The Courage from Whistle-blowing
Exclusive: Courage, like cowardice, can grow when an action by one person
influences decisions by others, either toward bravery or fear. Thus, the gutsy
whistle-blowing by some NSA officials inspired Edward Snowden to expose
mass data collection on all Americans, recalls ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
When Edward Snowden in early June 2013 began to reveal classified data showing
criminal collect-it-all surveillance programs operated by the U.S. government’s
National Security Agency, former NSA professionals became freer to spell out the
liberties taken with the Bill of Rights, as well as the feckless,
counterproductive nature of bulk electronic data collection.
On Jan. 7, 2014, four senior retired specialists with a cumulative total of 144
years of work with NSA William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk
Wiebe prepared a Memorandum for the President providing a comprehensive account
of the problems at NSA, together with suggestions as to how they might be best
addressed.
The purpose was to inform President Obama as fully as possible, as he prepared
to take action in light of Snowden’s revelations.
On Jan. 23, 2015 in Berlin, Binney was honored with the annual Sam Adams Award
for Integrity in Intelligence. Ed Snowden was live-streamed-in for the occasion,
and said, “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.” (Binney had been
among the first to speak out publicly about NSA abuses; apparently that
emboldened Snowden to do what he did.)
Snowden had already said when he fled to Hong Kong in June 2013 that he had
learned an extremely important lesson from the four years of government
persecution/prosecution of Tom Drake; namely, that he, Ed Snowden, had to leave
the country in order to fulfill his mission and to have some reasonable chance
to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. (Eventually, all the felony
charges against Drake were dismissed.)
An important take-away lesson from Binney’s and Drake’s boldness and tenacity is
that one never knows what impetus courageous truth-tellers can give to other,
potential whistleblowers like Ed Snowden.
In 1998, Bill Binney, with some 35 years under his belt as a senior NSA
mathematician and cryptologist took on a staggering problem for NSA: how to deal
with the vast amount of data available on the world wide web without burying
intelligence analysts under a haystack of data.
From Binney’s long experience, it seemed clear that selecting information by
using metadata relationships was the smart way to go. As he puts it, “Smart
selection is smart collection.”
This approach was totally different form the word/phrase dictionary-select type
approach in general use even today. Binney’s technique was to use metadata and
some additional rules to define relationships. This enabled discriminate
selection of data from the tens of terabytes twisting in the ether. The approach
focused the collected data around known targets, plus some potential
developmental targets, and yielded much more manageable content for analysts to
deal with.
Missing the Needles
Experience had long since shown that collecting everything in bulk, and using
word/phrase type queries, end up burying analysts in data and making them
dysfunctional.
In some of the internal NSA memos released by Snowden, NSA
analysts complain of the kind of analysis paralysis that makes it extremely
difficult for them to find and address the real threats.
As Snowden has quipped, “The problem with mass surveillance is when you collect
everything, you understand nothing.”
The net result is that people die first. Only then do detectives and law
enforcement go wading into their vast data, focus on possible perpetrators of
the crime and often find related information.
This is, of course, exactly the
reverse of how the security services should proceed assuming the main priority
is to thwart terrorist or other attacks. And yet the U.S. government proceeds
willy-nilly with its SOS (Stasi-On-Steroids) approach.
In sum, success can come only from a focused, disciplined selection of data off
the fiber lines, yielding usable metadata, as Binney and his NSA colleagues
demonstrated.
Indeed, there was quite enough electronic intelligence collected
by THINTHREAD, the collection system Binney and his team created, before 9/11 to
have thwarted the attacks, as NSA senior executive Thomas Drake learned, to his
horror, after the fact.
“Smart selection” techniques can also protect individual privacy, as Binney and
his colleagues likewise showed.
More to the point, this approach can provide a
rich but manageable data environment for analysts to use toward one of the most
important intelligence objectives predicting intentions and capabilities.
This way, one is not reduced to watching attack after attack and then wiping up
the blood and searching data bases for clues to the perpetrators primarily the
job of law enforcement.
Problems With Honesty
Sadly, recent history has shown that the directors of U.S. intelligence services
lie, and that directors of the NSA lie blatantly and suffer zero
consequences. On March 12, 2013 (less than two months before the Snowden
revelations), National Intelligence Director James Clapper lied under oath in
denying that NSA was “wittingly” collecting “any type of data at all on millions
or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, had put that question to Clapper that day at a formal,
open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
Similarly, on June 27, 2013, three weeks after the first Snowden revelations
started coming, then-NSA Director Keith Alexander lied in telling the same
Senate committee that NSA’s bulk telephone surveillance program had thwarted 54
terrorist “plots or events.” On Oct. 2, 2013, Gen. Alexander admitted, in
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the number of terrorist
plots thwarted was not 54, but one. (And that particular one cannot bear close
scrutiny.)
The failure to demand accountability for these deceptions proves as if further
proof were needed that the Senate intelligence “oversight” committees has long
since become the Senate intelligence “overlook” committee.
If democracy still means anything, we the people need to devise some kind of
replacement for the sleepy “watchdogs” in Congress who have forfeited their
responsibility to oversee and verify what the intelligence agencies are doing.
Again, Bill Binney has what seem the most sensible and doable suggestions toward
that end.
He has called for a properly cleared technical team, responsible to the courts,
with clearly spelled-out authority to go into any intelligence agency and look
directly into and inspect data bases and the tools in use. This would be a giant
step toward ensuring that we the people through this intrusive inspection regime
could monitor in some rudimentary way what our intelligence agencies are doing.
Binney suggests further that intelligence agencies be required to implement
software to monitor their own networks to detect automatically and to report
immediately violations of law and regulation.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour inner-city Washington. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), and is indebted to VIPS member Bill Binney for
much of the substance of this article, which came from McGovern’s prepared text
for remarks at a conference on Thursday in Moscow, marking the 10th anniversary
of RT’s founding.
Standing Up for Truth and Ben Franklin
Because of the excessive secrecy exercised by the U.S. government,
whistleblowing has become a necessity for American democracy, a reality that
struck home to former FBI official Coleen Rowley and other whistleblowers as
they encountered Benjamin Franklin’s words in Germany.
By Coleen Rowley
Our recent “Stand Up for Truth” whirlwind speaking tour through London, Oslo
(see here and here), Stockholm and Berlin last week as well as webinars, visual
presentations and speaking events in U.S. cities was exhausting but quite
successful.
Truth has always been a difficult and often frustrating business, especially
when that old story line tends to repeat of the naked Emperor continuing to
ignorantly march forward, even after the little boy has yelled the truth. But
someone has to do it!
Throughout the week, we discussed the problem of pernicious governmental,
corporate and other top-down secrecy involved in globalization that enables
large-scale wrongdoing and keeps citizens in the dark about it, making effective
solutions and real democracy, and even our collective security, impossible.
These issues were relevant especially in Germany, given the context of the
details that have emerged about the long-term NSA-BND spy pact targeting
European officials, a scandal now being investigated by a German parliamentary
committee. Of course such scandals only occur when the truth is effectively kept
hidden for decades by powerful institutions.
So how can citizens learn the truth a little sooner? We were able to meet with
Scandinavian officials working with the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human
Rights for the Council of Europe which, significantly, has just completed a
Draft Report on Improving the Protection of Whistleblowers.
In Norway, we were able to speak to the fact that a freedom of speech and debate
institution had just awarded the 2015 Bjørnson Prize, named after a Norwegian
Nobel literature laureate, to Edward Snowden. The academy lauded the American
whistleblower “for his work protecting privacy and for shining a critical light
on US surveillance of its citizens and others” asking the Norwegian cabinet to
protect his visit to Norway in September to receive the prize.
Such acceptance of truth-telling would be a real political challenge, given
Norway’s status as “one of America’s closest allies” but one of their most
respected law firms holds that Snowden cannot be extradited from Norway to the
U.S., since Snowden’s action is a political act to uphold the U.S. constitution,
not a crime. Similarly in Stockholm, our tour sponsors involved in the Right
Livelihood Award “the Alternative Nobel Prize,” whose past laureates include
“Most Dangerous Man” discloser of the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg (2006) and
Edward Snowden (2014), are pushing for Sweden’s government to ensure safe
passage for Snowden to travel to Sweden to accept his prize.
The final “Quo vadis Democracy?” event venue on our tour produced some real
serendipity as well as irony! We could not help notice the building’s striking
dedication to Ben Franklin as we walked into the Haus de Kulturen de Welt
(“House of the Cultures of the World”), located in the Kongresshalle, a unique
gift from the U.S. to Germany, designed in 1957 by a renowned American
architect.
Known to Berliners as the “pregnant oyster” for its distinctive shape, the Haus
sits next to the German Chancellery, on John Foster Dulles Allee in Berlin
(whence came the irony given the Dulles brothers’ sordid history of world-wide,
illegal exploitation). Triumphing over such perfidy, Franklin’s quote so aptly
reads:
“God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the
rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth so that a philosopher may
set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, ‘this is my country.’
“–Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“To these ideals and to the man who spoke them and lived them this Kongresshalle
is dedicated.”
These days, most Americans have no idea of the buried history behind Benjamin
Franklin’s becoming America’s first whistleblower, long before the word existed
in the English language.
You have to dig deeper than most sanitized American history textbooks to learn
that Benjamin Franklin was publicly vilified in Great Britain after courageously
taking responsibility in 1773, for his “Deep Throat”-like disclosures a year
before, disclosures of secret official correspondence related to a colonial
governor’s corruption and complicity with British repression, the truth of which
was to contribute to the American Revolution.
Two hundred years before there was a Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, or Edward
Snowden, an American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin was treated as a spy and
“incendiary agent,” suffering incredible backlash described as follows by
Franklin biographer H.W. Brands:
“For an hour (Solicitor General of the Lord North ministry, Alexander
Wedderburn) hurled invective at Franklin, branding him a liar, a thief, the
instigator of the insurrection in Massachusetts, an outcast from the company of
all honest men, an ingrate whose attack on [Gov. Thomas] Hutchinson betrayed
nothing less than a desire to seize the governor’s office for himself. So
slanderous was Wedderburn’s diatribe that no London paper would print it.”
No wonder Benjamin Franklin came to love liberty and understand the rights of
man! He had lived it. The courage and spirit of America’s first whistleblower
infused the “Quo vadis, Democracy?” discussion we had later that day with German
politicians charged with investigating the extent of U.S.-German surveillance
cooperation and with other German legal and data privacy researchers.
We each tried to effectively address the important questions: What happens to
the idea of democracy in an age of mass surveillance, data espionage and
collaboration between the German spy agency BND and the U.S. National Security
Agency? How was the NSA scandal received in the United States and Germany and
what can — and must — we learn from this?
In my own seven minutes, in the course of trying to explain how lies and
propaganda fueled the U.S. government’s “going to the dark side” after 9/11, I
ended up butchering Mark Twain’s quote: “A lie can travel halfway round the
world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” I hope I didn’t confuse the
German audience too much. I also hope they stopped on their way out to read the
building’s dedication and take some needed courage from the example of one of
American democracy’s Founding Fathers and its first whistleblower. This type of
courage is again required to stand up for truth.
Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former chief division counsel in
Minneapolis. She’s now a dedicated peace and justice activist.
Hiding Facts to Thwart Democracy
Over-classification of U.S. government information is a grave threat to the
Republic, giving politicians and bureaucrats the power to hide facts that
aren’t really sensitive but are vital to a meaningful public debate, such as the
IG report on President Bush’s surveillance program, says ex-NSA analyst Kirk
Wiebe.
