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Did NSA and JSOC Team Up to Game Obama and Monaco on Yemen Terror Alert?

NBC published a fascinating article yesterday that provided new and interesting details on the events surrounding the escalation of drone strikes in Yemen that took place in response to the “intercepted conference call” that wasn’t a conference call. Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito and Jim Miklaszewski report on the personnel and policy changes that were taking place in the Obama administration as these events unfolded and how these changes had led to a decrease in drone strikes:

Obama announced that he had chosen Lisa Monaco to replace Brennan as his top counterterror official on January 25, and she officially assumed the role of Homeland Security Advisor on March 8. The U.S. launched four strikes on Yemen between January 19 and January 23, just before Obama’s announcement about Monaco, but didn’t launch another until April 17.

“With Brennan going over to CIA and Monaco replacing him, it took time,” said a senior counterterrorism official. “This was a while coming. JSOC (the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command) was pushing for more strikes and more operations but the White House slowed everything down.”

Those three strikes in mid-April were followed by another lull in strikes until mid-May, when there were two strikes just before Obama’s drone policy speech:

In tandem with the drone speech, the President issued new internal guidance to officials that tightened controls on what targets could be hit and who could make the decision to launch a drone.

What followed, sources said, was more frustration from Defense Department officials, and a third, seven-week-long interruption in drone strikes that led to a backlog of identified militant targets in Yemen.

But the “targeting” done by JSOC in Yemen isn’t of the same quality as the information prepared for targeting by the CIA for strikes in Pakistan, according to the NBC report:

In May, around the time of Obama’s speech, senior military officials prepared “targeting packages” for Monaco, with a roster of suspected militants in Yemen that they wanted to eliminate. The “targeting packages” contain background information on the identified targets. The CIA’s packages for Pakistan are often very detailed, while the Defense Department’s research on Yemeni targets was sometimes less detailed.

In fact, the JSOC apparently even admitted that some of these recent targeting packages pertained to lower level targets, but in an apparent use of pre-cogs, they claimed these were going to be important al Qaeda figures in the future and the administration had to deal with the question of “pain now, or pain later” in their recommendation to take out these lower level operatives.

Keep in mind that these meetings to discuss drone targets, also know as “Terror Tuesday” meetings, are populated by high level security personnel from many agencies. Both JSOC, as the target developer for drone strikes in Yemen, and NSA, as the purveyor of information gleaned from surveillance, would of course be present.

As @pmcall noted to me on Twitter, the “intercept” then magically appeared and opened the floodgates for strikes:

Here’s how the NBC article described that: Read more

Of Course the NSA Can’t Search Its Own Emails…

Justin Elliott reports that when he tried to FOIA emails between National Geographic and the NSA, the world’s premier digital spying agency said they couldn’t search their own emails.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

This shouldn’t surprise him though. Fort Meade apparently can’t keep a close-circuit video stream running either, if the stream to the media room at the Bradley Manning trial was any indication.

I think Elliott went about this all wrong, though.

These are, after all, US Person emails. And the NSA doesn’t get US Person emails directly. Rather, they “target” the email of someone overseas, and get all the US Person emails “incidentally.”

All Elliott has to do is FOIA emails involved with the documentary in question overseas and declare he needed the NSA side of it to understand the foreign intelligence he had gathered.

And if that doesn’t work, Elliott should just ask GCHQ for the emails, as that seems to be the other cute workaround.

The Shell Game: What is Microsoft Doing?

[graphic: Google Finance]

[graphic: Google Finance]

What is this so-called tech company doing?

Microsoft sees itself as going head-to-head with Apple and Google. The 10-year chart above comparing Microsoft, Apple, and Google stock tells us this has been a delusional perception.

It also sees itself in competition with IBM. Yet IBM surpassed it in market value two years ago, even after nearly a decade of ubiquity across personal computers in the U.S. and in much of the world. (IBM is included in that chart above, too.)

One might expect a sea change to improve performance, but is the shell game shuffling of Microsoft executives really designed to deliver results to the bottom line?

Tech and business sector folks are asking as well what is going on in Redmond; even the executive assignments seemed off-kilter. One keen analysis by former Microsoft employee Ben Thompson picked apart the company’s reorganization announcement last Thursday — coincidentally the same day the Guardian published a report that Microsoft had “collaborated closely” with the National Security Agency — noting that the restructuring doesn’t make sense.

