While NSA boss Keith Alexander issued a misleading denial of this morning's report of how the NSA has infiltrated Yahoo and Google's networks by hacking into their private network connections between datacenters, the NSA has now come out with its official statement which is yet another typical non-denial denial. They deny things that weren't quite said while refusing to address the actual point:
NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation. The Washington Post's assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true.
The assertion that we collect vast quantities of US persons' data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies attorney general-approved processes to protect the privacy of US persons – minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination.
NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we're focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.
Note what is missing from all of this. They do not deny hacking into the data center connection lines outside of the US. They do not deny getting access to all that data, especially on non-US persons. As for the claim that they're protecting the privacy of US persons, previous statements from Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have already made it clear that if they collect info on Americans, they're going to use this loophole to search them:
"If we're validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don't have to close our eyes to that," Litt said. "I'm not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we've already collected."
So, for all the claims that this kind of information will be "minimized," it certainly looks like they've already admitted they don't do that.
Meanwhile, that Guardian article that has the NSA's response also has responses from the 3 other players in this drama. There's the UK's GCHQ, who apparently has partnered with the NSA in breaking into Google and Yahoo. It didn't want to say a damn thing:
"We are aware of the story but we don't have any comment."
Google, however, was reasonably furious about this story.
In a statement, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company was "outraged" by the latest revelations.
"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide," he said.
"We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."
Yahoo's response, unfortunately, was a lot more restrained and not particularly on point.
"We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."
Yeah, but the story is how the NSA got around your security. Yahoo should be a lot angrier about this. One hopes that once the technical people talk to management, the company will realize just how bad this situation is.
Hopefully, this means that Google and Yahoo will stop just focusing on getting more "transparency" out of the government concerning NSA surveillance, and will start taking a much more active role. This includes: (1) pushing back hard against government surveillance, including going to court to stop it and (2) building much more secure systems that cannot be easily compromised by the NSA.
In an interesting bit of timing, just as the Washington Post was breaking the news that the NSA had infiltrated Google and Yahoo's cloud data by hacking into the (stupidly) unencrypted data links between data centers, it turned out that NSA boss Keith Alexander was on stage at a Bloomberg Government Cybersecurity conference. He was asked about the report, and he tried to tap dance around it by claiming the NSA doesn't have access to Yahoo and Google's servers. The Guardian has a brief summary:
Alexander, asked about the Post report, denied it. “Not to my knowledge, that’s never happened,” the NSA director said, before reiterating an earlier denial Prism gave the NSA direct access to the servers of its internet service provider partners.
“Everything we do with those companies that work with us, they are compelled to work with us,” Alexander said. “These are specific requirements that come from a court order. This is not the NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So I don’t know what the report is, but I can tell you factually: we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers, dot-dot-dot. We go through a court order.”
But, of course, in typical Alexander fashion, he's choosing his words carefully -- and thankfully people can more easily see through it at this point, since they're getting so used to it. The report didn't say they were accessing those companies' servers or databases, but rather hacking into the network connection between their data centers. That's like a report breaking of the NSA hijacking armored cars with cash, and Alexander claiming "we didn't break into the bank." Nice try.
If you've been following all the NSA stuff, you're used the regular claims from the NSA's defenders. The folks over at Al Jazeera were able to get the talking points that the NSA has been using in response to the Snowden leaks, and they're exactly everything we've been hearing -- with extra emphasis on playing up 9/11. My favorite talking point, described as a "sound bite that resonates" is:
I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.
You'll also note an awful lot of "we need to connect the dots," though they leave out the part about how having more data actually makes it harder to connect the dots. They also play up the "over 50 cases" of dealing with "terrorist events" -- a number that has since been totally debunked.
The documents are the basic talking points that Keith Alexander, James Clapper and others have been using in their various Congressional hearings. If you watched the hearing yesterday, for example, you'd notice that Clapper especially was almost always reading off the talking points even when asked questions (Alexander appears to feel more comfortable "winging it"). Given that, there's not much that's totally surprising -- we've heard all of this. But it's still fascinating to see it in black and white.
