Ex-CIA Director And Current Surveillance Task Force Member Mike Morell Parrots Talking Points To Defend Bulk Collections

from the death-of-three-thousand-exploited-to-surveil-millions dept

Former no. 2 man at the CIA and current surveillance task force member Mike Morell has made only a few comments since his new appointment, but every one he's made indicates he's a true "company man."

Last month, he astounded his fellow task force members by asserting that the NSA's metadata programs should be expanded, despite other members arriving at the conclusion that there was very limited evidence, if any, that the programs produced useful intel. And that's only what he said when he bothered to show up. Morell skipped the first set of meetings, claiming the review board's very existence threatened to distract Congress from ending the government shutdown and doctors from curing pediatric cancer. (I AM NOT LYING.)

Now, he's decided to offer his opinion again, and he's back to defending bulk record collections using a completely debunked argument.

"If the program were in place before 9/11, I believe it would have prevented 9/11," Mike Morell said earlier today on the CBS television program `Face the Nation.' "And by the program, I mean two things. I mean, NSA's ability to query the database, which would have allowed NSA to find one of the 9/11 hijackers in California, and the part of the program where NSA shares such information with the F.B.I. If both of those pieces had been in place, 9/11 would have been prevented by this program."

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

This "theory" that the NSA was hamstrung by its lack of access to millions of irrelevant call records practically debunks itself at this point. The defenders of these programs can't seem to find a better rhetorical device than this one, which has been completely eviscerated by dozens of intelligence experts and the 9/11 Commission itself.

Morell's position on the surveillance review task force seems to be as a "devil's advocate" -- someone placed on the board by the president to ensure no one gets too carried away trying to protect Americans' rights or limit the NSA's power.

Morell also delivered the other company line, this one equally as provably false as the first.

"There have been a handful of cases, literally, a handful where NSA employees have looked into the database inappropriately, looked at boyfriends or girlfriends and every one of those cases, they were dealt with appropriately and I believe, actually, some of them may have been fired. But that's the limited abuse that has taken place. There has been no systematic abuse, there has been no political abuse, it has been minor, very minor."

Just as wrong. Just as stupid. Just as willfully ignorant of the NSA's abuse of its capabilities.

Rather than point out where Morell's wrong, I'd rather link to (and quote) a response by blogger Alex Marthews at Digital Fourth ([p]h/t to Popehat) that puts into very effective words just how sick of the "prevent 9/11" justification we all are:

Its apologists scurry round spreading fear about reforms that would actually make their work more restrained and effective, and in a last, desperate throw of the dice, they are invoking the shadow of 9/11 – the same 9/11 that their bulk surveillance failed to thwart last time around. These days, the only terrorist attacks they seem capable of thwarting are the ones they gin up in advance…

These clowns gleefully threw the Constitution on the fire, and gave us NOTHING in return. We’re not safer. We’re certainly not richer. We have lost so much, so that a few people could become extremely rich and powerful, and our corrupt system is now incapable of holding them personally to account. Yet still they yammer on, clamoring for more funding for an NSA that doesn’t work, a TSA that doesn’t work, an FBI that chases imaginary plots instead of focusing on locking up actual criminals. They have played on our fears to make us exchange realistic risk assessment for a meaningless, nightmarish pantomime where we, the American people and indeed the people of the whole world, have to accept the loss of every freedom we hold dear in order to “do whatever it takes” to “catch the bad guys...”

Do you think we’re all scared six-year-olds hiding underneath our stairwells, waiting for Big Daddy NSA to tell us that everything’s OK and we can come out now?

[...]

You’re the six-year-olds here, standing there with the Constitution on a skewer over an open flame and hollering, “9/11 MADE ME DO IT.”

This is all the agency's defenders have to offer in defense of massive, untargeted surveillance, and it's simply not good enough. Even if the "we could have prevented 9/11" claim were true (which is isn't), it still wouldn't be enough to justify what the NSA does under the cover of "national security." The involved agencies couldn't protect us the first time, and now their defenders are claiming that if everything gets left alone, they can ensure an attack-free future. And they expect us to believe that claim, even after their collective minds have been unable to conjure up a scarier prevented terrorist "attack" than a person sending $8,500 to Al Shabab.

