Posts

Turns Out the NSA “May” Destroy Evidence of Crimes before 5 Years Elapse

/6 Comments/in /by

The metadata collected under this order may be kept online (that is, accessible for queries by cleared analysts) for five years, at which point it shall be destroyed. — Phone dragnet order, December 12, 2008

The Government “takes its preservation obligations with the utmost seriousness,” said a filing signed by Assistant Attorneys General John Carlin and Stuart Delery submitted Thursday in response to Presiding FISA Court Judge Reggie Walton’s accusation they had made material misstatements to him regarding the question of destroying phone dragnet data.

Recognizing that data collected pursuant to the Section 215 program could be potentially relevant to, and subject to preservation obligations in, a number of cases challenging the legality of the program, including First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles  v. NSA,

… Signals Intelligence Division Director Theresa Shea wrote in her March 17 declaration (starting at page 81) explaining what the government has actually done to protect data under those suits.

At which point Shea proceeded to admit that the government hadn’t been preserving the data they recognized was potentially relevant to the suits at hand.

… since the inception of the FISC-authorized bulk telephony metadata program in 2006, the FISC’s orders authorizing the bulk collection of telephony metadata under FISA Section 501 (known also as the Section 215 program) require that metadata obtained by the NSA under this authority be destroyed no later than five years after their collection. In 2011, the NSA began compliance with this requirement (when the first metadata collected under the FISC authority was ready to be aged off) and continued to comply with it until this Court’s March 10 order and the subsequent March 12, 2014 order of the FISC.

Thursday’s filing added to that clarity, not only saying so in a footnote, but then submitting another filing to make sure the footnote was crystal clear.

Footnote 6 on page 5 was intended to convey that “[c]onsistent with the Government’s understanding of these orders in Jewel and Shubert, prior to the filing of the Government’s Motion for Second Amendment to Primary Order, the Government complied with this Court’s requirements that metadata obtained by the NSA under Section 215 authority be destroyed no later than five years after their collection.”

The significance seems clear. The Government admits it could potentially have a preservation obligation from the filing of the first Section 215 suit, Klayman v. Obama, on June 6, 2013. But nevertheless, it destroyed data for 9 months during which it recognized it could potentially have a preservation obligation.  That means data through at least March 9, 2009 and perhaps as late as September 10, 2009 may already be destroyed, assuming reports of biannual purging is correct. Which would perhaps not coincidentally cover almost all of the phone dragnet violations discovered over the course of 2009. It would also cover all, or almost all, of the period (probably)  NSA did not have adequate means of identifying the source of its data (meaning that Section 215 data may have gotten treated with the lesser protections of EO 12333 data).

And the amount of data may be greater, given that NSA now describes in its 5 year age-off requirement no affirmative  obligation to keep data five years.

This all means the government apparently has already destroyed data that might be implicated in the scenario Judge Jeffrey White (hypothetically) raised in a hearing on March 19, in which he imagined practices of graver Constitutional concern than the program as it currently operates five years ago.

THE COURT: Well, what if the NSA was doing something, say, five years ago that was broader in scope, and more problematical from the constitutional perspective, and those documents are now aged out? And — because now under the FISC or the orders of the FISC Court, the activities of the NSA have — I mean, again, this is all hypothetical — have narrowed. And wouldn’t the Government — wouldn’t the plaintiffs then be deprived of that evidence, if it existed, of a broader, maybe more constitutionally problematic evidence, if you will?

MR. GILLIGAN: There — we submit a twofold answer to that, Your Honor.

We submit that there are documents that — and this goes to Your Honor’s Question 5B, perhaps. There are documents that could shed light on the Plaintiffs’ standing, whether we’ve actually collected information about their communications, even in the absence of those data.

As far as — as Your Honor’s hypothetical goes, it’s a question that I am very hesitant to discuss on the public record; but I can say if this is something that the Court wishes to explore, we could we could make a further classified ex parte submission to Your Honor on that point.

According to the NSA’s own admissions, until just over 5 years ago, the NSA was watchlisting as many as 3,000 Americans without doing the requisite First Amendment review required by law. And that evidence — and potentially the derivative queries that arose from it — is apparently now gone.

Which puts a new spin on the narratives offered in the press about DOJ’s delay in deciding what to do with this evidence. WSJ described the semiannual age-off and suggested the issue with destroying evidence might pertain to standing.

As the NSA program currently works, the database holds about five years of data, according to officials and some declassified court opinions. About twice a year, any call record more than five years old is purged from the system, officials said.

A particular concern, according to one official, is that the older records may give certain parties legal standing to pursue their cases, and that deleting the data could erase evidence that the phone records of those individuals or groups were swept up in the data dragnet.

FP’s sources suggested DOJ was running up against that semiannual deadline.

