Terrorist Hobgoblins Bite the Intelligence Community in Its Efficacy Ass

I just finished watching the House Intelligence Committee hearing on the NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden. I’ll have a lot more to say about the content of the revelations in the next few days. But first, a general observation.

Since the initial Snowden revelations, the Intelligence Community and other Administration surrogates have been trying to minimize our understanding of the scope of their surveillance and use traditional fearmongering to justify the programs by focusing on the importance of the Section 702 collection to stopping terrorism. While James Clapper’s office has made it clear that Section 702 goes beyond counterterrorism by revealing that its  successes include counterproliferation and cybersecurity successes, as well as counterterrorism ones, the focus has nevertheless been on TERROR TERROR TERROR.

Today’s hearing was really the culmination of that process, when Keith Alexander boasted up upwards of 50 terrorist plots — about 40 of which were overseas — that Section 702 has prevented.

Of the four plots the government has revealed — David Headley, Najibullah Zazi, as well as these two today

Mr. Joyce described a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange by a Kansas City man, whom the agency was able to identify because he was in contact with “an extremist” in Yemen who was under surveillance. Mr. Joyce also talked about a San Diego man who planned to send financial support to a terrorist group in Somalia, and who was identified because the N.S.A. flagged his phone number as suspicious through its database of all domestic phone call logs, which was brought to light by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

… the government has either overblown the importance of these programs and their success or are fairly minor plots.

None of the four may be as uniquely worthwhile as the cyberattack described by Clapper’s office a week ago, which it has not, however, fleshed out.

Communications collected under Section 702 have provided significant and unique intelligence regarding potential cyber threats to the United States, including specific potential network computer attacks. This insight has led to successful efforts to mitigate these threats.

That is, the government might–might!–be able to make a far better case for the value of these programs in discussing their role in preventing cyberattacks rather than preventing terrorist plots.

And yet it hasn’t done so, even as it pushes one after another attempt to legislate internet access in the name of protecting Intellectual Property and critical infrastructure.

Given the increasing focus on cybersecurity — and the already dishonest claims people like Mike Rogers have made about the means to accomplish that focus — this is the discussion we need to be having, rather than digging up terror plots first developed in 2004 that never happened. But in the same way the government shied away from conducting an honest discussion with us in 2001 and again in 2006 about these programs, it is refusing to conduct an honest discussion about cybersecurity today.

And, ironically, that refusal is preventing them from describing the value of a program that surely contributes more to countering cyberattacks than terror attacks at this point.

Why Would You Segregate the FISA Orders, But Not the Directives?

The FBI, according to Eli Lake, thinks someone besides Edward Snowden may be responsible for leaking the Section 215 order to Verizon ordering them to turn over the metadata on all their American customers’ calls. They claim to think so because digital copies of such orders exist in only two places: computers at the FISA Court and FBI’s National Security Division that are segregated from the Internet. (Note: where Lake says “warrant” in this passage, he means “order.”)

Those who receive the warrant—the first of its kind to be publicly disclosed—are not allowed “to disclose to any other person” except to carry out its terms or receive legal advice about it, and any person seeing it for those reasons is also legally bound not to disclose the order. The officials say phone companies like Verizon are not allowed to store a digital copy of the warrant, and that the documents are not accessible on most NSA internal classified computer networks or on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the top-secret internet used by the U.S. intelligence community.

The warrants reside on two computer systems affiliated with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. Both systems are physically separated from other government-wide computer networks and employ sophisticated encryption technology, the officials said. Even lawmakers and staff lawyers on the House and Senate intelligence committees can only view the warrants in the presence of Justice Department attorneys, and are prohibited from taking notes on the documents.

Now, when the order first leaked, I actually suspected the leaker might be in this general vicinity. If that’s right, then I also suspect the FBI is interested in finding this person because he or she would be reacting to the FBI’s own wrong-doing on another matter. Heck, the FBI could conduct a manhunt in this general vicinity just for fun to make sure their own wrong-doing doesn’t get exposed.

