WaPo suggested that the NSA has changed how they collect Internet metadata (which may be what that other clause “technical data base information, as defined in Section 2(i)” in the minimization order refers to. It may be they’re conducting their cybersecurity dragnet via other means, perhaps even as a way to maintain this lower standard of minimization.

The government is clearly planning to engage in far more intrusive collection in the name of cyberwar than described in discussions about Section 702 (and at the end of the hearing yesterday, Mike Rogers alluded to keeping the programs in place, with their permissive standards, for other reasons, which I took to mean cybersecurity). And that is bound to treat far more Americans as targets of foreign-type collection.

Terrorist Hobgoblins Bite the Intelligence Community in Its Efficacy Ass

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I just finished watching the House Intelligence Committee hearing on the NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden. I’ll have a lot more to say about the content of the revelations in the next few days. But first, a general observation.

Since the initial Snowden revelations, the Intelligence Community and other Administration surrogates have been trying to minimize our understanding of the scope of their surveillance and use traditional fearmongering to justify the programs by focusing on the importance of the Section 702 collection to stopping terrorism. While James Clapper’s office has made it clear that Section 702 goes beyond counterterrorism by revealing that its  successes include counterproliferation and cybersecurity successes, as well as counterterrorism ones, the focus has nevertheless been on TERROR TERROR TERROR.

Today’s hearing was really the culmination of that process, when Keith Alexander boasted up upwards of 50 terrorist plots — about 40 of which were overseas — that Section 702 has prevented.

Of the four plots the government has revealed — David Headley, Najibullah Zazi, as well as these two today…

Mr. Joyce described a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange by a Kansas City man, whom the agency was able to identify because he was in contact with “an extremist” in Yemen who was under surveillance. Mr. Joyce also talked about a San Diego man who planned to send financial support to a terrorist group in Somalia, and who was identified because the N.S.A. flagged his phone number as suspicious through its database of all domestic phone call logs, which was brought to light by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

… the government has either overblown the importance of these programs and their success or are fairly minor plots.

None of the four may be as uniquely worthwhile as the cyberattack described by Clapper’s office a week ago, which it has not, however, fleshed out.

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.

That is, the government might–might!–be able to make a far better case for the value of these programs in discussing their role in preventing cyberattacks rather than preventing terrorist plots.

And yet it hasn’t done so, even as it pushes one after another attempt to legislate internet access in the name of protecting Intellectual Property and critical infrastructure.

Given the increasing focus on cybersecurity — and the already dishonest claims people like Mike Rogers have made about the means to accomplish that focus — this is the discussion we need to be having, rather than digging up terror plots first developed in 2004 that never happened. But in the same way the government shied away from conducting an honest discussion with us in 2001 and again in 2006 about these programs, it is refusing to conduct an honest discussion about cybersecurity today.

And, ironically, that refusal is preventing them from describing the value of a program that surely contributes more to countering cyberattacks than terror attacks at this point.

House Intelligence Parrot: These Programs Are Not Secret…

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… but it’s a grave danger for you to know about them.

Bob Minehart, a staffer for Democrats (presumably Dutch Ruppersberger) on the House Intelligence Committee, has put together a pair of talking point documents for members of the House to talk about the programs revealed by the Guardian last week. (I found out Minehart is the author by checking the documents’ metadata.) The talking points largely track what James Clapper released, though with a few differences that may come from Mike Rogers which I may return to.

The talking points claim the reporting on the programs have inaccuracies.

The articles referenced above contain numerous inaccuracies that imply the United States Government is spying on Americans. That is just plain false.

But the documents include a number of claims that are meaningless, given the underlying standards involved.

The FISA Court authorizes intelligence collection only after the Intelligence Community has proven its case, based on underlying facts and investigations.

The most pathetic part of these talking points, however, is the claim that these are not secret programs. Not the Section 215 dragnet of every Americans’ call data.

There is no secret program involved here – it is strictly authorized by a U.S. statute.

And not the direct access to Internet companies data with just a 51% certainty that the data collected is foreign.

There is no secret program involved – it is strictly authorized by a U.S. statute.

