So Much For NSA Chief's Offer To Store Data At A 'Neutral' Site: AT&T Receiving $10 Million/Yr From CIA For Phone Records

from the well,-that's-officially-everybody dept

More news has arrived on AT&T's willing accommodation of every government agency that asks for a peek at the numbers (or a never ending, rolling 3-month haul of all records). At least this time, it's getting something more in return than boilerplate court orders with that new ink pad smell. As the New York Times reports, the CIA wants in on the action, and it doesn't need court orders -- just a big stack of cash.

The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company's vast database of phone records, which includes Americans' international calls, according to government officials.

This is all purely voluntary ($10mil of greased palms/wheels notwithstanding), hence the lack of court orders or subpoenas. Oddly enough, this voluntary system actually protects the privacy of Americans much better than the "legal" Section 215 collections.

The C.I.A. supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects, and AT&T searches its database and provides records of calls that may help identify foreign associates, the officials said…

Because the C.I.A. is prohibited from spying on the domestic activities of Americans, the agency imposes privacy safeguards on the program, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it is classified. Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when the company produces records of international calls with one end in the United States, it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and “masks” several digits of their phone numbers, the officials said.

Of course, these "masked" records can be very simply unmasked by "tipping" them to other agencies, like the FBI, which then acquires a subpoena/court order to "unmask" the records. This just goes to show that these agencies can cooperate, as long as its in the interest of furthering domestic surveillance.

Ultimately though, this news isn't surprising. Phone companies have been collecting government paychecks in exchange for data for a very long time. True, the telcos don't want to appear as though they're selling Americans' data for cash, but that's exactly what's happening. The CIA's primary focus is foreign surveillance and, thanks to AT&T, there's some minimization in place to keep the agency focused on its purview.

More interesting, however, is how this news affects General Alexander's "generous" offer to store data at a "neutral site" in order to alleviate privacy concerns. As was noted back when he made this offer, American telcos are hardly "neutral sites" given their history of swiftly coughing up anything requested with a minimum of pushback.

So, AT&T (and Verizon, etc.) are not "neutral" in any true sense of the word, but at least storing the data there would put the NSA in the position of having to bring its selectors to a third party before accessing stored records, rather than just having them conveniently available (and exploitable) in its own storage for an indefinite period of time. This would trim down the "accidental" abuse that has been displayed by the agency in the past.

More recently, ODNI lawyer Robert Litt (along with the FBI's general counsel) suggested storing data with the originators would lead to less privacy. Given what we know about the CIA's paid data plans, he might be correct, even if his motives for making that claim were completely disingenuous.

It would introduce extra steps, but it appears as though there would be a way to "tip" domestic data to the NSA by simply using the process it uses with the FBI. Restrictions on both the NSA and CIA are meant to minimize the amount of unrelated domestic metadata they have access to. The CIA's restrictions are harsher than the NSA's, but the CIA can still grab and let the NSA wrangle the paperwork needed to unmask numbers. Or vice versa. The NSA can access its on-site metadata stores (with unmasked numbers) and tip domestic call data back to the CIA.

Both of these scenarios are unlikely, but storing the data at AT&T seems to offer very minimal privacy advantages over storing it in the NSA's data centers. At best, this creates some mild speed bumps for the agency to deal with in exchange for a small amount of "peace of mind" privacy-wise. Most telcos have seemed even less interested protecting Americans' privacy than the inquiring agencies themselves. As you'll recall, AT&T went out of its way to perform phone record queries for the FBI for agents armed with nothing more legally binding than a Post-It note.

The other thing to note is that this is another bit of evidence that undercuts the telcos' repeated assurance that they "value their customers' privacy." This sentence is usually followed directly by defensive wording about "complying" with "applicable laws" -- which actually means "complying with intelligence agencies." There's very little true concern on display and little to no evidence AT&T (and Verizon) have ever made any serious attempt to push back on government requests.