Such is the beauty of secret counterintelligence investigations.

That said, Lake’s reporting is an example of something I suggested in the first day of this leak: we’re going to learn more about how the NSA works from leaks about the investigation of it than from the leaks themselves.

And this story provides a lot of evidence that the government guards its generalized surveillance plans more jealously than it guards it particularized surveillance targets. (See this post for a description of the difference between orders and directives specifying targets.)

Consider what kinds of documents the FISA Court produces:

  • Standing Section 215 orders such as the Verizon one in question
  • Particularized Section 215 orders; an example might be an order for credit card companies and Big Box stores to turn over details on all purchases of pressure cookers in the country
  • FISA Amendments Act orders generally mapping out the FAA collection (we don’t know how detailed they are; they might describe collection programs at the “al Qaeda” and “Chinese hacker” level, or might be slightly more specific, but are necessarily pretty general)
  • Particularized FISA warrants, targeted at individual US persons (though most of this spying, Marc Ambinder and others have claimed, is conducted by the FBI under Title III)

Aside from those particularized warrants naming US persons, FISA Court doesn’t, however, produce (or even oversee) lists of the great bulk of people who are being spied on. Those are the directives NSA analysts draw up on their own, without court supervision. Those directives presumably have to be shared with the service providers in some form, though all the reporting on it suggests they don’t see much of it. But, Lake’s remainder that Google’s list of surveillance targets had been hacked by China to identify which of its agents in the US we had identified and were surveilling makes it clear they do get the list in some form.

In April, CIO.com quoted Microsoft’s Dave Aucsmith, the senior director of the company’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, saying a 2009 hack of major U.S. Internet companies was a Chinese plot to learn the targets of email and electronic surveillance by the U.S. government. In May, the Washington Post reported Chinese hackers had accessed a Google database that gave it access to years’ worth of federal U.S. surveillance records of counter-intelligence targets.

But the prior hack makes obvious something that has been apparent since the Verizon order leaked: China doesn’t have much use for information that shows NSA is compiling a database of all calls made in the US. It does, however, have a great use for the list of its spies we’ve identified.

What this report seems to suggest, among other things (including that the Congressional committees don’t have enough scrutiny over these orders because they’re not allowed to keep their own copy of them), is that details on the particularized spying is more widely dispersed, in part because it has to be. Someone’s got to implement that particularized spying, after all, and that requires communication that traverses multiple servers.

But the generalized stuff — the stuff the FISA Court actually oversees — is locked up in a vault like the family jewels.

You might ask yourself why the government would go to greater lengths to lock up the generalized stuff — the stuff that makes it clear the government is spying on Americans — and not the particularized stuff that has far more value for our adversaries.

Update: After the hearing today, Keith Alexander said Snowden is the source of the order, and he got it during training at Fort Meade.

Alexander told reporters after a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the man who’s acknowledged being the source of the recent leaks, Booz Allen Hamilton information technology specialist Edward Snowden, had access to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order and related materials during an orientation at NSA.

“The FISA warrant was on a web server that he had access to as an analyst coming into the Threat Operations Center,” Alexander said. “It was in a special classified section that as he was getting his training he went to.”

Which suggests the leaking about someone in the FISA Court may, as I thought, be an effort to impugn people in the vicinity of the court the FBI would like to shut up.

Saxby Chambliss Reveals the Game

In an article explaining why Dianne Feinstein is in no rush to hold a hearing on the massive dragnet sucking up your communication and mine, Saxby Chambliss is quoted as saying,

“We so rarely have open hearings,” Chambliss said.

Eleven days ago, Saxby offered this as proof there is no problem with a dragnet collection of all Americans’ phone records.

To my knowledge, we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.

Congressional oversight in a democracy, ladies and gentlemen!