The new organization pulls everything related to Windows 8 under a single leader, from desktop to mobile devices using the same operating system, migrating to a functional structure from a divisional structure. There are several flaws in this strategy Thompson notes, but a key problem is accountability.

To tech industry analysts, the new functional structure makes it difficult to follow a trail of failure in design and implementation for any single product under this functional umbrella.

To business analysts, the lack of accountability means outcomes of successful products hide failed products under the functional umbrella, diluting overall traceability of financial performance.

But something altogether different might be happening beneath the umbrella of Windows 8.

There’s only one product now, regardless of device — one ring to rule them all. It’s reasonable to expect that every single desktop, netbook, tablet, cellphone running on Windows 8 will now substantially be the same software.

Which means going forward there’s only one application they need to allow the NSA to access for a multitude of devices.

We’ve already learned from a Microsoft spokesman that the company informs the NSA about bugs or holes in its applications BEFORE it notifies the public.

It’s been reported for years about numerous backdoors and holes built intentionally and unintentionally into Microsoft’s operating systems, from Windows 98 forward, used by the NSA and other law enforcement entities.

Now Skype has likewise been compromised after Microsoft’s acquisition of the communications application and infrastructure for the purposes of gathering content and eavesdropping by the NSA, included in the PRISM program.

Given these backdoors, holes, and bugs, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday — in addition to its product registration methodology requiring online validation of equipment — certainly look very different when one considers each opportunity Microsoft uses to reach out and touch business and private computers for security enhancements and product key validations.

Why shouldn’t anyone believe that the true purpose of Microsoft’s reorganization is to serve the NSA’s needs?

Tech magazine The Verge noted with the promotion of Terry Myerson to lead Windows — it’s said Myerson “crumples under the spotlight and is ungenerous with the press” — Microsoft doesn’t appear eager to answer questions about Windows.

As ComputerworldUK’s Glyn Moody asked with regard to collaboration with the NSA, “How can any company ever trust Microsoft again?”

If a company can’t trust them, why should the public?

The capper, existing outside Microsoft’s Windows 8 product: Xbox One’s Kinect feature is always on, in order to sense possible commands in the area where Kinect is installed.

ACLU’s senior policy analyst Chris Sogohian tweeted last Thursday, “… who in their right mind would trust an always-on Microsoft-controlled Xbox camera in their living room?”

One might wonder how often the question of trust will be raised before serious change is made with regard to Microsoft’s relationship with the NSA. With political strategist Mark Penn handling marketing for the corporation and Steve Ballmer still at the helm as CEO, don’t hold your breath.

Federal Court Strikes Down Obama DOJ’s State Secrets Defense

In what can only be described as a significant ruling, Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern California District (CAND) has rejected the federal government’s, via the Obama and Holder Department of Justice, assertion of state secrets privilege in the case of Jewel v. National Security Agency and the related consolidated case of Shubert v. Obama.

The full decision of the court is here, and in the critical active language from the court’s own summary states:

Having thoroughly considered the parties’ papers, Defendants’ public and classified declarations, the relevant legal authority and the parties’ arguments, the Court GRANTS the Jewel Plaintiffs’ motion for partial summary adjudication by rejecting the state secrets defense as having been displaced by the statutory procedure prescribed in 50 U.S.C. § 1806(f) of FISA. In both related cases, the Court GRANTS Defendants’ motions to dismiss Plaintiffs’ statutory claims on the basis of sovereign immunity. The Court further finds that the parties have not addressed the viability of the only potentially remaining claims, the Jewel Plaintiffs’ constitutional claims under the Fourth and First Amendments and the claim for violation of separation of powers and the Shubert Plaintiffs’ fourth cause of action for violation of the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, the Court RESERVES ruling on Defendants’ motion for summary judgment on the remaining, non-statutory claims.

The Court shall require that the parties submit further briefing on the course of this litigation going forward.

Now, before too much celebration is made, there are some sobering aspects of this decision as well. As can be told from the quote above, several counts in both complaints have been dismissed based on sovereign immunity, and the court has questions about the continued validity of the remaining counts and has requested further briefing in that regard.