Filed Under: cia, data, metadata, nsa, phone calls, privacy, surveillance
Companies: at&t

CIA Has 'Acquired A Taste' For Killing People With Drones; Won't Give It Up

from the that-seems-problematic dept

The US's use of drones is nothing if not controversial, and the overall secrecy around the program -- including the belief that it can be used against Americans as well -- has worried an awful lot of people. Even those in the administration who support the program apparently are uncomfortable with it implicitly, as the Obama administration had drawn up a whole bunch of rules that would limit drone killing... which they wanted to put in place in case Romeny won the election. But, when Obama won, they abandoned the idea. In other words, the position of the administration is basically, "trust us with these drone killing programs... but no one else." Under significant pressure about all of this, the President finally announced in May that the drone killing program would be moved from the CIA to the Defense Department, where it would have more oversight (slightly) and limits.

Except, as Foreign Policy is now reporting, that isn't actually happening and may never happen. The main reason appears to be fairly simple: the CIA loves killing people with these drones, and people in the Defense Department are kind of uncomfortable with doing so. So, the CIA wants to keep control, and the Defense Department doesn't want it.

The U.S. official said that while the platforms and the capabilities are common to either the Agency or the Pentagon, there remain distinctly different approaches to "finding, fixing and finishing" terrorist targets. The two organizations also use different approaches to producing the "intelligence feeds" upon which drone operations rely. Perhaps more importantly, after years of conducting drone strikes, the CIA has developed an expertise and a taste for them. The DOD's appetite to take over that mission may not run very deep.

Yes, the CIA has developed a taste for killing people from the skies with drones controlled from far away. It's like a sport.

Remember when the US banned assassinations by the CIA? Yeah. Weren't those the days?

Filed Under: assassinations, cia, defense department, dod, drones, targeting killing

The Senate Is Sitting On A Devastating Report About How The CIA Avoided Oversight Of Unnecessary Torture Program

from the congressional-oversight! dept

So much attention concerning the intelligence community lately has been focused on the NSA. There has been a bit of looking at the FBI as well, but for the most part the CIA has been left untouched -- even though when the Washington Post released details of the US's black budget (thanks to Ed Snowden), it surprised many people to discover that the CIA still has a significantly larger budget than the NSA.

Late last week, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer had a fantastic article revealing some details of a still-classified report put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee which apparently rips the CIA to shreds over its torture program, both in how ineffective the program was, but also in how the CIA tried to avoid any real oversight from Congress.

At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program’s integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush’s before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.

The CIA, apparently, has been "defiant and defensive" in response to the massive report (over 6,000 pages, and which apparently cost $40 million to produce). CIA boss John Brennan has apparently been especially aggressive in trying to challenge the report and in blocking it from being declassified.

As Mayer notes, many of the new details came out due to Senator Mark Udall (who, for years, has been a leader in trying to stop the NSA's bad behavior) first blocking the confirmation of Stephen Preston to become General Counsel of the Defense Department (a position formerly held by Jeh Johnson, who was just nominated to run Homeland Security). Preston, prior to this, had been General Counsel for the CIA. Udall used the opportunity to quiz Preston about both the Intelligence Committee's report and the CIA's angry rebuttal, noting that if Preston stood by the rebuttal, he would be very uncomfortable about confirming him for the Pentagon job.

Preston, in his response, appears to distance himself from the CIA's position, agreeing with some of the findings in the Senate report. In particular, he admits that the CIA "fell well short" of keeping Congress informed and allowing Congress to have oversight over the CIA's torture program.

In fact, Preston admits outright that, contrary to the C.I.A.’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the Committees included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”

The contention that the C.I.A. provided inaccurate information to the congressional oversight committees is apparently extensively documented by the report. Udall notes that the report contains a two-hundred-ninety-eight-page section on “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.”

Furthermore, the report apparently notes that rather than actually briefing the entire Intelligence Committee on what it was doing, the CIA only briefed the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In other words, beyond providing enough misleading information to fill a large book, the CIA also made sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee members (outside of the two top members) weren't even informed of the details of what they did.

