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Senate Intelligence Committee Open Hearings: A Platform for Liars

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Pentagon Papers era NYT Counsel James Goodale has a piece in the Guardian attracting a lot of attention. In it, he says the first step to reform NSA is to fire the liars.

The NSA has lied to the Congress, the courts, and perhaps even to the president himself, but no one seems to care.

The Director of National Intelligence James R Clapper admitted he lied to Congress about the NSA metadata collection program. He said the NSA had no such program – and then added that that was the least “untruthful” remark he could make. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, lied in 2012 that the NSA does not hold data on US citizens, and repeated similar misstatements, under oath, to Congress about the program:

We’re not authorized to do it [data collection on US citizens], nor do we do it.

NSA lawyers lied to secret Fisa court Judges John D Bates and Reggie B Walton. In recently released opinions, Bates said he had been lied to on three separate occasions and Walton said he had been lied to several times also.

But Clapper and Alexander have not been held in contempt of Congress. Nor have the Justice Department attorneys, who lied to Judges Walton and Bates, been disciplined.

And while he links to many of the best examples of James Clapper and Keith Alexander lying, he misses this.

In just its third open hearing this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has arranged the following witnesses for tomorrow’s hearing on NSA’s spying.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) today announced the committee will hold an open hearing to consider legislative changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to include the NSA call records program, on Thursday, September 26, at 2 p.m.

WHAT:  Public hearing on FISA, NSA call records

WHO:

Panel I

  • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
  • National Security AgencyDirector General Keith Alexander
  • Deputy Attorney General James Cole

Panel II

  • Ben Wittes, Brookings Institution
  • Tim Edgar, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

So DiFi’s idea of an “open hearing” is to invite two established liars. And for her non-governmental witnesses, one keeps declaring Congress NAKED! in the face of evidence the government lies to them, and the other tells fanciful stories about how much data NSA shares.

It’s like DiFi goes out of her way to find liars and their apologists to testify publicly.

That’s nothing new, though. Those other two open hearings? The Global Threat Assessment hearing where Clapper assured Ron Wyden the NSA didn’t collect data on millions of Americans. And the confirmation hearing for John Brennan, who once claimed the US had killed no civilians in an entire year of drone strikes (and, if his odd mouth gestures were the tell they appeared to be, he lied about leaks to journalists including on UndieBomb 2.0 in the hearing as well.)

It’s DiFi’s committee. And if she wants every single open hearing to serve as a platform for accomplished liars, I guess that’s her prerogative.

But observers should be clear that’s the purpose of the hearings.

Ben Wittes, Brookings Buck Naked

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Ben Wittes tries to respond to my complaints that he continues to insist all of Congress had a way of knowing about the Section 215 dragnet program and its abuses — THEY ARE NAKED, Wittes proclaims over and over while accusing me of spewing a “storm of outrage.”

My case, remember, is based on two discrete facts, only one of which Wittes even tries to address in his rebuttal.

First, the 93 Representatives elected in 2010 were never provided access to the letter the Administration wrote, ostensibly to inform them about the dragnet so they could make an informed vote. Assuming that the 7 members of the House who were on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees learned of the program, that still left 86 members of the House who never had an opportunity to read about the secret use of Section 215 and the gross violations of it. Of those, 65 voted in favor of the PATRIOT reauthorization.

Here’s how Ben responds to this, in the 28th paragraph of his response.

Ms. Wheel insists that the 65 freshman members of the House who were not provided the 2011 briefing [note his inaccurate portrayal of this fact]  might have swung the 250-153 vote for FISA reauthorization. She’s almost certainly wrong. On July 24, 2013, well after the public revelations of Section 215 bulk metadata collection hit the press and the butt-covering had begun, the House had the chance for a do-over. It voted on the Amash-Conyers amendment to halt NSA’s “indiscriminate” collection of telephony metadata. The House declined on a 217-to-205 vote to adopt it.

Ben presents evidence of a 33-vote swing at a time before the Administration released the notice letters or the White Paper that provided sanitized descriptions of the program abuses, or the Primary Order showing some other fairly troubling details of the program, to say nothing of the 2009 documents showing the government had enabled chaining four hops deep off of 27,090 approved selectors to find informants as well as terrorists, and claims it is proof that Members of Congress won’t change their vote based on full information about these programs. (At least one member has actually stated on the record he would now vote differently on Amash-Conyers given some of these more recent revelations.)