By Kirk Wiebe
A few weeks ago, as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the
New York Times, we were able to view a redacted version of the so-called “Five
IG’s” report, formally entitled “Report on the President’s Surveillance Program”
or PSP, written by the Inspectors General of the Defense Department, the
National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence
Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
What was most interesting about the portions of the report that were released
was how badly over-classified much of the report originally was. The first
paragraph of the introduction to Volume 1, dated July 10, 2009, was rather
innocuous until you notice the “scratch out” of the original classification,
(TS//SI//OC//NF).
As someone who has worked extensively with classified information, converting it
from raw source materials to forms appropriate for analysis, as well as for
publication to a wide array of intelligence consumers throughout the U.S.
Government, I can tell you without hesitation that it is highly unusual to see
an entire paragraph of an originator-controlled (OC) document rendered
completely unclassified after being initially classified Top Secret.
In fact, I have never seen such a gross change in classification in more than 34
years of intelligence work. First, the terminology making up the classification
of the paragraph in question:
TS means Top Secret (information that if released to an enemy would result in
grave damage to the security of the United States); SI for Special Intelligence
(intelligence derived from signals); OC for Originator Controlled (no changes to
content or classification can be made without the permission of those
originating/publishing the document); NF for NOFORN (no foreign nationals not
even partners as in the “Five Eyes” construct are permitted to see information).
Allow me to emphasize that such over-classification is both extreme and
dangerous because 1) TS is supposed to be used only to notify the reader that
the associated information is of the kind that would most harm the United States
if disclosed, and 2) it undermines the security of true secrets by marking
everything under the sun “TOP SECRET.” It also enables the government to
prosecute unjustly those accused of possessing or mishandling “classified
information.”
Yet, this formerly TS/SI/OC/NF paragraph reads as follows: “In response to the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, on 4 October 2001, President George W.
Bush issued a Top Secret authorization to the Secretary of Defense directing
that the signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities of the National Security
Agency (NSA) be used to detect and prevent further attacks in the United States.
The Presidential Authorization stated that an extraordinary emergency existed
permitting the use of electronic surveillance within the United States for
counterterrorism purposes, without a court order, under certain circumstances.
For more than five years, the Presidential Authorization was renewed at 30- to
60-day intervals to authorize the highly classified NSA surveillance program,
which is referred to throughout this report as the President’s Surveillance
Program (PSP).”
While the most important fact coming out of the extensive report (over 700 pages
in length) probably is the confirmation that the NSA was collecting not just
metadata about Americans and foreigners but also content beginning in October
2001 I submit that the pervasive and egregious over-classification of whole
paragraphs within the Five IG’s document is far more troubling and carries with
it potentially wide ramifications affecting legal cases around the country
brought by the U.S. Government that involve the possession or mishandling of
“classified information”.
In just the first 50 pages of the report, there are 29 paragraphs that are
declassified that were originally classified Top Secret, and 26 paragraphs that
are declassified that were originally classified Secret (serious damage to U.S.
security if in the hands of an enemy). Three more examples are:
“(TS//SI//NF) When NSA personnel identified erroneous metadata collection,
usually caused by technical problems or inappropriate application of the
authorization, they were directed to report the violation or incident through
appropriate channels and to delete the collection from all NSA databases. NSA
reported three such violations early in the program and took measures to correct
them.”
The next section refers to information that President George W. Bush’s Attorney
General John Ashcroft provided to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, then
presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, responsible for
issuing secret approval for electronic spying inside the United States.
“ (TS//SI//OC/NF)
Ashcroft provided Lamberth a brief summary of the President’s
decision to create the PSP, and Ashcroft stated that he had determined, based
upon the advice of John Yoo, an attorney in DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OCL),
that the President’s actions were lawful under the Constitution. Ashcroft also
emphasized to Lamberth that the FISC was not being asked to approve the program.
Following Ashcroft’s summary, Hayden described for Lamberth how the program
functioned operationally, Yoo discussed legal aspects of the program, and Baker
proposed procedures for handling international terrorism FISA applications that
contained PSP-derived information. For the next four months, until the end of
his term in May 2002, Lamberth was the only FISC judge read into the PSP.”
“ (TS//SI//OC/NF)
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly succeeded Lamberth as the FISC
Presiding Judge and was briefed on the PSP on 17 May 2002. The briefing was
similar in form and substance to that provided to Lamberth. In response to
several questions from Kollar-Kotelly about the scope of the President’s
authority to conduct warrantless surveillance, DoJ prepared a letter to KollarKotelly, signed by Yoo, that, according to Kollar-Kotelly, ‘set out a broad
overview of the legal authority for conducting [the PSP], but did not analyze
the specifics of the [PSP] program.’ The letter, which Kollar-Kotelly reviewed
at the White House but was not permitted to retain, essentially replicated Yoo’s
2 November 2001 memorandum regarding the legality of the PSP. Kollar-Kotelly was
the only sitting FISC judge read into the PSP until January 2006, when the other
FISC judges were read in.”
Such a pervasive corruption of the classification process runs counter to the
expectation that the Government has an obligation to carry out its
responsibilities with a reasonable measure of propriety; in other words, an
expectation that it must perform in its quasi-contractual obligations to serve
the American people.
Clearly the prevalence of over-classification in a document issued by five
Inspector’s General from within the hallowed halls of the most secret
organizations in the Government is a sign not of occasional error, but of
widespread incompetence, even malfeasance, in the Government’s ability to
properly classify a document containing both classified and unclassified
information as defined by Executive Order 13526, the controlling authority for
government classified information.
Many of these examples suggest classification not because the information is
truly sensitive to national security, but because it is potentially politically
sensitive or embarrassing if discovered by the American public at large.
One can only wonder what the consequences of such willful and reckless overclassification has been in the prosecutions, both past and present, of
defendants left to plead their sentences in cases where the evidence is deemed
classified and the courts have not demanded that the Government defend its
claims that information should indeed be classified.
Kirk Wiebe is a retired National Security Agency senior analyst and recipient of
that Agency’s second highest award the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. As an
employee of NSA, he has sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. He has worked with colleagues Bill Binney, Ed
Loomis, Tom Drake and Diane Roark to oppose NSA corruption and over-surveillance
since 2001.
Seeing the Stasi Through NSA Eyes
In January when former Western intelligence officials, including from the U.S.
National Security Agency, toured the old offices of East Germany’s Stasi, it was
a look back into a dystopian past but also a chilling reminder of how far modern
surveillance has come in the past quarter century, writes Silkie Carlo.
By Silkie Carlo
The Stasi offices in Berlin have been frozen in time since they were stormed by
activists on Jan. 15, 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall three
months earlier. As tourists creep around, room by room, through this monument to
fascism, it feels as though millions of secrets are still ingrained in the
fabric of the chairs and the fibers of the ubiquitous oak furniture.
The museum that now occupies the building is an oddly mundane reminder of
another era: Indistinguishable rooms of desks, phones and filing cabinets,
fenced by aging net curtains filtering the sunlight. It is the walls adorned
with surveillance photos of supposed state enemies, and exhibits of household
gadgets planted with audio recording devices, that color the office’s banality
with a shade of darkness.
But the specter of Big Brother lingers, as I’m reminded by the man who is
accompanying me through the exhibits: William Binney, the former technical
director of the U.S. National Security Agency who helped design mass
surveillance systems for the NSA before spending a decade warning the world
about the risks of those systems.
As we tread past identical desks, retro rotary dial phones, and
electromechanical typewriters, the Stasi’s quaint spying technology reminds him
of his NSA office in the 1980s, he says. Except the NSA today is estimated to
hold one billion times more data than the Stasi held.
“The NSA’s agenda is to control the government, and control the population,”
Binney says.
I had come to the ​Stasi Museum with a group of U.S. and UK intelligence
whistleblowers, who had congregated in Berlin to award Binney with the
2015 ​Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The first award,
presented in 2002, went to former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who testified to
Congress about intelligence failures prior to 9/11; last year’s award went to
Edward Snowden.
In the years before September 11, Binney, then the technical director of world
geopolitical and military analysis at the NSA, developed a surveillance
program known as ThinThread. A spying tool for the Twenty-first Century, it
was designed to sift global digital signals and procure important intelligence
in a way that the NSA never had.
Because it scanned a sizable amount of international communications traffic, it
swept up Americans’ data in the process; to address that problem, Binney
installed privacy features that anonymized American data, while it scanned for
patterns that suggested a search warrant would be needed to explore the data
further.
Protecting the privacy of Americans was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and
in the agency’s core directives. “I was giving privacy to everyone in the
world,” he says.
After his creation was tested in the wild in 2000 and 2001, Binney proposed that
ThinThread, which he says cost the NSA only $3.2 million to build, would require
an additional $9.5 million to follow the surveillance targets that the program
identified.
But then-NSA Director Michael Hayden was determined to ditch the program in
favor of another data analysis program called Trailblazer. Proposed around the
same time as ThinThread was born, and developed by a defense contractor
called Science Applications International Corporation with ​close ties to the
NSA, the program collected a much broader swath of information, but lacked
the privacy controls of ThinThread. It was also far more expensive, at a cost
that would ultimately reach an estimated $1.3 billion. Nevertheless, a month
before the attacks of September 11, ThinThread was quietly put aside.
Binney warned that not only was this kind of program unconstitutional, conjuring
“the Stasi on steroids,” but would lead to “data bulk failure,” whereby real
security threats would be lost in the global haystack of information.
Information overload would make terrorist attacks, like the kind that would
happen in Boston and Paris, more difficult to prevent.
Soon after, everything changed. As three World Trade skyscrapers turned to dust
on September 11, so did Americans’ sense of safety. In the days after the
attacks, Bush authorized the NSA and other government agencies to begin
hoovering up every bit of data they could, under a secret wartime decree that
appeared to override the Constitution.
In the last week of September 2001, Binney watched as piles of hardware were
carried into the agency’s SIGINT Automation Research Center in Maryland. These
were the instruments of a new spying system focused on domestic communications,
built on the innovative architecture of ThinThread, Binney would learn.
The new surveillance system, codenamed “Stellar Wind,” would capture data both
outside and inside the U.S., harvesting Americans’ emails, web-browsing data,
telephone communications, and financial transactions. Over the years, the system
would grow, evolve, and be overseen, officially, by a secret court, which is now
charged with approving domestic surveillance searches. (Of the thousands of
surveillance requests to the FISA court in recent years, almost none have been
denied.)
As we walked through the Stasi’s walls of reinforced filing cabinets, it was
hard to visualize this modern data collection. By one estimate, it would require
an estimated 42 trillion Stasi filing cabinets to hold hard copies of all the
NSA’s virtual files.
Binney, who resigned from the NSA in October 2001, speaks of the secret powers
of the state from personal experience. In 2002, he and two other NSA
veterans formally complained to the Department of Defense about what they saw as
fraud, waste, and abuse at the NSA. In 2005, a New York Times report about the
NSA’s surveillance program led the Justice Department to open a leak
investigation. Binney and his fellow whistleblowers became prime suspects.
Although Binney had been cleared of any wrongdoing, in July 2007 the FBI
initiated an eight-hour raid on his home, confiscating a computer, disks, and
personal and business records; as he was coming out of his shower, he says one
agent pointed a gun at his head. Binney, as the most senior intelligence
whistleblower, is certain the U.S. government still keeps a close eye on him.
