Declassified Docs Show NSA Trying To Prosecute A Journalist For His Successful FOIA Requests

from the war-on-whistleblowers,-leakers,-and-FOIA-records-requesters dept

MuckRock has been digging into a large pile of declassified CIA documents for the past several months and has come up with some surprising finds. It recently liberated nearly 13 million pages of CIA documents -- known as the CREST archive -- via a FOIA lawsuit. Since this monumental release, MuckRock has covered everything from a CIA report on an Italian pasta shortage to deeper, darker topics like a CIA asset in Mexico being linked to a long list of atrocities.

Digging through the CIA's archives has dug up dirt on other agencies as well. Emma Best details another MuckRock/CIA gem -- one that shows the NSA attempting to prosecute a journalist for obtaining documents via FOIA requests.

Declassified documents in the Central Intelligence Agency’s archives show that while the CIA was looking to include the Freedom Of Information Act in its war on leaks, the National Security Agency was seriously considering using the Espionage Act to target target Puzzle Palace author James Bamford for using FOIA.

While Bamford has briefly discussed this on a handful of occasions, the declassified memos and briefings from NSA confirm that this was more than just an intimidation tactic or a passing thought - the NSA had truly wanted to jail a journalist for his use of public records. When the Agency determined that this was unlikely to happen, they moved on to exploring other legal avenues which could be used to punish Bamford for his FOIA work.

The chain of events leading up to the NSA's discussion about prosecuting someone for doing something the law specifically allowed unsurprisingly includes legal violations of its own the agency was hoping to keep hidden. What Bamford had obtained was a DOJ Inspector General's report detailing the CIA and NSA's abuse of electronic surveillance.

The NSA felt it should have been notified and given a chance to redact or withhold the documents. The DOJ, understandably, felt no compunction to share the documents with the subject of its investigation while the investigation was still underway. (This makes it surprising the documents ever made their way into Bamford's hands considering ongoing investigations make for handy FOIA exemptions.)

Despite the documents being made public, the NSA tried to argue they were still classified. And if Bamford was in possession of classified documents -- even ones obtained legally through FOIA requests -- he could be made to face espionage charges.

Due to “the serious consequences” of the FOIA disclosure, the NSA Director asked that the DOJ immediately contact Bamford to retrieve the documents along with all copies and to learn who else had that information. The NSA Director also requested that the DOJ tell Bamford “that his retention or disclosure of such information could result in his prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 793 or 798,” which are better known as the Espionage Act.

The government has never been shy about prosecuting whistleblowers and leakers. But in most cases, the documents at the center of the cases haven't been handed over to journalists as the result of a completely legal process. That the NSA would consider pushing for an espionage prosecution over legally-obtained documents shows how far the Intelligence Community is willing to go to protect its reputation.

Filed Under: doj, espionage act, foia, james bamford, journalism, nsa, transparency

How The NSA Enabled Israel Military Intelligence To Politically Persecute Innocent Palestinians

from the a-huge-mess dept

Almost exactly a year ago, one of the many Snowden revelations came out, this time concerning the fact that the NSA was giving raw domestic communications data to Israeli military intelligence. This was somewhat shocking, because it basically was allowing Israeli intelligence to sift through communications data (both metadata and actual communications), including on Americans, without any restrictions. As was noted at the time:

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

James Bamford, the long-time NSA watcher and chronicler, has a new article in the NY Times, where he now connects that free and unencumbered data sharing with revelations of abuse by the very Israeli military intelligence unit the data went to. Bamford notes that, when he interviewed Snowden over the summer, Snowden had called out the data sharing with Israel as one of the most shocking finds:

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.

Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

And, indeed, Bamford notes, it's now been more or less confirmed that the information that NSA was sharing was used to persecute innocent Palestinians. This is only coming out now because dozens of veterans of the unit publicly called out the abuses and refused to continue to participate in the process:

It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.

Everything about this is disturbing. There have long been concerns about the NSA and other intelligence agencies using the information they have access to try to coerce innocent people, threatening to embarrass them or reveal secrets. Other Snowden documents have revealed that the NSA in fact had plans on how to do something similar, using things like the porn surfing habits of people they didn't like to embarrass and discredit them -- even if they weren't part of any terrorist organization. While the NSA insisted it never did such things, this latest revelation suggests that the NSA clearly enabled the Israelis to do exactly that -- often using communications and metadata of Americans, handed over willy-nilly to the Israelis to do just that.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Israeli veterans for blowing the whistle on this kind of activity.

Filed Under: ed snowden, embarassment, israel, james bamford, minimization, palestinians, privacy, raw data, surveillance, unit 8200

Syria Dropping Off The Internet In 2012 Was Result Of NSA Hack Gone Wrong, Not Syrian Government

from the because-of-course-it-was dept

You may recall that, back in 2012, Syria suddenly dropped off the face of the internet. It actually happened twice. There was all sorts of speculation about how it happened. At the time, Cloudflare's analysis was one of the most thorough, noting that it almost certainly "was done through updates in router configurations" rather than a physical failure or a cable cut or something. Of course, everyone assumed that it was the Syrian government, trying to cut off access to the outside world.

However, in James Bamford's big Wired article about Ed Snowden, Snowden reveals it was actually an NSA hack gone wrong:

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”

Thus, it appears that Cloudflare's speculation that it was done as a router update was entirely correct -- just that no one realized it was the NSA that was updating the routers, rather than the Syrians.

Filed Under: ed snowden, hack, internet, james bamford, nsa, router, surveillance, syria, tao