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Unit 8200 Refuseniks Make Visible for Israel What Remains Invisible in the US

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Last week, 43 reserve members of Israel’s equivalent to the NSA, Unit 8200, released a letter announcing they would refuse to take actions against Palestinians because the spying done on them amounts to persecution of innocent people. The IDF has responded the same way government agencies here would — scolding the whistleblowers for not raising concerns in official channels. But the letter has elicited rare public discussion about the ethics and morality of spying.

One of the allegations made by the refuseniks highlighted in the English press is that Israel used SIGINT to recruit collaborators, which in turn divides the Palestinian community.

The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence. While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection. There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself. In many cases, intelligence prevents defendants from receiving a fair trial in military courts, as the evidence against them is not revealed. Intelligence allows for the continued control over millions of people through thorough and intrusive supervision and invasion of most areas of life. This does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence further distancing us from the end of the conflict. [my emphasis]

These refuseniks, apparently, have access both to the intelligence they collect and how it is used. That means they’re in a position to talk about the effects of Unit 8200’s spying. And press coverage has made it sound like something that would uniquely happen to occupied Palestinians.

It’s not.

We know of one way that the NSA’s dragnet is definitely being used to recruit informants (aka collaborators), and another whether it it permissible to use.

The first way is via the phone dragnet. As I have noted, the government has twice told the FISA Court — once in 2006 and once in 2009 — that FBI uses dragnet derived information to identify people who might cooperate (aka inform or collaborate) in investigations. Once people come up on a 2-degree search, they are dumped into the corporate store indefinitely, data mined with sufficient information to find embarrassing and illegal things. Apparently, FBI uses such data to coerce cooperation, though we have no details on the process.

All the revealing things metadata shows? The government uses that information to obtain informants.

One way the government probably does this is by using the connections identified by metadata analysis (remember, this is not just phone and Internet data, but also includes financial and travel data, at a minimum) to put people on the No Fly list, regardless of whether they are a real threat to this country. Then, No Fly listees have alleged, FBI promises help getting them off that life-altering status if they inform on their community.

More troubling still is FBI’s uncounted use of warrantless back door searches of US person content when conducting assessments. As I noted, in addition to doing assessments in response to “tips,” the FBI will use them to profile communities or identify potential informants.

As the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide describes, assessments are used for “prompt and extremely limited checking out of initial leads.” No factual predicate (that is, no real evidence of wrong-doing) is required before the FBI starts an assessment. While FBI cannot use First Amendment activities as the sole reason for assessments, they can be considered. In addition to looking into leads about individual people, FBI uses assessments as part of the process for Domain Assessments (what FBI calls their profiling of Muslim communities) and the selection of informants to try to recruit. In some cases, an Agent doesn’t need prior approval to open an assessment; in others, they may get oral approval (though for several kinds, an Agent must get a formal memo approved before opening an assessment). And while Agents are supposed to record all assessments, for some assessments, they’re very cursory reports — basically complaint forms. That is, for certain types of assessments, FBI is not generating its most formal paperwork to track the process.

So while I can’t point to a DOJ claim to FISC that these back door searches are useful because they help find informants, it appears to be possible. Plus, as early as 2002, Ted Olson said they would use evidence of rape collected using traditional FISA to talk someone into cooperating (aka inform or collaborate); that was the reason he gave for blowing the wall between intelligence and criminal investigations to smithereens.

Indeed, knowing the way the government uses phone dragnet information as an index to collected content, the government may well use phone dragnet metadata to pick which Americans to subject to warrantless back door searches.

It sounds really awful when we hear about Israel using SIGINT — including information we provide without minimizing it — to spy on Palestinians.

But we have a good deal of reason to believe the US intelligence community — in collaboration — does similar things, spying on Muslim communities and using SIGINT to recruit collaborators that end up sowing paranoia and distrust in the communities.

Not only don’t we have a group of refuseniks who, among themselves, can explain how all of this works. But how the FBI uses all this data is precisely what the government intends to keep secret under the so-called “transparency” provisions of USA Freedom Act. While I will provide more detail in a follow-up post, remember that the FBI refuses to count its back door searches, which means it would be almost impossible for anyone to get a real sense of how these warrantless back door searches on US persons are used. It also has asserted it does not need to disclose evidence derived from Section 215 to criminal defendants, which is another way the evidence against defendants gets hidden.

It’s awful that Israel is doing it. But it’s even worse that we’re almost certainly doing the same, but that we can only find hints of how it is being done.

The Associations behind FBI’s No Fly Informant Coercion

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Before I disappeared on my trip last week, the WaPo and others reported on a new suit against the FBI for using the No Fly list to coerce Muslims to become informants, one of whom, Naveed Shinwari, talked about it with Democracy Now as well.