There's a lot more in the Mayer piece, going through many of the key revelations that can be parsed out from both Udall's questions and Preston's answers, but it's apparent that (1) the CIA had very little real oversight from Congress concerning its torture program, (2) the Senate Intelligence Committee is pissed off about this, and (3) there's a massive report detailing all of this that will eventually see the light of day. It does sound like many on the Senate Intelligence Committee -- including (much to my surprise) Dianne Feinstein -- are fighting to have the report released (I'm sure with many redactions). Udall is pushing strongly for such a declassification:

“My views of the C.I.A.’s response remain unchanged,” Udall wrote. “As I told John Brennan during his confirmation hearing, acknowledging the flaws of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program is essential for the C.I.A.’s long-term institutional integrity—as well as for the legitimacy of ongoing sensitive programs. At this point, I do not believe the C.I.A. has sufficiently acknowledged the flaws that the committee has meticulously detailed with thirty-five-thousand footnotes in six-thousand-three-hundred pages.”

Udall also reiterated his demand to “declassify as much of the committee’s report as possible.” He added, “Without the right amount of sunshine, some of the problems documented in the study—to include problems that I believe still exist today—will remain uncorrected. The American people have the right to know what the government has done on their behalf.”

Between the lack of any real oversight of the NSA and now, it appears, the CIA as well, once again we're left wondering how the administration can pretend that these agencies are actually under control and not prone to abuse.

Filed Under: cia, enhanced interrogation, jane mayer, john brennan, mark udall, senate intelligence committee, stephen preston, torture

Snowden's Negative Writeup By The CIA Was For Whistleblowing; Taught Him Why Going Through Proper Channels Gets Punished

from the interesting dept

You may recall there was a bizarre story last week in the NY Times, in which CIA officials had "leaked" to the NY Times that while in Geneva, back in 2009, Ed Snowden had been written up for "trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access." The CIA, though, quickly denied the story, and the whole thing seemed odd. The way it was written, it certainly suggested that Snowden was "hacking" around for questionable documents for years. However, in his new interview with the NYT's James Risen, Snowden explains what really happened, which actually tells a far more interesting story. It's not so much a story about Snowden trying to hack into machines to access data, but more a story of his first clear lesson in finding out what the intelligence community does to whistleblowers: because that's what he had done:

Mr. Snowden said that in 2008 and 2009, he was working in Geneva as a telecommunications information systems officer, handling everything from information technology and computer networks to maintenance of the heating and air-conditioning systems. He began pushing for a promotion, but got into what he termed a “petty e-mail spat” in which he questioned a senior manager’s judgment.

Several months later, Mr. Snowden said, he was writing his annual self-evaluation when he discovered flaws in the software of the C.I.A.’s personnel Web applications that would make them vulnerable to hacking. He warned his supervisor, he said, but his boss advised him to drop the matter and not rock the boat. After a technical team also brushed him off, he said, his boss finally agreed to allow him to test the system to prove that it was flawed.

He did so by adding some code and text “in a nonmalicious manner” to his evaluation document that showed that the vulnerability existed, he said. His immediate supervisor signed off on it and sent it through the system, but a more senior manager — the man Mr. Snowden had challenged earlier — was furious and filed a critical comment in Mr. Snowden’s personnel file, he said.

This is kind of interesting. It sounds like some CIA folks had tried to "leak" the story about the early reprimand in an attempt to make Snowden look bad, but now that a more complete version of the story is out, you quickly realize that it actually reinforces the reasons why Snowden knew that going through "official channels" for whistleblowing wasn't effective, and would likely just lead to him getting in trouble.

Filed Under: cia, ed snowden, geneva, whistleblowing

Latest Snowden Leak Shows NSA's Involvement In US Drone-Based Assassination Program

from the 'targeted-killing' dept

At this point, both the NSA's extensive surveillance programs and the CIA's controversial drone "targeted killing" program (read: assassination program) are known and widely discussed. But the two had not been fully connected until now. There had been some reports from the various reporters who have access to the leaked Snowden documents that the NSA was involved, but the details are finally coming out. The first article comes via Barton Gellman at the Washington Post, detailing the NSA's extensive involvement in helping the CIA find targets to kill, including Hassan Ghul, who was taken out by a drone strike a year ago.