Morell has no position on a surveillance oversight board. He's skipped meetings and issued talking points, and appears to be wholly uninterested in doing the job he's been tasked with. He's an intel flack whose years of experience at the CIA have given him little more than a greater disregard for Americans' civil liberties.

Filed Under: 9/11, metadata, michael morell, mike morell, nsa, task force

Former CIA Boss, Task Force Member Says Even Though Metadata Collection Hasn't Been Useful, It Should Be Expanded

from the huh? dept

We've pointed out that one of the big surprises in the White House's task force proposals on NSA reform, was that the task force was pretty clear that the NSA had absolutely nothing to support the claims that the Section 215 (of the PATRIOT Act) bulk metadata collection had been even remotely helpful. Multiple members of the task force have discussed how shocked they were to find the lack of any "there" there. As we noted, law professor Geoffrey Stone expressed his shock to NBC:

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”

“We found none,” said Stone.

Meanwhile, Richard Clarke, former anti-terrorist czar to multiple presidents, expressed similar surprise in an interview with On The Media. When asked about that program, he noted that the task force had been given security clearance to go through all of the data and all of the cases where Section 215 data was used, and:

"we came to the conclusion it was not necessary in any case where it was used."

Throughout all of this, I'd been kind of curious to hear where task force panel member Michael Morell came down on all of this. He was the most suspect member of the task force, having been the acting director of the CIA until just a little while before the task force was put together. In other words, he was an ultimate intelligence community insider, and I kind of wondered if he had been a dissenting voice on some of this, overruled by the others.

Well, Morell is now speaking out, and while it's not clear if he was overruled, he is trying very, very hard to spin the proposals and findings over Section 215 into something very different, almost directly in contrast with the statements from Stone and Clarke. Specifically, he is arguing that even though the bulk data collection has been useless he's sure it could be useful in the future if allowed to continue. Actually, he goes beyond that, saying that what would be even more useful is if they added back bulk metadata collection around email, the program that had been stopped back in 2011, as even the NSA itself had admitted it had little to no value. But Morell supports them both, because he thinks that maybe it'll be helpful in the future.

"I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data," Morell told National Journal in a telephone interview. "You can bet that the last thing a smart terrorist is going to do right now is call someone in the United States."

Morell also said that while he agreed with the report's conclusion that the telephone data program, conducted under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, made "only a modest contribution to the nation's security" so far, it should be continued under the new safeguards recommended by the panel. "I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future," he said. "This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11, and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened."

This is ridiculous on multiple levels. The idea that more data collection would have stopped 9/11 has already been thoroughly debunked by Michael German, who went through the 9/11 Commission report, showing that the intelligence community actually had already collected more than enough info to discover the plot -- they just failed to do anything with the information. And, in fact, that's a key part of the problem: adding more data to the pile actually makes it harder to understand that data. This is why it's silly for NSA defenders to keep talking about "needles and hay stacks." The point of the needle and the haystack is that the more hay you have, the harder it is to find the needle.

Furthermore, it takes some kind of logic to argue that a program that's been in existence for years, with not a single success to show for it, should be kept up (and expanded) just because it might be useful somehow in the future. Elsewhere, Morell faithfully repeated the NSA's other big talking point about how none of what it's doing is "spying on Americans."

“I think that is a perception that's somehow out there. It is not focused on any single American. It is not reading the content of your phone calls or my phone calls or anybody else's phone calls. It is focused on this metadata for one purpose only and that is to make sure that foreign terrorists aren't in contact with anybody in the United States,” said Michael Morell on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

While some people do think that (and, for what it's worth, it does appear that the NSA is collecting such content on many people, including Americans, through other programs), people are just as concerned about the metadata collection -- as has been clearly explained many times over. Besides, the report that Morell himself was a part of seems to indicate the quite reasonable concern that this data could be seriously abused.

