You’ve no doubt read the multiple posts in which I responded with growing incredulity at the response of DOD and the Intelligence Community to the gaping holes in their network security.

Basically, a review of DOD networks after Bradley Manning’s alleged leaking (which came two years after they reviewed DOD networks after a bad malware infection introduced via a thumb drive), DOD admitted that they still let service members access computers on DOD’s classified network with removable media (like Lady Gaga CDs) two years after they vowed to end the practice; they didn’t have personal keys to offer better authentication and tracking of actions taken online; and they couldn’t audit for unusual activities online.

In short, they don’t have the kind of security that is considered routine in the private sector.

On our classified network.

And in response to their admission of gaping holes in Department of Defense’s (and presumably, because they want the same deadline, other parts of the IC’s) network security, they laid out a plan to fix the problems … by 2013.

Cause I’m sure none of our enemies will come looking for our secrets between now and then.

It’s becoming an obsession for me, this disinterest in fixing gaping holes in our network security even as the Administration claims Bradley Manning’s alleged leak could be a capital offense. If this stuff is so damned secret, plug the fucking holes!

So you can imagine my shock when I read the Obama Administration’s response to the intelligence bill’s endorsement of the 2013 deadline DOD and the IC asked for: (h/t Steven Aftergood)

Section 402 requires the DNI to create an insider threat detection program for the information resources of each element of the IC to detect unauthorized access to classified information. The Administration wholeheartedly agrees with the need to be vigilant and proactive in trying to detect, mitigate, and deter insider threats, and supports a comprehensive insider threat detection capability. The Administration is currently working toward its implementation. However, the Administration is concerned with the unrealistic timelines required by this provision for the program’s operational readiness, and strongly requests that the provision be amended to grant the DNI flexibility in implementation timelines of the program.

Hey bad guys?!?!?!? No one is checking the intelligence community’s networks to see whether you’re nicking highly classified information off of them. No one is checking their networks to see what kind of abnormal activities their own spooks are engaging in.

And they’re not going to be until … well, they don’t know. A deadline, you see, would be rather restrictive. And our fucking classified networks just aren’t a priority for network security! All I can tell you is 2013–two full years from now–that’s too soon.

So China, Iran? Just take what you want. Just make sure you do it in the next two … or maybe three … or who knows? years, because sometime in the distant future the IC aspires to have the same kind of network security your average bland business has.

The other day I summarized a National Consumer Law Center report showing how some banks–particularly US Bank and JP Morgan–are screwing those who receive unemployment funds on debit cards with exorbitant fees. WSJ did a story on the report, too, with this appalling detail.

Banks are barreling into the business, led by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the second-biggest U.S. bank in assets, which has contracts with 21 states. U.S. Bancorp, based in Minneapolis, has contracts with 16 U.S. states. The nation’s largest bank by assets, Bank of America Corp., has deals in five states and will start issuing debit cards for California’s unemployment benefits in July.

One reason why financial institutions like prepaid debit cards: They largely escaped the recent crackdown by U.S. lawmakers and regulators on fees, interest rates and billing practices for credit and debit cards.

Last year, 10 state treasurers successfully prodded lawmakers to shield prepaid debit cards from part of the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law that limits so-called “swipe fees” charged to retailers. Prepaid debit cards also are exempt from a 2009 law that outlawed fees for infrequent card use. In addition, most of those cards aren’t subject to Federal Reserve rules requiring debit-card users to agree before banks can charge them for overdrawing the balance in their account.

Richard Davis, U.S. Bancorp’s chairman, president and chief executive, said last month that prepaid debit cards and other products will help the company recover roughly half of the revenue likely to be lost from swipe-fee rules being written by regulators. The banking industry is lobbying to repeal or delay the rules.

That is, US Bancorp (which the report showed was charging overdraft fees up to $20) plans to make up what it’ll lose in profits if swipe fees in Dodd-Frank remain in the law by screwing the unemployed even worse.

No wonder the bankster bailouts aren’t leading to any new jobs: they’re using the unemployed as a captive profit center.

Greg Sargent has liberated the letter that Leon Panetta sent to John McCain to explain how torture didn’t find Osama bin Laden. Sargent has three paragraphs of the letter (go read them), but here is the operative passage.

Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.

In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.