In the search for targets, the NSA has draped a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan. In Ghul’s case, the agency deployed an arsenal of cyber-espionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio files and other messages, and tracking radio transmissions to determine where Ghul might “bed down.”

The e-mail from Ghul’s wife “about her current living conditions” contained enough detail to confirm the coordinates of that household, according to a document summarizing the mission. “This information enabled a capture/kill operation against an individual believed to be Hassan Ghul on October 1,” it said.

The file is part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA’s exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

The NSA likes to talk about how its focus is on counter-terrorism operations in the form of finding out about potential terrorist activities in order to stop them. It likes to pretend that it isn't so involved in offensive actions. However, the reporting here suggests a different story altogether. The NSA is a key part of the assassination program.

While it may be a good thing to track down terrorists working to attack the US, the potential that these kinds of programs might also be abused is serious. Once again, what becomes clear is that the NSA will apparently do everything possible to get access to the information it wants:

“But if you wanted huge coverage of the FATA, NSA had 10 times the manpower, 20 times the budget and 100 times the brainpower,” the former intelligence official said, comparing the surveillance resources of the NSA to the smaller capabilities of the agency's IOC. The two agencies are the largest in the U.S. intelligence community, with budgets last year of $14.7 billion for the CIA and $10.8 billion for the NSA. “We provided the map,” the former official said, “and they just filled in the pieces.”

In broad terms, the NSA relies on increasingly sophisticated versions of online attacks that are well-known among security experts. Many rely on software implants developed by the agency’s Tailored Access Operations division with code-names such as UNITEDRAKE and VALIDATOR. In other cases, the agency runs “man-in-the-middle” attacks in which it positions itself unnoticed midstream between computers communicating with one another, diverting files for real-time alerts and longer-term analysis in data repositories.

Through these and other tactics, the NSA is able to extract vast quantities of digital information, including audio files, imagery and keystroke logs. The operations amount to silent raids on suspected safe houses and often are carried out by experts sitting behind desks thousands of miles from their targets.

The reach of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations division extends far beyond Pakistan. Other documents describe efforts to tunnel into systems used by al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Africa, each breach exposing other corridors.

It appears that the attacks are quite effective as well:

The operations are so easy, in some cases, that the NSA is able to start downloading data in less time than it takes the targeted machine to boot up. Last year, a user account on a social media Web site provided an instant portal to an al-Qaeda operative’s hard drive. “Within minutes, we successfully exploited the target,” the document said.

Now, to some extent, you can argue that these kinds of activities are the ones we'd expect the NSA to be taking: using systems to break into communications efforts of terrorists to track them down. But, as the report also notes, this main operative who they caught through use of this system, Ghul, was actually in CIA custody for years before they released him... only to then have the NSA go through this big process to re-find him and take him out with a drone.

Oh, and not just take him out... but then use the NSA to find out for sure that he was dead:

Even after Ghul was killed in Mir Ali, the NSA’s role in the drone strike wasn’t done. Although the attack was aimed at “an individual believed to be” the correct target, the outcome wasn’t certain until later when, “through SIGINT, it was confirmed that Hassan Ghul was in fact killed.”

The NSA and its supporters will undoubtedly spin this to show how good it is that the NSA has these kinds of capabilities, allowing them to track down and dispatch terrorists. But it remains concerning how this level of spying and power (all the way down to assassinations) can easily be combined and used in ways that are even more questionable.

Filed Under: assassination, cia, drones, hassan ghul, nsa, nsa surveillance, targeted killing

CIA Warned About Snowden Trying To Get Into Computers He Wasn't Authorized On Back In 2009 [Update: Or Not]

from the checks-and-balances dept

Update: And, of course, now the NY Times is walking back this story as the CIA has directly denied it:

Asked repeatedly for comment over the past several weeks, most recently on Thursday, the C.I.A. declined. But on Friday, the C.I.A. responded with a statement, the first public acknowledgment that Mr. Snowden had worked for the agency.