Edward Snowden: Congress Has Immunity from Spying, But You Don’t

I’ll admit from the start that the Snowden chat at the Guardian was a brilliant journalistic and technical feat. At the same time, it’s clear that Snowden is still closely following the news, and presumably shaping his answers for maximal political effect.

So I take this comment, the last words he spoke on the chat, with a grain of salt.

This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

Certainly, it would seem technically feasible to block all Verizon numbers associated with official Congressional communications devices. It would be far harder to block the abundant communications devices tied to campaign activity.

From this, shall we assume the White House and Courts are also immune?

Contrast that with Snowden’s claims about we peons’ communications.

NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of “warranted” intercept, it’s important to understand the intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you would consider a “real” warrant like a Police department would have to, the “warrant” is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

[snip]

US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it’s important to understand that policy protection is no protection – policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection – a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the “widest allowable aperture,” and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn’t stop being protected communications just because of the IP they’re tagged with.

I do believe I pointed out James Clapper using “domestic” as just on such weasel word (I prefer to call it Orwellian turd-splat) this morning!

Clearly, Snowden is trying to make it clear that our Congressional overseers aren’t protecting our interests as well as the NSA has protected theirs (for good reasons under the Constitution, I would add).

So this claim may just be an effort to make us more pissed.

Remember, however, the day after the first leak on this, Eric Holder testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Barbara Milulski, who (as a tremendously powerful Senator representing NSA) had not previously publicly ever met NSA surveillance she didn’t like, was up in arms about the possibility the government was surveilling her communications.

Those concerns had been placated by the time Keith Alexander testified a day or so later.

So while Snowden is clearly trying to push the debate, it is also quite likely that the immunity comment is true.

James Clapper Throws a Concentrated Nugget of Orwellian Turd-Splat

Hooboy.

I was going to leave the whole CNET thing well enough alone after Jerry Nadler issued a statement retracting his sort-of suggestion that the NSA could wiretap Americans without a warrant (more on that below).

But I can’t remember seeing a more concentrated piece of Orwellian turd-splat than this statement addressing the issue from James Clapper.

The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress. Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world.

The claim that NSA doesn’t wittingly “collect” data on millions of Americans was just an opening act for James Clapper, it seems. I know it won’t work this way for those who trust this program, but Clapper’s statement should raise more questions whether the thrust of what Nadler said, rather than four words taken out of context, are in fact true.

Let’s take this slowly.

I’ve put my transcription of the exchange between Jerry Nadler and Robert Mueller below for your reference. But one thing to keep in mind as you read Clapper’s turd-splat is that Nadler first described “getting the contents of the [American] phone” identified using the metadata database and, in repeating the question he had earlier asked a briefer who actually knows about how these programs are used, “getting specific information from that telephone.” It is true that in response to Mueller, he spoke of “listening to the phone,” the four words taken out of context, and his walk-back describes “listening to the content.” But the range of Nadler’s language suggests the distinct possibility the briefer discussed a different kind of collection, and Nadler never once explicitly described setting a dedicated wiretap on the phone of an American identified from conversations with suspected terrorists (which is what CNET blew it up as).

With that in mind, I offer you turd-splat:

The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization and was not briefed to Congress.

Clapper has set up a straw man that differs in at least three key ways from what Nadler asked about. First, he is addressing only eavesdropping, monitoring a phone in real time going forward, not accessing historic collections (though one thing these two programs in conjunction do is collapse historic and ongoing communications). I’m especially amused by this move, because it replicates a mistake that many have made when discussing these programs (especially the metadata one) as wiretapping. Clapper is only addressing the most inflammatory language Nadler used, not the language he used first and last in this exchange.

Then Clapper introduces the idea of domestic communications. This has no source in Nadler’s comment whatsoever, at least so long as you believe the only way NSA uses the metadata database is to see which Americans are talking to suspected foreign terrorist phone numbers. Given the government’s improbable claim they’re only making 300 queries a year, we may well be talking about domestic communications, but that’s not what Nadler addressed, which was about the American participant in a call with a suspected foreign terrorist phone number.