But in spite of this claim that massive dragnets deceitfully denied in Congressional hearings are not secret, the PRISM-related set still warns about what grave danger the leak of the information created.

The unauthorized disclosure of information about this critical legal tool puts our national security in grave danger, puts Americans at risk of terrorist and cyber attacks, and puts our military intelligence resources in danger of being revealed to our adversaries.

These are not secret programs, Dutch Ruppersberger wants you to know. But revealing them will kill us all.

Have Clapper, Feinstein, and Rogers Confused the Distinct Issues of Section 215 and PRISM? Or Are They Indistinct?

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[youtube]hmw4G5q1OkE[/youtube]

Last year, when Pat Leahy tried to switch the FISA Amendments Act reauthorization to a 3 year extension instead of 5, which would have meant PATRIOT and FAA would be reconsidered together in 2015, the White House crafted a talking point claiming that would risk confusing the two provisions.

Aligning FAA with expiration of provisions of the Patriot Act risks confusing distinct issues.

In the last week, the Guardian had one scoop pertaining to FAA (the PRISM program) and another to PATRIOT (the use of Section 215 to conduct dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records).

Since then, almost everyone discussing the issues seems to have confused the two.

Including, at a minimum, Mike Rogers, as demonstrated by the video above. When Dianne Feinstein started explaining the Section 215 Verizon order, Mike Rogers interrupted to say that the program could not be targeted at Americans. But of course the Section 215 order was explicitly limited to calls within the US, so he had to have been thinking of PRISM.

Then there what, on first glance, appears to be confusion on the part of journalists. I noted how Reuters’ Rogers-related sources were clearly confused (or in possession of a time machine) when they made such claims, and NYT appeared to conflate the issues as well. Similarly, Andrea Mitchell took this exchange — which is clearly about Section 215 — and elsewhere reported that the law allowing NSA to wiretap Americans (which could be FISA or FAA) stopped the attack.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

At the same time, when Americans woke up and learned because of these leaks that every single telephone call in this United States, as well as elsewhere, but every call made by these telephone companies that they collect is archived, the numbers, just the numbers, and the duration of these calls. People were astounded by that. They had no idea. They felt invaded.

JAMES CLAPPER:

I understand that.

[snip]

A metaphor I think might be helpful for people to understand this is to think of a huge library with literally millions of volumes of books in it, an electronic library. Seventy percent of those books are on bookcases in the United States, meaning that the bulk of the of the world’s infrastructure, communications infrastructure is in the United States.

[snip]

So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.

[snip]

So when we pull out a book, based on its essentially is– electronic Dewey Decimal System, which is zeroes and ones, we have to be very precise about which book we’re picking out. And if it’s one that belongs to the– was put in there by an American citizen or a U.S. person.

We ha– we are under strict court supervision and have to get stricter– and have to get permission to actually– actually look at that. So the notion that we’re trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them, or listening to everyone’s phone calls is on its face absurd. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to. And I assure you, we don’t want to.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Why do you need every telephone number? Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, you have to start someplace. If– and over the years that this program has operated, we have refined it and tried to– to make it ever more precise and more disciplined as to which– which things we take out of the library. But you have to be in the– in the– in the chamber in order to be able to pick and choose those things that we need in the interest of protecting the country and gleaning information on terrorists who are plotting to kill Americans, to destroy our economy, and destroy our way of life.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Can you give me any example where it actually prevented a terror plot?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, two cases that– come to mind, which are a little dated, but I think in the interest of this discourse, should be shared with the American people. They both occurred in 2009. One was the aborted plot to bomb the subway in New York City in the fall of 2009.

And this all started with a communication from Pakistan to a U.S. person in Colorado. And that led to the identification of a cell in New York City who was bent on– make– a major explosion, bombing of the New York City subway. And a cell was rolled up, and in their apartment, we found backpacks with bombs.

A second example, also occurring in 2009, involved– the– one of the– those involved, perpetrators of the Mumbai bombing in India, David Headley. And we aborted a plot against a Danish news publisher based on– the same kind of information. So those are two specific cases of uncovering plots through this mechanism that– prevented terrorist attacks.

What would seem to support the conclusion that everyone was just very confused is that, in his talking points on the two programs, Clapper claims three examples as successes for the use of PRISM, none of which is Zazi or Headley.

