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Saxby Chambliss Reveals the Game

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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!

NSA Spying: The Oversight of the Passive Voice

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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.

PRISM: The Difference between Orders and Directives

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The AP has a story that lays out the architecture of how PRISM fits in with the rest of the government surveillance programs. The short version is, as much prior reporting supports, it uses PRISM to target communications it has collected, as packets, from the telecom backbone. Like the Section 215 dragnet (and consistent with James Clapper’s metaphor that the dragnet serves as the Dewey Decimal system to direct the government were to find the conversations it wants) it seems to serve to tell the government where to look to get more content.

The story is most valuable, in my opinion, for the distinction it describes between orders — which courts approve — and directives — which courts don’t.

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn’t required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue “directives” to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

I’ve seen some apologist reporting that conflates these two, suggesting that the courts approve individual targets.

The entire point of FISA Amendments Act is to have the courts approve broader targeting.

As Russ Feingold warned four years ago, there is less oversight of how you get from orders to the procedures that make them compliant with the Constitution.

AP goes on to explain the danger to this scheme, though: there’s far less oversight over individual targets. Which can — and in 2009, at least — led the NSA to take US person data.

A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Remember, this overcollection was self-reported by the Obama Administration at the time, not discovered by the FISA Court. Good for the Obama Administration, though we’re trusting them at their word that the overcollection was unintentional.

As part of a periodic review of the agency’s activities, the department “detected issues that raised concerns,” it said. [snip]

The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic.

But that raises one of the problems with the program. The court oversight is removed from the specificity of the collection, and the law, by design, prevents the court from double-checking whether the government does at the directive level what it says it will do at the order level.

Trust us.

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Who Are the Potential Targets of the OTHER Section 215 Program(s)

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There are several small, but significant, discrepancies between what Dianne Feinstein and Keith Alexander said in yesterday’s Senate Appropriation Committee hearing on cyber and what others have said. As one example, last week James Clapper said this was the standard for accessing the dragnet of Americans’ call data:

The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. [my emphasis]

DiFi yesterday said this was the standard:

It can only look at that data after a showing that there is a reasonable, articulable suspicion that a specific individual is involved in terrorism, actually related to al Qaeda or Iran. [my emphasis]

These are slightly different things (and Congress has fought hard over the word “articulable” in very similar contexts to this in the past — plus, whichever word is used may trace back to Jack Goldsmith’s 2004 OLC opinion on the illegal wiretap program). It’s possible — likely even — that Clapper was just dumbing down his statement the other day. But it is a difference.

I’m particularly interested in the point I raised yesterday. DiFi, in discussing the NSA’s use of the Section 215 data, says it can only be used to find people in the US with ties to terrorists or Iran.

But when Clapper discussed all the potential targets the Intelligence Community might want to trace using Section 215 data, he mentioned a broader group.

There are no limitations on the customers who can use this library. Many and millions of innocent people doing min– millions of innocent things use this library, but there are also nefarious people who use it. Terrorists, drug cartels, human traffickers, criminals also take advantage of the same technology. So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read. [my emphasis]

But remember. Clapper oversees all 16 members of the intelligence community, including FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center. DiFi’s statement (and Alexander’s confirmation) applied only to NSA. Elsewhere in the hearing, Alexander said NSA only used what he called “BR” (for business records) to collect phone records. And we know that — at least as recently as 2011 — there was at least one other secret collection program using Section 215. So one of those other entities — almost certainly FBI — must run that program.

Moreover, there’s no reason to believe that Edward Snowden, who had unbelievable access to NSA’s networks and, some time ago, CIA’s records, would have access to programs that didn’t involve those agencies.

And Keith Alexander probably knows that.

Also, terrorists, certainly, and Iran, sort of, are legitimate targets for DOD (I’m actually wondering if the government has acrobatically justified going after Iranian contacts by relying on the still extant Iraq AUMF). For NSA to pursue drug cartels and criminals might present a posse comitatus problem (one that I believe was part of the problem behind the 2004 hospital confrontation).

So I’m wondering how many of the answers we’re getting are designed to minimize the scope of what we know by referring only to the NSA programs?

 

BREAKING: Iran Is a Terrorist Organization

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I’m trying to sort through the irreconcilable claims about the Section 215 and PRISM/702 programs made in today’s Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on cyber.