Nadler asked about an analyst deciding, on the basis of metadata analysis, that a US phone number looks suspicious, to “get the content” from that number. He implies that he has been told an analyst has that authority. Clapper addresses only whether an analyst without proper legal authorization can get US person content. That is, in response to Nadler’s question whether an analyst does have the legal authority to get content based on suspicion, Clapper says an analyst can’t get content without the proper legal authority. Nadler’s entire (implied) question was whether an analyst would have the legal authority to do so. Clapper doesn’t answer it.

So in other words, Clapper alters Nadler’s comment in three fundamental ways, changing its entire meaning, and then asserts Clapper’s now only tangentially related distortion of Nadler’s comment was not briefed to Congress.

No. Of course not. And Nadler hadn’t said it was, either.

And then Clapper describes what (he claims) members were briefed. Splat!

Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world.

Whoa! Do you see what Clapper did there? Nadler asked a question about how an analyst would move from metadata analysis — the Section 215 program — and then use it to access content, via whatever means. Nadler mentioned Section 215 specifically. Yet Clapper claims this is all about the implementation of Section 702. (Note, I find this interesting in part because Mueller suggests Nadler might be talking about another program entirely, which remains a possibility.)

I have pointed out on several times how desperate the Administration is to have you believe that Section 215 metadata collection and Section 702 content collection are unrelated, even if surrogates can’t keep them straight themselves. Clapper’s ploy is more of the same.

As is his emphasis that Section 702 targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose. Now, just to make clear, the government has always held that any collection of information on what foreigners are doing is a valid foreign intelligence purpose. While Clapper doesn’t engage in suggesting this as directly as he and others have in past weeks, for Section 702 there is clearly no limitation of this authority to terrorism or counterintelligence or proliferation or hacking (the Administration and surrogates have suggested there is a terrorism limit for the Section 215 dragnet, but if there is, it comes from court-ordered minimization, not the law). But the real cherry here is the word “target,” which has become almost as stripped of common meaning as “collect” in this context.

In the 702 context, “target” refers to the node of communication at which collection is focused, not to all communications associated with that collection. So a directive to Verizon might ask for all communications that the original suspected terrorist phone number engages in (including its surfing and texting and pictures and email). But at a minimum that would include everyone the suspected terrorist communicates via his Verizon service, and there’s very good reason to believe it includes at least one and probably more degrees of separation out, if Verizon has it.

So when Clapper says 702 cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world, he means Americans cannot be the communication node on which collection is focused unless you have a FISA warrant (which is the practice Marc Ambinder, who is far more impressed with Clapper’s turd-splat than I am, addresses in this piece).

But what has never been answered — except perhaps in an off-hand comment in a debate defeating language that would actually prevent what everyone says is already prevented — is whether the government can, um, “collect” the content of Americans who communicate with those who are, um, “targeted.”

I’m not saying I have the answer to that question — though it is a concern that has been raised for years by the very same people who have been vindicated in their warnings about Section 215. But let’s be very clear what Clapper did here. He completely redefined Nadler’s comment, then divorced that redefined comment from the context of Section 215, and then threw the Orwellian term “target” at it to make it go away.

He could have denied Nadler’s more general assertions. That, he did not do.   Read more

The CNET “Bombshell” and the Four Surveillance Programs

CNET is getting a lot of attention for its report that NSA, “has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.”

In general, I’m just going to outsource my analysis of what the exchange means to Julian Sanchez (I hope he doesn’t charge me as much as Mike McConnell’s Booz Allen Hamilton for outsourced analysis).

