FBI Asks William Webster to Look Closer at Nidal Hasan Analysis

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The WaPo reports that the FBI has appointed William Webster to review the FBI’s response to Nidal Hasan’s actions leading up to the Fort Hood shootings.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has asked former director and retired federal judge William H. Webster to conduct an independent review of the bureau’s actions in advance of last month’s deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., according to government officials familiar with the move.

But the most interesting thing about the report are the details it offers on the FBI’s analysis of Anwar al-Awlaki’s communications.

FBI agents in California already monitoring Aulaqi, whose violent rhetoric has inspired terrorist plots in Canada, Great Britain and the United States, forwarded two e-mails to the Washington task force, another government official confirmed. An analyst there took a few months to review the messages, before concluding they were innocent and in line with research Hasan had been conducting about Muslim soldiers and mental health issues, the official said.

Later e-mails between Hasan and the cleric were not sent to agents in Washington, but were reviewed by analysts in San Diego who determined they were in line with the earlier correspondence, the official added.

To sum up, the FBI maintains that Awlaki has “inspired” attacks plots [corrected per KenMuldrew] in Canada, the UK, and the US. Though this does not include a description of what “inspired” means.

It also reveals that the actual analysis of Awlaki’s communication–which we have reason to believe were collected under FISA surveillance–was initially done in CA (presumably, in San Diego). But the initial decision whether or not to pursue an investigation of Hasan based on the wiretaps was made in DC.

Not that I have any grand conclusions about that–but I do find it curious that the analysis of communications with Awlaki–whose last US-based location was in the DC area–was done in San Diego.

One more thing. What the WaPo doesn’t mention about Webster’s background is that, in addition to being a judge and a former FBI Director (and an Amherst grad), he’s also a former CIA Director and Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Both of those roles would add another layer of expertise that may be useful for this review.

Update: I asked Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, why they might be doing the analysis in San Diego. He said that the JTTF in San Diego is pretty substantial. Like me, he speculated that SAIC, which is located in San Diego, may be involved.

The most likely contractor would be SAIC, and not just because it’s based in San Diego. It has very close ties with the FBI and is a prime contractor on a massive FBI database called Investigative Data Warehouse. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been trying to shine some light on IDW through FOIA, and earlier this year released some of its findings: http://www.eff.org/issues/foia/investigative-data-warehouse-report

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The Spying Industrial Complex

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Chris Soghoian, whose post on 8 million times the government has used GPS tracking on Sprint’s customers in the last year, has apparently flushed out the spying policies of many of the nation’s telecoms. Cryptome has them posted–though (as Mary points out) Yahoo has freaked out and initiated take-down proceedings.

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document. So far, Young has refused.

Meanwhile, Soghoian asked a really interesting question on Saturday:

Nextel charged $150 per GPS ping in 2002. http://bit.ly/7hg8Ys How much did Sprint/Nextel charge for the 8 million pings over the last year?

If Sprint/Nextel’s rates last year were what Nextel’s were six years ago, then those 8 million pings would have netted them $1.2 billion.

Sprint’s operating revenues in 2008 were $35 billion. Even if Sprint has lowered its price for GPS pings (doubtful for a company in some trouble, though possible given the way they’ve automated the process for the government), allowing the government to spy on its customers is still a huge part of its income. And that’s not counting the other kinds of spying Sprint facilitates, such as the $1500 Nextel charged for a pen register (Sprint charged differently in 2002, with $250 for a pen register or trap and trace within one market, plus $25 a day after that).

You see, these companies only look like telecom companies. Really, they’re telecom and surveillance companies. The question is, how much telecom is it, and how much surveillance?

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The New SWIFT Agreement

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Last night I went to bed before I looked at the new SWIFT Agreement giving the US access to all of Europe’s finance data to track for terrorists. Here’s that agreement and here’s a Q&A document about what the agreement does. The agreement is instructive both for what it suggests about the negotiations between the US and EU, but also for what it suggests about the protections the US is willing to grant citizens of other countries that it is not extending to its own citizens.