It's interesting to see Morell try to spin his own report, but the words of his fellow panelists show what's really going on. Section 215 hasn't done anything useful. Morell's idea of expanding it and claiming it might do something useful in the future is based on nothing other than the general desire of the intelligence community, which Morell is a part of, to always suck up as much information as possible, no matter what the consequences or harm it may cause.

Filed Under: bulk metadata collection, cia, geoffrey stone, intelligence, michael morell, nsa, richard clarke, section 215, task force

Former CIA Director Morell Skips Surveillance Review Board Meeting; Pats Self On Back For Not 'Distracting' Congress From Shutdown

from the taking-one-for-the-team dept

Former CIA director Michael Morell has decided that the Surveillance Review Board (SRB) shouldn't meet again until the government shutdown is over. The board met last Tuesday with members of the Senate and Congress, but Morell opted out and took his high horse out for a spin.

“I simply thought that it was inappropriate for our group to continue working while the vast majority of the men and women of the intelligence community are being forced to remain off the job,” Morell said Saturday in response to a query from POLITICO. “While the work we’re doing is important, it is no more important than - and quite frankly a lot less important - than a lot of the work being left undone by the government shutdown, both in the intelligence community and outside the intelligence community.”

Showing solidarity for furloughed government workers would be somewhat admirable if a) he hadn't decided to speak for the board and declare its work unimportant and b) he had been a bit more of an active participant in the first set of meetings.

The debut of the SRB featured a pair of meetings. The first meeting, held at the White House and featuring mainly by tech industry lawyers, was attended by Morell. The second meeting, held a few blocks away from the White House and featuring representatives from civil liberties groups like ACLU and EPIC, was skipped by Morell (and former Bush anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke).

Arguably, the SRB shouldn't have to miss any meetings. Certainly, representatives from the intelligence community should be available. The Pay Our Military Act (POMA), which was rushed through the House and the Senate last week, authorized the uninterrupted payment nearly all civilian Defense personnel, under which the NSA's civilian workers fall. (So much for Morell's laborious lament that so many in the intelligence community are "forced to remain off the job…") The SRB reports directly to James Clapper, meaning it would fall under this purview as well. But that ultimately doesn't matter as the board is unpaid. The travel expenses, however, are no longer covered.

Despite being a day into the shutdown, the panel met last Tuesday -- without Morell.

The Review Group’s meeting with Congressional leaders on Tuesday went forward without Morell. Feinstein and the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, attended the session, according to a Senate aide. House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) also took part, a House aide confirmed.

Morell said part of his decision to bow out last week was driven by the desire not to distract members of Congress and their staff from what he believes should be their No. 1 priority. “I just firmly felt Congress should be focused on one thing and one thing only, which is ending the shutdown,” he said.

Once the government is back up and running, it will be interesting to see if Morell can come up with more excuses to stay disengaged from the SRB. So far, he's skipped two out of the first three meetings -- not exactly a sign he's thrilled with the position. But, as Morell takes pains to point out, this isn't (just) because he doesn't think the SRB has an important job to do, it's that there's so much more out there that deserves time, attention and money.

“How could this be more important than kids starting cancer trials at NIH?” Morell asked.

Ah, cancer: the Hitler of the pathology field. Nothing shuts down an argument no one was making like comparing Pursuit A with "curing cancer." I don't think anybody implied the SRB's work was more important than treating and studying cancer, especially picturesque, tear-jerking kid cancer. In fact, I find it hard to believe anyone did anything more than ask Morell why he didn't attend Tuesday's meeting. But let's spin that for second: is returning hundreds of NSA and CIA civilian contractors to work more important than starting pediatric cancer trials? If not, then maybe Morell should use his free time to hassle every single member of the House and Senate for passing POMA rather than finding a way to restart the government or secure funding for cancer trials.