“The C.I.A did not file any report on Snowden indicating that it suspected he was trying to break into classified computer files to which he did not have authorized access while he was employed at the C.I.A., nor was he returned home from an overseas assignment because of such concerns,” Todd Ebitz, an agency spokesman, said in the statement.

This contradicts what the NY Times had reported on Friday -- and while it appears someone is not being particularly honest, we'll take back the story as well. Original below -- but crossed out.

The NY Times has an interesting report, claiming that investigators looking back through Ed Snowden's history, discovered that he was written up back in 2009, while working for the CIA, in Geneva, for "trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access." It was for this reason that he was sent home, and moved on to a new job, as a contractor for the NSA. The report notes that the writeup -- known as a "derogatory report" -- was considered somewhat minor, and wasn't shared with folks at the NSA.

What's interesting about this is that it at least suggests that Snowden has been considering all of this for quite a long time. Back in June, he had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that his time in the CIA "disillusioned" him, and a colleague of his in Geneva apparently said recently that Snowden "was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts" when she knew him back then. This seems interesting on a variety of levels, as it further highlights that Snowden didn't take the decision he made to be a whistleblower lightly. Plus, he had a long time to think things through, which supports the claims that Barton Gellman recently made, concerning Snowden's larger view of what he was doing.

Filed Under: background checks, cia, ed snowden, nsa, security

CIA Also Scolded By Court For 'Twisting The Factual Record' And Withholding Documents

from the guess-they-were-getting-lonely dept

So much of the attention about our abusive intelligence agencies has focused on the NSA. Even the FBI has been seeing some sunlight as its abusive practices have been revealed. But, amazingly, the CIA has been rather unscathed by all of this, even if the revelations of the intelligence black budget showed that the CIA was actually getting more money than the NSA (something most people thought was not true). However, in a story that has received not much attention, McClatchy reporters recently wrote about the CIA getting smacked around by Judge Beryl Howell in a DC district court (yes, that Beryl Howell).

Howell was not impressed by the CIA's attempt to keep certain documents under wraps:

In a recent decision, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell denounced several of the CIA’s legal arguments. At one point, she accused the CIA of a “shameless twisting of the factual record.” Other assertions by the agency, she called “dead wrong” and “implausible.”

The specific quote on the shameless twisting of the factual record concerned the CIA's attempt to portray a non-profit that had requested documents under a FOIA request as a for profit organization, because it sought funds on its website. This is similar to our recent report of the FBI arguing that FOIA service Muckrock wanted documents for commercial reasons. Basically, it looks like they'll look for any excuse. Of course, given the smackdown Judge Howell gave the CIA over this, the FBI may want to reconsider its letter to Muckrock:

The CIA appears to conclude that NSC is a for-profit entity based on the fact that “its website appears to solicit paying customers.”.... The mere earning of income, however, is not at all an indication that an entity is organized for profit. Even nonprofit organizations must pay their bills. The government, of all entities, should know that the difference between a for-profit corporation and a non-profit organization is not whether the entity earns income (or even whether it earns income at a profit). Rather, “[i]n contrast to a for profit corporation, a non-profit organization must utilize its earnings to finance the continued provision of the goods or services it furnishes, and may not distribute any surplus to the owners.” .... The CIA’s shameless twisting of the factual record in this case to portray their assignment of rights position in a better light falls short of the level of representation that this Court expects of a United States government agency. The CIA should know better than to make such an obviously unfounded argument, particularly in light of the many allegations of bad faith that have been leveled by the plaintiff in these cases, including allegations that prompted a nonfrivolous motion for sanctions.

Yes, we recognize that the intelligence community's default mode is to keep things secret. But that doesn't mean it gets to misrepresent and lie when confronted with a basic FOIA request. You expect a culture of deception to rise up in agencies whose main purpose is to deceive, but that's exactly why we need more transparency and strict oversight of their activities -- and that's something that we've fallen well short of achieving.