With the ultimate status of the litigation left for another day, the big news today is the negation of the dreaded state secrets assertion. To say this is a rare occurrence is to be too kind. In fact, the main instance where the privilege was overcome was the al-Haramain litigation, also in CAND, where Judge Vaughn Walker found non-classified evidence sufficient to proceed in the face of the state secrets assertion, and even that case was later reversed and dismissed by the 9th Circuit.

The court in Jewel mapped out the consideration process for the privilege challenge:

The analysis of whether the state secrets privilege applies involves three distinct steps. First, the Court must ascertain whether the procedural requirements for invoking the privilege have been satisfied. Second, the Court must make an independent determination whether the information is privileged. In determining whether the privilege attaches, the Court may consider a party’s need for access to the allegedly privileged materials. See Reynolds, 345 U.S. 19 at 11. Lastly, the “ultimate question to be resolved is how the matter should proceed in light of the successful privilege claim.” El-Masri v. United States, 479 F.3d 296, 304 (4th Cir. 2007).

Noting that the assertion of state secrets must not cause “a complete surrender of judicial control over access to the courts”, Judge White wrote:

Here, having reviewed the materials submitted for review and having considered the claims alleged and the record as a whole, the Court finds that Defendants have timely invoked the state secrets doctrine. Defendants contend that Plaintiffs’ lawsuits should be dismissed as a result of the application of the privilege because the state secrets information is so central to the subject matter of the suit that permitting further proceedings would jeopardize national security. Given the multiple public disclosures of information regarding the surveillance program, the Court does not find that the very subject matter of the suits constitutes a state secret. Just as in Al-Haramain, and based significantly on the same set of facts in the record here, the Court finds that although there are certainly details that the government has not yet disclosed,

because of the voluntary disclosures made by various officials since December 2005, the nature and purpose of the [Terrorist Surveillance Program], the ‘type’ of persons it targeted, and even some of its procedures are not state secrets. In other words, the government’s many attempts to assuage citizens’ fears that they have not been surveilled now doom the government’s assertion that the very subject matter of this litigation, the existence of a warrantless surveillance program, is barred by the state secrets privilege.

507 F.3d at 1200; see also Hepting v. AT&T Corp., 439 F. Supp. 2d 974, 986-88, 991 (N.D. Cal. 2006) (holding that the existence of a program of monitoring the contents of certain telephone communications was no longer a state secret as a result of the public statements made by the President and the Attorney General). Accordingly, the Court does not find dismissal appropriate based on the subject matter of the suits being a state secret. See Totten, 92 U.S. at 107.

White went on to note that there were significant items of evidence in the Jewel case tending to confirm or negate the factual allegations in Plaintiffs’ complaints that would be subject to state secrets exclusion. However, White held that, as a matter of law, the FISA procedural mechanism prescribed under 50 U.S.C. 26 § 1806(f) preempted application of the state secrets privilege in the litigation at bar.

Citing one of the interlocutory appellate decisions in al-Haramain and the underlying logic of then trial judge Vaughn Walker), Judge White said:

In its opinion on remand in the Al-Haramain matter, this district court found that “FISA preempts the state secrets privilege in connection with electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes ….” In re National Security Agency Telecommunications Records Litigation (“In re N.S.A. Telecommunication Records Litig.”), 564 F. Supp. 2d 1109, 1111 (N.D. Cal. 2008). The undersigned agrees and finds that the in camera review procedure in FISA applies and preempts the determination of evidentiary preclusion under the state secrets doctrine. Section 1806(f) of FISA displaces the state secrets privilege in cases in which electronic surveillance yields potentially sensitive evidence by providing secure procedures under which courts can consider national security evidence that the application of the state secrets privilege would otherwise summarily exclude.

Section 1806 of the FISA enabling statutes in Title 50 of the United States Code provides, inter alia;

… whenever any motion or request is made by an aggrieved person pursuant to any other statute or rule of the United States or any State . . . to discovery or obtain applications or orders or other materials relating to electronic surveillance . . . the United States district court … shall, notwithstanding any other law, if the Attorney General files an affidavit under oath that disclosure or an adversary hearing would harm the national security of the United States, review in camera and ex parte the application, order, and such other materials relating to the surveillance as may be necessary to determine whether the surveillance of the aggrieved person was lawfully authorized and conducted.