The House Intelligence Committee, led by chief NSA apologist Rep. Mike Rogers, held yet another hearing about the NSA scandal on Tuesday, with an official focus on "potential changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," but that was barely discussed at all. Instead, the panel, made up of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA boss Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and number 2 guy at NSA Chris Inglis, mostly focused on defending the NSA, especially in light of the recent headlines concerning spying on foreign leaders. Rogers focused on tossing out a bunch of softball questions to the panel to get them to say that they had clearly informed the House Intelligence Committee about spying on foreign leaders. After the softballs were hit back, Rogers would add a stage-whispered "Hmm," followed by an angry attack on reporters for buying into the story that the NSA hadn't informed Congress.
Of course, given that Rogers' counterpart in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, claims that she wasn't informed, this seems a bit strange. But it got even stranger when various other committee members, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Rep. Adam Schiff made it clear that they had no idea this was going, despite being on the committee.
That resulted in an incredible exchange, in which Rogers attacked others on the Committee, suggesting that they should just shut up if they're going to say they weren't informed -- hinting that some Committee members "do more work than others." Schiff, quite reasonably, appeared to take offense to this, and challenged Rogers, asking for more details as to when and how the Committee was told about spying on foreign leaders. Rogers without actually answering the question kept "warning" other members not to say something about this. Schiff broke in again (with Rogers trying to stop him from talking) to ask if the Committee was directly informed about this or if it was just a giant data dump of information that he would have had to go through carefully to find out who they were spying on. Rogers again refused to answer the question, and again hinted that those who put in the "effort" would have known about this -- and then flat out cut off Schiff and handed the floor to Rep. Michele Bachmann, who went back to tossing softballs (sample question: "Do you think Snowden is a traitor?").
In the end, Rogers weak attempt to continue to defend the NSA here made it pretty clear, once again, that the claims that he has not adequately informed others in Congress of what's going on are quite accurate.
So, last week, there was the report that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had found out about the US NSA spying on her mobile phone and had made an angry call to President Obama. As we noted, US officials made perhaps the weakest response ever, insisting that they weren't monitoring her phone today and promising that they wouldn't monitor it in the future -- but absolutely refusing to comment on whether or not the NSA had done so in the past. Of course, that just called much more attention to the obvious implication that they had -- and it took just a couple days before Spiegel revealed the details. Not only had the NSA been monitoring Merkel's mobile phone, but they'd been doing it for over a decade, since before she was in power:
There are strong indications that it was the SCS that targeted the cell phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. This is suggested by a document that apparently comes from an NSA database in which the agency records its targets. This document, which SPIEGEL has seen, is what set the cell phone scandal in motion.
The document contains Merkel's cell phone number. An inquiry to her team revealed that it is the number the chancellor uses mainly to communicate with party members, ministers and confidants, often by text message. The number is, in the language of the NSA, a "Selector Value." The next two fields determine the format ("raw phone number") and the "Subscriber," identified as "GE Chancellor Merkel."
[....] The time stamp is noteworthy. The order was transferred to the "National Sigint Requirements List," the list of national intelligence targets, in 2002. That was the year Germany held closely watched parliamentary elections and Merkel battled Edmund Stoiber of Bavaria's Christian Social Union to become the conservatives' chancellor candidate. It was also the year the Iraq crisis began heating up. The document also lists status: "A" for active. This status was apparently valid a few weeks before President Obama's Berlin visit in June 2013.
Spiegel has a lot more, including some revealing information about how the NSA uses the US embassy in Berlin to intercept all kinds of communications.
But then there's this incredible claim: President Obama insists he had no idea about it when he spoke to Merkel:
Merkel spoke with Obama on Wednesday afternoon, calling him from her secure landline in her Chancellery office. Both spoke English. According to the Chancellery, the president said that he had known nothing of possible monitoring, otherwise he would have stopped it. Obama also expressed his deepest regrets and apologized.
Now, remember, this is the very same President Obama, who just a couple months ago claimed that every time more Snowden news broke, it would be the first he'd heard about some of these programs, and he'd have to go ask the NSA what they were really doing. Could this be one of those situations? It seems almost impossible to believe that the NSA would be spying on the head of state of one of our closest allies without the President being aware. As the Spiegel report notes, those kinds of orders would have to be renewed with approval from the top:
Among the politically decisive questions is whether the spying was authorized from the top: from the US president. If the data is accurate, the operation was authorized under former President George W. Bush and his NSA chief, Michael Hayden. But it would have had to be repeatedly approved, including after Obama took office and up to the present time. Is it conceivable that the NSA made the German chancellor a surveillance target without the president's knowledge?