Filed Under: beryl howell, cia, foia

The CIA Says Many Of Its Applicants Have Ties To Terrorist Organizations -- And That's Just The Ones The Vetting Process Catches

from the look!-an-actual-'insider-threat!'-I'll-get-my-camera! dept

Update: We've adjusted this post after realizing that the initial points were based on a misread. It's not 20% of all applicants, but rather 20% of a subset that were flagged. Apologies for any confusion.

Among the many things exposed by the leak of the intelligence agencies' "black budget" was this interesting factoid.

The CIA found that among a subset of job seekers whose backgrounds raised questions, roughly one out of every five had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The groups cited most often were Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but the nature of the connections was not described in the document.

The NSA has recently announced its plan to investigate its contractors and perhaps cut loose 90% of its sysadmins as a result of one sysadmin walking out the door with thousands of highly classified documents. The government as a whole is also tackling its "insider threats," although its methods and definitions leave a lot to be desired, considering it seems to be more targeted at rooting out whistleblowers than actual threats.

But what's really interesting about this statement from the CIA is not so much how many applicants with ties to terrorists are looking for intelligence work. Every intelligence agency will have its fair share of spies and moles angling for a spot on the inside. No, the more interesting question would be: how many are already working for the CIA?

As we covered back in July, the process for vetting intelligence agency employees is severely broken, with contractors being caught interviewing dead people and, in the case of one enthusiastic but seriously useless employee, falsifying one out of three background checks -- 1,600 in total over a three-year period.

If the vetting process has serious (and systemic) problems, it's very likely that a few potential terrorists have already made their way inside. If so, then the insider threat "problem" is now an actual problem, and while the government instructs its employees to pursue people who just don't seem to be "team players," employees who could do real damage to the agencies -- and know how to keep their heads down -- remain free from scrutiny.

Filed Under: applications, cia, terrorists

Latest Snowden Leaks Detail The 'Black Budget' And How Much The Gov't Wastes On Useless Surveillance

from the i-could-use-me-a-black-budget-too dept

Barton Gellman and Greg Miller over at the Washington Post have the latest scoops from the Ed Snowden leaks, in which it appears they've been able to go through the details of the infamous "black budget," detailing the money that is spent on intelligence operations. Apparently, the total budget is around $52.6 billion this year (which actually is a bit lower than I would have expected, but is apparently twice what the budget was back in 2001). There's also another $23 billion spent on "intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military."

Not surprisingly, the Post agreed to leave most of the document unpublished and is careful not to reveal anything really damaging (i.e., sources and methods), but the results are still quite revealing. Of course, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is still angry, arguing that any info from the budget "could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods." Blah, blah, blah. Someone doesn't like being held accountable. Others point out that discussing the budget seems quite reasonable. The post quotes Lee Hamilton, the former chair of the 9/11 commission (and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee), who argues that having this info public is important to having an informed public debate on the surveillance state. That's the only way that the intelligence community can be held accountable.

And, actually, what the budget reveals is a rather stunning lack of accountability for the budget -- much of it going to the CIA. While many people had assumed that the CIA had been diminishing in power and authority within the intelligence community (especially in relation to the NSA), it turns out that its budget has been growing and growing, and is much more than the NSA's. Furthermore, the CIA has basically been transformed from an "intelligence" agency into a "paramilitary force."

And for all this funding, with so little accountability, it should come as no surprise to find out that much of this money appears to be wasted, and not particularly effective.

Throughout the document, U.S. spy agencies attempt to rate their efforts in tables akin to report cards, generally citing progress but often acknowledging that only a fraction of their questions could be answered — even on the community’s foremost priority, counter-terrorism.

In 2011, the budget assessment says intelligence agencies made at least “moderate progress” on 38 of their 50 top counterterrorism gaps, the term used to describe blind spots. Several concern Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, an enemy of Israel that has not attacked U.S. interests directly since the 1990s.

Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China’s next generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia’s government leaders are likely to respond “to potentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks.”

A chart outlining efforts to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly bleak. U.S. agencies set themselves annual goals of making progress in at least five categories of intelligence collection related to these weapons. In 2011, the agencies made headway on just two gaps; a year earlier the mark was zero.

So, we're spending all of this money (our money) on top secret operations, including spying on pretty much every American... and so far it's been almost entirely useless against the actual threats we face. Well, that's comforting. Oh, and if you wondered about the failure to connect the dots on the Boston Marathon bombings? It's because the intelligence community and all that money have no idea how to figure out those kinds of attacks.

The intelligence community seems particularly daunted by the emergence of “home grown” terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad, a threat realized this year, after the budget was submitted, in twin bombings at the Boston Marathon.

The National Counterterrorism Center has convened dozens of analysts from other agencies in attempts to identify “indicators” that could help law enforcement understand the path from religious extremism to violence. The FBI was in line for funding to increase the number of agents surreptitiously tracking activity on jihadist Web sites.

But a year before the bombings in Boston the search for meaningful insight into the stages of radicalization was described as one of “the more challenging intelligence gaps.”

Also, the NSA is swimming in so much information that it asked for nearly $50 million to cope with the problem of having too much information. We've pointed out for years that the trick to finding the needles in haystacks isn't to build bigger haystacks, but that's long been the NSA's approach. However, those haystacks have become so big that the NSA asked for $48.6 million designated for "coping with information overload." Here's a simple, and cheaper, plan: don't collect so much irrelevant data. You can ship me half of the $48.6 million and keep the rest for something that's actually useful.

Also, there's this:

The agencies had budgeted for a major counterintelligence initiative in fiscal 2012, but most of those resources were diverted to an all-hands, emergency response to successive floods of classified data released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

For this year, the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed

The budget, obviously, was submitted before Snowden absconded with it and gave it to the Post, so I would imagine that there have been some revisions to create yet another "all-hands, emergency response" to Snowden-like situations.

Filed Under: black budget, budget, cia, intelligence community, nsa, surveillance

Blaming Sequestration, CIA Closes Historical Document Declassification Office

from the nice-going,-everyone-involved-[finger-pointed-at-Congress] dept

The forced cuts of the sequester are hitting everywhere, apparently even at agencies with black budgets. With the budgets not open for public inspection, whatever's cut by those agencies will take on the appearance of being "discretionary." The latest cut by the CIA certainly looks to be a cut of convenience, rather than one of necessity.

The budget ax has fallen on a CIA office that focused on declassifying historical materials, a move scholars say will mean fewer public disclosures about long-buried intelligence secrets and scandals.

The Historical Collections Division, which has declassified documents on top Soviet spies, a secret CIA airline in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis and other major operations, has been disbanded. The office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.

While most of the documents are mainly of historical interest, the fact is that there's a lot in the CIA's past that should be opened up to the public. It's not as if the agency has run a tight, clean program for the past several decades. Even if its past misdeeds (and that term really understates some of its actions) have little bearing on its current work, they still provide some insight into the mindset of the agency.

Dumping this onto the FOIA department just adds more work to a part of the agency that already uses every excuse it can to avoid complying with requests.

"This move is a true loss to the public," said Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who frequently litigates against the CIA. He said the CIA office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests "is the most obstructionist and unfriendly of those I have dealt with during the last two decades."

The agency's spokesman says this move will "create efficiencies," which is both untrue and a buzzword-ish mistreatment of English. All it does is push a likely unwanted task (does the CIA really care whether or not the public's interest is served?) to a part of the agency that wants it even less. With this move, the CIA's history is allowed to slink back into the shadows while its present continues to be kept out of the sunlight by an antagonist FOIA department.

The off-the-record budget keeps anyone from stating definitively whether this cut was mandatory or simply convenient, but considering its lack of direct benefit to the agency (and its agenda), it's not a surprise to see it swiftly placed on the chopping block.

Filed Under: cia, foia, historical documents, sequestration