Now, the AP reports Clapper’s office (which is fast losing credibility) has circulated talking points making the claim that PRISM helped nab Zazi.

The Obama administration declassified a handful of details Tuesday that credited its PRISM Internet spying program with intercepting a key email that unraveled a 2009 terrorist plot in New York.

The details, declassified by the director of national intelligence, were circulated on Capitol Hill as part of government efforts to tamp down criticism of two recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs.

But, as I suggested last year, the White House clearly wasn’t concerned about us confusing our pretty little heads by conflating FAA and Section 215. Rather, it seemed then to want to hide the relationship between the dragnet collection of Americans calls and the direct access to Internet providers’ data.

But Clapper and DiFi seem to hint at the relationship between them.

In her first comments about Section 215 (even before PRISM had broken) DiFi said this.

The information goes into a database, the metadata, but cannot be accessed without what’s called, and I quote, “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity.

And in his talking points on 215, Clapper said this.

By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.

This standard — reasonable suspicion that the records are relevant to or associated with a terrorist investigation (I’ll come back to the terrorism issue in another post) — is not the 215 standard, because it requires reasonable suspicion. But it’s not as high as a FISA warrant would be, which requires it to be more closely related than “relevant” to a terrorist investigation.

So what standard is this, and where did it come from? Read more →

Are Guardian’s Sources Responding to a New Use of Surveillance, Post-Boston?

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boundless heatmap

Update: The Guardian source, Edward Snowden, has revealed himself. Stunning.

Little mentioned as we talk about the massive amounts of spying Obama’s Administration undertakes is this passage from the President’s recent speech on counterterrorism.

That’s why, in the years to come, we will have to keep working hard to strike the appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are. That means reviewing the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication, and build in privacy protections to prevent abuse. [my emphasis]

As massive as the surveillance collection currently is, Obama recently called to expand it.

Most people have assumed that’s a reference to FBI’s persistent call for CALEA II, newly proposed to be a law imposing fines on companies that don’t comply with “wiretap” orders.

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has argued that the bureau’s ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is “going dark” as communications technology evolves, and since 2010 has pushed for a legal mandate requiring companies like Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging and other such systems a capacity to comply with wiretap orders. That proposal, however, bogged down amid concerns by other agencies, like the Commerce Department, about quashing Silicon Valley innovation.

While the F.B.I.’s original proposal would have required Internet communications services to each build in a wiretapping capacity, the revised one, which must now be reviewed by the White House, focuses on fining companies that do not comply with wiretap orders. The difference, officials say, means that start-ups with a small number of users would have fewer worries about wiretapping issues unless the companies became popular enough to come to the Justice Department’s attention.

That is certainly at least part of what Obama’s seeking (though the ill-considered plan presents as many security issues as it does privacy ones).

But I note that Mike Rogers said this on ABC this morning.

And so each one of these programs — and I think the Zazi case is so important, because that’s one you can specifically show that this was the key piece that allowed us to stop a bombing in the New York Subway system.

But these programs, that authorized by the court by the way, only focused on non-United States persons overseas, that gets lost in this debate, are pieces of the puzzle. And you have to have all of the pieces of the puzzle to try to put it together. That’s what we found went wrong in 9/11.

And we didn’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle, we found out subsequently, to the Boston bombings, either. And so had we had more pieces of the puzzle you can stop these things before they happen. [my emphasis]

Mike Rogers asserted, with no evidence given, that had we had more information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we might have been able to prevent the Boston attack.

Rogers has, in the past, suggested that if we had gotten the texts between Tsarnaev’s mother and a relative in Russia discussing Tamerlan’s interest in fighting jihad. But it’s not clear that anything prevented us from collecting the relative’s communications, and if the discussion of fighting is as obvious as reporting claims (I suspect it is not), there would have been adequate probable cause to ID the mother.

In fact, one of the Guardian’s other scoops makes it clear that we don’t collect all that much SIGINT from Russia in the first place, so the fact we missed the text may say more about our intelligence focus than the technologies available to us.

Nevertheless, Rogers at least suggests that we might have been able to prevent the attack had we had more data.