Consider the significance of this letter. The Director of the CIA claims no credit for the two biggest intelligence leads that led to OBL (mind you, he oversaw that actual op to get OBL, so CIA did have a big role). While this letter doesn’t say it, McCain’s two statements (which I presume reflect further conversations with Panetta) reveal that the detainee who first discussed Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was interrogated by another country.

The first mention of the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as well as a description of him as an important member of Al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country. The United States did not conduct this detainee’s interrogation, nor did we render him to that country for the purpose of interrogation. We did not learn Abu Ahmed’s real name or alias as a result of waterboarding or any ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used on a detainee in U.S. custody.

And we know from other descriptions that we got Abu Ahmed’s real name and location via SIGINT. Rather bizarrely, Pakistan even claims to have collected and handed over those intercepts to us (doesn’t the NSA have the best intercept capability in the Milky Way?).

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the ISI, which prides itself on arresting a series of key terrorists including the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has now broken off relations with the Central Intelligence Agency.

“They are furious. They handed over telephone intercepts in 2009 that were crucial in leading to bin Laden’s courier – the key breakthrough in the hunt,” said a source briefed on relations between the two countries.

“Then four months ago they were told there was nothing in it, it was what the Americans called a ‘cold lead’. Since then they have been left out completely out of the loop.”

In addition, we also used various means of tracking him (presumably including more SIGINT and satellite imagery).

Note, too, that in this passage at least, Panetta doesn’t even take credit for the intelligence provided by Hassan Ghul about the true role of al-Kuwaiti in al Qaeda. As McCain describes he, he had to learn that from SSCI staffers.

I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee – information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden – was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’

In other words, the CIA Director is not even bragging about stuff that did come from a CIA detainee (though I’ve raised my doubts about when he was transferred into CIA custody).

Now, maybe Panetta is doing this to appease the Pakistanis. While we can’t publicly say the SIGINT came from them (and possibly the first detainee interrogation intelligence), if CIA doesn’t claim credit it sort of makes it easier for others to do so.

But think about the other implication of this. Panetta has a date with–among others–Jeff Sessions and Scott Brown for confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Defense. This letter–and the fact it was liberated just in time to spoil AEI’s torture fest–is not going to make things easy for Panetta among the nuttier Republicans on the committee and in the Senate more generally.

Good thing the guy he wrote the letter to is the Ranking Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

SCOTUS just declined to take the Jeppesen Dataplan suit.

The high court rejected an appeal by five men who claimed that U.S. operatives—with support from Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing unit—abducted them and sent them to other countries where they were tortured. They alleged Jeppesen provided critical flight planning and logistical support to the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The men were seeking unspecified monetary damages from the company.

This effectively means that men like Binyam Mohamed, who the Brits have admitted was tortured after being rendered, cannot sue for redress. And the ruling is particularly egregious since a Jeppesen executive admitted that his company was flying rendition flights.

In effect, SCOTUS’ decision not to take this case leaves in place state secrets precedent that allows the government to commit grave crimes, but hide behind state secrets.

Update: The Brennan Center and a bunch of other crazy hippies who believe in rule of law wrote a letter in response to SCOTUS’ decision to DOJ reminding them that, per their purported state secrets policy, credible allegations of wrong-doing must be referred to the Inspectors General of the relevant agencies for investigation.

In December of last year, the undersigned groups and individuals wrote to inquire whether the Department of Justice had referred to the Inspectors General (IG) of the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, or any other department or agency allegations arising out of the government’s extraordinary rendition program detailed in several recently dismissed civil complaints—a referral required by the Department of Justice’s policy on the use of the state secrets privilege issued on September 23, 2009 (hereinafter “the September 23 policy”).  As we have received no response to that letter, and today’s Supreme Court decision makes it highly unlikely that any examination of the issue will take place in the courts, we submit this open letter posing the same question.

If the required referrals have not yet been made, we respectfully request that you now ask the relevant IGs to undertake a joint investigation into the Executive’s use of extraordinary rendition and to issue a public report—with as little redaction as possible—of their findings.  Should the IG investigation uncover government wrongdoing, we also urge that plaintiffs’ legitimate claims be acknowledged and redressed—that the government vindicate their claims by recognizing the ordeals they endured and denouncing any wrongdoing; by issuing a public apology; by providing monetary compensation; and through any other means that justice requires.