Binney suggests that the attacks of 9/11 were “allowed to happen.” He explained:
“There’s an agenda that’s after money, and not solving the problem. If you solve
the problem you don’t have the problem to get more money. It gave them all the
money they could want.” Binney insists that the NSA wasn’t just negligent in
preventing 9/11, but is guilty of a “deliberate cover up.”
What he told me next was alarming: that the NSA sought to mislead the 9/11
Commission in its investigation of intelligence failures. Binney said Tom Drake,
a former NSA colleague also turned whistleblower, “took our program, ThinThread,
and ran it on NSA data after 9/11. It showed the dispersal pattern of the people
who actually didn’t hijack the planes,” like suspects and accomplices in the
hijackers’ support network, and “it showed the dispersal of them going back and
getting out of the country. It also showed all those people and where they were
and what they were doing long before 9/11. All the data was there.”
Binney and his former colleagues would detail this failure in their confidential
report to the Pentagon’s Inspector General.
“But NSA suppressed all of that data,” he says. “The first thing they did was
kill the program that Tom used, because it would show all the warts. The
Congressional Investigating Committees didn’t get truth from the intelligence
agencies.”
Drake, who was also touring the Stasi museum with us, told me the NSA has “huge
culpability in the failure to protect the U.S. from the 9/11 attackers, and has
gone to great lengths to suppress the truth.” During his investigation into
ThinThread and data the NSA had, he says, he discovered “all kinds of critical,
actionable intelligence, that painted the tragic picture of what NSA could have
known, should have known, and didn’t share that they did know.”
Years after he warned Congressional investigators about NSA wrongdoing, Drake
also ​became a target of the government’s leak investigation; his home was
raided, and he was charged with violating the Espionage Act, facing 35 years in
prison.
After a lengthy legal battle, the government’s case against him collapsed, but
the agency’s inspector general found that his allegations of NSA retaliation
were unfounded, even though, as McClatchy recently reported, the inspectors
examined only two years out of the ten years detailed in his complaint.
In response to Binney’s accusations of deliberate malfeasance and a cover-up, a
spokesperson for the NSA said that his concerns are a “matter of public record”
and suggested I “review all of the related information that has been in the
public domain for several years.” However, Drake’s testimony to 9/11 Commission
investigators remains classified.
After examining Binney’s claims about the NSA’s choice of Trailblazer over
ThinThread, the Defense Department agreed with him. In ​a 2004 report,
it concluded that Trailblazer had “disregarded important solutions to urgent
security needs,” was “poorly executed” and “overly expensive.” And it found
that ThinThread’s ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that
of Trailblazer in 2004. (Much of the report, including the NSA’s response,
remains classified.)
Hayden himself admitted in 2005 that Trailblazer was hundreds of millions of
dollars over budget. Five years and over a billion dollars later, the program
was terminated, only to be replaced with more powerful mass surveillance
systems, as evidenced by documents provided by Edward Snowden.
The refrain that the NSA collects “just metadata” now? “That’s false,” Binney
says. “I put this ​in a sworn affidavit that I submitted to court. All emails
are collected and the content of about 80 percent of everyone’s phone calls are
recorded. Currently, I think phone calls are stored for about 20 to 30 days.
Although, if you’re targeted for surveillance, you’re screwed. Everything
collected, everything stored.”
Binney alludes to even more extreme intelligence practices that are not yet
public knowledge, including the collection of Americans’ medical data, the
collection and use of client-attorney conversations, and law enforcement
agencies’ “direct access,” without oversight, to NSA databases.
Vanee Vines, an NSA spokeswoman, would not comment directly on Binney’s claims,
but suggested that I “contact other U.S. institutions about law enforcement and
other domestic matters.”
She added that the United States “is not spying on ordinary people who don’t
threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into
account in our policies and procedures.”
Signals intelligence, she said, is only carried out “where there is a foreign
intelligence or counterintelligence purpose for doing so,” including “terrorist
plots from al-Qaeda, ISIL, and others; the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction; foreign aggression against ourselves and our allies; and
international criminal organizations.”
Why would the NSA, I asked Binney, want to collect a phone conversation that
Average Joe has with his mother, for instance? “Because Average Joe can turn
into somebody objecting, and you don’t want any opposition. You can’t allow
those people to organize,” he said.
So, what kind of encryption technology does Binney use to communicate now?
“Nothing,” he says. Although Binney broadly agrees with Snowden that “crypto
works,” he knows that the NSA circumvents encryption by targeting the computer
systems of recipients of encrypted mail, and sometimes even breaks encryption,
as revealed in the Snowden documents.
In his acceptance speech, Binney thanked Snowden for his disclosures about
widespread surveillance, since now he and other whistleblowers “can talk about
it more easily.” Despite ​the government’s attempt to gag whistleblowers, he
added, “I will not give up my First Amendment right to free speech, particularly
to speak of information already in the public domain, for anyone.”
The bugging devices we were observing in the Stasi museum looked almost
comedic next to the kind of tools Binney was talking about. The Stasi’s weird
little watering cans with hidden cameras, plug sockets with listening devices,
and steam machines for opening intercepted mail, they looked crude compared to
the all-seeing surveillance apparatus constructed by today’s government spies.
I thought we were visiting Stasi HQ to glimpse at a dystopian past, but the more
I spoke to my fellow museum-goers, it felt like we were looking back at the
beginning of something.
Silkie Carlo is a London based journalist, musician, and co-author of the
book, Information Security for Journalists. [This story originally appeared at
Motherboard.]
Examining the Stasi, Seeing the NSA
Exclusive: For many years, the East German Stasi was viewed as the most
totalitarian of intelligence services, relentlessly spying on its citizens
during the Cold War. But the Stasi’s capabilities pale in comparison to what the
NSA can now do, notes former U.S. intelligence analyst Elizabeth Murray.
By Elizabeth Murray
On a chilly morning in late January 2015,
an unlikely assortment of former U.S.
and U.K. intelligence officers gathered at the former headquarters of the Stasi,
the former East Germany’s Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit
[Ministry of State
Security], for a tour of Berlin’s “Stasi Museum.”
The delegation – which included ex-officers from the National Security Agency,
the Central Intelligence Agency and British MI5, who count themselves among the
members of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) – had
traveled to Berlin to confer the 2015 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in
Intelligence on former NSA senior technical director-turned-whistleblower
William Binney, for his role in exposing the extent of mass surveillance of
ordinary citizens in the United States.
In accepting the award, Binney said he resigned from the NSA in 2001 after
realizing that the agency was “purposefully violating the Constitution” with its
“bulk acquisition of data against U.S. citizens … first against U.S. citizens by
the way, not foreigners.”
Binney had worked the Soviet target for nearly 30 years at NSA, “so it was easy
for me to recognize the danger” to democracy and individual freedom posed by
bulk data collection, “that’s what the Stasi did, the KGB did it – every
totalitarian state down through history did that” (albeit with a lot less
technological power than was available to the NSA).
Now, in a strangely fitting yet ironic twist, Binney stood among fellow
whistleblowers in the entrance foyer at the spy headquarters of what was once
the world’s foremost totalitarian surveillance state, one of whose former
operatives, Wolfgang Schmidt, noted wistfully that the current extent of mass
surveillance of the domestic U.S. population would have been a “dream come true”
for the Stasi.
As Stasi Museum tour guide Julia Simoncelli described the inner workings of the
East German intelligence service in great detail, it was telling to observe the
facial expressions of Binney and his whistleblower colleagues as Simoncelli
discussed what had been Stasi’s equivalent of the current U.S. “Insider Threat”
program and the psychological levers used to manipulate citizens into informing
on one another.
“They [the Stasi] figured out that there was a technique far more effective than
force or violence to convince people to inform on one another, and that was to
persuade them that doing so would be ‘good for them’, i.e., a place for their
child at university, career advancement, an apartment, access to Western
luxuries, et cetera,” explained Simoncelli.
The Stasi also made a point of uncovering what motivated a particular person,
including what he/she feared most (anyone who has read Orwell’s 1984’ or seen
the film “The Lives of Others” will have seen vivid examples of how such
information can be exploited).
Annie Machon, a Sam Adams Associate and former MI5 officer who lived in exile
for three years after blowing the whistle on MI5 illegalities along with her
then-partner David Shayler, commented that the techniques used by the Stasi
“brought back a lot of memories for me from the 1990s. Despite it being the
analog [versus digital] era, it was startling how much personal data they could
capture, and how much worse it is now for all of us.”
She observed that the Stasi Museum is “a potent warning from history,” adding
that “the sense of loss of privacy in your own home, when phoning your family,
and when talking to friends who may potentially be turned against you is
corrosive to the human spirit.”
Machon noted that while the former East Germany “is always excoriated as the
worst police state ever,” MI5 was deploying “exactly the same intrusive
techniques as the Stasi against hundreds of thousands of political activists in
the U.K. for decades, and only stopped in the mid-1990s.The penetration levels
were not as high per capita, nor were people snatched and interrogated then
(unless they were Irish) but the paranoid, barricade mentality was equivalent.”
Retired U.S. Army Major Todd Pierce, who served on the defense team for two
Guantanamo Prison detainees in his capacity as a Judge Advocate General (JAG)
officer, stated that “it was the Stasi that led the way in torture techniques,
with us merely adopting theirs.”
The Stasi, Pierce said, “even led the way in teaching us about kidnappingrenditions, as they would kidnap West Germans and rendition them to East Germany
for trial by military court (Military Commissions).”
Former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley, a previous recipient of the Sam Adams
Award and Time Magazine’s 2002 Person of the Year for her role in exposing the
FBI failure to share information that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks,
commented that “what jumped out at me from that [Stasi Museum] tour in comparing
all the excessive spying on the personal lives of citizens and oppression and
abuse during that period of East German history was that, despite the use of
different ideologies, religions and loyalty groups, and despite the use of new
spy technologies, what remains constant is this form of ‘control-freak’
perceived need for domination.
“Those in power do tend to be ‘true believers’ in their own noble cause
justifying their terribly wrongful, illegal methods.”
Rowley added that current “FBI-CIA methods against the Muslim community in the
United States are not much different [from Stasi tactics], most likely also
assisted by intelligence unlawfully gained through electronic surveillance to
extort and coerce collusion.”
And, in earlier comments during the Sam Adams Award ceremony, former NSA senior
executive Thomas Drake, who won the Sam Adams Award in 2011 jointly with former
Justice Department attorney Jesselyn Radack, reflected: “Here we are, on what
used to be the front lines of the Cold War, facing the greatest threat in terms
of what we’ve created electronically which is the real prospect of turnkey
tyranny of a digital kind.”
Drake said he “never imagined that the model of the Stasi, which was to know
everything, would turn into the collect-it-all digital dragnet.”
As the former intelligence officers-turned-whistleblowers walked among the wellpreserved offices and conference rooms of a former totalitarian state’s internal
spy apparatus, the sense of deja vu and irony of what the United States of
America has become was clearly not lost on any of them.
Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near
East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career
in the U.S. government. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
NSA’s Binney Honored for Integrity
Retired National Security Agency official William Binney, who challenged
decisions to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the government’s massive — and
wasteful — collection of electronic data, faced career and legal repercussions.
Because of his courage, he is being honored by former intelligence officials.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is pleased to
announce that it has selected retired NSA Technical Director William “Bill”
Binney to receive its 2015 award for integrity in intelligence. The public is
invited to attend the award presentation scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. on Jan.
22at the Berlin Moscow venue, Unter den Linden 52, 10117, Berlin, Germany.
After serving four years in the Army Security Agency during the Vietnam War,
Binney joined the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1970.