In part of an interview with Andrea Mitchell that has not yet (AFAIK) been shown, James Clapper whined that the intelligence community was accused of not being intrusive enough following the Boston attack.

DNI Clapper @TodayShow: I find it a little ironic that after the Boston bombings we were accused of not being intrusive enough

Which makes me wonder whether Obama is calling for more than just CALEA II, but has floated using all this data in new ways because two guys were able to conduct a very low-tech attack together.

Glenn Greenwald said somewhere (I haven’t been able to find it) that he had been working on the PRISM story for around 2 months. If so, that would put it close to the Boston attack (though if it were two full months, it’d make it before the attack).

Given that timing, I’m wondering if the final straw that motivated this presumably high level NSA person to start leaking was a proposed new use of all this data hoovered up. Clapper et al insist that the FISA Court does not currently allow the NSA to data mine the data collected in its dragnet.

But have then been thinking about changing that?

Mike Rogers: As Confused about Telecom Surveillance as He Is about Drone Strikes

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Congressman Mike Rogers, like most members of the ranking Gang of Four members of the Intelligence Committees, has long made obviously false claims about the drone program, such as that public reports of civilian casualties (which were being misreported in intelligence reports) were overstated.

That’s just one of the many reasons I was dubious about this report, claiming that, well … it’s not entirely clear what it claimed. Here’s the lead two paragraphs:

A secret U.S. intelligence program to collect emails that is at the heart of an uproar over government surveillance helped foil an Islamist militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009, U.S. government sources said on Friday.

The sources said Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, was talking about a plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident, when he said on Thursday that such surveillance had helped thwart a significant terrorist plot in recent years.

These paragraphs suggest that we found Najibullah Zazi — pretty clearly the most successful effort to prevent a known terrorist attack since 9/11 — because of one of the programs the Guardian (and WaPo) broke over the last few days.

Some paragraphs down, the piece explains the program in question was the “one that collected email data on foreign intelligence suspects.” Which is weird, because we’ve learned about a program to collect email data on everyone in the United States, not “foreign intelligence suspects.” And a program to collect a range of telecom content on known foreign intelligence suspects and their associates. Already, Reuters’ sources seemed confused.

The next paragraph describes the PRISM program by name.

The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Thursday published top-secret information from inside NSA that described how the agency gathered masses of email data from prominent Internet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under the PRISM program.

And the rest of the report traces what former Agent and now FBI mouthpiece CBS pundit John Miller had to say.

All of that might lead you to believe this is a story reporting that we had foiled Zazi’s plot using PRISM, the program that involves the NSA accessing bulk data on everything these foreign targets were doing. But even that is problematic, since Zazi is a US person, whose communications are supposedly excluded from this program.

Then there are the problems with the actual content of this.

Read more →

Ron Wyden Calls Bullshit on Mike Rogers’ Claims

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Mike Rogers, in an effort to defend his efforts to approve and hide dragnet collection on all Americans for years, claimed today that the dragnet prevented a terrorist attack.

“Within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States. We know that. It’s important. It fills in a little seam that we have,” Rogers told reporters Thursday. ”And it’s used to make sure that there is not an international nexus to any terrorism event if there may be one ongoing. So in that regard, it is a very valuable thing,” Rogers said.

When pressed later for more details, Rogers said the committee is “working on trying to get this declassified in a way that we can provide more information. We’re not there yet. But it was a significant case that happened within the last few years.”

Get this: Rogers’ defense argues it makes sense to conduct dragnet surveillance of 310 million Americans for 7 years (plus the 5 years Bush did so illegally), all to thwart one terrorist plot.

One. Plot.

21 million person-years of call data collected since 2006.

One plot.

In his statement, Ron Wyden is a lot more skeptical that this program is so valuable.

The American people have a right to know whether their government thinks that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being conducted. Furthermore, they have a right to know whether the program that has been described is actually of value in preventing attacks. Based on several years of oversight, I believe that its value and effectiveness remain unclear.

Hey, I’d say that one plot over 7 years — especially when you consider how many banksters have done trillions of damage while FBI and NSA have been fiddling with the call records of innocent people — is the definition of a waste of time and resources.