Ben’s argument remains the same then — pointing at votes that happen without full information about a program as proof that Congress supports that program. NAKED!

But Ben fails to even hint at the other critical fact here, the evidence we have about the briefings that those 83 and other House members had available, in spite of the fact he makes this assertion:

So we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the administration wanted members to have certain detailed information about the program. We also know that there were a lot of briefings by that administration concerning this program to those same members [another false claim–all but two of the briefings were limited to Senators or Judiciary and Intelligence Committees] in the same time frame as the administration wanted those members to read that briefing paper.

Hmmmm. Wonder what they could have been talking about in those briefings….

It’s telling, here, that Ben doesn’t link to this post — which was a direct response to one of Ben’s other attempts to insist THOSE CONGRESSMEN ARE NAKED — nor to this one — which was still up on Emptywheel’s front page when I wrote this post and which quotes Ben’s NAKED post. That, in spite of the fact that Ben included this tweet among those he so courteously collected to support his assertion about my “storm of outrage” that he ignored the actual facts.

All of those would alert his readers to this detail, from one of just two out of the long list of briefings Ben posted that actually could have informed House members not on the Intelligence or Judiciary Committees. DOJ’s own account of what happened at the May 13, 2011 briefing — which Ben is sure adequately briefed those who attended about the dragnet — records this exchange.

Comment — Russ Feingold said that Section 215 authorities have been abused. How does the FBI respond to that accusation?

A — To the FBI’s knowledge, those authorities have not been abused.

A Member of Congress — surely picking up on public details Ben recites as proof they had some way of knowing about the dragnet — actually asked a question that goes to the heart of the dragnet and its problems. Feingold says Section 215 has been abused. Has it? And in response, two members of the Administration, Valerie Caproni and Robert Mueller — the people Ben is certain “beyond any shadow of a doubt” wanted Members of Congress to be informed — say the FBI had no knowledge of abuse.

Read more →

Also, the Nail Polish Remover Lobby Didn’t Challenge Section 215 Orders

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The takeaway from the FISC opinion released today from about 6 outlets seems to be that no telecom has ever challenged a Section 215 order.

But the opinion actually says more than that. It says,

To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony has challenged the legality of such an Order. Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an Order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so.

Now, if your bullshit antennae aren’t buzzing when you read that formulation, “no holder of records,” then you need to have them checked. Because it sure seems to allow for the possibility that someone whose customers had their records seized via someone deemed the actual holder of them objected. That entity, after all, wouldn’t be a Section 215 Order recipient, and therefore would have no standing to object, regardless of the statutory mechanism for doing so. (Plus, both EPIC and ACLU have — and had, by the time this order was written — objected. But they don’t count because they’re the actual customers.)

But remember, as far as we know, Section 215 has not been used for Internet metadata (except for subscriber information for the first 2 years of the program; see Verizon’s CEO bitching about the email companies his company stole data from for years complaining publicly about the dragnet). The one other big “customer base” we know has been targeted by bulk-ish orders are hydrogen peroxide and nail polish remover (acetone) purchasers.

However, there, too, like Internet providers whose data gets sucked up at a telecom provider’s switch, the actual beauty supply companies are unlikely to be the “holder of records.” The beauty of the Third Party doctrine, for the government, is it can always look elsewhere for people who have “records” that betray customers’ interests.

If only we had a powerful nail polish remover lobby we might be able to combat the dragnet.

Wyden/Udall: If Intelligence Community Is Dumb Rather than Malicious, Why Should We Trust Them?

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Ron Wyden and Mark Udall just released a second statement on last week’s Section 215 dragnet document dump, taking the intelligence community’s excuse — that no one really knew what these programs were doing — at face value.

If the IC is dumb rather than malicious, they ask, why should we take their word on the value of the programs?

The intelligence community’s defense was that these violations were occurring because no one had a full grasp of how the bulk collection program actually worked.

If the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.

The government’s misrepresentations inevitably led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court being consistently misinformed as it made binding rulings on the meaning of U.S. surveillance law. This underscores our concern that intelligence agencies’ assessments and descriptions about particular collection programs — even significant ones — are not always accurate. It is up to Congress, the courts and the public to ask the tough questions and require intelligence officials to back their assertions up with actual evidence. It is not enough to simply defer to these officials’ conclusions without challenging them. [my emphasis]

Though I get the feeling that Wyden and Udall aren’t buying this “dumb not malicious” line.