He worked there as a
Russia specialist in the operations side of intelligence, starting as an analyst
and ending as Technical Director of NSA’s World Geopolitical & Military Analysis
organization.
He was also co-founder of the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center where he
worked with Ed Loomis, Kirk Wiebe, and others to solve the issues of velocity,
variety, and volume of information in the Information Age. Having expertise in
intelligence analysis, traffic analysis, systems analysis, knowledge management,
and mathematics, Binney has been described as one of the best analysts,
mathematicians and code breakers in the NSA’s history.
As a 36-year intelligence agency veteran, William Binney resigned from the NSA
in 2001 and became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a datamonitoring program he had helped develop were being used to spy on
Americans. Binney explained that he “could not stay after the NSA began
purposefully violating the Constitution.”
In September 2002, he, along with colleagues,
Wiebe and Loomis, asked the U.S.
Defense Department Inspector General to investigate the NSA for allegedly
wasting “millions and millions of dollars” on Trailblazer, a system intended to
analyze data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had
been one of the inventors of an alternative, less intrusive and far less
expensive system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen
instead. Trailblazer was declared a failure in 2005.
Later, Binney, Loomis and Wiebe, along with Diane Roark, a senior staffer with
the House Permanent Select Subcommittee on Intelligence staffer, complained to
Congress regarding the fact that NSA was illegally spying on U.S. citizens.
Binney became one of several people investigated as part of an inquiry into the
2005 (Pulitzer prize-winning) exposé by New York Times reporters James Risen
and Eric Lichtblau) on the agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.
Although Binney was told he was cleared of wrongdoing after three interviews
with FBI agents beginning in March 2007, a dozen agents with guns drawn appeared
at his house a few months later, one of whom entered his bathroom and pointed
his weapon at Binney, who was coming out of the shower.
In that raid, the FBI confiscated a desktop computer, disks, and personal and
business records. The following day, NSA revoked his security clearance, forcing
him to close a business he ran with Loomis and Wiebe.
Despite a serious health condition which has left him a double amputee, Bill
Binney is tireless, pledging to spend the remainder of his years speaking out
and working to reform the gross governmental illegality and stupidity of
intercepting trillions and trillions of communications “transactions”
of innocent persons’ phone calls, emails and other forms of data.
“I should apologize to the American people,” Binney told Jane Mayer of The New
Yorker. “It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the
whole world.”
Thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, documents detailing the top-secret
surveillance program were published that corroborate what Binney had long said.
Binney was subsequently called as a witness in U.S. lawsuits challenging the
legality of this massive surveillance and also testified to European bodies
including the German Bundestag’s NSA Inquiry Commission, deploring the fact that
“we have moved away from the collection of (relevant) data to the collection of
(non-relevant) data of the 7 billion people on our planet.”
Binney fears the data is being used to “map” or build real-time profiles of
innocent individuals. “So that now I can pull your entire life together from all
those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time,” Binney told
documentarian Laura Poitras in “The Program.” Binney added that the purpose of
the program is “to be able to monitor what people are doing” and with whom they
are doing it.
More background information regarding the “Sam Adams Award for Integrity in
Intelligence” that has been given annually since its inception over 12 years
ago as a way to honor the intelligence work of CIA analyst Sam Adams during the
Vietnam War is available at http://samadamsaward.ch/. The story of CIA analyst
Sam Adams is detailed at http://samadamsaward.ch/history-of-the-sam-adamsaward/.
It is hoped the award will serve to encourage more integrity in intelligence
work — as well as more courage on the part of those in position to blow the
whistle when that work violates the Constitution.
Stifling Dissent on the Upper East Side
Exclusive: Modern U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine doesn’t just target people in
faraway lands where the U.S. military is battling some uprising. It also takes
aim at Americans whose dissent might undermine those wars, possibly explaining
the strange arrest of Ray McGovern, writes retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.
By Todd E. Pierce
Did COIN or counterinsurgency doctrine come to New York’s Upper East Side in
late October? One might think so when a critic of retired Gen. David Petraeus
was denied entry to a public event and then roughly arrested by New York police.
On Oct. 30, this generation’s COIN deity David Petraeus and acolytes John Nagl
and Max Boot were to discuss “national security” at an event open to the public
at the Upper East Side Y. However, when former CIA analyst and war critic Ray
McGovern arrived with ticket in hand, he was “neutralized,” as the COIN
practitioners might put it.
McGovern was greeted by a security official who addressed McGovern by name and
seemed to be expecting him. The security official told McGovern he was “not
welcome” and denied him entry, ticket or no ticket. Not only did the security
officer seem to expect McGovern, but NYPD reinforcements were on hand to arrest
McGovern on charges of trespassing, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.
The 75-year-old ex-CIA analyst, who was suffering from a shoulder injury, had
his arms pulled painfully behind him as he was handcuffed, causing him to scream
in pain. He was then transported to jail where he spent the night on a metal
cot.
McGovern wrote afterward: “But one mystery lingers. The ‘organs of state
security’ (the words used by the Soviets to refer to their intelligence/security
services) were lying in wait for me when I walked into the Y? Why? How on earth
did they know I was coming?”
McGovern’s answer to his own question was that it would seem the group that he
was staying with was the target of an intelligence collection operation. That is
what one would expect the authorities to do to “counter insurgents” in a foreign
nation where U.S. forces operate, as Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Manual
explains. Or, you might see it in a nation under an authoritarian political
system, what we used to call a Police State before we Americans adopted those
same methods.
But the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is supposed to prevent the
suppression of public speech by government or quasi-government officials. That
was the principle at least, until the 9/11 attacks “changed everything.”
Unlimited Powers
On Oct. 23, 2001, six weeks after those attacks, Justice Department officials
Robert Delahunty and John Yoo signed an Office of Legal Counsel Opinion entitled
“Authority for Use of Military Force To Combat Terrorist Activities Within the
United States,” essentially giving President George W. Bush, as the “Commander
in Chief,” the power to impose martial law.
Yoo/Delahunty wrote in that opinion that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to
military operations within the United States, which would logically include
operations by the National Security Agency, an intelligence agency within the
Department of Defense, i.e., surveillance operations against the U.S.
population.
Yoo/Delahunty also claimed: “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be
subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. ‘When a nation is
at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to
its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and
that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.’”
This assertion that the Constitution’s safeguards of a citizen’s rights must be
set aside at a time of war even one as vague as the “war on terror” and must be
replaced by the prerogative power of the military authorities, with the
“Commander in Chief” at the top,
acting under a theory of unlimited
presidential powers, is descriptive of martial law.
Or as the Supreme Court once said, “what is termed martial law, but which would
be better called martial rule, for it is little else than the will of the
commanding general sometimes advanced by men, with more zeal than wisdom and is
at variance with every just notion of a free government.”
All the available evidence, principally the DOD/NSA’s spying-on-citizens
program, would indicate that martial law was instituted under the Bush regime
and remains in place with continued domestic DOD/NSA spying under the Obama
regime. That authority for domestic military operations would logically include
COIN, a menu of tactics so extensive that it covers everything from full-scale
army operations to the control of undesired political speech.
This is what Ray McGovern can be said to have encountered at the Upper East Side
Y. It is irrelevant that no military personnel were on hand, other than retired
military officers. Martial law is not limited to only the military exercising
the prerogative power of the Commander in Chief; it is most successful when
citizens themselves take on the task of enforcing the “Commander’s intent,” in
whole or in part.
Nor is it necessary that martial law be publicly declared. For example, the
removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast during World War II at the
instigation of General John L. DeWitt was an example of martial law. It wasn’t
called that for political purposes, just as it is not called that now, even
though the military, via the DOD’s NSA, continues to conduct a military
operation against U.S. citizens.
The McGovern Case
So here is the logic of a COIN operation and how that can hypothetically be seen
as having been executed against Ray McGovern: Part of COIN theory deals with
control of information, sometimes called “information warfare,” in which the
enemy’s propaganda and other communications are blocked or undermined and your
own messaging is left unchallenged.
From the 2014 version of the COIN Manual, or FM 3-24, “Information Operations”
are defined as information-related capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt,
or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and potential adversaries while
protecting our own.” Part of the strategy is for “our own” side to influence a
“target audience” while making sure the enemy is frustrated in similar attempts.
At the Oct. 30 event, Petraeus, Nagl and Boot given the role they’ve played
promoting COIN might very easily see their public speaking through a COIN lens.
Thus, their listeners that evening would constitute a “target audience” whom the
speakers clearly intended to influence. And, Ray McGovern by planning to
challenge Petraeus during the Q-and-A could be viewed as the “enemy” or at least
someone aiding the “enemy” cause.
McGovern, though a longtime intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army and the CIA,
has emerged as an internationally known antiwar political activist who, in 2006,
publicly challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about his false statements
regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a confrontation that led evening
news shows, energized domestic critics of the Iraq War and arguably in
Petraeus’s view undermined public support for the war.
FM 3-24 explains, “Threat characteristics involve the activities, and tactics of
an insurgency. Tactics for an insurgency include political activities. The use
of political activities to influence a society is another political activity of
an insurgency.”
These activities include “Demonstrations, propaganda, strikes, and civil
disobedience. Propaganda is one of the most important political tools an
insurgency has” by providing the means for an insurgency “to communicate a
message, often political, to the population.” This allows an “insurgency to
create a narrative of why the government’s actions are not legitimate.”
In other words, McGovern might have asked a pointed question that would counter
the message that Petraeus was seeking to convey to the audience, particularly
that his COIN policies have protected America from its “enemies” and thus must
be continued.
McGovern said his hope was to ask Petraeus, who had been responsible for
training the Iraqi army, why that training had failed to prevent the Iraqi army
from fleeing the battlefield when confronted by militants from the Islamic
State. “Will you come out of retirement and try to do it better this time to
train the Iraqi forces?” McGovern said, describing his intended question.
In other words, McGovern’s question might have popped the inflated bubble around
Petraeus’s reputation and raised doubts about whether the general’s
counterinsurgency warfare had actually done much to protect Americans.
Repression Coming Home
But one may ask, this was at the 92nd St. Y in New York City, not an overseas
country where the U.S. is currently applying COIN? FM 3-24 explains, however: “A
center of gravity (emphasis in original) is the source of power that provides
moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act. Counterinsurgents
must understand their own center of gravity and that of the host nation. In many
cases, political support is the strategic center of gravity for the U.S.”
That is, if political support among the American people for the U.S. military’s
counterinsurgent policies is lost, then the insurgents win, according to this
COIN theory. Much of this thinking stems from the supposed “lessons” of Vietnam
where many generals blamed the U.S. defeat not on their own failings but on the
success of “enemy propaganda.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the Vietcong targeted the U.S. media and
American antiwar activists, causing the public to lose faith in and patience
with the war. After the war finally ended, Gen. William Westmoreland and other
generals complained that the U.S. news media gave moral support to the enemy
through critical reporting about the war and helped turn the American people
against the conflict.
But the American people didn’t need the media to tell them about this failed
war; they had evidence from the many funerals of dead servicemen and anecdotal
stories from returning soldiers. Subsequent studies, including by U.S. military
historians, have further debunked the military’s “stabbed-in-the-back”
complaint, blaming the defeat instead on an unwinnable strategy and the
staggering loss of life.