This finding by Judge White reaffirmed at least some control by federal trial courts of sweeping assertions of state secrets privilege by the Executive Branch. That is, better than nothing, for sure. But it is rather small comfort in light of the finding of qualified immunity extended to the government on the Jewel and Shubert plaintiffs’ statutory claims under FISA.

In discussing the intersection of the FISA claims with related claims by plaintiffs under the Stored Communication Act and Wiretap Act, the court did leave several more general counts of the complaints active. However, there is no way to look at the entirety of Jeff White’s opinion and come away believing the plaintiffs have any clear path to victory in the long run. The Jewel and Shubert cases live on to fight another day, for now, but the handwriting is on the wall for either the 9th Circuit or Supreme Court to deal the death blow down the road.

The 2009 Draft NSA IG Report Makes No Mention of One Illegal Practice

The 2009 Draft NSA IG Report released by the Guardian last week — and related reporting from Barton Gellman — seem to clarify and confirm what I’ve long maintained (12/19/057/29/07; 7/30/07): that one part of the illegal wiretap program that Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey found “illegal” in 2004 was data-mining of Americans.

Eight days later on 19 March 2004, the President rescinded the authority to collect bulk Internet metadata and gave NSA one week to stop collection and block access to previously collected bulk Internet metadata. NSA did so on 26 March 2004. To close the resulting collection gap, DoJ and NSA immediately began efforts to recreate this authority in what became the PR/TT order.

Mind you, this bulk collection resumed after Colleen Kollar-Kotelly signed an order permitting NSA to collect the same data under a Pen Register/Trap & Trace order on July 14, 2004.

The FISC signed the first PR/TT order on 14 July 2004. ALthough NSA lost access to the bulk metadata from 26 March 2004 until the order was signed, the order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk Internet metadata that it had under the PSP, except that it specified the datalinks from which NSA could collect, and it limited the number of people that could access the data.

Indeed, we know the program was expanded again in 2007, to get 2 degrees of separation deep into US person Internet data. The Obama Administration claims it ended this in 2011, though there are also indications it simply got moved under a new shell.

Mystery solved, Scoob!

Not so fast.

It appears the bulk Internet metadata collection and mining is just one of two practices that Goldsmith and Comey forced Bush to at least temporarily halt in 2004. But the second one is not mentioned at all in the NSA IG Report.

I first noted that Bush made two modifications to the program in this post, where I noted that 6 pages (11-17) of Jack Goldsmith’s May 6, 2004 OLC opinion on the program described plural modifications made in March and one other month in 2004 (I correctly surmised that they had actually shifted parts of the program under parts of the PATRIOT Act, and that they had narrowed the scope somewhat, though over-optimistically didn’t realize that still included warrantless collection of known domestic content).

But there’s actually a far better authority than Goldsmith’s heavily redacted opinion that confirms Bush made two modifications to the program in this period.

Dick Cheney.

When his office disclosed to Patrick Leahy in 2007 what documents it had regarding authorizations for the illegal wiretap program, it listed two modifications to the program: the one on March 19 described in detail in the NSA IG Report, plus one on April 2.

[Cheney Counsel Shannen] Coffin’s letter indicates that Bush signed memos amending the program on March 19 and April 2 of that year.

But there’s no hint of a second modification in the NSA IG Report.

That could mean several things. It could mean the April 2 modification didn’t involve the NSA at all (and so might appear in a one of the other Agency IG Reports at the time — say, DNI — or might have been completed by an Agency, like some other part of DOD, that didn’t complete an IG Report). It could mean that part of the program was eliminated entirely on April 2, 2004. Or it could mean that in an effort to downplay illegality of the program, the IG simply didn’t want to talk about the worst prior practice eliminated in the wake of the hospital confrontation.

Goldsmith’s opinion does seem to indicate, however, that the modification pertained to an issue similar to the bulk metadata collection. He introduces that section, describing both modifications, by saying “it is necessary to understand some background concerning how the NSA accomplishes the collection activity authorized under” the program.

That may still pertain to the kind of data mining they were doing with the Internet metadata. After all, the fix of moving Internet metadata collection under the PR/TT order only eliminated the legal problem that the telecoms were basically permitting the government to steal Microsoft and Yahoo Internet content from their equipment. There still may have been a legal problem with the kind of data mining they were doing (perhaps arising out of Congress’ efforts in that year’s NDAA to prohibit funding for Total Information Awareness).

Whatever it is, one thing is clear. Even with the release of the unredacted Draft NSA IG Report, we still aren’t seeing all the details on what made the program so legally problematic.

Maybe it’s something the Senate Judiciary Committee might ask Jim Comey during his FBI Director confirmation hearing?

Seeing Through the Blizzard to Utah: How Much Space Does Metadata Need

In the blizzard of half-truths, dissembling, and prevarications about the nature of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, it’s easy to lose sight of the obvious. In this case, the obvious is about one million square feet in size.

First, a few other large scale objects for comparison:

[photo: DeveloperTutorials.com]

[photo: DeveloperTutorials.com]

Here’s Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon; note the size of cars in proportion to the size of the buildings on this campus. You’ll find cars are the best tool for estimating approximate physical scale of this and the following examples.

[photo: DataCenterKnowledge.com]

[photo: DataCenterKnowledge.com]

This is Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Again, compare the automobiles against the building in the photo for scale.

[photo: DataCenterKnowledge.com]

[photo: DataCenterKnowledge.com]

Microsoft has a data center in Dublin, Ireland. It’s a little harder to estimate physical size in this photo. A key difference is the height of the facility, as if development was limited in footprint.  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.

What Does NCTC Do with NSA and FBI’s Newly Disclosed Databases?

The discussion about the various “NSA” programs we’ve seen so far have discussed only how NSA works with FBI. FBI requests the dragnet phone information and hands it over to NSA. NSA negotiates direct access to internet companies that allow FBI to make direct queries.

We’ve heard from Keith Alexander about what NSA does — its only use of Section 215, he said, was the phone records.

We heard from Robert Mueller who gave less clear answers about what FBI does and does not do.

But we have yet to have direct testimony from James “least untruthful too cute by half” James Clapper. Mind you, we’ve gotten several fact sheets and Clapper’s hilarious interview with Andrea Mitchell. Just no specific public testimony.

And curiously, in the DNI’s own fact sheets, he doesn’t specify who does what, aside from describing the statutory role his position and the Attorney General play in authorizing FAA 702 orders. He doesn’t say what FBI does, what NSA does … or what his own organization does.

That’s important, because in addition to overseeing all intelligence, Clapper’s office also includes the National Counterterrorism Center. And the NCTC is the entity in charge sharing data. Indeed, it is statutorily required to have access to everything.

[The National Security Act] provides that “[u]nless otherwise directed by the President, the Director of National Intelligence shall have access to all national intelligence and intelligence related to the national security which is collected by any federal department, agency, or other entity, except as otherwise provided by law, or as appropriate, under guidelines agreed upon by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence.

That means, presumably, that NCTC is doing a lot of the work that NSA and FBI are making narrow denials about.

But it also means that NCTC can play with these databases — the dragnet and the access via PRISM to 702 data — as well as any other data in the Federal government, including databases that John Brennan gave it the ability to go get.

So here’s the thing. When Keith Alexander gives you pat reassurances about how limited NSA’s access to Americans’ call data is, that may disclose a whole lot more intrusive data mining over at James Clapper’s shop.

Remember, here is what James Clapper was initially asked.

Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Clapper: No, sir.

Wyden: It does not?

Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect—but not wittingly.” [my emphasis]

His first attempt to walk back that lie went like this:

What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails. [my emphasis]

His second attempt to walk it back went like this:

ANDREA MITCHELL: Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said that there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: First– as I said, I have great respect for Senator Wyden. I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked– “When are you going to start– stop beating your wife” kind of question, which is meaning not– answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.

And again, to go back to my metaphor. What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers– of those books in that metaphorical library– to me, collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Taking the contents?

JAMES CLAPPER: Exactly. That’s what I meant. Now–

ANDREA MITCHELL: You did not mean archiving the telephone numbers?

All of those efforts were, by context at least, limited exclusively to NSA. They don’t address, at all, what NCTC might do with this data (or, for that matter, FBI).

So what does the NCTC do with the data that NSA and FBI have issued careful denials about?

Update: I’m going to replicate a big chunk of this post on the oversight over NCTC’s use of other agencies data, complete with the bit about how the guy in charge of it thought Cheney’s illegal program was the shit.

Back when John Negroponte appointed him to be the Director of National Intelligence’s Civil Liberties Protection Officer, Alexander Joel admitted he had no problem with Cheney’s illegal domestic wiretap program.

Read more

NSA PRISM Slides: Notice Anything Unusual or Missing?

We haven’t seen (and likely will never see) all of the NSA slides former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden shared with the Guardian-UK and the Washington Post. But the few that we have seen shared by these two news outlets tell us a lot — even content we might expect to see but don’t tells us something.

First, let’s compare what appears to be the title slide of the presentation — the Guardian’s version first, followed by the WaPo’s version. You’d think on the face of it they’d be the same, but they aren’t.

[NSA presentation, title slide via Guardian-UK]

[NSA presentation, title slide, via Guardian-UK]

[NSA presentation, title slide, via Washington Post]

[NSA presentation, title slide, via Washington Post]

Note the name of the preparer or presenter has been redacted on both versions; however, the Guardian retains the title of this person, “PRISM Collection Manager, S35333,” while the WaPo completely redacts both name and title.

This suggests there’s an entire department for this program requiring at least one manager. There are a number of folks who are plugging away at this without uttering a peep.

More importantly, they are working on collection — not exclusively on search.

The boldface reference to “The SIGAD Used Most in NSA Reporting” suggests there are more than the PRISM  in use as SIGINT Activity Designator tools. What’s not clear from this slide is whether PRISM is a subset of US-984XN or whether PRISM is one-for-one the same as US-984XN.

Regardless of whether PRISM is inside or all of US-984XN, the presentation addresses the program “used most” for reporting; can we conclude that reporting means the culled output of mass collection? Read more

Still No Answer on How Minh Quang Pham Materially Supported Terror While in Custody

The WaPo has an interesting story about US intelligence efforts to disrupt the most recent release of Inspire magazine. While the confirmation that the US was responsible for the recent disrupted release is not surprising, I find this rather interesting.

“You can make it hard for them to distribute it, or you can mess with the content. And you can mess with the content in a way that is obvious or in ways that are not obvious,” said one intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal debates.

WaPo’s sources are now bragging that they’ve altered the content of Inspire, in addition to delaying its release.

While the article focuses on this most recent sabotage, it rather bizarrely makes no mention that the first installment of Inspire was hacked in very similar way (purportedly by the Brits).

In the case of Inspire, the debate stretches back three years. The first issue contained a recipe for making a bomb using common materials, such as nails and a pressure cooker like the ones used in Boston. The title of the article was “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

There was also a threat to Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist who published a satirical cartoon about the prophet Muhammad. “She should be taken as a prime target of assassination,” wrote Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

Though it does quote Keith Alexander making the case for sabotage.

“It’s obvious if people are calling for crazies to murder a U.S. citizen, why wouldn’t you stop it?” said one former official, recalling the debate in which National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander argued on behalf of disruption.

In that case, the administration decided against action, in part because the CIA preferred to use the site to gather intelligence. In subsequent debates, the danger of an imminent threat “really made the difference” in terms of whether to disrupt issues of the magazine, according to a former administration official.

DOD and CIA have, according to public reports without details, had significant deconfliction issues in the past on cyber operations. Are we so convinced DOD didn’t help the Brits insert cupcake recipes in that first installment?

And this article doesn’t mention something I’ve been tracking for a while: the case of Vietnamese-English Minh Quang Pham graphic artist, whom the US charged with materially support Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula last year. Of note, when they charged him, they called for him to forfeit any means he had to influence AQAP.

As a result of planning and perpetuating Federal crimes of terrorism against the United States … defendant [] shall forfeit … all right, title, and interest in all assets, foreign and domestic, affording a source of influence over al Shabaab and AQAP.

Which is all the more interesting still considering the period for which the US charged Pham for material support includes five months — from July to December 2011 — during which a great deal of evidence suggests he was in British custody.

I suppose it might make it easier to hack Inspire if you had their graphic artist in secret custody.