What seems more likely is that Nadler is saying analysts sifting through metadata have the discretion to determine (on the basis of what they’re seeing in the metadata) that a particular phone number or e-mail account satisfies the conditions of one of the broad authorizations for electronic surveillance under §702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

[snip]

The analyst must believe that one end of the communication is outside the United States, and flag that account or phone line for collection. Note that even if the real target is the domestic phone number, an analyst working from the metadatabase wouldn’t have a name, just a number.  That means there’s no “particular, known US person,” which ensures that the §702 ban on “reverse targeting” is, pretty much by definition, not violated.

None of that would be too surprising in principle: That’s the whole point of §702!

That is, what Nadler may have learned that the same analysts who have access to the phone metadata may also have authority to issue directives to companies for phone content collection. If so, it would be entirely feasible for the same analyst to learn, via the metadata database, that a suspect phone number is in contact with the US and for her to submit a request for actual content to the providers, without having to first get a FISA order covering the US person callers directly. Since she was still “targeting” the original overseas phone number, she would be able to get the US person content without a specific order.

Screen shot 2013-06-16 at 11.50.59 AMI just want to point to a part of this exchange that everyone is ignoring (but that I pointed out while live tweeting this).

Mueller: I’m not certain it’s the same–I’m not certain it’s an answer to the same question.

Mueller didn’t deny the NSA can get access to US person phone content without a warrant. He just suggested that Nadler might be conflating two different programs or questions.

And that’s one of the things to remember about this discussion. Among many other methods of shielding parts of the programs, the government is thus far discussing primarily the two programs identified by the Guardian: the phone metadata collection (which the WaPo reports is called MAINWAY) and the Internet content access (PRISM).

Read more

Shell Games: How to Keep Doing Internet Data Mining and Avoid the Courts

As I noted, the WaPo makes it clear one of the most sensitive parts of the government’s surveillance programs is the collection of Internet metadata.

But the thing is, it doesn’t come out and explain whether and if so how it continues to go on.

This passage, written in the present tense, sure seems to suggest it continues.

MARINA and the collection tools that feed it are probably the least known of the NSA’s domestic operations, even among experts who follow the subject closely. Yet they probably capture information about more American citizens than any other, because the volume of e-mail, chats and other Internet communications far exceeds the volume of standard telephone calls.

The NSA calls Internet metadata “digital network information.” Sophisticated analysis of those records can reveal unknown associates of known terrorism suspects. Depending on the methods applied, it can also expose medical conditions, political or religious affiliations, confidential business negotiations and extramarital affairs.

What permits the former and prevents the latter is a complex set of policies that the public is not permitted to see. “You could do analyses that give you more information, but the law and procedures don’t allow that,” a senior U.S. intelligence lawyer said.

Yet buried in the last paragraphs of the story, WaPo’s sources suggest “the NSA is no longer doing it.” Or — as elaborated — doing “it” under the guise of and with the oversight of the FISA court.

As for bulk collection of Internet metadata, the question that triggered the crisis of 2004, another official said the NSA is no longer doing it. When pressed on that question, he said he was speaking only of collections under authority of the surveillance court.

“I’m not going to say we’re not collecting any Internet metadata,” he added. “We’re not using this program and these kinds of accesses to collect Internet metadata in bulk.”

I keep saying this: sources on this story are trying hard to get us to focus on a few programs managed by FBI and NSA under two particular provisions of law that happen to have (secret, limited) court oversight, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act. But that leaves out several other likely candidates to conduct such intelligence analysis, notably the NCTC. And it leaves out other potential sources of collection, such as cybersecurity in the name of self-defense.

Telecoms Versus the Toobz: The Source of the Legal Troubles

In this important piece on overbroad surveillance programs under Presidents Bush and Obama, the WaPo reveals that the program James Comey almost resigned over in 2004 involved sucking Internet metadata off telecom switches owned by the telecoms.

Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.

At Bush’s direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.

For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.

This leads me to wonder whether legal leverage from the Internet providers — rather than any squeamishness about the law itself — caused the conflict.

Remember, in the fight over retroactive immunity in 2008, the industry group for the Internet providers — including Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google — argued against retroactive immunity.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) strongly opposes S. 2248, the “FISA Amendments Act of 2007,” as passed by the Senate on February 12, 2008. CCIA believes that this bill should not provide retroactive immunity to corporations that may have participated in violations of federal law. CCIA represents an industry that is called upon for cooperation and assistance in law enforcement. To act with speed in times of crisis, our industry needs clear rules, not vague promises that the U.S. Government can be relied upon to paper over Constitutional transgressions after the fact.

Given the WaPo’s report, this amounts to a demand that Congress allow the Internet companies to hold the telecoms accountable for helping the government seize their data.

As well they should have been able to. To a degree, these companies compete, and in the name of helping the government, the telecoms were helping themselves to Internet suppliers crown jewels.

Microsoft and Google versus AT&T and Verizon. Now that would have been an amusing lawsuit to watch. And probably a lot bigger worry for the people who use all of them to spy on us peons than we peons actually are.

NSA Spying: The Oversight of the Passive Voice

In a white paper claiming “the American people deserve to know what we are doing to protect both” privacy and liberty, and security, the government (Ellen Nakashima, at least, doesn’t specify which agency generated this) also includes this assertion:

The [dragnet metadata] program is subject to strict controls and oversight: the metadata is segregated and queries against the metadata are documented and audited.

The detail is one that NSA Director Keith Alexander had already claimed in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. He claimed,

Every time we query that database, it’s auditible by the committees, by DOJ, by the court, by the Administration.

In a telling comment to the press the other day, though, Dianne Feinstein, whose staffers on the Intelligence Committee would be the ones auditing the queries, said this:

Asked to confirm that intelligence officials do not need a court order for the query of the number itself, Feinstein said, “that’s my understanding.”

I found it really strange that a person who should be solidly in the thick of the audits Alexander was boasting about didn’t even seem sure about how someone accessed the database.

But then, Alexander said they were “auditable,” not that they were audited by all these people.

One of just a few explanations about oversight in a document trying to prove the government protects our privacy and liberty might be more persuasive if they weren’t presented in the passive voice. It doesn’t sound like DiFi knows Congress could audit the document; I wonder if the FISA Court, which Alexander claims also can audit the data, knows it can (I’d also like to see someone audit the claim it is segregated; is it ever copied?).

The white paper’s statements about the 702/PRISM program are equally unsatisfying.

Congress requires the Government to develop and obtain judicial approval for “minimization” procedures to ensure appropriate protection of any information about U.S. persons that may be incidentally acquired. The Government did that, and its procedures were approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, the FISC doesn’t get to review compliance with these procedures, only the adequacy of them if applied as promised. And since this white paper makes no claims that the government can’t access this US person data — which, after all, includes content and metadata — it suggests the most sensitive collection for Americans has only internal (DOJ and ODNI review) safeguards for Americans’ Internet communications.

Effectively, in addition to providing further evidence for Mark Udall’s assertions that the government could accomplish what it says it is doing via other, far less sensitive means, this document only serves to show how inadequate the oversight of these programs is.

To Justify Dragnet, FBI Implies It Can’t File 300 More NSLs in a Year

So Mark Hosenball just reported this, uncritically.

The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

As Jim Sensenbrenner noted the other day, if the government is doing only what it says it is with the database — finding US persons who are in contact with suspected terrorists — the FBI could use a grand jury subpoena or a National Security Letter to do so. Collecting all the phone records of Americans would only be required if the FBI were doing so many checks such a process became onerous.

Except that the FBI routinely gets upwards of 10,000 NSLs a year. Adding these 300 would be a drop in the bucket.

So the difficulty of getting NSLs can’t be the problem.

Which suggests the 300 claim is implicit acknowledgment they’re doing something more with this data than they’re letting on.

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