However, after trying to avoid the question, over the weekend, the NSA admitted that Keith Alexander had never briefed the President about spying on Merkel (though, it's possible he heard about it from others).
This makes it sound, again, like the NSA has gone rogue. How can President Obama seriously allow Keith Alexander and James Clapper to remain in charge when they've just made him look like a complete fool, supposedly totally unaware of what his own intelligence apparatus is up to -- especially when it concerns programs that, once revealed, can have a serious negative impact on a variety of diplomatic fronts?
And for what benefit? The Spiegel report makes it clear that the NSA saw little value in spying on Merkel. They just did it because... reasons.
Former NSA employee Thomas Drake does not see this as a contradiction. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany became intelligence target number one in Europe," he says. The US government did not trust Germany, because some of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots had lived in Hamburg. Evidence suggests that the NSA recorded Merkel once and then became intoxicated with success, says Drake. "It has always been the NSA's motto to conduct as much surveillance as possible," he adds.
The fact that President Obama hasn't yet fired Alexander in particular is fairly incredible, given this latest revelation.
As noted by Politco, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents:
"I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared.
It's not the policymakers and the courts. It's the Constitution, and it says there's freedom of the press.
Other parts of the interview continue to show Alexander spewing things that have already been debunked:
“When you look at the 9/11 commission, it faulted the intelligence community for not connecting the dots. We didn’t have the tools. These [programs we have now] are tools that help us connect the dots. We have learned that lesson once. We all vowed this would never happen again. We should commit to that course of action.”
That's not true. The 9/11 commission argued, indeed, that the intelligence service failed to connect the dots, but it wasn't because they lacked the information. It's just that it wasn't properly shared. The way to fix that is not to collect more information and make it even harder to connect the dots. And yet that's been General Alexander's strategy all along.
Elsewhere in the interview, Alexander laughably tries to pretend that US Cyber Command, which he also controls, is focused on protecting "intellectual property." But that's also not true. As has been clearly stated and confirmed, it's focused on offensive attacks, which it does more than any other country (even as the US government tries to scold countries like China and Iran for their online attacks).
And then, I guess he figures that if he's going to lie about, well, everything, why not go all in, and just claim that these programs aren't "spying."
“They aren’t spying programs,” he says directly. “One is called the Business Records FISA Program, or Section 215, and the other is called the FISA Amendment Act 702 or PRISM.”
The business records program, or Section 215, is probably the most misunderstood of the two programs. The metadata program takes information and puts it in a data repository. Metadata is the phone number, the date, time, group, and duration of the call.
“That’s all we have,” Gen. Alexander explains. “We don’t have any names or any content.”
Except that having that metadata is incredibly revealing and absolutely is a form of spying. If it's not, why won't General Alexander release his phone numbers, date, time, group and duration of all of his calls from the past year? Why not? Because he thinks that's private information. Because it is. And because General Alexander is a hypocrite.
“The oversight and compliance on these programs is greater than any other program in our government.”
Hahahahah. No. This is also a lie. It's been shown that the courts and Congress have admitted they're limited by what the NSA tells them -- and the NSA goes out of its way to avoid telling Congress very much.
Alexander also mocks the recent claims about spying on French phone calls, using the exact same dodge as his boss, James Clapper. Both pretend that the news reports said that 70 million calls were recorded. Alexander mocks this by pointing out it would be impossible to have so many calls listened to, and to find enough translators to understand them. But the reports were about mostly metadata, and just some recordings. Pretending that the press said something that it didn't doesn't make Alexander look trustworthy. It makes it look like he's lying.
Not surprisingly, though hilariously, the blogger for the Defense Department's "Armed With Science," Jessica Tozer doesn't appear to challenge any of Alexander's claims. Instead, she repeats all the statements and mocks anyone who might challenge them:
Some people would rather believe a dramatic, convenient lie than a real, uncomplicated truth. Don’t be that person.