Putin’s Game

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‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last. ‘There ought to be some men moving about somewhere–and so there are!’ she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. ‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played–all over the world–if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is!’

As you may have heard, the Russians rather ostentatiously outed an alleged American spy, Ryan Fogle, yesterday. Before I talk about that, I wanted to make sure folks had Garry Kasparov’s op-ed in the WSJ from the other day. Among other questions about whether we really want to be partnering closely with Vladimir Putin, Kasparov notes how selective Putin’s attentiveness to terrorism can be.

Terror would seem to be a more likely area for U.S.-Russian collaboration, especially regarding the virulent brand of Islamist extremism that has been bubbling over in Russia’s southwestern Caucasus region since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet the Kremlin’s cooperation on the Islamist threat has been remarkably selective.

Soon after the suspects’ names in the Boston bombing became known, the Russian security services announced that they had warned the FBI about the elder Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, in 2011. But what about during and after Tamerlan’s visit to Russia’s North Caucasus in 2012? That’s when he reportedly was indoctrinated and trained by radicals in Dagestan.

Why were there no communications in 2012 from the FSB (the successor of the KGB) about a suspected radical, an American no less, training in the hottest of Caucasus terrorist hotbeds and then returning to the U. S.? It is beyond belief that the extensive police state that monitors every utterance of the Russian opposition could lose track of an American associating with terrorists.

Tamerlan reportedly met with Makhmud Mansur Nidal, a known terror recruiter, and William Plotkin, a Russian-Canadian jihadist. Both men were killed in Dagestan by the Russian military just days before Tamerlan left Russia for the U.S. If no intelligence was sent from Moscow to Washington, all this talk of FSB cooperation cannot be taken seriously.

This would not be the first time Russian security forces seemed strangely impotent in the face of an impending terror attack. In the Nord-Ost theater siege by Islamist Chechens in 2002 and the Beslan school hostage attack by Chechen and other Islamist radicals in 2004, it later came to light that there were FSB informants in both terror groups—yet the attacks went ahead unimpeded. Beslan was quickly used by Mr. Putin to justify shredding the last vestiges of Russian democracy by eliminating the election of regional governors.

It’s not just Kasparov doubting Putin’s cooperation on the Boston Marathon investigation.

House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers complained about it back on April 26.

“The Russians I think have a lot more information here than they are sharing today,” Rogers told Fox News. “They’ve kind of let us peek under the curtain a little bit, but it’s very clear to me that they have valuable information that, A, they should have provided earlier, and B, that we need to get now to understand what happened when he went back to Russia.”

Shortly thereafter, Putin and President Obama had their second conversation on the topic, after which Putin publicly professed to have little of value to offer because the Tsarnaev’s hadn’t been living in Russia.

Mr. Putin said last week that the Federal Security Service was unable to provide “information which had operative value” about the Tsarnaev brothers, “due to the fact that the Tsarnaevs had not lived in Russia for many years.”

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, repeated that phrase after the two presidents spoke on Monday, but he said cooperation between the countries’ counterterrorism and intelligence services had improved to new levels as a result of the Boston bombing.

“This aroused praise from Putin and Obama, and their satisfaction,” Mr. Peskov told the Interfax news service, adding that cooperation on intelligence “on the whole promotes mutual confidence in bilateral relations.”

The White House offered a more reserved account of the two leaders’ conversation, noting “the close cooperation that the United States has received from Russia on the Boston Marathon attack.”

Meanwhile, a WSJ story from last week catalogued all the things Russia either did not turn over in timely fashion or did turn over with errors:

  • (Possibly) that Canadian alleged extremist William Plotnikov –whom Russia killed last July — had implicated Tamerlan as an associate in 2010
  • The original tip from the FSB provided incorrect birth dates for Tamerlan
  • FSB provided no response to three requests for more information from FBI
  • Texts from Tamerlan’s mother telling another relative he’d be interested in joining jihad
  • Details from Tamerlan’s trip to Russia in which FSB alleges he met with militants

To be sure, some of this reluctance to share information is a very normal imperative to protect sources and methods, Read more →

G-Men Want Mike Rogers to Lead FBI

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In what is presumably an attempt to forestall a Lisa Monaco nomination, the FBI Agents Association just endorsed Mike Rogers to be their next boss.