[snip]

Consequently, we believe that a thorough investigation—conducted by all relevant Inspectors General with full access to all relevant witnesses, documents, tapes, photographs, and other material, and culminating in a public report—would serve the interests of justice, and would accord with the September 23 policy’s aspiration to “provide greater accountability and reliability in the invocation of the state secrets privilege.” Moreover, where government wrongdoing is uncovered, providing plaintiffs appropriate redress could at least grant some small measure of recompense for the denial of these plaintiffs’ day in court.

This is me officially holding my breath for the Obama Administration to do what they promised on this front.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve got a long undercover investigation of a young Muslim man. It ends in the man acting to get what turns out to be an inert bomb. And there seem to be problems with the undercover work in the investigation.

It sounds like the case of Mohamed Mohamud, right?

Well, in many respects it is just like the case of Mohamed Mohamud. Except, unlike the Mohamud investigation, the FBI suggests this one–of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh for allegedly conspiring to target synagogues–is flimsy.

WNYC has learned the lack of Federal participation in the high-profile case of two Queens men allegedly involved in a plot to blow up New York City synagogues and churches was related to concerns it was not a bona fide terrorism case.

Two Federal law enforcement sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the FBI did not take the case of the two alleged Queens terrorists because the undercover operation was problematic and the end result was being over-hyped. They also expressed concern the case would ultimately not hold up in court as terrorism case. “Should guys that want to buy guns be off the street, absolutely,” one of the Federal officials said.

[snip]

At the press conference announcing the arrests of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, local officials said the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had the right of first refusal on all terrorism cases, but had opted out of this one. Officials characterized the case as one involving a “pair of lone wolves” who were not part of a broader global terrorism conspiracy.

This is the same FBI that tried to hide its first contacts with an accused attempted bomber, set up all the details of his alleged plot, and made darn sure he never had a real bomb. In other words, the FBI that insists its Mohamud indictment is completely legitimate. But I guess when you’re in a pissing match with the NYPD, standards for serious investigations or not suddenly change?

Jane Mayer, who did such crucial work showing how the Bush Administration chose torture in preference to a more effective, legal interrogation approach, now does similar work explaining that a similar choice of an illegal and ineffective approach over a legal one lies behind the Thomas Drake leak.

As she describes–relying largely on interviews with Thomas Drake, former Congressional staffer Diane Roark, and others with ties to the issue–that Drake and others were targeted because they championed a program called ThinThread over the expensive and ineffective SAIC version, Trailblazer. Both were data mining programs, but ThinThread automatically encrypted US person data. Trailerblazer did not, probably deliberately so. Between championing the wrong (but probably more effective) program, and submitting an Inspector General’s complaint about Trailblazer in 2002, Drake, Roark, and the others were targeted as potential leakers of the warrantless wiretap program.

Ultimately, in an effort to pressure Drake to testify falsely against they others and using evidence collected ostensibly in search of leads on the warrantless wiretap case, they cobbled together a charge based on five documents of disputed classification.

For four months, Drake continued coöperating. He admitted that he had given Gorman information that he had cut and pasted from secret documents, but stressed that he had not included anything classified. He acknowledged sending Gorman hundreds of e-mails. Then, in April, 2008, the F.B.I. told him that someone important wanted to meet with him, at a secure building in Calverton, Maryland. Drake agreed to the appointment. Soon after he showed up, he says, Steven Tyrrell, the prosecutor, walked in and told him, “You’re screwed, Mr. Drake. We have enough evidence to put you away for most of the rest of your natural life.”

Prosecutors informed Drake that they had found classified documents in the boxes in his basement—the indictment cites three—and discovered two more in his e-mail archive. They also accused him of shredding other documents, and of deleting e-mails in the months before he was raided, in an attempt to obstruct justice. Further, they said that he had lied when he told federal agents that he hadn’t given Gorman classified information.

“They had made me into an enemy of the state just by saying I was,” Drake says. The boxes in his basement contained copies of some of the less sensitive material that he had procured for the Inspector General’s Trailblazer investigation. The Inspector General’s Web site directs complainants to keep copies. Drake says that if the boxes did, in fact, contain classified documents he didn’t realize it. (The indictment emphasizes that he “willfully” retained documents.) The two documents that the government says it extracted from his e-mail archive were even less sensitive, Drake says. Both pertained to a successor to Trailblazer, code-named Turbulence. One document listed a schedule of meetings about Turbulence. It was marked “unclassified/for official use only” and posted on the N.S.A.’s internal Web site. The government has since argued that the schedule should have been classified, and that Drake should have known this. The other document, which touted the success of Turbulence, was officially declassified in July, 2010, three months after Drake was indicted.