WaPo included a quote from a former senior FBI official dismissing the notion that someone might be added to the No Fly lists to coerce them to inform.

A former senior FBI official said that there are criteria for putting people on the list and that refusing to work as a confidential informant is not one of them.

“That’s not a reason,” the former official said. “It has nothing to do with potential threats to aviation.”

That is, FSFBIO claims there are criteria that must be met before placing someone on the No Fly list.

Let’s take the FSFBIO at his (or her) word, and imagine that the FBI singled out the four plaintiffs in this suit for some reason, and only then used the No Fly status as leverage to try to coerce an informant. Because the sort of things that appear to have gotten the FBI interested in these plaintiffs is just as telling as that, after learning the men weren’t threats, the FBI then tried to use their No Fly status to flip them.

At least according to the complaint, the FBI seems to have focused on these men because of who they knew or what they may have done online.

Naveed Shinwari

Naveed Shinwari, whom Amy Goodman interviewed above, was first questioned in Dubai on his way back from his wedding in Afghanistan in February 2012. At that point, they asked general questions about his trip to Afghanistan, including whether he had visited any training camps on his trip.

But a month later, the FBI asked about videos he had watched online.

Agents Dun and Langenberg began the meeting by asking Mr. Shinwari to think about the reasons why he may have been placed on a watch list. Mr. Shinwari said that he did not know. The agents then asked Mr. Shinwari about videos of religious sermons that he had watched on the internet. Mr. Shinwari responded that he watched the videos to educate himself about his faith.

Last December though, in response to Shinwari’s second TRIP complaint (DHS’ ineffective recourse process), DHS suggested the whole thing had been a mistake.

The letter stated, in part, that Mr. Shinwari’s experience “was most likely caused by a misidentification against a government record or by random selection,” and that the United States government had “made updates” to its records.

Since then, Shinwari has flown domestically once, but says he has become reluctant to share his religious and political views with others.

Awais Sajjad

Like Shinwari, Awais Sajjad may have first come to attention of FBI because of a trip to a wedding — that of his brother — in Pakistan.

He was first prevented from flying when trying to visit his father and grandmother in Pakistan in September 2012. In that interrogation, he was asked about his friends in the US. But in a follow-up interrogation a month later, the FBI asked for specifics about a trip he had made the previous year.

Once inside Mr. Sajjad’s home, the agents asked Mr. Sajjad many questions, including questions about his last trip to Pakistan in 2011, why he went and which cities he visited on that trip. Mr. Sajjad replied that he went to Pakistan to attend his brother’s wedding.

But then, as part of the same interrogation, they asked if he watched bomb-making videos on YouTube.

On the way, they asked Sajjad whether he had watched bomb-making videos on YouTube, to which he replied that he had not, that he only watches movies and music videos.

More recently, in an interview without the presence of his counsel, the FBI asked what Sajjad would do if his family members were involved in a terrorist attack.

They asked him hypothetical questions regarding what he would do if he were to find out that any of his relatives or friends were involved in a terrorist attack.

At that same interview, however, one of the FBI Agents told Sajjad he was not a threat to America.

Agent John Doe #13 told Mr. Sajjad that he had been watching Mr. Sajjad for the last two years and knew that Mr. Sajjad did not do anything wrong and was not a “terrorist” or a threat to America.

As far as Sajjad knows, he remains on the No Fly list.

Muhammad Tanvir

The FBI first approached Muhammad Tanvir back in 2007, when out of the blue they came to his workplace to interview him. At that very first interview, they asked about “an old acquaintance” who apparently had tried to enter the US illegally.

They asked him about an old acquaintance whom the FBI agents believed had attempted to enter the United States illegally.

Then, as he returned from a 2008 trip to visit his wife in Pakistan, agents (possibly DHS) interrogated him for 5 hours and confiscated his passport. Just before he was supposed to go back to DHS to get it back, the FBI showed up to his workplace again. This time, they asked questions about Taliban training camps, but also his rappelling skills.(!)

The FBI agents asked Mr. Tanvir about terrorist training camps near the village where he was raised, and whether he had any Taliban training. The agents also referred to the fact that at his previous job as a construction worker, Tanvir would rappel from higher floors while other workers would cheer him on. They asked him where he learned how to climb ropes. Mr. Tanvir responded that he never attended any training camps and did not know the whereabouts of any such camps. He also explained to the FBI agents that he grew up in a rural area, where he regularly climbed trees and developed rope-climbing skills.

Immediately after that interview, DHS returned Tanvir’s passport, saying he had been cleared. But he was prevented from flying after that point — in 2010 domestically,and twice in 2011 and once in 2012 to Pakistan — because he had gotten placed on the No Fly List. All that time, the FBI continued to pressure him to inform.

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