A U.S. official familiar with the legal process said the question about what to do with the phone records needn’t have been handled at practically the last minute. “The government was coming up on a five-year deadline to delete the data. Lawsuits were pending. The Justice Department could have approached the FISC months ago to resolve this,” the official said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

There should be no February to March deadline. Assuming the semiannual age-off were timed to March 1, there should have already been a September 1 deadline, at which point NSA presumably would have destroyed everything moving forward to March 1, 2009.

Which may mean NSA and DOJ put it off to permit some interim age-off, all the out of control violations from 2009.

We shall see. EFF and DOJ will still litigate this going forward. But as I look more closely at the timing of all this, DOJ’s very belated effort to attempt to preserve data in February seems to have served, instead, to put off dealing with preservation orders until the most potentially damning data got destroyed.

All of this is separate from the dispute over whether DOJ violated the preservation order in Jewel, and that case may be coming up on the 5 year destruction of the last violative Internet metadata, which might be aged off by April 30 (based on the assumption the Internet dragnet got shut down on October 30, 2009).

But even for he more narrow question of the phone dragnet, for which the government admits it may have data retention obligations, the government seems to have already violated those obligations and, in the process, destroyed some of the most damning data about the program. 

Why Did 3 Top DOJ Officials Feed Their Dog DOJ’s Homework?

/9 Comments/in /by

DOJ has submitted what it claims is an explanation for why it materially misstated facts to Reggie Walton in discussions about destroying phone dragnet data. (See this post and this post for background.)

As you recall, Walton had read EFF’s emails closely enough to realize that EFF had asked Civil Division lawyers why they had claimed there was no protection order when they believed they had one.

A review of the E-mail Correspondence indicates that as early as February 26, 2014, the day after the government filed its February 25 Motion, the plaintiffs in Jewel and First Unitarian indeed sought to clarify why the preservation orders in Jewel and Shubert were not referenced in that motion. E-mail Correspondence at 6-7. The Court’s review of the E-mail Correspondence suggests that the DOJ attorneys may have perceived the preservation orders in Jewel and Shubert to be immaterial to the February 25 Motion because the metadata at issue in those cases was collected under what DOJ referred to as the “President’s Surveillance Program” (i.e., collection pursuant to executive authority), as opposed to having been collected under Section 215 pursuant to FISC orders — a proposition with which plaintiffs’ counsel disagreed. Id at 4. As this Court noted in the March 12 Order and Opinion, it is ultimately up to the Northern District of California, rather than the FISC, to determine what BR metadata is relevant to the litigation pending before the court.

As the government is well aware, it has a heightened duty of candor to the Court in ex parte procedings. See MODEL RULES OF PROF’L CONDUCT R. 3.3(d) (2013). Regardless of the government’s perception of the materiality of the preservation orders in Jewel andShubert to its February 25 Motion, the government was on notice, as of February 26, 2014, that the plaintiffs in Jewel and First Unitarian believed that orders issued by the District Court for the Northern District of California required the preservation of the FISA telephony metadata at issue in the government’s February 25 Motion. E-mail Correspondence at 6-7. The fact that the plaintiffs had this understanding of the preservation orders–even if the government had a contrary understanding–was material to the FISC’s consideration of the February 25 Motion. The materiality of that fact is evidenced by the Court’s statement, based on the information provided by the government in the February 25 Motion, that “there is no indication that nay of the plaintiffs have sought discovery of this information or made any effort to have it preserved.” March 7 Opinion and Order at 8-9.

The government, upon learning this information, should have made the FISC aware of the preservation orders and of the plaintiffs’ understanding of their scopre, regardless of whether the plaintiffs had made a “specific request” that the FISC be so advised. Not only did the government fail to do so, but the E-mail Correspondence suggests that on February 28, 2014, the government sought to dissuade plaintiffs’ counsel from immediately raising this issue with the FISC or the Northern District of California. E-mail Correspondence at 5.

DOJ’s excuse for not telling Walton EFF believed they had a protection order is roughly as follows:

1. Notwithstanding a past comment about preservation orders in the matters before Judge Walton, the government claims EFF’s suits are unrelated to the phone dragnet.

[T]he Government has always understood [EFF’s suits] to be limited to certain presidentially authorized intelligence collection activities outside FISA, the Government did not identify those lawsuits, nor the preservation order issued therein, in its Motion for the Second Amendment to Primary Order filed in the above-captioned Docket number on February 25, 2014. For the same reasons, the Government did not notify this Court of its receipt of plaintiffs’ counsel’s February 26, 2014, e-mail.

Note, to sustain this claim, the government withheld both the state secrets declarations that clearly invoke the FISC-authorized dragnets as part of the litigation, even though the government’s protection order invokes it repeatedly, as well as Vaughn Walker’s preservation order which is broader than DOJ’s own preservation plan. Thus, they don’t give Walton the things he needs to be able to assess whether DOJ’s actions in this matter were remotely reasonable.