But the “enemy within” myth continued to dominate much of U.S. military’s
thinking about the Vietnam War, including Petraeus’s updated counterinsurgency
manuals and subsequent ones. “In a counterinsurgency, the insurgent often
targets the U.S. population with themes and messages concerning the insurgency,”
FM 3-24 asserts. In other words, American anti-war activists, who question the
U.S. government’s own propaganda themes or who give credence to the arguments
from the other side, are still being viewed as “enemies within” who must be
neutralized.
Of course, this outlook overlooks what has been a central tenet of al-Qaeda’s
strategy to draw the United States deeper into the Middle East in order to
exhaust America financially and militarily, to keep the U.S. locked in this
conflict until it suffers a devastating strategic defeat much as was done to the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But to military COIN theorists, like
Petraeus and Boot, al-Qaeda’s scheme is outside the scope of their analytical
ability.
The Information Battlefield
So, in the minds of the totalitarian-oriented COIN theorists, the war is really
about information and the battlefield is everywhere. According to this doctrine,
“Insurgent support activities include communications. These support activities
sustain insurgencies and allow for both military and political actions. They are
enabled by an insurgency’s ability to generate popular support. These networks
can include support from other nations or from population groups outside the
country.”
This paranoid viewpoint is, of course, not unprecedented. Indeed, it has been
common for authoritarian systems to label dissent against their war policies as
support for insurgents or other “subversives.” This attitude has been a common
denominator of nearly all despotic military regimes from Hitler’s Germany to
Pinochet’s Chile to modern Egypt under a variety of military rulers: dissent
equals treason.
In fact, the COIN Manual cites as an example the case of the Tamil Tigers and
the alleged support these insurgents received from civilians of the Tamil
diaspora following ethnic riots against the Tamil people that drove many to flee
Sri Lanka. According to the manual, this global diaspora then became a major
part of the Tamil Tigers’ “propaganda network,” a statement that would be a bit
like charging German Jewish émigrés pre-World War II of being part of an
American “propaganda network” for telling the truth about conditions in Germany.
FM 3-24 does acknowledge that a prerequisite for an insurgency is “Motive” but
adds that grievances alone are not sufficient to spur an insurgency. It takes
leaders “to build a compelling narrative that links grievances to a political
agenda and mobilizes the population to support a violent social movement. When
grievances mobilize a population, they are a root cause of an insurgency. The
presence of a foreign force can be the root cause of an insurgency.”
While all that is well and good and would apply to almost all political
uprisings including the American Revolution the lessons drawn from this current
obsession with “counterinsurgency” veers off into some dangerous directions.
Behind it is the assumption that virtually all insurgencies at least those not
initiated by Washington deserve countering.
Yet, sometimes, indeed often, insurgencies reflect the urgent desires of an
oppressed people for justice, meaning that modern counterinsurgency warfare, as
practiced by Gen. Petraeus and other U.S. strategists, can become just one more
boot on the people’s neck.
It also follows that the COIN’s obsessive practitioners will begin to detect the
enemy within the United States, since the information war is global and the
counterinsurgency operation must protect itself against a loss of political will
among the American people. Thus, a citizen who asserts that the U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq was to blame for the Iraqi insurgency could be accused of
enabling the insurgency, being part of the enemy’s “propaganda network.”
In counterinsurgency thinking, “external support” for an insurgency can be
something as vague as “moral support.”
The Insurgent ‘Network’
Another pertinent dynamic identified in the COIN Manual is “Organizational and
Operational Patterns,” which can be almost as ambiguous as “moral support.” It
is explained that “Insurgents may be organized into networks,” a series of
“direct and indirect ties from one entity to a collection of entities. Insurgent
networking extends the range and variety of both insurgent military and
political actions. Networks of communications, people, and activities exist in
all populations and have a measurable impact on the organized governance of a
population and, consequently, military operations.”
So “networks” are not limited to insurgents inside the foreign nation where the
insurgency is active; these “direct and indirect ties” can extend to all
populations and include a variety of friendly, neutral and threat networks, each
meriting its own treatment.
Individuals in a network are called “actors or nodes.” Connections between nodes
are links, and a link between two people is a “dyad.” Understanding dyads is
essential to understand the nature of an insurgency, per the FM 3-24’s doctrine.
This is accomplished through “network mapping, charting, and social network
analysis,” which are “intelligence products that can aid in refined analysis and
course of action developments.” Intelligence collection for this purpose would
be in the manner of total surveillance, electronically and digitally, as the NSA
is alleged to be engaged in globally, including inside the United States.
So what does a counterinsurgent do when encountering a “network?” FM 3-24
prescribes the solution: attack the network.
“Attack the network operations consist of activities that employ lethal and
nonlethal means to support friendly networks, influence neutral networks, and
neutralize threat networks.” Thus, an individual node, a dyad or a larger group
providing external moral support to an insurgency whose root cause is the
presence of U.S. forces in that country or region would be defined as a “threat
network” which would need to be “neutralized.”
At least one type of network as described in the COIN Manual, “friendly,” and
maybe the second sort, “neutral,” were present at the 92nd Street Y when Ray
McGovern approached with a ticket in hand. As an antiwar activist who has called
for U.S. troop withdrawals from countries where U.S. forces have been engaged in
counterinsurgency, Petraeus’s COIN doctrine and its totalitarian view of the
world would put McGovern into the “threat network” as perhaps a “peripheral
node,” even though he does not support any of the insurgents in those conflicts.
But actual support is not required to become part of a “threat network,” just
behavior that causes trouble for the counterinsurgency strategy or that could be
interpreted as undermining the information warfare campaign against the enemy or
that could be seen as lending “moral support.” And, according to the COIN
Manual, these “threat networks” must be neutralized to protect friendly forces
and populations while creating time and space for other counterinsurgency
operations to succeed.
While the talks by Petraeus, Nagl and Boot could be expected to bolster
“friendly networks,” McGovern threatened to undermine that effort by posing a
critical or embarrassing question to Petraeus. Thus, the doctrine called for
taking “direct actions against threats, reducing their functionality and impact,
in order to set conditions for supporting friendly networks and influencing
neutral networks. The goal is to change the perceptions and behaviors of neutral
audiences to support the achievement of U.S., multinational, and host nation
objectives.”
Getting in the Way
According to the doctrine, it is not necessary that the forces neutralizing a
node in a network be military; in fact, “If the police have a reasonable
reputation for competence and impartiality, it may be better for them to execute
urban raids than military forces because the population is more likely to view
their application of force as legitimate.”
Of course, we can’t say for sure at this time what prompted the preemptive
strike against McGovern and his troublesome question. The precise scenario of
who instigated the arrest might emerge from future court proceedings or the
details might always remain a mystery.
Perhaps the incident was not organized by senior practitioners of
counterinsurgency strategy, even though the speakers that night were well versed
in these theories. Another possible interpretation is that some individuals who
simply despise dissent a right-wing goon squad in the mold of old-time fascist
storm troopers took it upon themselves to squelch McGovern’s attempt to exercise
his First Amendment rights.
Either analysis could be correct and might not represent much of a distinction
because COIN doctrine has become something of a secular religion in many
political circles in the United States, a disdain for people who challenge the
government’s assertion of “national security.” That anger at anti-war dissent
has percolated from the top down and gained an official imprimatur through the
“war on terror.”
After all, COIN amounts to the exercise of military rule over a given area while
all forms of force from full-scale army operations to paramilitary killings to
dissemination of propaganda to political activity are used to crush the
resistance.
nd
In the case of neutralizing Ray McGovern at the 92
Street Y on Oct. 30 a
mission carried out by the NYPD and private security operatives the tactics of
COIN doctrine were on display. So was the possible motive: the need to suppress
McGovern’s question that might have undercut the U.S. government’s
counterinsurgency goals.
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG)
Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the
Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions.
Filling the Blanks in Snowden’s
‘Citizenfour’
Exclusive: To grasp the full story of Citizenfour, the documentary on Edward
Snowden’s decision to expose NSA spying, you must go back four decades to see
how the reality slowly dawned on Americans that their privacy and freedoms were
at risk, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
In 1974, at about the time President Richard Nixon was resigning due to the
Watergate scandal, director Francis Coppola released his haunting, compelling
film about electronic surveillance, The Conversation. Centered within the lives
of surveillance technicians and the powerful corporate officers who employed
them, Coppola depicted a nightmare world: one fraught with the invisible threat
of electronic spying at almost any place, at any time including in public parks
and inside private hotel rooms.
The film had a remarkable double twist at the end. The protagonist, played by
Gene Hackman, has found out that, unbeknownst to him, the people who hired him
used his work to stage a killing. In turn, they find out about his dangerous
knowledge. The long last scene depicts Hackman literally dismantling his
apartment, trying to find the microphone his murderous employers have placed in
his room.
Coppola has said he never realized his film would play out against the backdrop
of the Watergate scandal, which also had electronic surveillance at its center,
this time politically, with the Republicans spying on the Democratic campaign
headquarters for the 1972 presidential race.
In the wake of the Watergate imbroglio, some of the people on the Watergate
Committee, such as Sen. Howard Baker, were not satisfied with the congressional
investigation led by Sen. Sam Ervin. Baker felt that the role of the CIA in the
two-year long ordeal had been glossed over.
This, plus the exposure of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton’s
domestic operations, gave birth to the Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank
Church, D-Idaho. It was the first full-scale inquiry into the crimes of the FBI
and CIA.
As a result of the publicity given to that committee (back then such events were
actually covered in the U.S. news media, not mocked and ignored), some reforms
in the monitoring of the intelligence agencies were enacted. After these reforms
were put in place, the Senate decided that there should also be some limits and
controls placed upon electronic surveillance over alleged threats from domestic
enemy operatives inside the United States.
The Birth of FISA
Therefore, a handful of senators, including Ted Kennedy, banded together in 1977
to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The act allowed for
surveillance of up to one year without a warrant over foreign targets. If one
was not foreign, but an American citizen, a warrant had to be granted within 72
hours.
There was an eponymous special class of courts known as the FISA courts set up
to deal with these cases. To review and issue the warrants, 11 judges are chosen
by the Supreme Court for a period of seven years. When deciding to grant a
warrant, the court usually consists of three judges.
The idea was that no American should be spied upon unless the government showed
some kind of “probable cause” that the American citizen was an agent of a
foreign power or terrorist organization. In other words, the judges were to
provide some safeguard against unwarranted and unjustified spying by the
government, albeit with their deliberations in secret and without an adversarial
proceeding.
Frank Church had seen the awesome power of the FBI, CIA and NSA up close. He had
seen what people like longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had done to Martin
Luther King Jr., trying to coerce the civil rights leader over his personal
life. Church had been exposed to MH CHAOS, the CIA’s domestic spying on radicals
and the alternative press in the 1960s and 1970s. He had seen the documents on
COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate and then undermine leftist, activist
groups like the Black Panthers.
And Church had been one of the first outsiders to get an in-depth look at just
what the technological capabilities of the National Security Agency were. Even
back in 1975, Church was very much impressed and, at the same time, he was quite
fearful. He made the following memorable quote in regards to the powers of the
NSA:
“If a dictator ever took over, the NSA could enable it to impose a total
tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. That capability could at any
time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any
privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone
conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.
There would be no place to hide.
“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity
that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this
agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and
under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the
abyss from which there is no return.”
Spying on Dissent
Those comments were probably made because Church found out about Project
Minaret, an early and limited attempt at domestic surveillance which targeted
the communications of famous personages who criticized the Vietnam War, e.g.,
himself and King.
Project Minaret lasted from 1967 to 1973 and ended up targeting about 1,650
American citizens. These names were on Watch Lists made up by the executive
intelligence agencies. There was no judicial oversight and no warrants were
obtained.