I'd argue that right back at Tozer and Alexander, because Alexander is flat out lying in the interview, based on confirmed facts.
Don’t give credence to speculation, rumor, or hyperbole. Simply put, don’t give into the hype. When it comes down it, a nation without the NSA would be a nation left undefended.
And that, dear readers, is no lie.
Um. It's absolutely a challengeable statement, but the Defense Department, obviously, isn't here for reasoned discussion on this issues.
Two weeks after Edward Snowden's first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. "We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany," Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. "So lives have been saved."
In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.
"Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe -- saving real lives," Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. "This isn't a game. This is real."
But there's no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.
The NSA itself has been inconsistent on how many plots it has helped prevent and what role the surveillance programs played. The agency has often made hedged statements that avoid any sweeping assertions about attacks thwarted.
A chart declassified by the agency in July, for example, says that intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions "has contributed to the [U.S. government's] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad" -- a much different claim than asserting that the programs have been responsible for thwarting 54 attacks.
NSA officials have mostly repeated versions of this wording.
When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July, for instance, he referred to "54 different terrorist-related activities," 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided "material support" to terrorism.
But the NSA has not always been so careful.
During Alexander's speech in Las Vegas, a slide in an accompanying slideshow read simply "54 ATTACKS THWARTED."
And in a recent letter to NSA employees, Alexander and John Inglis, the NSA's deputy director, wrote that the agency has "contributed to keeping the U.S. and its allies safe from 54 terrorist plots." (The letter was obtained by reporter Kevin Gosztola from a source with ties to the intelligence community. The NSA did not respond when asked to authenticate it.)
Asked for clarification of the surveillance programs' record, the NSA declined to comment.
Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
"Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or no?"
"Yes," Alexander replied, without elaborating.
It's impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified.
Officials have openly discussed only a few of the cases (see below), and the agency has identified only one -- involving a San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support the militant group Al Shabab -- in which NSA surveillance played a dominant role.
The surveillance programs at issue fall into two categories: The collection of metadata on all American phone calls under the Patriot Act, and the snooping of electronic communications targeted at foreigners under a 2007 surveillance law. Alexander has said that surveillance authorized by the latter law provided "the initial tip" in roughly half of the 54 cases. The NSA has not released examples of such cases.
After reading the full classified list, Leahy concluded the NSA's surveillance has some value but still questioned the agency's figures.
"We've heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted" by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. "That's plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs."
The origins of the "54" figure go back to a House Intelligence Committee hearing on June 18, less than two weeks after the Guardian's publication of the first story based on documents leaked by Snowden.
At that hearing, Alexander said, "The information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world." He didn't specify what "events" meant. Pressed by Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., Alexander said the NSA would send a more detailed breakdown to the committee.
Speaking in Baltimore the next week, Alexander gave an exact figure: 54 cases "in which these programs contributed to our understanding, and in many cases, helped enable the disruption of terrorist plots in the U.S. and in over 20 countries throughout the world."
But members of Congress have repeatedly ignored the distinctions and hedges.
The websites of the Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee include pages titled, "54 Attacks in 20 Countries Thwarted By NSA Collection."
And individual congressmen have frequently cited the figure in debates around NSA surveillance.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., who is also on the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement in July referring to "54 terrorist plots that have been foiled by the NSA programs." Asked about the figure, Westmoreland spokeswoman Leslie Shedd told ProPublica that "he was citing declassified information directly from the National Security Agency."
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, issued a statement in July saying "the programs in question have thwarted 54 specific plots, many targeting Americans on American soil."
Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., issued his own statement the next day: "The Amash amendment would have eliminated Section 215 of the Patriot Act which we know has thwarted 54 terrorist plots against the US (and counting)." (The amendment, which aimed to bar collection of Americans' phone records, was narrowly defeated in the House.)