I don't mind if the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and SRB have to take time off during the government shutdown. It's somewhat annoying that the surveillance will continue unabated (including domestic surveillance) but "national security" continues to trump everything, so it's hardly a surprise. What bothers me is when someone clearly uninterested in the job at hand portrays it as though his self-serving absence is borne of clarity, objectiveness and vast stores of empathy. It's even more annoying when the portrayal trots out "poor furloughed government workers" and "pediatric cancer" as set dressing.

Filed Under: government shutdown, michael morell, nsa review, surveillance, surveillance review board

Administration's Surveillance Review Board Appointees Mostly Sympathetic Insiders

from the totally-dying-of-shock-right-now dept

The surveillance review panel (feat. special guest James Clapper!) Obama announced on August 9th has taken shape. Four appointees have been named, and if this ends up being the totality of the panel, there's not much hope it will provide any sort of meaningful pushback on excessive or intrusive surveillance.

As the Washington Post reports, the four members of the panel are all Washington insiders.

[O]bama administration’s surveillance review panel will include former intelligence and White House staffers, including Michael Morell, Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire.

Morell is 33-year veteran of the CIA, who retired from his post just two weeks ago. Where he stands on privacy matters isn't exactly clear, but considering his former position as deputy director, it would stand to reason he's more aligned with the NSA's thinking than the public's.

Richard Clarke is a long-time cyberwar hawk, having served as the chairman of the Counter-Terrorism Security Group under George H.W. Bush, as well as a long stint on the National Security Counsel. Clarke has made recent pushes for more offensive cyberwar strategies and has generally contributed to the FUD surrounding these issues.

On the plus side, he was highly critical of the second Bush administration's actions during his testimony to the 9/11 Commission. That being said, he's really not in favor of scaling back surveillance efforts. Orin Kerr sums Clarke up this way in his piece on the surveillance panel.

[I]n my experience working on some similar issues as he did in the government, Clarke had a reputation for seeing everything as an extraordinarily grave national security threat. I would think Clarke is likely to bring in a pro-government perspective on the issues here.

This brings us to Cass Sunstein, who's a bit of a wildcard. Sunstein's written work tends to draw together a blend of constitutional law, behavioral science and economics, often reaching some very interesting conclusions. But what's most concerning about Sunstein's appointment is the views he expressed in a 2008 paper co-authored with Adrian Vermule, where he argued that the government should be paying more attention to those spreading conspiracy theories.

"The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be." They go on to propose that, "the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups"...

Glenn Greenwald has more on Sunstein's paper in his 2010 piece for Salon.com

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”

This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.

Whatever you may personally think about conspiracy theorists and the potential dangers they pose, it's hard to believe that government infiltration and propagandizing is the correct response. (It's somewhat hard to argue this sort of activity actually requires a response from the government at all.) Having someone with an inclination towards government-led espionage activities aimed at its own citizens on a surveillance review board isn't exactly a comforting thought.

The final name on the list, Peter Swire, may be the only appointee to take on an actively adversarial role. Swire has long been an advocate for privacy, having served as the Chief Counselor for Privacy in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Clinton administration.

More recently he has been very active working to achieve a global "Do Not Track" standard and has, over the past several years, written articles and given interviews critical of the agency's activities, including co-signing an amicus brief arguing that the NSA's telephone metadata program is illegal. He's also been a longtime critic of parts of the PATRIOT Act. If anyone's going to be advocating for privacy, it's probably going to be Swire. Unfortunately, this may leave him as the odd man out.

On top of that, this board, composed mainly of government and surveillance proponents, will be reporting directly to confirmed liar James Clapper (the administration phrases it "reporting through") who is or isn't directly involved with the appointment process, depending on how you define the word "establish."

I guess one (or 1.5, depending on Sunstein's contribution) out of four is better than nothing. But by selecting intelligence officials and former administration staff members, Obama is (once again) sending the message that the "debate" will be still be very tightly controlled.

Filed Under: barack obama, cass sunstein, james clapper, michael morell, nsa, nsa surveillance, peter swire, review, review board, richard clarke, surveillance