ACLU [and congress] Has Standing to Know What It Is Debating

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It is fundraising week(ish) here at Emptywheel. If you can, please support the site. 

In superb news, the FISA Court has agreed to release to ACLU whatever Section 215 opinions are not already covered by a 2011 FOIA suit ACLU filed in Southern District of New York.

 In an important decision, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the government to review for release the court’s opinions on the meaning, scope, and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The ruling is on a motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Access Information Clinic. Section 215, which authorizes the government to obtain “any tangible things” relevant to foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigations, is the claimed legal basis for the NSA’s mass phone records collection program.

“We are pleased that the surveillance court has recognized the importance of transparency to the ongoing public debate about the NSA’s spying,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “For too long, the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of Americans has been shrouded in unjustified secrecy. Today’s ruling is an overdue rebuke of that practice. Secret law has no place in our democracy.”

The decision was based on a determination that, since ACLU is so central in these debates, it has standing to make such a request.

The Court ordinarily would not look beyond information presented by the parties to find that a claimant has Article III standing. In this case, however, the ACLU’s active participation in the legislative and public debates about the proper scope of Section 215 and the advisability of amending that provision is obvious from the public record and not reasonably in dispute. 11 Nor is it disputed that access to the Section 215 Opinions would assist the ACLU in that debate. The Court therefore concludes that the ACLU has satisfied that requirement. See, Ohio Citizen Action v. City of Englewood, 671 F.3d 564, 579 (6th Cir. 2012). Accordingly, the Court finds that the withholding from the ACLU of the Section 215 Opinions constitutes a concrete and particularized injury in fact to the ACLU for purposes of Article III standing.

11 See e.g., Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office, Misdirection: The House Intelligence Committee’s Misleading Patriot Act Talking Points (June 20, 2013) (https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/misdirection-house-intelligencecommittees-misleading-patriot-act-talking); Testimony of Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU Foundation, and Laura W. Murphy, Director, Washington Legislative Office, ACLU, before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Strengthening Privacy Rights and National Security:

In truth, after Monday’s document dump, this decision may be more about precedent than expanded releases. Because it is limited to substantive decisions on Section 215 — and wouldn’t include every time a judge pulls more hair out upon being informed of yet another “violation” — there may not be many more decisions to release (unless, as I have wondered, there have been significant violations since 2009).

But there is another part of this decision that may be even more important, from the standpoint of precedent. It gives this brief nod to the amici, calling out the Members of Congress specifically (the other amici were journalism organizations, which, like the third party with ACLU, Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, might have been denied standing), for its claim to standing.

Assuming that there are such Section 215 Opinions that are not at issue in the FOIA litigation, movants and amici have presented several substantial reasons why the public interest might be served by their publication.

[snip]

Congressional amici emphasize the value of public information and debate in representing their constituents and discharging their legislative responsibilities.

Remember, the Congressional amici argued they can’t do their job without being able to discuss public FISC opinions.

Notwithstanding the compelling public interest in an open debate about the scope and propriety of government surveillance programs authorized under FISA, even the amici — Members of the U.S. Congress — cannot meaningfully participate in that public debate so long as this Court’s relevant decisions and interpretations of law remain secret. Read more →

Imagine the Informants You Can Coerce When You Can Spy on Every Single American

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Please consider supporting my fundraiser so I can continue to do this kind of work. 

Two years ago, I noted a chilling exchange from a 2002 FISA suit argued by Ted Olson. Laurence Silberman was trying to come up with a scenario in which some criminal information might not have any relevance to terrorism. When he suggested rape, Olson suggested we might use evidence of a rape to get someone to inform for us.

JUDGE SILBERMAN: Try rape. That’s unlikely to have a foreign intelligence component.

SOLICITOR GENERAL OLSON: It’s unlikely, but you could go to that individual and say we’ve got this information and we’re prosecuting and you might be able to help us.

It’s chilling not just because it suggests rapists have gone free in exchange for trumping up terrorist cases for the government, but because it makes clear the kinds of dirt the government sought using — in this case — traditional FISA wiretaps.

Now consider this passage from the government’s 2009 case that it should be able to sustain the Section 215 dragnet.

Specifically, using contact chaining [redacted] NSA may be able to discover previously unknown terrorist operatives, to identify hubs or common contacts between targets of interest who were previously thought to be unconnected, and potentially to discover individuals willing to become U.S. Government assets.