Mike Rogers, the Intelligence Committee chairman who credited the surveillance programs with thwarting 54 attacks on the House floor, repeated the claim to Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation" in July."You just heard what he said, senator," Schieffer said, turning to Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., an NSA critic. "Fifty-six terror plots here and abroad have been thwarted by the NSA program. So what's wrong with it, then, if it's managed to stop 56 terrorist attacks? That sounds like a pretty good record." Asked about Rogers' remarks, House Intelligence Committee spokeswoman Susan Phalen said in a statement: "In 54 specific cases provided by the NSA, the programs stopped actual plots or put terrorists in jail before they could effectuate further terrorist plotting. These programs save lives by disrupting attacks. Sometimes the information is found early in the planning, and sometimes very late in the planning. But in all those cases these people intended to kill innocent men and women through the use of terror."
Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., went even further in a town hall meeting in August. Responding to a question about the NSA vacuuming up Americans' phone records, he said the program had "been used 54 times to be able to interrupt 54 different terrorist plots here in the United States that had originated from overseas in the past eight years. That's documented."
The same day, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who sits on the Intelligence Committee, defended the NSA at a town hall meeting with constituents in Cranston, R.I. "I know that these programs have been directly effective in thwarting and derailing 54 terrorist attacks," he said. Asked about Langevin's comments, spokeswoman Meg Fraser said in an email, "The committee was given information from NSA on August 1 that clearly indicated they considered the programs in question to have been used to help disrupt 54 terrorist events. That is the information the Congressman relied on when characterizing the programs at his town hall."
Wenstrup, Heck and Lankford did not respond to requests for comment.
The claims have also appeared in the media. ABC News, CNN and the New York Times have all repeated versions of the claim that more than 50 plots have been thwarted by the programs.
The case of Basaaly Moalin, the San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support Al Shabab, the terrorist group that has taken responsibility for the attack on a Kenyan mall last month. The NSA has said its collection of American phone records allowed it to determine that a U.S. phone was in contact with a Shabab figure, which in turn led them to Moalin. NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has argued that the NSA could have gotten a court order to get the phone records in question and that the case does not justify the bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
The case of Najibullah Zazi, who in 2009 plotted to bomb the New York subway system. The NSA has said that an email it intercepted to an account of a known Al Qaeda figure in Pakistan allowed authorities to identify and ultimately capture Zazi. But an Associated Press examination of the case concluded that, again, the NSA's account of the case did not show the need for the new warrantless powers at issue in the current debate. "Even before the surveillance laws of 2007 and 2008, the FBI had the authority to -- and did, regularly -- monitor email accounts linked to terrorists," the AP reported.
A case involving David Coleman Headley, the Chicago man who helped plan the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. Intelligence officials have said that NSA surveillance helped thwart a subsequent plot involving Headley to attack a Danish newspaper. A ProPublica examination of that episode concluded that it was a tip from British intelligence, rather than NSA surveillance, that led authorities to Headley.
A case involving a purported plot to attack the New York Stock Exchange. This convoluted episode involves three Americans, including Khalid Ouazzani of Kansas City, Mo., who pleaded guilty in 2010 to bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda. An FBI official said in June that NSA surveillance helped in the case "to detect a nascent plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange." But no one has been charged with crimes related to that or any other planned attack. (Ouazzani was sentenced to 14 years last month.) The Kansas City Star reported that one of the men in the case had "pulled together a short report with the kind of public information easily available from Google Earth, tourist maps and brochures" and that his contact in Yemen "tore up the report, 'threw it in the street' and never showed it to anyone." Court records also suggest that the men in Yemen that Ouazzani sent over $20,000 to may have been scamming him and spent some of the money on personal expenses.
For more from ProPublica on the NSA, read about the agency's campaign to crack Internet security, a look at the surveillance reforms Obama supported before he was president, and a fact-check on claims about the NSA and Sept. 11.
There's been some recent chatter over a Reuters report highlighting that both of the top two officials at the NSA, director Keith Alexander and deputy director Chris Inglis, are retiring in the next few months. Lots of people are misreading this, believing that this is something new, and suggesting that both were either pushed out, or are doing this in response to all of the Snowden revelations. That's simply not true. Alexander's retirement has been widely reported since at least June (and has been covered in a number of other publications as well). Both retirements were planned long ago, and appear to be exactly on schedule, rather than as any reaction to things happening in the news.