With this in mind, Church, Ted Kennedy and others were seeking to balance the
threat of domestic infiltration by foreign powers with some semblance of legal
strictures to protect our fundamental freedoms, so that Coppola’s Kafkaesque
vision did not become an American reality.
This imperfect balance was maintained for about two decades, from the creation
of the FISA courts in 1978 to the start of the new millennium. Very few people
had ever even heard of FISA courts or understood what they did. Then came George
W. Bush and the Al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As the saying went,
“everything changed.”
The vast expansion of the NSA’s spying began within a few months of those
attacks. But the American public did not know about it until December 2005. In
fact, President Bush appears to have lied about the program in public when he
made two speeches in April 2004 in which he said any wiretaps his administration
employed necessitated a court order.
He then added, “When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking
about getting a court order before we do so.” He made the same claim at least
three other times.
Then on Dec. 15, 2005, the New York Times published a story that revealed
President Bush had allowed the NSA to “eavesdrop on Americans and others inside
the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without courtapproved warrants.” One source for the story said, “This is really a sea change.
It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches.”
The story was written by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. And it was revealed
that the Times had sat on it for more than a year. Why? Because the White House
pressured the newspaper not to print it. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Spying and
the Public’s Right to Know.”]
Scaring the Times
Bush and his aides had used all kinds of intimidation tactics to keep the story
out of print. From saying the paper would be held responsible for any upcoming
successful terrorist attack to threatening another Pentagon Papers-style
lawsuit.
A key reason that the Times changed its mind and published the story in December
2005 was that Risen was including the information in his book, State of War,
scheduled for release in January 2006. The Times editors judged that the
potential embarrassment from continuing to sit on such a newsworthy story
outweighed the risks of offending the Bush administration.
The hidden controversy about the story reveals that a number of people inside
the NSA and the Intelligence Community were disturbed by what Bush had
authorized them to do. And although Risen and Lichtblau used anonymous sources,
the government apparently suspects that one major source for them was Justice
Department lawyer Thomas Tamm and another was Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, a CIA
operations officer.
Sterling is now under indictment for violation of the Espionage Act. Tamm’s
house was raided by the FBI in 2007. Charges were not filed against Tamm,
although the investigation continued until 2011.
It turned out that the release of the Times story and the subsequent legal
skirmishes over the whistleblowers set a pattern in this legal area. Contrary to
popular belief, Edward Snowden was not the first NSA employee to reveal the
illegality of classified programs in the wake of 9/11, just the highest profile
one. The drama around Snowden’s revelations also reflected the reality that, as
the years rolled on, the scope of NSA spying grew exponentially.
The program that Bush authorized in late 2001 was titled STELLARWIND. It allowed
“data mining” of Internet activity, e-mail communications, phone calls financial
transactions. The fact that this was done on a massive scale precluded the
formal vetting done by a FISA court.
Bush’s rationale for this program was that the U.S. had failed to stop the 9/11
attacks because its defenses were too timid, not aggressive enough. For
instance, in the year 2001, FISA granted 932 warrants. What Bush was doing
dwarfed that.
STELLARWIND was briefly discontinued in 2004 when Deputy Attorney General James
Comey refused to renew it while his boss John Ashcroft was in the hospital. To
his credit, when visited in the hospital by Bush’s representatives, Attorney
General Ashcroft himself refused to sign. Bush then got FISA court chief judge
Collen Kollar-Kotelly to approve the program — 30 months after it started. (The
Guardian June 27, 2013)
A Mainstream Scandal
With the release of the Times story in December 2005 and Risen’s book, State of
War, a month later, the controversy was propelled into the major media onto the
front pages and into the lead stories of TV news shows. That’s when the real
trouble began.
The divisive issues were those of civil liberties, civil disobedience and the
fundamental one: were what FISA, Bush and the NSA doing constitutional? Or, if
under the cover of an undeclared “war on terror,” were Frank Church’s fears and
Coppola’s nightmare vision now coming to fruition?
William Binney was one of the very first to protest from the inside in the wake
of the New York Times story. Binney had 32 years in the NSA and was considered
one of the finest cryptographic analysts they had. He had devised a program
called THINTHREAD against incoming foreign communications. But the Bush White
House ordered the NSA to drop the privacy controls on the program that
guaranteed Americans would not be surveilled.
Since Binney understood that spying on Americans was illegal without a warrant,
he and his friend and colleague Kirk Wiebe began making unwelcome entreaties to
Congress and the Defense Department, even a Supreme Court justice. (Vanity Fair,
“The Snowden Saga” May 2014)
As a reward for “going through channels,” Binney and Wiebe were flagged as leak
suspects with their NSA superiors steering the FBI in their direction, Binney
said in an email to me. Binney added that the NSA “apparently got our names form
the DOD IG’s [Inspector General’s] office – as we were the ones to file the DOD
IG complaint about NSA fraud waste and corruption.” (Bureaucratically, the NSA
is under the Defense Department.)
Binney had his house raided by FBI agents. He was dragged out of the shower with
a gun aimed at him. The excuse for the raid was the agents were looking for the
sources for the New York Times story.
NSA Whistleblowers
Thomas Drake was another NSA official who had complained about NSA abuses to
other government agencies. He then went to the newspapers, specifically the
Baltimore Sun. Drake was formally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. The
government had no real case under that statute, but the expense and time of the
legal ordeal essentially broke up Drake’s life. Today he is employed by an Apple
Store. (ibid)
But the role of Drake goes much further than the Vanity Fair article took it.
That article stated that Drake had exposed waste, fraud and abuse at NSA, which
is only part of the story. He went much further than that.
In a memorandum sent to President Obama on Jan. 7, 2014, predating the Vanity
Fair piece, Drake revealed a major reason why he was charged and why others,
like Binney, resigned. This memorandum was signed by Binney, Drake, former NSA
division chief Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe, former NSA senior analyst. To my
knowledge, Consortiumnews.com was the only outlet that has printed it in its
entirety.
The document states that National Intelligence Director James Clapper lied to
Sen. Ron Wyden on March 12, 2013, during a formal session of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. Wyden asked if the NSA collected any type of data on
millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Clapper replied in the negative.
Yet this collection was going on since STELLARWIND.
What the memo revealed was that the whole pubic scandal about STELLARWIND was
unnecessary because Binney, Loomis and Wiebe had devised a much better program
called THINTHREAD. This did much the same thing, but it had encryption formulas
entered into it so that records relating to American citizens would remain
secret at least until a FISA court could decide on whether or not probable cause
existed to open them.
The program was also cross-relational: “It united data associated with
terrorists/criminals from all databases.” And it was relatively
cheap. THINTHREAD was developed in-house for a paltry $3 million and could be
fully deployed for about $300 million. But NSA Director Michael Hayden vetoed
this program in favor of an outside contractor’s program called TRAILBLAZER, a
decision made three weeks before the 9/11
attacks.
Bloating a Budget
One of the bureaucratic “advantages” of TRAILBLAZER was that it cost more than
ten times as much as THINTHREAD and allowed the NSA and various members of
Congress thus to show that they were doing more about terrorism and helping out
some favored contractors even though TRAILBLAZER ultimately proved a failure and
a waste of some $3.8 billion.
However, after 9/11, money was really no worry at the NSA. With the FBI and CIA
taking the brunt of the blame for the failure to stop the attacks, Hayden had a
great opportunity to build up the NSA’s budget and image, taking the codebreaking agency into the forefront of the U.S. intelligence community.
After 9/11, Drake tried unsuccessfully to revive THINTHREAD, but failed to
scrape together enough money to complete a THINTHREAD content analysis program
on NSA databases. This was how Drake learned that the NSA’s information on some
of the 9/11 hijackers was not shared outside the agency.
Drake discovered that the NSA had produced a lengthy analytic report that broke
open the entire structure of Al-Qaeda and associated groups, including the
content of phone calls between hijacker Khalid al-Midhar in San Diego with the
known Al-Qaeda safe house communications center in Yemen.
Drake’s information, of course, undermined the whole Bush/Cheney argument that
if the U.S. only had a bulk collection program prior to 9/11, the attacks could
have been prevented. Instead, the problem was an analytical failure to
understand the import of information already collected. Piling on vast amounts
of additional data arguably made the problem worse, burying the analysts in an
unimaginably giant haystack of data and expecting them to locate the crucial
needle.
As Drake noted, it was Vice President Dick Cheney who in pursuit of collecting
as much data as possible got Hayden to violate the Fourth Amendment restrictions
about the NSA’s spying on Americans.
In an ironic twist, Cheney misused the Khalid al-Midhar case transforming it
into an example of how the NSA could have prevented the attacks if it only had
more data when, in fact, the NSA had this information in hand. But contradicting
high-level officials on such sensitive matters will get employees not just
drummed out of an agency, but indicted. As it did Drake.
Snowden and Drake
All of this is apropos to any informed discussion regarding the new film about
Edward Snowden called Citizenfour because Snowden was well aware of what
happened to Drake. Snowden once said people in the NSA were afraid to go public
because of what had been done to Drake.
But why did Snowden approach filmmaker Laura Poitras? In August 2012,
documentary director Poitras released a short film called The Program, which was
billed as a work in progress. It was largely based on interviews with Binney in
which he discusses his work on STELLARWIND and how, unbeknownst to him, that
program was turned on Americans after the 9/11 attacks.
The short film also mentioned a huge depository being built in Utah to house
massive amounts of data gathered by the NSA. Because of her work on this and
other politically relevant films, Poitras told PBS that she was placed on
Homeland Security’s Watch List and that she was frequently detained during
border crossings with her work products searched.
But the first person we see in Citizenfour is not Snowden. Neither is it
Poitras. It is columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald, because of the three
people Snowden tried to get in contact with to publicize the spy scandal at NSA,
Greenwald was the first. (For some reason, the film leaves out the third person:
Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman.)
The film takes its title from the fact that Snowden used that rubric as his
encrypted email signature when he made some of his initial contact attempts. But
Snowden was too mysterious and vague for Greenwald to deal with. Snowden also
wanted him to employ some exotic encryption devices and sent Greenwald tutorials
on how to use them. Greenwald put them aside and Snowden disappeared back into
the blackness of cyberspace. That was in December of 2012.
Reaching Out
In January 2013, Citizenfour tried again, this time with Poitras. Greenwald had
written about Poitras and her problems with Homeland Security, and Snowden had
seen the film about Binney. Unlike Greenwald, Poitras was familiar with PGP
encryption keys and even more exotic devices.
Snowden assured her, “I am a senior member of the intelligence community. This
will not be a waste of your time.” And this is how the film begins, with Poitras
showing blown-up versions of these enigmatic early emails from an anonymous
source claiming to be high up in the Intel community.
Poitras does not want to continue the communications stateside so she goes to
Berlin to learn more about her anonymous informant. At this point, the film
relates part of the Binney story. It also begins to touch upon the misuse of
FISA courts in the massive overreach of NSA and describes the new storage
facility in Utah.
Somehow Poitras was allowed to film a hearing before a court about the
government’s use of a private phone company, AT&T, to monitor thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands of cell phones. The lawyers for the government clearly do
not want to disclose certain aspects of the program. One of the judges gets the
message and says words to the effect that you would rather us not be here at
all.
Poitras cuts to a briefing by an Occupy Wall Street technology leader. He is
telling a small room full of representatives how the government and the NSA can
trace their calls through their cell phones and also their financial
transactions through their bank cards and credit cards. In other words, the
government can trace their actions day by day to put together where they were at
certain times.