But for now, I want to post Dianne Feinstein’s statement about what Section 215 does because, well, it seems Iran is now a terrorist. (This is around 1:55)

The Section 215 Business Records provision was created in 2001 in the PATRIOT for tangible things: hotel records, credit card statements, etcetera. Things that are not phone or email communications. The FBI uses that authority as part of its terrorism investigations. The NSA only uses Section 215 for phone call records — not for Google searches or other things. Under Section 215, NSA collects phone records pursuant to a court record. It can only look at that data after a showing that there is a reasonable, articulable that a specific individual is involved in terrorism, actually related to al Qaeda or Iran. At that point, the database can be searched. But that search only provides metadata, of those phone numbers. Of things that are in the phone bill. That person, um [flips paper] So the vast majority of records in the database are never accessed, and are deleted after a period of five years. To look at, or use content, a court warrant must be obtained.

Is that a fair description, or can you correct it in any way?

Keith Alexander: That is correct, Senator.

Frankly, Dianne Feinstein has appeared to keep her facts straight about Section 215, at least, better than Mike Rogers and James Clapper over the last week. But this statement conflicts in some important ways with what others are saying.

So maybe this is not accurate.

But according to DiFi — and backed by General Keith Alexander, head of NSA — Iran, along with al Qaeda, is now a terrorist organization.

Have Clapper, Feinstein, and Rogers Confused the Distinct Issues of Section 215 and PRISM? Or Are They Indistinct?

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[youtube]hmw4G5q1OkE[/youtube]

Last year, when Pat Leahy tried to switch the FISA Amendments Act reauthorization to a 3 year extension instead of 5, which would have meant PATRIOT and FAA would be reconsidered together in 2015, the White House crafted a talking point claiming that would risk confusing the two provisions.

Aligning FAA with expiration of provisions of the Patriot Act risks confusing distinct issues.

In the last week, the Guardian had one scoop pertaining to FAA (the PRISM program) and another to PATRIOT (the use of Section 215 to conduct dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records).

Since then, almost everyone discussing the issues seems to have confused the two.

Including, at a minimum, Mike Rogers, as demonstrated by the video above. When Dianne Feinstein started explaining the Section 215 Verizon order, Mike Rogers interrupted to say that the program could not be targeted at Americans. But of course the Section 215 order was explicitly limited to calls within the US, so he had to have been thinking of PRISM.

Then there what, on first glance, appears to be confusion on the part of journalists. I noted how Reuters’ Rogers-related sources were clearly confused (or in possession of a time machine) when they made such claims, and NYT appeared to conflate the issues as well. Similarly, Andrea Mitchell took this exchange — which is clearly about Section 215 — and elsewhere reported that the law allowing NSA to wiretap Americans (which could be FISA or FAA) stopped the attack.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

At the same time, when Americans woke up and learned because of these leaks that every single telephone call in this United States, as well as elsewhere, but every call made by these telephone companies that they collect is archived, the numbers, just the numbers, and the duration of these calls. People were astounded by that. They had no idea. They felt invaded.

JAMES CLAPPER:

I understand that.

[snip]

A metaphor I think might be helpful for people to understand this is to think of a huge library with literally millions of volumes of books in it, an electronic library. Seventy percent of those books are on bookcases in the United States, meaning that the bulk of the of the world’s infrastructure, communications infrastructure is in the United States.

[snip]

So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.

[snip]

So when we pull out a book, based on its essentially is– electronic Dewey Decimal System, which is zeroes and ones, we have to be very precise about which book we’re picking out. And if it’s one that belongs to the– was put in there by an American citizen or a U.S. person.

We ha– we are under strict court supervision and have to get stricter– and have to get permission to actually– actually look at that. So the notion that we’re trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them, or listening to everyone’s phone calls is on its face absurd. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to. And I assure you, we don’t want to.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Why do you need every telephone number? Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, you have to start someplace. If– and over the years that this program has operated, we have refined it and tried to– to make it ever more precise and more disciplined as to which– which things we take out of the library. But you have to be in the– in the– in the chamber in order to be able to pick and choose those things that we need in the interest of protecting the country and gleaning information on terrorists who are plotting to kill Americans, to destroy our economy, and destroy our way of life.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Can you give me any example where it actually prevented a terror plot?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, two cases that– come to mind, which are a little dated, but I think in the interest of this discourse, should be shared with the American people. They both occurred in 2009. One was the aborted plot to bomb the subway in New York City in the fall of 2009.

And this all started with a communication from Pakistan to a U.S. person in Colorado. And that led to the identification of a cell in New York City who was bent on– make– a major explosion, bombing of the New York City subway. And a cell was rolled up, and in their apartment, we found backpacks with bombs.

A second example, also occurring in 2009, involved– the– one of the– those involved, perpetrators of the Mumbai bombing in India, David Headley. And we aborted a plot against a Danish news publisher based on– the same kind of information. So those are two specific cases of uncovering plots through this mechanism that– prevented terrorist attacks.

What would seem to support the conclusion that everyone was just very confused is that, in his talking points on the two programs, Clapper claims three examples as successes for the use of PRISM, none of which is Zazi or Headley.

Now, the AP reports Clapper’s office (which is fast losing credibility) has circulated talking points making the claim that PRISM helped nab Zazi.

The Obama administration declassified a handful of details Tuesday that credited its PRISM Internet spying program with intercepting a key email that unraveled a 2009 terrorist plot in New York.

The details, declassified by the director of national intelligence, were circulated on Capitol Hill as part of government efforts to tamp down criticism of two recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs.

But, as I suggested last year, the White House clearly wasn’t concerned about us confusing our pretty little heads by conflating FAA and Section 215. Rather, it seemed then to want to hide the relationship between the dragnet collection of Americans calls and the direct access to Internet providers’ data.

But Clapper and DiFi seem to hint at the relationship between them.

In her first comments about Section 215 (even before PRISM had broken) DiFi said this.

The information goes into a database, the metadata, but cannot be accessed without what’s called, and I quote, “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity.

And in his talking points on 215, Clapper said this.

By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.

This standard — reasonable suspicion that the records are relevant to or associated with a terrorist investigation (I’ll come back to the terrorism issue in another post) — is not the 215 standard, because it requires reasonable suspicion. But it’s not as high as a FISA warrant would be, which requires it to be more closely related than “relevant” to a terrorist investigation.

So what standard is this, and where did it come from? Read more →

If Wanting to Reveal that All Americans’ Metadata Gets Swept Up Is Treason, Edward Snowden Is in Distinguished Company

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Earlier this evening, Dianne Feinstein called Edward Snowden’s decision to leak NSA documents an act of treason.

“I don’t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason,” the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters.

The California lawmaker went on to say that Snowden had violated his oath to defend the Constitution.

“He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s treason.”

Perhaps DiFi can be excused for her harsh judgment. After all, in addition to exposing the sheer range of surveillance our government is doing, Snowden made it very clear that DiFi allowed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to her committee.

And continues to allow Clapper’s lie to go unreported, much less punished.

But I thought it worthwhile to point out the many people who have committed to make the FISA Court Opinions describing, among other things, how the government’s abuse of Section 215 violated the Constitution.

In 2010, DOJ promised to try to declassify important rulings of law.

In 2010, as part of the same effort, Clapper’s office promised to try to declassify important rulings of law.

In 2011, prior to be confirmed as Assistant Attorney General, now White House Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco promised, “I will work to ensure that the Department continues to work with the ODNI to make this important body of law as accessible as possible.”

All these people claimed they wanted to make FISC’s opinion, among other things, on the secret use of Section 215 public.

What Snowden released on Section 215 — just a single 215 order to Verizon, without details on how this information is used — is far, far less than what DOJ and ODNI and Lisa Monaco pledged to try to release. Given that the collection is targeted on every single American indiscriminately, it won’t tell the bad guys anything (except that they’ve been sucked into the same dragnet the rest of us have). And while it shows that FBI submits the order but the data gets delivered to NSA (which has some interesting implications), that’s a source and method to game the law, not the source or method used to identify terrorists.

So if Snowden committed treason, he did so doing far less than top members of our National Security establishment promised to do.

Wait.

There’s one more member of this gang of — according to DiFi — traitors committed to tell Americans how their government spies on them. There’s the Senator who said this on December 27, 2012.

I have offered to Senator Merkley to write a letter requesting declassification of more FISA Court opinions. If the letter does not work, we will do another intelligence authorization bill next year, and we can discuss what can be added to that bill on this issue.

Oh, wait! That was Senator Dianne Feinstein, arguing that they didn’t have time to pass an actual amendment, attached to the actual FISA Amendments Act renewal, forcing the government to turn over this secret law.

But she promised to write a letter!

And even, DiFi claimed (though similar promises to John Cornyn to obtain the OLC memo authorizing Anwar al-Awlaki’s killing went undelivered), to include a requirement in this year’s intelligence authorization requiring the government to turn over far more information on the government’s use of Section 215 than Snowden did.

I get that DiFi doesn’t agree with his method — that he leaked this rather than (!) write a letter. I get that Snowden has exposed DiFi for allowing Clapper lie to her committee, in part to hide precisely this information.

But in debates in the Senate, at least, DiFi has claimed to support releasing just this kind of information.

Is Robert Mueller, a Purported Hero of the Hospital Confrontation, Responsible for Section 215 Use?

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On March 23, 2004 at noon, less than two weeks after the dramatic hospital confrontation and threats to quit reportedly got the Administration to agree to stop data mining Americans, FBI Director Robert Mueller had a meeting with Dick Cheney, at the Vice President’s request, in the Vice President’s office. In his notes, Mueller doesn’t describe what the VIce President wanted, nor am I aware that it has even been reported in the press.

The next day, the Chief Division Counsel of some Division of the FBI wrote a memo to the FBI General Counsel noting that FBI was using a “new standard” with Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and indicating that a “recent decision” had been made to bypass the review of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review on Section 215 applications.

In part, the apparent decision to bypass OIPR, which had rejected the premise of the previous Section 215 orders FBI had submitted in the past, reflected no more than a concerted effort on FBI’s part to make sure it could start using all the PATRIOT authorities it had been granted in 2001 in anticipation of renewal discussions that would take place the following year. Yet the timing of this change is particularly curious, given that we now know Section 215 has been used to collect data that could be used for data mining Americans, precisely the problem that had caused the hospital confrontation 12 days earlier.

At the very least, however, it shows that sometime around the same time as Jim Comey and others at DOJ tried to stop the data mining of Americans under NSA’s illegal program, FBI claimed to have eliminated one review step for Section 215 orders and changed the standard used for them. That reference notwithstanding, DOJ Inspector General at least reported that OIPR continued to have a role. (Note, the office that got cut out of the process, OIPR, is where one of the key whistleblowers on the illegal program, Thomas Tamm worked, though I have asked him if he knew whether they used Section 215 to accomplish the same program and he didn’t know anything about it.)

On May 21, 2004, just as the the confrontation was settling down, FBI got its first Section 215 order approved. MIRACLES! the memo subject line read. “We got our first business record order signed today. It only took two and a half years.”

Now, at least some of the people commenting publicly on the confirmation that Section 215 has been used to compile a database recording details on all calls Americans make say Section 215 has supported that purpose only since 2006. Dianne Feinstein, for example, says the practice has gone on for 7 years.

As far as I know, this is the exact three month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA Court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore, it is lawful.

Seven years would put its start almost exactly at the March 9, 2006 renewal of the PATRIOT Act, which added new language on Section 215 in the wake of the December 15, 2005 exposure of Bush’s illegal wiretap program. In discussions of this collection program since last week, it has generally been accepted that’s when it all started.

Curiously (particularly given his insistence that PRISM only started in 2008, slides to the contrary notwithstanding), James Clapper made no claims about precisely when this practice started.

The Patriot Act was signed into law in October 2001 and included authority to compel production of business records and other tangible things relevant to an authorized national security investigation with the approval of the FISC. This provision has subsequently been reauthorized over the course of two Administrations – in 2006 and in 2011. It has been an important investigative tool that has been used over the course of two Administrations, with the authorization and oversight of the FISC and the Congress.

It is possible that this program was conducted under a different PATRIOT provision (such as the Pen Register ones) prior to 2006; in fact, Clapper never mentions the term “Section 215” in his purported clarification of the program.

Now, consider one more detail. In a statement before the 2009 debate on PATRIOT Act reauthorization focusing closely on Section 215, Russ Feingold suggested that the debate over reauthorization in 2005, which led to purported initial use of Section 215 to conduct this dragnet, had been stymied by classification of how the PATRIOT had been implemented.

I remain concerned that critical information about the implementation of the Patriot Act has not been made public – information that I believe would have a significant impact on the debate. During the debate on the Protect America Act and the FISA Amendments Acts in 2007 and 2008, critical legal and factual information remained unknown to the public and to most members of Congress – information that was certainly relevant to the debate and might even have made a difference in votes. And during the last Patriot Act reauthorization debate in 2005, a great deal of implementation information remained classified.

[snip]

But there also is information about the use of Section 215 orders that I believe Congress and the American people deserve to know. I do not underestimate the importance of protecting our national security secrets. But before we decide whether and in what form to extend these authorities, Congress and the American people deserve to know at least basic information about how they have been used. So I hope that the administration will consider seriously making public some additional basic information, particularly with respect to the use of Section 215 orders.

There can be no question that statutory changes to our surveillance laws are necessary. Since the Patriot Act was first passed in 2001, we have learned important lessons, and perhaps the most important of all is that Congress cannot grant the government overly broad authorities and just keep its fingers crossed that they won’t be misused, or interpreted by aggressive executive branch lawyers in as broad a way as possible. [my emphasis]

This suggests the plan to use Section 215 may have been explicit in those classified debates.

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Dianne Feinstein: We Need to Collect Data on Every Single American Because We Can’t Control Our Informants

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I will have far, far more to say about the claims about the various surveillance programs aired on the Sunday shows today.

But this is absolutely batshit crazy.

FEINSTEIN: Well, of course, balance is a difficult thing to actually identify what it is, but I can tell you this: These programs are within the law. The [Section 215] business records section is reviewed by a federal judge every 90 days. It should be noted that the document that was released that was under seal, which reauthorized the program for another 90 days, came along with a second document that placed and discussed the strictures on the program. That document was not released.

So here’s what happens with that program. The program is essentially walled off within the NSA. There are limited numbers of people who have access to it. The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill, which has been held not to be private personal property by the Supreme Court.

If there is strong suspicion that a terrorist outside of the country is trying to reach someone on the inside of the country, those numbers then can be obtained. If you want to collect content on the American, then a court order is issued.

So, the program has been used. Two cases have been declassified. One of them is the case of David Headley, who went to Mumbai, to the Taj hotel, and scoped it out for the terrorist attack. [my emphasis]

Dianne Feinstein says that one of the two plots where Section 215 prevented an attack was used (the other, about Najibullah Zazi, is equally batshit crazy, but I’ll return to that) is the Mumbai attack.

What’s she referring to is tracking our own informant, David Headley.

And it didn’t prevent any attack. The Mumbai attack was successful.

Our own informant. A successful attack. That’s her celebration of success 215’s use.

So her assertion is we need to collect metadata on every single American because DEA can’t keep control of its informants.

Update: Technically DiFi didn’t say this was a success, just that it had been used. I’ve edited the post accordingly.

Mike Rogers: As Confused about Telecom Surveillance as He Is about Drone Strikes

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Congressman Mike Rogers, like most members of the ranking Gang of Four members of the Intelligence Committees, has long made obviously false claims about the drone program, such as that public reports of civilian casualties (which were being misreported in intelligence reports) were overstated.

That’s just one of the many reasons I was dubious about this report, claiming that, well … it’s not entirely clear what it claimed. Here’s the lead two paragraphs:

A secret U.S. intelligence program to collect emails that is at the heart of an uproar over government surveillance helped foil an Islamist militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009, U.S. government sources said on Friday.

The sources said Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, was talking about a plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident, when he said on Thursday that such surveillance had helped thwart a significant terrorist plot in recent years.

These paragraphs suggest that we found Najibullah Zazi — pretty clearly the most successful effort to prevent a known terrorist attack since 9/11 — because of one of the programs the Guardian (and WaPo) broke over the last few days.

Some paragraphs down, the piece explains the program in question was the “one that collected email data on foreign intelligence suspects.” Which is weird, because we’ve learned about a program to collect email data on everyone in the United States, not “foreign intelligence suspects.” And a program to collect a range of telecom content on known foreign intelligence suspects and their associates. Already, Reuters’ sources seemed confused.

The next paragraph describes the PRISM program by name.

The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Thursday published top-secret information from inside NSA that described how the agency gathered masses of email data from prominent Internet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under the PRISM program.

And the rest of the report traces what former Agent and now FBI mouthpiece CBS pundit John Miller had to say.

All of that might lead you to believe this is a story reporting that we had foiled Zazi’s plot using PRISM, the program that involves the NSA accessing bulk data on everything these foreign targets were doing. But even that is problematic, since Zazi is a US person, whose communications are supposedly excluded from this program.

Then there are the problems with the actual content of this.

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