This is a temporary extension

This is not a permanent agreement. This is a 9 month extension of the SWIFT agreement from February 1 of next year for nine months, meaning the new EU government will begin negotiations on a proposed new agreement immediately.

in July of this year the 27 Member States of the European Union unanimously gave the EU Presidency a mandate to negotiate an agreement with the United States to ensure the transfer of the data and thereby the continuation of the TFTP. In July, it was not known when or indeed whether the Lisbon Treaty would come into force. Accordingly, the mandate is based on the legal mechanism of the EU Treaty which will cease to exist on 1 December when the Lisbon Treaty enters into force. To ensure that the European Parliament is able to exercise its new powers under the new Treaty in this regard, the envisaged Agreement is for a maximum duration of 9 months. The Commission will come forward with a new proposed mandate in early 2010 for a subsequent agreement based on the Lisbon Treaty. [my emphasis]

Note that “maximum duration” language. I’m guessing the US is going to try to bulldoze an agreement through ASAP, presumably before the new government (or, more importantly, activists) settles in.

The envisaged Agreement has a short duration in order to ensure that the European Parliament’s new powers under the Lisbon Treaty will apply to any possible longer term agreement which might replace the envisaged Agreement.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this agreement gets better, or worse, in the coming months.

The agreement claims the data is not used for data-mining

Here’s what the agreement claims the US does with this data.

The [Terrorist Finance Tracking Program] does not involve data mining or any other type of algorithmic or automated profiling or computer filtering. The U.S. Treasury shall ensure the protection of personal data by means of the following safeguards, which shall be applied without discrimination, in particular on the basis of nationality or country of residence.

(a) Provided data shall be processed exclusively for the prevention, investigation, detection, or prosecution of terrorism or its financing;

(b) All searches of Provided Data shall be based upon pre-existing information or evidence which demonstrates a reason to believe that the subject of the search has a nexus to terrorism or its financing;

(c) Each individual TFTP search of Provided Data shall be narrowly tailored, shall demonstrate a reason to believe that the subject of the search has a nexus to terrorism or its financing, and shall be logged, including such nexus to terrorism or its financing required to initiate the search;

(d) Provided data shall be maintained in a secure physical environment, stored separately from any other data, with high-level systems and physical intrusion controls to prevent unauthorized access to the data;

(e) Access to Provided Data shall be limited to analysts investigating terrorism or its financing and to persons involved in the technical support, management, and oversight of the TFTP;

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All Yurp’s Data Belongs to US

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Remember how the Germans were trying to delay agreement on a deal giving the US access to European bank data until there was time for a debate?

They caved.

In a little noticed information note released last week, the EU said it had agreed that Europeans would be compelled to release the information to the CIA “as a matter of urgency”. The records will be kept in a US database for five years before being deleted.

Critics say the system is “lopsided” because there is no reciprocal arrangement under which the UK authorities can easily access the bank accounts of US citizens in America.

They also say the plan to sift through cross-border and domestic EU bank accounts gives US intelligence more scope to consult our bank accounts than is granted to law enforcement agencies in the UK or the rest of Europe.

[snip]

According to the EU information note, the United States can request “general data sets” under the scheme based on broad categories including “relevant message types, geography and perceived terrorism threats”.

And yes, scribe told me so.

Of course, if you think the CIA is not also collecting such “general data sets” in the US, you’re nuts. We just get more details about it when it happens in Europe.

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Scahill: Prince Is Conducting Graymail

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Jeremy Scahill expands the explanation he gave Rachel Maddow last night about what Erik Prince was doing with the Vanity Fair article admitting his role in the CIA (primarily) operations.

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince’s forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world’s most famous mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed.

I’m most interested, though, in what Scahill says about the JSOC side of this.

While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince’s work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.[my emphasis]

Those JSOC issues, of course, would be far more inflammatory than the stuff he already revealed about the CIA.

But what I’m most interested in is who the target of this threat is: yes, Blackwater’s role is scandalous (and might make Leon Panetta regret revealing Blackwater to Congress). But there are a whole lot of people who are more worried about what Prince would have to say than Panetta.

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Spy Versus Spy with Erik Prince

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SpyVSpyDangerIntrigueStupidity_AProhias_300pxhIt’s best to start reading the big Vanity Fair Erik Prince piece from this paragraph.

Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. “The left complained about how [C.I.A. operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.” As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted C.I.A. attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.

I say that not because we’ve got a few Plame experts hereabouts. And not because that revelation–that the CIA referred the stories on Blackwater to the DOJ for criminal investigation–is news to me, at least, though I think it very significant news.

But because of the premise.

Erik Prince complains that Blackwater’s role in the assassination and drone programs was leaked, just as Plame’s identity was leaked. And it’s worse, Prince says. Not because the kinds of operations he was involved in were leaked (on that level, it is worse; it took years before any details of Plame’s identity in preventing Iranian proliferation came out, not least because Cheney didn’t want that out). But because his “name along with it” was revealed.

As if the entire country didn’t already know that Erik Prince–who has testified to Congress as the head of Blackwater–is the head of Blackwater.

(I should say, “was,” since Prince claims he is “through” with Blackwater.)

Yet, in the same article where Prince complains that he, personally, has been outed, here are the things that he, personally, reveals.

  • He was tasked by the CIA to create a “small, focused capability”
  • The CIA’s original assassination squad trained at his personal estate outside of DC
  • Prince integrated third-party nationals into the assassination squad who did not know of the CIA connection
  • He (personally) and a team of foreign nationals targeted someone in 2008
  • He did the targeting on al-Qaeda middleman Abu Ghadiyah in Syria

It even reveals some of Prince’s operational tactics–such as flying coach, or switching vehicles shortly after arriving at a destination.

Prince doesn’t seem all that bugged, when you take a step back, about the details of this program being leaked.

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The Irony of Tora Bora

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Picture 160Understand that–for better or worse–the new report released by John Kerry on how Osama bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora is a designed to be a political document. It offers the following “irony” to the chattering classes the weekend before Obama announces his new Afghanistan strategy,

Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora. Further, the dangerous contagion of rising violence and instability in Afghanistan has spread to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally of the United States which is now wracked by deadly terrorist bombings as it conducts its own costly military campaign against a domestic, Taliban-related insurgency.

The report relies on just a few interviews, but mostly on existing histories (including a Special Ops Command history included as an appendix) and even an extended column from Michael O’Hanlon (also included as an appendix)–not exactly the kind of guy I’m thrilled to see at the center of a taxpayer funded report. I view the report as the logical endpoint of Kerry’s decision to hire journalist Douglas Frantz (whose biography of AQ Khan is cited once) to head investigations.

Which is not to say the research isn’t valid. Rather, that the timing and format of the report seems designed to emphasize the irony, noted above, and other little ironies such as the way our desire to get the corrupt Hamid Karzai installed as leader of Afghanistan affected our willingness to commit troops at Tora Bora.

[Franks’ second-in-command during the war, General Michael DeLong] amplified the reasons for not sending American troops after bin Laden. ‘‘The real reason we didn’t go in with U.S. troops was that we hadn’t had the election yet,’’ he said in the staff interview, a reference to the installation of Hamid Karzai as the interim leader of Afghanistan. ‘‘We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power. We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the time.’’

And the conclusion (less well supported by the facts presented in the report) that the same unwillingness to commit troops to Afghanistan in 2001 led to Mullah Omar’s escape.

The same shortage of U.S. troops allowed Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban leaders to escape. A semi-literate leader who fled Kandahar on a motorbike, Mullah Omar has re-emerged at the helm of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has grown more sophisticated and lethal in recent years and now controls swaths of Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is aligned with a loose network of other militant groups and maintains ties to Al Qaeda, has established shadow governments in many of Afghanistan’s provinces and is capable of mounting increasingly complex attacks on American and NATO forces. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who helped develop the Obama administration’s Afghan policy, recently referred to the mullah’s return to power ‘‘one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history.’’

All these ironies, delivered just in time to play into the debate that will intensify next week.

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Where Does Blackwater Play in the CIA-DNI Conflict?

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By now you’ve probably read Jeremy Scahill’s latest, which moves forward the story of Blackwater thugs being deployed with the JSOC in Pakistan. It confirms what Sy Hersh reported last year–that these covert actions were (and may still be) eluding Congressional oversight, that Dick Cheney directed their activities directly.