The FBI Agents Association is expected to announce its endorsement of Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), a former agent, and urge President Obama to nominate him when Mueller’s term ends in September.

“His unique and diverse experience as a veteran, FBI agent and member of Congress will allow him to effectively lead the men and women of the bureau,” Konrad Motyka, president of the FBI Agents Association, said in an interview. Motyka said the association’s representatives met with Vice President Biden’s staff about two weeks ago to push for Rogers’s nomination.

Rogers, who has served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee since 2011, said he was “humbled” by the endorsement of the FBI agents group and would be interested in the job.

The nomination has me laughing my ass off for several reasons.

First, there’s the issue of the MI Senate seat. The GOP believes Rogers is their best hope to beat Democrat Gary Peters for the seat. The fact that Rogers is shopping for another job that is not a well-paying lobbying gig (though it would surely lead to well-paid lobbying gigs in retirement) tells me Rogers doesn’t think he can win the Senate race.

Then there are the comments Former MI AG, Mike Cox, had about Rogers a few weeks back.

Former GOP Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox downplayed that motivation, saying Rogers’ ambition for higher office trumps his desire to make a meaningful influence in foreign policy. “If [Rogers] lost, he could make a lot of money in D.C. as a lobbyist,” Cox said last week. “He’s so full of [expletive] to begin with. He tells all these stories about being an FBI agent, and he was in the FBI for two years. Like he was J. Edgar Hoover.”

Sadly, the Senate Judiciary Committee is too polite to ask Rogers whether he is, in fact, full of shit. I do hope they ask him whether he aspires to be J Edgar (which I would believe). I guess I shouldn’t laugh that an aspiring J Edgar wants to take J Edgar’s old job.

Ultimately, though, I have to laugh because I doubt Rogers is really prepared to take the same kind of accountability that Congress currently holds the national security establishment to. Any single terror attack, no matter how crude, is a failure in the post-Cheney era. Rogers may say he wants the job, but I’m not quite convinced.

I guess I should be a lot more worried about the possibility an aspirational J Edgar is talking about taking over at FBI and I may well get there. But for the moment, at least, I’m just laughing.

Article I Aghast that Article III Insisted on Separation of Powers

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It turns out Obama’s DOJ has not discovered new respect for accused rights since holding Manssor Arbabsiar and Faisal Shahzad two weeks without seeing a judge or lawyer after all. Rather, the magistrate who signed the complaint Sunday night made the decision on Saturday.

A federal judge made the call to advise the Boston bombing suspect of his Miranda rights, even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception.

[snip]

The judge first told the Justice Department on Saturday she intended to read Mr. Tsarnaev his rights on Monday. One U.S. official said the judge cited the intense television coverage of the capture as one reason for initiating the criminal prosecution.

Kudos to Judge Marianne Bowler for the courage to stand by the law.

Meanwhile, the Members of Congress who learned about this yesterday were outraged Article II didn’t tell Article III to fuck off. Mike “Like he was J Edgar Hoover” Rogers even wrote Eric Holder about it (as if Holder had sway over Bowler).

House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said in an interview Thursday that Justice officials should have pushed back on the judge’s plans. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder late Wednesday to register his concerns.  “What I find shocking is that the judiciary proactively inserted itself into this circumstance and the Justice Department so readily acquiesced to the circumstance,” he said. “The court doing this proactively they may have jeopardized our ability to get public-safety information.”

[snip]

The revelation came late Wednesday at a briefing before the House intelligence committee. One lawmaker in the meeting asked FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce why the FBI didn’t raise objections, according to another U.S. official.

Mr. Joyce said in essence it wasn’t the FBI’s role to object to such a determination, the official recounted.

The answer stunned many of the lawmakers in the room. “The whole tenor in the room changed,” the official said.

Remember, by the time Bowler read Dzhokhar his rights, multiple government witnesses were leaking publicly that the government was convinced there was no imminent threat, the entire point of the public safety exception. No one was even pretending this was about public safety anymore.

Nevertheless, the House Intelligence Committee is outraged — outraged!! — that a judge did her job.