Since we know the Occupy Wall Street movement was under surveillance, this scene
has a chilling overtone to it because it cuts to the quick of what Frank Church
was worried about: NSA surveillance turned on domestic targets for purely
political purposes. In this case, it was the suppression of a leftist populist
movement.
Meeting in Hong Kong
From here Poitras cuts to a series of officials, like Clapper, misrepresenting
the reach and impact of programs like STELLARWIND. We then go to Snowden’s
communications requesting a formal meeting with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong
Kong. This happens on June 3, 2013.
Much of this part of the film is shot in Snowden’s rather small rented room in a
Hong Kong hotel. Poitras is never on camera. But Ewen MacAskill from The
Guardian is. Since the paper employed Greenwald, the whole project came under
the UK newspaper’s purview.
The American editor of the paper, Janine Gibson, wanted a veteran presence in
the mix. So MacAskill is the second person in the room as we watch the renegade
NSA employee begin to disclose some of the deepest secrets of the so-called “war
on terror.”
Snowden talks about one of the things that actually disgusted him while working
for the NSA, that the employees actually got to watch drone strikes in real time
on their desktop computers. They would watch the drones approach the target and
then circle it for, at times, hours on end.
Snowden then says to Greenwald that he does not want the issue to be about him
personally. That is not the way he sees it. To Snowden, this is rather a simple
schematic, it’s State Power vs. Citizen Power. He then adds that the great
promise of the internet has now been compromised because of the use of it as a
tool of surveillance.
Here, I should interject an example to convey how real that Snowden’s issues
are. A few months ago, in advance of a major conference on the Kennedy
assassination in Pittsburgh, a former investigator for the House Select
Committee on Assassinations asked me by email how I got a summary of an
interview that he did with the late David Phillips. Like Snowden, he sent me his
communications encrypted. But even at that, I did not wish to reply online.
When I saw him in person, I explained to him how I got the Top Secret summary
but I had held back from communicating this information by email because of the
chilling effect caused by knowledge about programs like STELLARWIND.
Through the PRISM
As the documentary unfolds, Snowden explains two more programs: TEMPORA, and
PRISM. For TEMPORA, the NSA contracted out work to the British GCHQ, the NSA’s
UK equivalent, to tap into hundreds of the world’s fiber optic network cables,
which allows for spying on more than 600 million telephone actions per day.
But beyond that, the program allows the user to intercept emails, check people’s
access to internet web sites, and see what they are posting on Facebook.
This is conducted through the so-called Five Eyes alliance, the loose union of
the intelligence communities of America, England, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. Poitras takes her camera to the wind-blown coast of England and shows
how the GCHQ has attached probes to trans-Atlantic cables when they hit British
soil.
Another program, PRISM, is used by the NSA domestically. Snowden secured a 41frame Power Point presentation on it. The aim of this program is to collect
private electronic data belonging to users of major internet carriers like
Gmail, AOL, Skype and YouTube.
With the exposure of PRISM, Snowden cut out one of the most often used defenses
by both the Bush and Obama administrations, namely, that they were collecting
only “metadata,” that is, only the times and durations of communications. PRISM
collects the contents of emails, online chats, cloud-stored files, and much
more.
In fact, PRISM is so intrusive that there is a dispute over whether or not the
aforementioned companies have agreed to let their clients be spied on. The
companies denied they had cooperated with the NSA. But the government says the
FISA courts have issued orders to do so that are presented to the companies in
question. (See, for example, “Everything You need to Know about Prism”, by T.C.
Sottek and Joshua Kopstein, in The Verge, July 17, 2013)
Brad Smith, a general counsel for Microsoft, gave the game away. Quoted for
attribution, he said, “We believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees our freedom
to share more information with the public, yet the government is stopping us.”
(ibid) In other words, these private companies are now under the thumb of the
NSA. But they don’t want to be held liable for a class-action lawsuit on
invasion of privacy.
Real-Time Access
As Snowden notes in the film, PRISM is not just a recording device. It can be
channeled backward and forwards in time. That is, once the target is identified,
PRISM can access all the information from the company’s databank, from the past
to the present and monitor it into the future.
One of the disclosures made by Snowden that had a huge impact and that the film
properly plays up was the fact that Verizon had agreed to turn over records of
millions of its customers to the NSA and FBI. This court order required the
company to turn over on an “ongoing, daily basis” all phone calls in its
systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. (The
Guardian, June 6, 2013)
This began in April 2013, and was renewed at 90-day intervals. In other words,
it was done under President Obama. Without Snowden, it is unlikely this story
would have ever seen the light of day because the court order expressly barred
Verizon from disclosing the existence of the FBI’s request for the records or
the court order itself. (ibid)
This points out a matter not dealt with in the film. Namely that Chief Justice
John Roberts has stacked the FISA courts with judges who simply will not say no
to any national security request, no matter how much it infringes on privacy and
the Fourth Amendment. They have, for all intents and purposes, become rubber
stamps for administration requests.
As we watch the film, one of the issues Greenwald and Snowden discuss is how
much of the story should be about Snowden, who isn’t seeking out notoriety. He
simply tells Greenwald that he grew up in North Carolina and Maryland and that
he ended up working for the NSA through subcontractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
Snowden’s Biography
But, actually, Snowden’s life is much more interesting than he lets on and in my
view should have been a bigger part of this film. Snowden comes from a military
family. His father and grandfather were both in the Coast Guard, and he was born
in the port town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In fact, many of the men in
Snowden clan had careers in either law enforcement or the military.
The family moved to Maryland when Snowden was nine. In high school he became ill
with mononucleosis, dropping out before his sophomore year. At this time, he
became very interested in computer technology and took a number of advanced
classes in community colleges and earned certification as a systems engineer.
He became obsessed with computer technology and tried to tear down systems to
see how they worked. He then reconstructed them so they would work better. He
began hanging out at an online chat room called Ars Technica.
When 9/11 happened, Snowden favored invading Iraq. And in May 2004, he joined
the Army. “I felt I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from
oppression,” he said later. (op. cit. Vanity Fair)
After arriving at Fort
Benning, Georgia, Snowden broke both legs in a training accident. After he was
released from the military, he joined the CIA in 2006.
Snowden himself could not believe it. On Ars Technica he wrote, “I don’t have a
degree of any type. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma. . . . and
my co-workers have BSs, MSs and ten to fifteen years of experience. Employers
fight over me. And I’m 22.”
Snowden worked in network security, allowing him to have a top-secret clearance.
Less than a year later, he was transferred to Geneva with a diplomatic cover as
part of the mission to the United Nations. He was given a four-bedroom
government-issue apartment. And in some of his online posts, he said he was
having a very nice time.
But it was also in Geneva that Snowden began to become ambivalent toward his
job. As part of an undercover mission, he saw how the CIA got a banker drunk,
encouraged him to drive, and then after he got in an accident, recruited him as
an informant.
Snowden told The Guardian that he witnessed several instances like this in
Europe and concluded, “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me
about how my government functions and what its impact in the world.” (ibid)
Indeed, it was at this point, in about 2008, that Snowden first thought about
leaking confidential documents, in part because he felt that the Democratic
candidate for president, Barack Obama, might change things.
Getting Angry
Shortly after Obama’s election, Snowden left the CIA. To this day, there are
several versions why. But most observers agree that Snowden came back to America
as somewhat of an angry young man. His online posts seem to indicate that he was
rather conservative. For instance, he railed against Social Security.
But Snowden soon landed a job with Dell Computer, and the NSA was one of Dell’s
biggest and most secret clients. Snowden began working on NSA projects in Japan,
and in summer 2010, he was transferred back to Maryland where the NSA is based.
Here he led a team of experts in designing state-of-the-art, cloud-computing
platforms, and also technically sophisticated super computers for breaking
passwords. (ibid)
Snowden then took another step upward and another change of locale. He became a
high-level systems administrator in Hawaii. But there was also a change in the
young man’s attitude. He now wore a sweatshirt sold by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, whose motto was “Defending your rights in the digital world.”
Snowden also began to complain about the NSA’s unlawful though authorized
surveillance. When he was brushed off, he began to use his clearance and
position as a systems administrator to delve into areas that were not related to
his job description. In the summer of 2012, Snowden made his first illegal
downloads.
Snowden also applied for a job directly with the NSA and was offered a position
though he felt it was not high enough in the bureaucracy. So, he turned it down
and applied for a position at Booz Allen Hamilton, a company owned by the
politically well-connected Carlyle Group. He got a job in cyber security, saying
later: “My position with Booz granted me access to lists of machines all over
the world that the NSA hacked.”
By this time, spring 2013, Snowden was in communication with Greenwald, Poitras
and Gellman. In May, he had all his documents ready to go. To this day, no one
knows how many there were. Snowden kept downloading Top Secret documents until
the end.
Finally, on May 17, he told his girlfriend he was leaving on a business trip. He
went to Honolulu Airport and ended up in Hong Kong. He booked a room at the Mira
in the Kowloon area.
Libertarian Leanings
All of this is only dealt with glancingly in the film, if at all. To me, it
seems of paramount interest because, unlike say the Cambridge Five, the infamous
British spy ring recruited by the Soviet Union, Snowden did what he did not for
ideology but because he was genuinely offended by the NSA’s invasion of
citizens’ privacy.
Politically speaking, Snowden appears to be more or less a moderate with
libertarian leanings. If I were Poitras, I would have insisted some of this
background make it into the film.
There is another aspect of the Snowden saga that I feel was slighted. We watch
as Greenwald tells Snowden not to try and hide his identity. In fact, Snowden
paid for his room at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong with his own credit card.
Greenwald says words to the effect: just do it out in the open, let them react
to who you are.
Here Citizenfour introduces Julian Assange and Wikileaks, with Assange aware of
the harsh imprisonment of his leading source Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning
arranging for Snowden to get out of Hong Kong before the State Department could
close in on him. Assange and his assistant Sarah Harrison get Snowden a flight
to Moscow for a stopover en route to his planned destination in Latin America.
But the U.S. government charges Snowden under the Espionage Act and he has no
choice but to seek asylum in Russia. Since the State Department cancelled
Snowden’s passport, he remains in Russia.
Towards the end of the film, there are two ominous episodes. As Greenwald and
his partner are traveling back to their home in Brazil, his partner is detained
at Heathrow Airport for nine hours, the legal limit without making an arrest.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill then makes an appearance and poses the question: If
one wants to communicate sensitive information today and be sure it’s not
intercepted, how does one do it? The answer is to return to Watergate days, with
conversations in parking lot garages late at night, while avoiding electronic
communications.
The last scene is a bit problematic. Greenwald is visiting Snowden in Russia.
They talk about how many people are on the Watch List today and communicate via
written messages which are then ripped up.
Snowden is shocked at the figure of 1.2 million people, and we see this on a
torn paper. I thought this was all strained. What was the need of communicating
with written messages in Moscow? And both participants must have known the
camera was there. After all it zoomed in for close-ups on the paper. So why rip
up the paper on camera?
This was using the techniques of a dramatic scenarist in a documentary.
Greenwald and Snowden came close to being actors here, rather than participants
in a real-life drama.
There will be future movies on the Snowden story with actual actors playing the
key protagonists, including a feature film by director Oliver Stone. But this
documentary is a creditable first offering in the field.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book
is Reclaiming Parkland.