But I’d like to focus on the picture Scahill draws of the competing lines of authority in Pakistan and put it in the context of the recently-solved turf war between Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair. Scahill explains that, since both JSOC and CIA are doing drone strikes in Pakistan (and Blackwater is assisting both) but JSOC’s have remained secret until now, CIA often gets the blame for Blackwater’s mistakes.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. “Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it’s JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes.” The Pentagon has stated bluntly, “There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.”

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC’s drone bombings as well. “It’s Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC,” said the source. When civilians are killed, “people go, ‘Oh, it’s the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.’ Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that’s JSOC [hitting] somebody they’ve identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they’ve culled the intelligence themselves or it’s been shared with them and they take that person out and that’s how it works.”

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings.

I’m particularly focused on these competing lines of authorities in Pakistan because of one aspect to the turf war between Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair. Read more →

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Obama Holding Off on Declassification Order Bush Made

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Steven Aftergood reports that a looming December 31, 2009 declassification deadline–imposed by Bush’s Executive Order on classification–presents a big dilemma for the Obama White House. Obama’s been preaching openness. Yet Bush’s EO says that documents that involve multiple agency classification interests will automatically be declassified at the end of the year. And the agencies that haven’t gotten around to reviewing some documents that fall under the EO are balking. And so Obama’s trying to push through a new EO quickly.

Development of a new executive order on classification of national security information is now proceeding at an accelerated pace in order to preempt a deadline that would require the declassification of millions of pages of historical records next month.

A revised draft executive order was circulated to executive branch agencies by the Office of Management and Budget on November 16, with agency comments due back today, November 23.  A final order is likely to be issued by the end of this year.

There is an incentive to complete the development of the executive order before December 31, 2009 because of a deadline for declassification of historical records that falls on that date.  Under the current Bush executive order, classified records that are at least 25 years old and that have been referred from one agency to another because they involve multiple agency interests are supposed to be automatically declassified at the end of this year.  (See E.O. 13292, section 3.3(e)(3)).

But in order to meet this December deadline, several agencies would have to forgo a review of the affected historical records, which they are unwilling to do.  And so it seems they will simply be excused from compliance.  But in order to modify the deadline in the Bush order, it will be necessary to issue another executive order.  If the comprehensive new Obama order on classification policy (which would assign processing of such records to a National Declassification Center that does not yet exist) is not ready for release by December 31, then another stand-alone order would have to be issued, canceling or extending the looming deadline.  And officials are reluctant to issue such an order since they say it would be awkward for the avowedly pro-openness Obama Administration to relax or annul a declassification requirement that was imposed by the ultra-secret Bush Administration.

The dilemma illustrates the big problem with EOs. Even putting aside the way that some Administrations have just pixie dusted their own EOs (indeed, the Bush EO in question is the one he used to claim, four years after the fact, that Cheney didn’t have to follow the rules on classification and declassification that agencies had to), they’re simply pieces of paper that the next Administration can and will rewrite.

Which is why Congress really needs to push through some laws on classification policy (starting with State Secrets), to prevent the executive branch from just using classification policy to accrue more power and/or evade oversight. And so that we, as citizens, can begin to scrutinize what Ronnie Reagan did in our name.

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Studs Terkel, Terrorist

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Studs TerkelNo, I’m not really claiming that Studs Terkel was a terrorist.

But, after reading his FBI file, you get a renewed sense of what the FBI’s files on Muslims and DOD’s files on peace activists must look like. It’s worth a gander, if only for a reminder of how paranoid–and susceptible to fear-mongerers–our country gets when we begin to profile our citizens because of alleged associations. Among Terkel’s suspicious ties include the National Lawyers Guild and Jewish women’s organizations.

The CUNY NYC NewsService FOIAed Turkel’s file after he passed away last year. Though the FBI just turned over 147 of 269 pages of his file.

The NewsService piece also reminds of Terkel’s NYT op-ed written during the debate about amending FISA in 2007.

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which placed national security investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect, but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

As we continue to wade through the EFF document dump of that legislative battle and engage on the current battle over PATRIOT, it’s worth listening to Studs Terkel once again.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48434860@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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