In other words, after targeting Drake in the warrantless wiretap leak but not having any evidence to make a case, they charged him with espionage for having followed protocol on submitting an Inspector General complaint and keeping one email marked unclassified and another that has since been declassified. For that they want to send him to prison for 35 years.

As I laid out the other day, the government is claiming it can treat the parts of these five documents that even its expert has determined to be unclassified as they would treat classified information in CIPA.

In other words, it seems the defense planned to (and did not object to the evidence in the binder based on that plan) to cross-examine [the government’s expert] on the substance of her decisions about what was and was not classified in the documents Drake is alleged to have illegally retained and copied. It goes to the heart of the case against Drake. But the government wants to hinder the defense efforts by making sure that even things Murray decided were unclassified can’t be revealed in raw form to the jury.

And of course, as Drake points out in his interview with Mayer, the bigger thing the government is trying to hide is the cheaper, more effective program that preserved privacy rights they ignored in favor of the illegal wiretap program.

There’s lots more in the story–including Michael Hayden explaining to Roark that the government chose not to protect Americans’ privacy in the warrantless program because they “had the power” not to.

She asked Hayden why the N.S.A. had chosen not to include privacy protections for Americans. She says that he “kept not answering. Finally, he mumbled, and looked down, and said, ‘We didn’t need them. We had the power.’ He didn’t even look me in the eye. I was flabbergasted.” She asked him directly if the government was getting warrants for domestic surveillance, and he admitted that it was not.

Go read the whole thing.

US-Pakistani relations really didn’t need this right now. Pakistan arrested–and then released, apparently because the person’s claim to have diplomatic status checked out–an American with high tech gear allegedly snooping around a nuke lab.

The American diplomat, purportedly called Matthew Bennett, was found near Fateh Jang by ISI and MI personnel who had been watching him for a while.

He was found taking photographs in an area which, according to officials and locals, served as a secret passage for the transportation of sensitive materials to the Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta.

They found some neat toys on him, too.

Let’s see. We had the first outed CIA station chief last year. Followed by the six week confrontation over Raymond Davis, which may have resulted in the exposure of hundreds more spooky contractors. Followed by a raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound that–the Pakistanis claim, at least, took them by complete surprise. In apparent response, a second CIA station chief was outed. And now someone apparently working under diplomatic cover gets caught taking tourist photos of an passage to Pakistan’s nuclear lab?

Is someone keeping count?

So we got Osama bin Laden. And in exchange, Pakistan’s nuclear program will go completely dark?

Just weeks after the SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, a company best known for profiting wildly off of fantasy stories for children has trademarked Seal Team 6.

The Walt Disney Company has trademarked “Seal Team 6,” which also happens to be the name of the elite special forces team that killed Osama Bin Laden.

The trademark applications came on May 3rd, two days after the operation that killed Bin Laden… and two days after “Seal Team 6″  was included in thousands of news articles and TV programs focusing on the operation.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this. Do we really need Mickey Mouse making a movie celebrating violence? Boom, boom! as Mickey double-taps the bad guy.

And how does Disney get to trademark a government unit? Shouldn’t they be paying a license fee to the government if they want to make money off Seal Team 6’s success?

Finally, though, I’d love to second the suggestion made by @AllThingsCT: if Disney is going to insist on profiting off the exploits of SEAL Team 6, then they had better be giving most of those profits back, preferably to military families who are struggling through multiple deployments and PTSD.

The NYT has a story on how Erik Prince’s latest scam–to hide from the trial lawyers–involves using retired US servicemen to train Colombian mercenaries to “defend” the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest or were challenged by pro-democracy demonstrations in its crowded labor camps or democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

And Erik Prince said he resettled to UAE because of the churches!

Given Prince’s happiness about the legal climate in UAE you’d think he’d be able to wander publicly. But he appears to be exercising the same kind of tradecraft that Osama bin Laden did to evade spies in recent years.

