Surveillance Fans Angry Journalist Used Metadata, Contact Chaining To Out Comey's Secret Twitter Account

from the not-only-months-after-the-fact,-but-with-zero-self-awareness dept

Earlier this year, journalist Ashley Feinberg outed then-FBI Director James Comey's secret Twitter account, using nothing more than the "harmless" metadata people like James Comey have said no one needs to worry about. The secret account was sniffed out through something the Intelligence Community likes to call "contact chaining." The path ran through Comey's children's Instagram accounts and one conspicuous follower of Comey's previously-secret account: Lawfare writer, surveillance apologist, and personal friend of Comey's, Benjamin Wittes.

For some reason, months after the fact, Wittes has decided the route to unmasking Comey's Twitter account was more like stalking than journalism. Wittes objected to the "use" of Comey's children -- the seemingly-unrelated contacts who Feinberg chained together to reach her conclusion. This was weird because, as Marcy Wheeler points out, Comey seemed to be impressed by the journalist's work. Even weirder is the fact Wittes (and former IC attorney/Lawfare editor Susan Hennessey) didn't see the obvious parallels between Feinberg's detective work and the FBI's own use of metadata, contact chaining, and working its way towards targets through vast amounts of unrelated data.

Not only did he say he wasn't mad and compliment her work, but he posted the link to FBI jobs.

I'd say Jim Comey sees a similarity in what Feinberg did.

I'm all in favor of protecting the accounts of children from such contact chaining — and am really not a big fan of contact chaining, generally. But those who, like Comey and Wittes and Hennessey and Tait, have championed a system that endorses at least two hop chaining irrespective of who gets hopped, not to mention those who've tolerated the collection on family members in even more targeted surveillance, I'm not all that interested in complaints about the privacy of a 22-year old son.

Or rather, I point to it as yet another example of surveillance boosters not understanding what the policies they embrace actually look like in practice.

Which is precisely why this “doxing” was so newsworthy.

Wheeler goes into more detail on the FBI's use of contact chaining and metadata and discusses Comey's own approval of these practices during his tenure. This may explain why Comey was more impressed than angry when he was outed. As for the complaints about "outing" Comey's adult children, Wheeler points out Comey himself has thrust them into the public eye on more than one occasion, starting back when they were still young teenagers.

But beyond this there's the hypocritical nature of Wittes' attack on the journalist. Surveillance state supporters love surveillance -- except when the apparatus is controlled by people they don't like or aimed at people they do. These are ridiculous arguments to be making, especially when you actively support state-sponsored "stalking."

Filed Under: ashley feinberg, benjamin wittes, contact chaining, hops, james comey, journalism, stalking, surveillance, susan hennessey

FOIA Lawsuit Filed Over DOJ Data Complainant Is Pretty Sure Doesn't Even Exist

from the press-SEND-to-undermine-presidential-credibility dept

Benjamin Wittes of the Lawfare blog has filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DOJ, hoping to force the government to put its documents where the president's mouth is. [h/t Pwn All The Things]

Back in February, President Trump made the following assertion before a joint Congressional session:

“According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

But what data? That's what Wittes is seeking. As he pointed out in April, it appears the president generated this assertion completely out of firing synapses and airborne vibrations.

I'm going to be very blunt here: I not only believe that the White House made up "alternative facts" about the substance of this matter in a Presidential address to a Joint Session of Congress, I don't believe that the National Security Division of the Justice Department provided any data or analysis to the White House that could reasonably be read to support the President's claim. In other words, I believe the President was lying not merely about the underlying facts but about his own Justice Department. Or, in the alternative, I believe it's possible that the Office of the Attorney General may have supported the White House's claim. But I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the folks at NSD actually provided data in support of this presidential statement.

Other authors at Lawfare examined the claim in detail, finding that when people extradited to America to face charges were excluded from the count, the ratio of foreign-born terrorism convicts dropped to 18-21% of the total -- not anywhere near a "vast majority."

Beyond that, there's likely zero data available to support Trump's claim. Wittes notes the DOJ doesn't actually track where convicts are born, and certainly doesn't do so when foreigners are booted from the country by immigration enforcement, only to be dragged back to face criminal charges.

Wittes filed a FOIA request for the numbers the DOJ supposedly "provided" to the president. So far, he's heard nothing back. His requests have been acknowledged but no further processing has been done, not even a determination as to whether he'd qualify for a fee waiver. Now, he's suing [PDF].