Remember, while the government downplayed this fact, until Barack Obama won the 2008 election, the government permitted analysts to contact chain off of 27,090 identifiers, going deeper than 3 hops in. That very easily encompasses every single American.

The ability to track the relationships of every single American, and they were using it to find informants.

In the 7 years since this program (now allegedly scaled back significantly, but still very very broad) has existed, the dragnet has only helped, however indirectly, to capture 12 terrorists in the US (and by terrorist, they also include people sending money to protect their country against US-backed invasion).

Which means the real utility of this program has been about something else.

The ability to track the relationships of every single American. And they were using it to find informants.

Even while the number of terrorists this program discovered has been minimal, the number of FBI informants has ballooned, to 15,000. And those informants are trumping up increasingly ridiculous plots in the name of fighting terrorism.

The ability to track the relationships of every single American (or now, a huge subset of Americans, focusing largely on Muslims and those with international ties). And they were (and presumably still are) using it to find informants.

Update: Note how in Keith Alexander’s description of the alert list, the standard to be on it is “the identifier is likely to produce information of foreign intelligence value” that are “associated with” one of the BR targets (Alexander 33). This is very similar to the language Olson used to justify getting data that didn’t directly relate to terrorism.

Also note this language (Alexander 34):

In particular, Section 1.7(c) of Executive Order 12333 specifically authorizes NSA to “Collect (including through clandestine means), process, analyze, produce, and disseminate signals intelligence information for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes to support national and departmental missions.” However, when executing its SIGINT mission, NSA is only authorized to collect, retain or disseminate information concerning United States persons in accordance with procedures approved by the Attorney General.

Again, this emphasizes a foreign intelligence and CI purpose for collection that by law is limited to terrorism. Which could mean they think they can collect info to coerce people to turn informant.

The AG guidelines on informants are, not surprisingly, redacted.

How Many People Are Included in Contact Chaining with 27,090 Numbers?

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I’ve decided that if I could have a nickel for every time I’ve said “I told the apologists so” as I’ve read these documents, I’d be Warren Buffet. But I don’t get a nickel for predicting the NSA is as bad as it is. So I could use your help to keep doing what I do. 

One of the most stunning revelations from ODNI’s conference call with Officials Who Can’t Be Quoted Because They Might Be Lying is that only 11% of the numbers the NSA was comparing daily business record collections against should have been included.

Those numbers are presented in the government’s first response to Reggie Walton’s order for more information.

In short, the system was designed to compare both SIGINT and BR metadata against the identifiers on the alert list but only to permit alerts generated from RAS-approved identifiers to be used to conduct contact chaining [redacted] of the BR metadata. As a result, the majority of telephone identifiers compared against the incoming BR metadata in the rebuilt alert list were not RAS-approved. See id. at 4, 7-8. For example, as of January 15, 2009, the date of NSD’s first notice to the Court regarding this issue, only 1,935 of the 17,835 identifiers on the alert list were RAS-approved. (10-11)

This means that every day, the NSA was comparing names they thought maybe might could be terrorist numbers, as well as numbers they actually had reason to believe actually were, with all the phone records in the US to see if Americans were talking to these people. [Update: And to clarify, the 89% on the list who were “compared” to the daily business record take weren’t contact chained — NSA just checked to see if they should look further.]

As I said, per the Officials Who Can’t Be Quoted Because They Might Be Lying who gave today’s conference call, that’s as bad as it gets.

But it appears to get worse.

You see, as NSA was confessing all this to DOJ’s National Security Division, they were also cleaning up their lists (the January 15 numbers come from a week after NSD first got involved). And it appears that before they started their confessional process (in the days before Obama took over from George Bush), they had far more people on their list. And they were contact-chaining those numbers.

At the meeting on January 9, 2009, NSA and NSA also identified that the reports filed with the Court have incorrectly stated the number of identifiers on the alert list. Each report included the number of telephone identifiers purported on the alert list. See, e.g., NSA 120-Day Report to the FISC (Dec. 11, 2008), docket number BR 08-08 (Ex. B to the Government’s application in docket number BR 08-13), at 11 (“As of November 2, 2008, the last day of the reporting period herein, NSA had included a total of 27,090 telephone identifiers on the alert list . . . .”). In fact, NSA reports that these numbers did not reflect the total number of identifiers on the alert list; they actually represented the total number of identifiers included on the “station table” (NSA’s historical record of RAS determinations) as currently RAS-approved) (i.e., approved for contact chaining [redacted]

This appears to mean the NSA could (they don’t say whether they did) conduct chaining two or three degrees deep on all these potential maybe might could be terrorists.

If those 27,090 talked to 10 people in the US, and those 270,090 people in the US regularly talked to 40 people in the US, and those people talked to 40, then it would potentially incorporate 433 millio–oh wait! That’s more people than live in the US!

That is, there’s a potential that, by contact chaining that many people, this actually represented a comprehensive dragnet of all the networked relationships in the US until the days before Obama became President.

And they lied to Reggie Walton about it as they got their first real legal review of the program.

But honest, all this was really just unintentional.

Update: Later in the filing, the government admits they were doing more than 3 hops until early 2009.

Second, NSA is implementing software changes to its system that will limit to three the number of “hops” permitted from a RAS-approved seed identifier.

This means those 27,090 identifiers that were in use on November 1, 2008 (at which point it became clear Obama would win the election) could have been contact chained far deeper into American contacts. This makes it very likely that that “contact chaining” actually did include everyone in the US.

The New I Con: “Total Number of Orders and Targets”

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The I Con people, in another attempt to feign transparency, have announced they will release “new” numbers.

Consistent with this directive and in the interest of increased transparency, the DNI has determined, with the concurrence of the IC, that going forward the IC will publicly release, on an annual basis, aggregate information concerning compulsory legal process under certain national security authorities.

Specifically, for each of the following categories of national security authorities, the IC will release the total number of orders issued during the prior twelve-month period, and the number of targets affected by these orders:

  • FISA orders based on probable cause ( Titles I and III of FISA, and sections 703 and 704).
  • Section 702 of FISA
  • FISA Business Records (Title V of FISA).
  • FISA Pen Register/Trap and Trace ( Title IV of FISA)
  • National Security Letters issued pursuant to 12 U.S.C. § 3414(a)(5), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1681u(a) and (b), 15 U.S.C. § 1681v, and 18 U.S.C. § 2709.

Only, this is, as I Con transparency always is, less than meets the eye.

To start with, the I Cons already release much of this due to statutory requirements. It releases the number of FISA orders on probable cause (and the number rejected), the number of business records, and the National Security letters, as well as the number of US persons included in those NSLs.

If I understand this correctly, the only thing new they’ll add to this information is the number of people “targeted” under the Section 215. In other words, they’ll tell us they’ve used fewer than 300 selectors in the previous year to conduct up-to three hop link analysis which in reality mean thousands or even millions might be affected (to say nothing of the hundreds of millions whose communications might be affected by virtue of being collected). But they won’t tell us how many people got included in those two or three hops.

Furthermore, in the absence of knowing what else they’re using Section 215 for, the meaning of these numbers will be hidden — as it already was when the government told us (last year) it had submitted 212 Section 215 applications, without telling us several of those applications collected every American’s phone records.

The same is true of the Pen Register/Trap and Trace provision. The government has told us they’re no longer using it to collect the Internet metadata of all Americans. But what are they using it to do? Are they (in one theory posited since the Snowden leaks started) using it to collect key information from Internet providers? Given the precedents hidden at the FISA Court, we’re best served to assume there is some exotic use like this, meaning any number they show us could represent a privacy threat far bigger than the number might indicate.

Then, finally, there’s Section 702, which will be new information. The October 3, 2011 John Bates opinion tells the NSA collects 250 million communications a year under Section 702; the August 2013 Compliance Assessment seems to support (though it redacts the numbers) the NSA targeting 63,000 to 73,000 selectors on any given day. In other words, those numbers are big. But that doesn’t tell us, at all, how many US persons get sucked up along with the targeted selectors. That number is one the NSA refuses to even collect, though Ron Wyden has asked them for it. Usually, when the NSA refuses to count something, it is because doing so would demonstrate how politically (and potentially, Constitutionally) untenable it is.

Moreover, the government doesn’t, apparently plan to release the number Google and Yahoo would like it to release, numbers which likely show how much more enthusiastic the well-lubricated telecoms are about providing this material than the less-well lubricated Internet providers. That is, the government isn’t going to (or hasn’t yet agreed to) provide numbers that show corporations have some leeway on how much of our data they turn over to the government.

So, ultimately, this seems to be about providing two or three new numbers, in addition to what the government is legally obliged to provide, yet without providing any numbers on how many Americans get sucked into this dragnet.

They will provide the “total number of orders and targets.” But they’re not going to provide the information we actually want to know.

Keith Alexander’s Dinner Theater

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A bunch of people have been discussing Stanford Professor Jennifer Granick’s account of a dinner she had with NSA Director and CyberComander Keith Alexander. The main storyline describes how, three weeks ago, Lying Keith promised Granick that seeing the Primary Order for the Section 215 dragnet would make her more comfortable with the program.

It didn’t work out how Lying Keith might have liked.

I had a chance to read the Primary Order the next day, and rather than reassure, it raised substantial concerns.  First, it did not set forth any legal basis for the phone record collection, which Christopher Sprigman and I have argued is illegal.  Second, it confirmed that the FISA court does not monitor compliance with its limitations on the collection program, a problem that, according to a former FISA court judge, is endemic to NSA surveillance programs.

If that weren’t already enough, seeing the FISA Court order released earlier this week, with its revelation that — at least until 2009 — the safeguards on the dragnet program never functioned at all, really ruined Alexander’s efforts to make her feel better.

I remembered our conversation about the Primary Order yesterday while reading the newly declassified FISA court opinion that tangentially raised the phone records surveillance program.  According to the court in 2011, NSA was flagrantly disregarding the dictates of the Primary Order anyway:

[T]he Court concluded that its authorization of NSA’s bulk acquisition of telephone call detail records … in the so-called “big business records” matter “ha[d] been premised on a flawed depiction of how the NSA uses [the acquired] metadata” and that “[t]his misperception by the FISC existed from the inception of its authorized collection in May 2006, buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions and despite a government-devised and Court-mandated oversight regime.” … Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard for querying.  The Court concluded that this requirement has been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.” (Footnote 14)

How does a good man sit across you from the dinner table and assure you the government is properly constrained, when in reality it lies and disregards even the most anemic purported safeguards?

Granick is far more polite than I am — because my conclusion here would be “a good man doesn’t spin you like this.”

But there’s one further bit of spin she doesn’t mention explicitly. Alexander — as he has done repeatedly since Snowden’s documents started leaking — pretended this was all about terrorism.

I have no doubt that Gen. Alexander loves this country as much as I do, or that his primary motivation is to protect our nation from terrorist attacks. “Never again,” he said over dinner.

[snip]

The General seemed convinced that if only I knew what he knew, I would agree with him. He urged me to visit Pakistan, so that I would better understand the dangers America faces.  I responded that one of my longest-standing friends has relatives there and visits regularly, maybe she would take me.  I did not miss his point, and he did not miss mine.

I’m not saying this isn’t, partly, about terrorism. But if that’s all he’s doing, Alexander can roll up his CyberCommand, all the programs targeting Iran, and more generalized cyberdefense: the things that, until these leaks, were considered more urgent issues. Once again, Alexander wants to use terror terror terror to justify a dragnet that (for the content side) targets far more broadly than just terror.

I asked Granick about this, and she said Alexander said “surprisingly little” about cybersecurity — perhaps just a comment about the applying the rules of armed conflict to cyberwar.

As with his audience at BlackHat, Alexander here was talking to someone that Stanford considers an expert on cybercrime and cybersecurity. All differences of opinion about the phone dragnet aside, he should have spent his dinner with Granick discussing ways to accomplish the objectives of cybersecurity most effectively.

[A]s we go into cyber and look at–for cyber in the future, we’ve got to have this debate with our country. How are we going to protect the nation in cyberspace?

… Alexander claimed when speaking to a group that stood to get rich off of cybersecurity.

And yet, once again, when presented an opportunity to have that debate with one of the experts he needs to win over, Alexander cowered from the debate.

Verizon: Get Exposed for Spying, Win $1 Billion!

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Congratulations to Verizon!

Just a few months after being exposed for providing all its American customer records to the government, it just won part of a $10 billion contract to provide cloud storage for the Department of Interior that may be worth as much as $1 billion.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has selected Verizon to participate in a $10 billion, 10-year contract to provide cloud and hosting services. This is potentially one of Verizon’s largest federal cloud contracts to date.

Verizon is one of 10 companies that will compete to offer cloud-based storage, secure file transfer, virtual machine, and database, Web, and development and test environment hosting services. The company is also one of four selected to offer SAP application hosting services.

Each of the 10 agreements awarded under the Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract has a potential maximum value of $1 billion.

Don’t worry. I’m sure the spying had nothing to do with Verizon winning this huge contract.

But I’m sure it will make Verizon much less interested in pushing the government to roll back the spying.