This is unfortunate, as it really does seem like there should be some punishment for the widespread excesses and abuses that have been revealed by Snowden. However, what is important to recognize is that this does present a real opportunity for the President to reshape the NSA. It seems unlikely that this will happen, but the President has said that he wants to rebuild the trust of Americans in the NSA and the wider intelligence community, and the choices he makes for who will lead the NSA are a real opportunity to at least take a step in that direction. No one actually expects him to, say, pick a civil liberties activist, but there are people out there who have experience in the intelligence community and who also have shown a respect and appreciation for privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, finding someone who can present the case for reform -- one which recognizes that "collect it all" is not just bad policy, but bad for actually finding useful information -- would be a big step forward.
“We followed the law, we follow our policies, we self-report, we identify problems, we fix them,” he said. “And I think we do a great job, and we do, I think, more to protect people’s civil liberties and privacy than they’ll ever know.”
Yes, by collecting pretty much every bit of data they can on everyone. That protects their privacy and civil liberties? How? By trampling the 4th Amendment? I don't think so. The whole "self-report... identify problems" claim is also hogwash. As we've noted, many of that "self-reporting" came years after the fact, and it's almost certain that plenty of other abuses have never been caught or reported.
Then there's General Alexander trying to claim he supports more transparency and that the American people need to know what's going on. I know. Stop laughing. He really said it:
“Given where we are and all the issues that are on the table, I do feel it’s important to have a public, transparent discussion on cyber so that the American people know what’s going on,” General Alexander said. “And in order to have that, they need to understand the truth about what’s going on.”
Of course, in the very same interview he insisted that this discussion that we're now having has done "significant and irreversible damage" to national security. So... he wants to have an open discussion and tell people what's going on, but solely on his own terms, and if anyone else brings up anything, we're all at risk.
He insisted that it would have been impossible to have made public, in advance of the revelations by Mr. Snowden, the fact that the agency collected what it calls the “business records” of all telephone calls, and many other electronic communications, made in the United States.
Why? This is a serious question, because it wouldn't have been impossible at all. The government could have easily said (as they're trying to now after Snowden revealed it) that they're doing this in a manner that (they believe) doesn't compromise our privacy, and it's for a good reason. And then let us have a public debate to see if people believe you or if they think you're full of it. That's what transparency is about.
The NY Times actually does a decent job in some points highlighting the ridiculousness of Alexander's answers, such as with this tidbit:
But he said the agency had not told its story well. As an example, he said, the agency itself killed a program in 2011 that collected the metadata of about 1 percent of all of the e-mails sent in the United States. “We terminated it,” he said. “It was not operationally relevant to what we needed.”
However, until it was killed, the N.S.A. had repeatedly defended that program as vital in reports to Congress.
Yup. The same way they continue to insist the telephone records are "vital" despite not actually showing how they've been necessary in stopping a single terrorist attack on the US.
At this point, you have to wonder what Alexander thinks he's accomplishing with each of these interviews or talks. It just seems like this strained, repetitive "but, really, I'm not such a bad guy, you just have to trust me!!!" exclamation over and over again that doesn't give us any reason to actually trust him. In fact, nearly all of the evidence that's come out from Snowden has actually shown (over and over and over again) why Alexander shouldn't be trusted at all.
Yet another post about the latest NSA revelations about collecting buddy lists and email contacts. As we'd mentioned in the original post, the story noted that this data collection was at times overwhelming. Here's the Washington Post's report on this point:
The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders. Three NSA documents describe short-term efforts to build an “across-the-board technology throttle for truly heinous data” and longer-term efforts to filter out information that the NSA does not need.
Spam has proven to be a significant problem for NSA — clogging databases with data that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”
In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”
The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.
After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”
Here's a slide from the leaked NSA presentation, in which it urges people to be more careful about what kind of data it collects via this program, saying they're trying to "store less of the wrong data" and "shift the collection philosophy at the NSA" to "memorialize what you need" from "order one of everything off the menu and eat what you want."
Of course, that's bogus, and the data deluge discussed in this program demonstrated why. Collecting it all makes it harder to find the right information. Piling more hay on the haystack doesn't make it easier to find the needle, it makes it harder. That's one of many reasons why we're so concerned about these bulk data collection programs. Not only do they rarely seem to turn up useful information, but they also seem to better obscure important information by flooding the system with bogus data.