To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower – a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.

But ultimately, this seems to be about Iran.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said.

[snip]

Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.

[snip]

Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.

“As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2’s work.

So, in a bid to avoid America’s trial lawyers, Blackwater 3.0 is holed up in UAE training unqualified Colombians so that the Blackwater guys have an excuse to shoot weapons against Iran?

Really?

Is this what we’ve come to?

Update: I edited this post to cut down on the blockquotes from NYT.

In this post, I noted that John McCain seemed to be talking about Hassan Ghul when he spoke of a detainee who gave up key information on Osama bin Laden’s courier without being tortured.

It’s the other detail I find even more interesting: that info on Abu Ahmed’s real role and his real relationship with OBL came using “standard, noncoercive means.” This break in intelligence has fairly consistently been attributed to Hassan Ghul in tick tocks of the hunt for OBL. And while McCain doesn’t confirm that Ghul provided the intelligence, if he did, then consider what it probably means.

I have noted that a detainee who appears to be Ghul was held for six months–from January to August 2004–before the CIA started getting approval for his CIA-led interrogation. If the detainee who provided the key information on Abu Ahmed was Ghul and did so through noncoercive means, it means that Ghul’s interrogation before CIA got him–presumably, Ghul’s interrogation by military interrogators not using torture–yielded the key piece of information that would eventually lead to OBL. And (such a scenario would further imply) CIA insisted on taking custody and torturing him, even after he yielded information that would lead to OBL. Which might explain the legal sensitivities around Ghul’s torture, because if they got key info without torture the claims they based torture on would all be demonstrably false.

Reuters has a piece on Ghul that may accord with my earlier speculation. (h/t MadDog) They describe DiFi confirming that key information came form Ghul, but before his torture started.

Earlier this week, [Dianne] Feinstein told Reuters about a CIA detainee who “did provide useful and accurate intelligence.” But she added: “This was acquired before the CIA used their enhanced interrogation techniques against the detainee.” Three U.S. officials said Feinstein was referring to Ghul.

Reuters relies heavily on declassified CIA documents to understand Ghul’s treatment–which I assume means they’ve confirmed that the May 2005 mention of Ghul was to Hassan Ghul, and not a second Janat Ghul that may have been held in CIA custody.

But if that’s true, they seem to be missing the key documents–the August 2004 documents cited in the May 2005 documents that ask for and get approval for four more torture techniques–dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing and abdominal slap. From those documents, we can at least presume that Ghul was being subjected to his first round of CIA interrogations between August 2 and August 25, 2004, when CIA asked for the four additional techniques (though there are other possibilities I laid out here).

Just as interesting is the paper trail discussing the CIA getting custody of a detainee–and the Principals Committee discussing the treatment of a detainee named “Ghul”–on July 2 (Jay Bybee has said that detainee was Janat Gul, but unless there’s a CIA detainee named Janat distinct from the Janat who was in Gitmo, that seems unlikely). At the Principals Committee meeting, they appear to have approved certain treatment of this Ghul, notably after the torture skeptics left the meeting.

In other words, if FOIAed documents do pertain to Hassan Ghul (and Reuters appears to suggest they do), then Ghul was likely not in CIA custody until July 2004. That is, it appears Ghul was not turned over to exclusive CIA custody until six months after he was captured. His initial torture approval came on August 2, and his second torture approval came on August 26.

So when DiFi says the key information from Ghul “was acquired before the CIA used their enhanced interrogation techniques against the detainee,” that probably also means that information was acquired before Ghul was transferred to CIA custody. That doesn’t mean CIA didn’t have access to him earlier than that, or that DOD didn’t use some kind of torture on him before then (again, see this post for some of the possibilities).

All of which has two really big possible implications.

First, that the Principals Committee–without input from key DOJ officials–approved the torture of Hassan Ghul after he had already given up vital information leading to Osama bin Laden’s location. And given that the torture approvals were always premised on the claim that a detainee wouldn’t give up information without torture, this would mean a key claim made to justify torturing Ghul appears to have been false. This would tie an illegal torture authorization directly to people like Dick Cheney, having effectively bypassed the normal DOJ approval process.

Also, this could mean that obfuscation happening here serves to hide the possibility that what we now call a CIA detainee gave up his most important information while still in DOD custody.