2. It explains that it never provided EFF with its own 2007 preservation plan (which did not meet the terms of Walker’s order) until March 17, 2014 because Stellar Wind — but not the FISC-authorized programs that the preservation plan excluded — was classified until December 2013.

A classified submission was necessary at that time [in 2007] because the existence of the presidentially-authorized program was classified and remained so until December 2013.

Note, it doesn’t mention that 19 days passed between the time EFF formally raised concerns about the protection order and the date DOJ actually provided the declassified protection plan to them, during which time, it appears, NSA destroyed one of the most damning half year’s worth of data in the program’s history (which I’ll return to in a later post).

3. In spite of EFF telling DOJ their earlier suits were relevant (and not having received the preservation plan which could have been declassified in December), DOJ claims they didn’t think they were relevant so it didn’t tell FISC about EFF’s beliefs.

Because the Government’s Motion for Second Amendment already had sought relief from this Court based on a list of BR metadata pursuant to FISC authorization, see Motion for Second Amendment at 3-5, counsel did not appreciate — even after receiving the email from plaintiffs’ counsel in Jewel — that it would be be important to notify this Court about Jewel and Shubert or the email from counsel for the Jewel plaintiffs about those cases with which the Government disagreed. Rather, counsel viewed any potential dispute about the scope of Jewel and Shubert preservation orders as a mater to be resolved, if possible, by the parties to those cases (though a potential unclassified explanation to plaintiffs’ counsel) or, failing that, by the district court.

Note what DOJ is not mentioning here? That EFF has a Section 215 lawsuit too, and that its understanding of the impact on that suit may have been influenced by the Shubert and Jewel protection orders.

4. DOJ’s Civil Division lawyers did not forward EFF’s email to DOJ’s National Security Division lawyers, they claim, because the Civil Division lawyers did not agree with EFF’s interpretation of the protection order.

For these reasons, counsel did not think to forward the email from Jewel Plaintiffs’ counsel to the attorneys with primary responsibility for interaction with this Court before the Court ruled on the Motion for Second Amendment. The Department wishes to assure the Court that it has always endeavored to maintain close coordination within the Department regarding civil litigation matters that involve proceedings before this Court, and will take even greater care to do so in the future.

5. DOJ told EFF to hold off formally alerting any Court in the belief that it could tell EFF about the preservation plan which could have been declassified in December but did not get declassified until 10 days after FISC issued its initial order requiring DOJ to destroy data, and that would solve everything.

In particular, the request in its February 28 email that counsel for the Jewel plaintiffs “forbear from filing anything with the FISC, or [the district court], until we have further opportunity to confer” was a good faith attempt to avoid unnecessary motions practice in the event that the issue could be worked out among the parties through the Government’s provision of an unclassified explanation concerning its preservation in Jewel and Shubert.

Read more →

DOJ’s Multiple Authorities for Destroying Evidence

/5 Comments/in , /by

It seems like aeons ago, but just a week ago, EFF and DOJ had a court hearing over preserving evidence in the EFF lawsuits (Shubert, Jewel, and First Unitarian Church v. NSA). As I noted in two posts, a week ago Monday DOJ surprised EFF with the news that it had been following its own preservation plan, which it had submitted ex parte to Vaughn Walker, rather than the order Walker subsequently imposed. As a result, it has been aging off data in those programs (notably the PATRIOT-authorized Internet and phone dragnets) authorized by law, as opposed to what it termed Presidential authorization. DOJ’s behavior makes it clear that it is  trying to justify treating some data differently by claiming it was collected under different authorities.

Remember, there are at least five different legal regimes involved in the metadata dragnet:

  • EO 12333 authority for data going back to at least 1998
  • Stellar Wind authority lasting until 2004, 2006, and 2007 for different practices
  • PATRIOT-authorized authorities for Internet (until 2011) and phone records (until RuppRoge or something else passes)
  • SPCMA, which is a subset of EO 12333 authority that conducts potentially problematic contact chaining integrating US person Internet metadata
  • Five Eyes, which is EO 12333, but may involve GCHQ equities or, especially, ownership of the data

At the hearing and in their motions, EFF argued that their existing suits are not limited to any particular program (they didn’t name all these authorities, but they could have). Rather, they are about the act of dragnetting, regardless of what authority (so they’ll still be live suits after RuppRoge passes, for example).

EFF appears to have at least partly convinced Judge Jeffrey White, because on Friday he largely sided with EFF, extending the preservation order and — best as I can tell — endorsing EFF’s argument that their suits cover the act of dragnetting, rather than just the Stellar Wind, FISA Amendments Act, or phone and Internet dragnets.

With that as background, I want to look at a few things from the transcript of last Wednesday’s hearing. Read more →