Wittes refers to this as the "friendliest lawsuit ever," given that it's not being fired off in hopes of liberating documents the DOJ would rather not part with, but instead to give the DOJ an opportunity to state -- on the record -- that it has none of the information Trump claimed was handed over to him. It would give the DOJ a way to contradict the president's claims without looking like it's intentionally undermining the president's assertions. Considered from this angle, it might be the sort of lawsuit the DOJ might welcome -- although if it was truly interested in disputing the president's statement, it might have chosen to provide Wittes with a more substantive response, rather than wait until it became a problem for the judiciary.

Filed Under: benjamin wittes, department of justice, donald trump, foia, freedom of information

Orwell Would Be Proud: NSA Defender Explains How Even Though NSA Spies On Americans, It's OK To Say They Don't

from the try-that-again? dept

Benjamin Wittes of the Brooking Institution has become the go-to non-government NSA apologist. One of his most recent articles is a true work of rhetorical artistry, in which he tries to explain why saying "the NSA doesn't spy on Americans" is acceptable shorthand for the fact that the NSA spies on pretty much every American. It's a master class in political doubletalk. First, it's the law's fault. The law, you see, is too complicated for mere mortals not working for the NSA to understand, so that makes it okay to lie:

The law is so dense and so complicated that it cannot be accurately summarized at a level a citizen can reasonably process.

Any effort to summarize the relevant law necessarily ignores themes sufficiently important to its architecture that the reductionism will partake of serious inaccuracy. The person who told my friend that NSA does not spy on Americans was not lying. He or she was highlighting a crucially-important limitation on NSA’s authority vis a vis US persons. The law and the relevant regulations all contain significant territorial restrictions and significant protections for US persons overseas as well—all designed to separate the foreign intelligence mission of NSA from both domestic intelligence and domestic law enforcement. It’s a sincere and pervasive effort. “We don’t spy on Americans” is a common shorthand for a wealth of law and practice that really and meaningfully keeps the agency out of the business of being a covert domestic intelligence agency.

Got that? Because there are some limitations on all the spying they do on Americans, and it's too complicated to understand those limitations, so it's okay to lie and say they don't spy on Americans. Of course, in the very next paragraph, Wittes tries to effectively brush away the massive amount of surveillance done on Americans.

NSA, after all, does spy on individual Americans with an order from the FISC. It does, moreover, capture all domestic telephony metadata. And most importantly, it does routinely capture communications between Americans and the targets of its surveillance and incidentally capture other material its systems scoop up overseas—subject to rules that limit the retention and processing of US person information. In other words, to say that NSA does not spy on Americans emphatically does not mean, as a reasonable student or citizen might expect it to mean, that the agency does not regularly acquire and process the communications of Americans.

Of course, as Jameel Jaffer from the ACLU points out, this is all nonsense because it's a simple fact that the NSA does do surveillance on Americans, and to claim otherwise is not acceptable shorthand. It's a lie. And while Wittes then tries to obfuscate things even more by trying and purposely failing to come up with a concise way of summarizing what the NSA does, Jaffer helps out with a few workable suggestions:

This is nonsense. Perhaps Ben’s right that it’s difficult to come up with a single sentence, or even a single paragraph, that clearly and comprehensively describes the nature and extent of the NSA’s surveillance of Americans. (Can you describe any federal agency’s functions in a single, comprehensive paragraph?) But it’s not difficult to come up with a sentence more accurate than “The NSA doesn’t spy on Americans.” Try this one: “The NSA spies on Americans.” Or this one: “The NSA collects a huge amount of information about Americans’ communications and in many contexts it collects the communications themselves.” Or this one: “The NSA is sometimes described as a foreign-intelligence agency but this label should not obscure the fact that a large part of the agency’s energy is dedicated to collecting and analyzing information about Americans.”

Jaffer further points out that Wittes's suggestion that those who claim the NSA doesn't spy on Americans are really trying to tell the truth through shorthand, is actually misleading. As Jaffer points out:

Any official who says the NSA isn’t spying on Americans is seeking to mislead.

And anyone defending that statement is trying to support that fundamental attempt to mislead.

Filed Under: americans, benjamin wittes, jameel jaffers, nsa, surveillance