Ellsberg Discusses Decline of Democracy
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg discussed the threat of National
Security Agency surveillance and the decline of American democracy in a latenight interview that he gave after a lecture at George State University in
Atlanta.
Do you worry about being surveilled?
Oh, I’m sure I’m surveilled in terms of credit card, cell phone, and email, as
is everyone. They collect everything but it doesn’t mean they collect it in
real-time. They want to record it. I’m sure it includes content as well as metadata. When they want to find out about somebody, they just dial it in like
Google and they’ll get someone’s whole life. By the way, they can listen to you
via your iPhone when it’s turned off. And of course the location is traceable.
In short, they are more interested in me.
Now that it’s come out that I’m going to see Snowden, I imagine they’ll be a lot
more interested in me. I don’t expect to take any computers or thumb drives or
anything with me because they would probably confiscate it right away.
Sometimes the public is the problem. Democracy is not foolproof. It’s just
better than the alternatives. I mean the elected Republicans took Congress, how
do you explain that? It sounds like the ethics commission did their job. Obama
appointed people to investigate the NSA after Snowden. They came up with a lot
of recommendations, and he almost entirely ignored it.
You can’t force the person appointed to follow their recommendations, and you
can’t ensure they will make good recommendations. When they do find things out
about the person or the administration that appointed them, they’re less likely
than before to have any of those recommendations followed. If the perpetrator is
in charge of implementing these things, then it’s not going to happen. It’s hard
to find the rationale for the people who elected these Republicans. Yes, the
country doesn’t like the economy. And to a great degree they blame Obama
probably more than his due.
The president usually gets blamed on the economy, whether it’s the weather or
whatever it is. If things are bad, the incumbent will get the blame. To be mad
at him and to elect people who oppose him seems like an understandable thing
except when you realize when they are almost certain to make matters worse. When
things are bad under the incumbent, it’s irrational to elect people who are
almost sure to make them worse. And yet people do that rather liberally. That
shows that the theory of rationality, getting all the information they can and
acting reasonably, is not something that humans should be counted on to do.
For the people to elect Republicans because they don’t like results under Obama
is self-punishing in effect. It’s ignorant. It’s counterproductive and does not
do them credit. I’m in a country that almost elected George W. Bush two times.
That’s quite a charge against any nation. Even if he did steal both elections,
he came close to winning. He got almost half the country.
That’s not easy to explain and it does us no credit as a country and frankly it
means that the chance that we will dig ourselves out of this hole of war, bad
economy, unemployment, and climate, and help the world take on those things, is
very small. We can do what we can and we should do it despite knowing that the
actual chance of success is not high. And when I talk about success, I’m talking
about survival of the species – the survival of our civilization.
As Noam Chomsky said recently, we’re in the twilight of civilization. It must be
hyperbolic, but it isn’t. There’s a very high chance of climatic catastrophe,
which ends urban civilization and large populations. It means a huge deal in the
next century. By huge, I mean most humans. It could not be more serious. It
could not be overstated. Yet this country and other countries are acting in
total denial, as if those problems are entirely trivial. This species and this
country and this civilization are in bad shape and we’re not showing signs of a
willing to do anything to avert catastrophe. And yet the challenge is there.
Whistleblowers have mostly not had an impact on policy, but sometimes they have.
Movements have generally not succeeded, but sometimes they have. The stakes,
being what they are, are definitely worth someone’s life, many lives, to try and
change the process.
The interview was originally posted by Paul DeMerrit at
http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2014/11/19/daniel-ellsberg-the-original-whis
tleblower-on-transparency-politics-and-civilizations-future
Katharine Gun’s Risky Truth-telling
Truth-telling can be a dangerous undertaking, especially when done by government
insiders trying to expose wrongdoing connected to war-making, as British
intelligence official Katharine Gun discovered in blowing the whistle on a preIraq War ploy, writes Sam Husseini.
By Sam Husseini
“I felt it was explosive, it really made me angry when I read it. … I genuinely
hoped that the information would strengthen the people’s voice. … It could
derail the entire process for war.” So said Katharine Gun recently when asked
about information she leaked shortly before the invasion of Iraq.
It wasn’t self-serving hyperbole. Daniel Ellsberg, who himself leaked the
Pentagon Papers, has called Katharine Gun’s leak “the most important and
courageous leak I have ever seen. No one else — including myself — has ever done
what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in
time, possibly, to avert it.”
And indeed, Ellsberg had asked for such a leak during this period. He had been
saying during the run-up to the Iraq invasion: “Don’t wait until the bombs start
falling. … If you know the public is being lied to and you have documents to
prove it, go to Congress and go to the press. … Do what I wish I had done before
the bombs started falling [in Vietnam] … I think there is some chance that the
truth could avert war.”
Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers — internal documents which showed a pattern
of U.S. government deception about the Vietnam War — in 1971, though he had the
information earlier. And while the Pentagon Papers, the leaks by Chelsea Manning
to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks were all quite
massive, the Katharine Gun leak was just 300 words. Its power came from its
timeliness.
In October of 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the so-called Authorization for Use
of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. In November, the U.S.
government had gotten the United Nations Security Council to pass a threatening
resolution on Iraq, but in most people’s view, it stopped short of actually
authorizing force.
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, John Negroponte, said when
resolution 1441 was adopted unanimously: “There’s no ‘automaticity’ and this is
a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that
have been expressed for the resolution.” That is, the U.S. would intend to come
back for a second resolution if Iraq didn’t abide by a “final opportunity to
comply with its disarmament obligations.”
On Feb. 5, 2003, Colin Powell claimed in his infamous presentation at the UN
that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Feb. 15, 2003 saw the greatest
global protests in history, with millions around the world rallying against the
impending Iraq invasion, including over a million near the UN headquarters in
New York City.
It was around this time that Katharine Gun, who worked as a language specialist
at the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the
NSA, got a memo from the NSA and then decided to — through intermediaries — leak
it to the media. The brief email read in part:
“As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly
directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course)
for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE:
Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/
negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc –
the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in
obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises. … to revive/
create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and
Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters.”
The memo outlined that U.S. and British assets should focus on getting
information to pressure member of the UN Security Council to go vote for a war
resolution — material for blackmail to put it bluntly. This internal government
document could show people — especially those who tend to put stock in
government pronouncements — that what President George W. Bush was claiming at
the time: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq” — was exactly
backwards. The U.S. government in fact was doing virtually everything it
possibly could to ensure war.
When the British reporters writing the story called the author of the memo,
Frank Koza, a top official at the NSA, they were put through to his office. When
they shared the nature of their phone call, they were told by an assistant they
had “the wrong number.” The reporters noted: “On protesting that the assistant
had just said this was Koza’s extension, the assistant repeated that it was an
erroneous extension, and hung up.”
The story was ignored by the U.S. media, though we at the Institute for Public
Accuracy put out a string of news releases about it. Gun has commented that
Martin Bright, one of the reporters who broke the story for the British
Observer, had been booked on several U.S. TV networks just after the story was
published but they had all quickly cancelled. [See video of an interview with
Gun and Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, on German TV
from last year.]
However, the story did cause headlines around the world — especially in the
countries on the Security Council that the memo listed as targets of the
surveillance. Through whatever combination of authentic anger or embarrassment
at their subservience to the U.S. government being exposed, most of these
governments apparently pealed away from the U.S., and no second UN resolution
was sought by the war planners.
Rather, George W. Bush started the Iraq war with unilateral demands that Saddam
Hussein and his family leave Iraq (and then indicated that the invasion would
commence in any case.)
In 2004, the Observer reported that “surveillance played a role in derailing a
compromise UN resolution in the weeks before the Iraq war. Adolfo Aguilar
Zinser, Mexico’s UN ambassador at the time, has charged that the U.S. spied on a
private meeting of six swing countries on the Security Council aimed at a
compromise. Zinser told the Observer: ‘The meeting was in the evening. They
[U.S. diplomats] call us in the morning before the meeting of the Security
Council and they say: “We appreciate you trying to find ideas, but this is not a
good idea.”‘”
Meanwhile, Katharine Gun had been found out as the leaker shortly after the memo
was published — she has a talent for telling the truth, not so much for covering
up apparently — and spent many months awaiting trial. England has no First
Amendment that might have protected Gun. It does have a repressive Official
Secrets Act, under which she was being prosecuted by the Blair government.
Marcia Mitchell, co-author of The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and
the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion, notes however that at the last
minute, the Blair government, which was about to face elections “with her signed
confession in hand, chose not to present evidence that the invasion of Iraq was,
in fact, legal, a demand by the Defense.”
That is, the British government was afraid of what could come out about the
legality of the Iraq war in a trial. And so Gun, who was newly married when she
exposed the NSA/GCHQ’s activities, was able to avoid jail and continue as a
language instructor. She has since been supportive of Edward Snowden and others
who expose government wrongdoing.
At the UN
The subject of spying at the UN was again highlighted in 2010 from cables leaked
to WikiLeaks by Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Reuters reported at the
time: “According to one cable, the State Department asked U.S. envoys at U.N.
headquarters and elsewhere to procure credit card and frequent flyer numbers,
mobile phone numbers, email addresses, passwords and other confidential data
from top U.N. officials and foreign diplomats.”
Of course, spying on UN missions by the U.S. is illegal, Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic Relations says: “The receiving State shall permit and protect free
communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes…. The
official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.”
Similarly, in 2013, the Guardian reported as G8 leaders meet in Northern
Ireland: “Turkey, South Africa and Russia have reacted angrily to the British
government demanding an explanation for the revelations that their politicians
and senior officials were spied on and bugged during the 2009 G20 summit in
London.” The governments were responding to the Guardian story: “GCHQ
Intercepted Foreign Politicians’ Communications at G20 Summits,” based on Edward
Snowden’s NSA leaks.
Lessons Learned
The Katharine Gun case give us many lessons. First off, it’s a great example to
rebut anyone parroting the establishment line that the NSA’s activities are
based on stopping terrorism, or that they are merely overzealous efforts at
ensuring security, or perhaps typical diplomatic games. Here, the NSA and GCHQ
were spying to try to facilitate an aggressive war — the highest war crime under
the Nuremberg statues.
Similarly, it highlights what great ideals some “whistleblowers” — the term
doesn’t really do justice — are motivated by. And of course, such revealers are
much more threatening to war-makers and others when they are acting in parallel
with movements. Those movements may also help ward off the government attempting
to imprison the whistleblower.
The “rebuttal” that everybody spies and therefore it’s no big deal when the U.S.
or some other government is caught doing so similarly doesn’t hold up. Yes,
virtually every government spies — but you’re not supposed to get caught. And if
a government does get caught, it’s an indication that it’s own people — the very
people who are paid to carry out the surveillance — don’t believe in it and are
willing to put themselves at risk to expose the spying and the underlying
wrongdoing.
Perhaps most importantly, the lesson is not that Katharine Gun’s leak was futile
because the U.S. invaded Iraq — any more than the lesson is that the Feb. 15
global protests were in vain. Rather, more of both could have really changed
things. If global protests had started in 2002, then the congressional
authorization for war in late 2002 could have been prevented. If more people
within the war-making governments had their consciences moved by such movements
and had leaked more critical information, war could have been forestalled.
And, even if the Iraq invasion happened, if global protests had continued and
global solidarity were better coordinated, when it became clear to all that the
WMDs not in Iraq were a contrived pretext for aggression, a sustained revulsion
against the invasion could have led to the war-makers being held accountable,
preventing much suffering in Iraq and elsewhere — and laying the basis for a
world free of war.
Sam Husseini is communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini.