By Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, June 12, 2013

June 12: This story has been updated with NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander’s Senate testimony on surveillance.

Defending a vast program to sweep up phone and Internet data under antiterror laws, senior U.S. officials in recent days have cited the case of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said a data collection program by the National Security Agency helped stop an attack on a Danish newspaper for which Headley did surveillance. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Senate intelligence chairwoman, also called Headley’s capture a success.

But a closer examination of the case, drawn from extensive reporting by ProPublica, shows that the government surveillance only caught up with Headley after the U.S. had been tipped by British intelligence. And even that victory came after seven years in which U.S. intelligence failed to stop Headley as he roamed the globe on missions for Islamic terror networks and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Supporters of the sweeping U.S. surveillance effort say it’s needed to build a haystack of information in which to find a needle that will stop a terrorist. In Headley’s case, however, it appears the U.S. was handed the needle first 2014 and then deployed surveillance that led to the arrest and prosecution of Headley and other plotters.

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Bloomberg reports: Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc. and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that don’t involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries. [Continue reading…]

Andrew Leonard writes: For decades, so-called gift economy collaboration, in which the community as a whole benefits from the freely donated contributions of its members, has been a potent driver of Internet software evolution. As I wrote 16 years ago, when chronicling the birth of the Apache Web server, the success of open source software “testifies to the enduring vigor of the Internet’s cooperative, distributed approach to solving problems.” Hadoop [an open source platform which is becoming the standard platform for big data analytics], which down to its fundamental structural essence is a distributed approach to solving problems, emblematized this philosophy at its core.

So, in a sense, Hadoop’s success was just the same old story. But back in the mid-’90s, around the time that one of the first open source success stories, the Apache Web server, was taking off, I’m not sure that anyone would have predicted that the National Security Agency and CIA would end up becoming stalwart participants in the gift economy. Even though it makes total sense, in principle, that the fruits of government-funded software development should be shared with the general public, there’s still something cognitively disjunctive about intelligence agencies that shroud their every activity in great secrecy contributing to projects built on openness and transparency. On the one hand, employees of the NSA are appearing at conferences discussing how they have adapted Hadoop to solve the problems of dealing with unimaginably huge data sets, but on the other hand, we’re not supposed to know anything about what they are actually doing with that data.

The intertwining of the intelligence agencies with the larger open source software community could hardly be more incestuous. In 2008, a group of Yahoo employees that eventually included Doug Cutting formed a start-up designed to commercialize Hadoop called Cloudera. The CIA, through its In-Q-Tel (named after James Bond’s Q character) venture capital arm, was an early investor in, and customer of, Cloudera. The NSA built a significant piece of software that works “on top” of Hadoop called Accumulo designed to add sophisticated security controls managing how data could be accessed, and then promptly donated that code to the Apache Software Foundation. Later, a group of NSA software engineers formed another spinoff company, Sqrrl, to commercialize Accumulo.

What all this means is that the improvements to tools that the NSA is making, with the aim of more efficiently catching terrorists, are propagating into the private sector where they will be used by Facebook and Neftlix and Yahoo to more accurately target ads or influence our purchasing behavior or provide us with content algorithmically shaped to our very specific desires. And vice versa. Innovations and increased capabilities pioneered by private companies trickle back to the NSA. The collective boot-strapping never stops.

Again, in principle, there is nothing necessarily wrong going on here. There is no one to blame. Some of the fiercer apologists for unfettered free markets might complain that government involvement in open source projects unfairly competes with private sector proprietary businesses, but a much stronger case can be made that any software development work that is funded by taxpayer money should by definition be considered freely sharable with the wider public. The NSA should probably be applauded for helping to improve Hadoop. And if the capabilities unlocked by Hadoop result in the prevention of some horrific terrorist act, then every programmer who contributed a line of code to the project justly deserves some congratulation.

But there’s also an intriguing inversion occurring here of what, for better or worse, we might call the purpose of the Internet. The Internet was initially created by the U.S. government to facilitate the sharing of information between geographically separate research centers. The Internet took off in the mid-’90s in large part because the general public recognized it as a phenomenal tool for sharing information with each other. The fact that so much of the Internet’s infrastructure was also built from code that was freely shared seemed like a pleasing match of form and function.

Free software and open-source software evolution is frequently driven not so much by hope for financial gain but by individuals looking to solve their immediate engineering problems. Over time, on the Internet at large, one of those problems has turned out to be the gnarly challenge of how to manage all the data created by all those people sharing so promiscuously with each other. Hadoop can justly be seen as the natural response to all that promiscuous sharing. And it certainly helped solve the problems faced by engineers at Facebook and elsewhere.

But what ended up getting enabled by the success of Hadoop is something significantly different than good old peer-to-peer sharing. The ability to make sense out of petabytes of data isn’t necessarily useful to you or me. But it’s god’s gift to the profit-minded corporations and terrorist-seeking intelligence agencies seeking to leverage the data we generate for their own purposes, to measure our behavior and ultimately to influence it. That could mean Netflix figuring out exactly what combination of plot twists and acting talent proves irresistible to streaming video watchers or Facebook figuring out exactly how to stock our newsfeeds with advertisements that generate acceptable click-through or Twitter knowing exactly where we are on the surface of the planet so it can pop up a sponsored tweet pushing a coupon for a happy hour at the bar just down the street — or the NSA spotting a peculiar pattern of pressure cooker purchases. This is no longer about sharing information with each other; it’s about manipulation, control and punishment. It’s about keeping stock prices up. We’re a long, long way here from the ideal gift economy, where everyone brings their home-cooked delicacy to the potlatch. We’ve arrived at a destination where the tools offer more power to them than to us. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The FBI has shrugged off growing congressional anxiety over its surveillance of US citizens, claiming such programs could have foiled the 9-11 terrorist attacks and would prevent “another Boston”.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, also revealed that US authorities would be taking action against whistleblower Edward Snowden for revealing the extent of its activities, confirming that the FBI and department of justice were taking “all necessary steps to hold the person responsible”.

But Mueller’s testimony before the House judicial oversight committee brought angry responses from many congressmen, who questioned whether such surveillance was lawful and demanded to know why it had failed to prevent the Boston bombing if it were so effective.

Preventing airline passengers from carrying knives on board; not basing thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia — there are all sorts of things that could have prevented 9/11.

What Mueller and other government officials are now doing is attempting to terrorize Americans. They are in effect saying that unless the citizens of this country are willing to live under mass surveillance, they or their loved ones are more likely to meet a premature and violent death. It’s called security-state blackmail.

The Guardian reports: Two prominent Senate critics of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance have challenged the agency’s assertion that the spy efforts helped stop “dozens” of terror attacks.

Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, said they were not convinced by the testimony of the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, who claimed that evidence gleaned from surveillance helped thwart attacks in the US.

“We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence,” they said in a statement released on Thursday ahead of a widely anticipated briefing for US senators about the National Security Agency’s activities.

“When you’re talking about important liberties that the American people feel strongly about, and you want to have an intelligence program, you’ve got to make a case for why it provides unique value to the [intelligence] community atop what they can already have,” Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told the Guardian in an interview on Thursday.

Marcy Wheeler writes: The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, made it clear Thursday that he believes the FBI should have access to any of your data not covered by the fourth amendment of the US constitution. Yet he seemed unwilling to turn over the FBI’s own metadata in return.

At issue is at least one of the NSA programs disclosed by the Guardian last week: the government’s use of a provision of the Patriot Act to collect the call data of most Americans’ phone calls to create a master database of all calls made in the US for the last five years. According to Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein and others, the government uses the database to check whether Americans have called numbers associated with suspected terrorists.

In a hearing before the House judiciary committee, a number of representatives – including John Conyers, Jim Sensenbrenner, Jerry Nadler, Bobby Scott, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and Jason Chaffetz – asked the director to justify obtaining data on all Americans. Sensenbrenner pointed out, for example, that the FBI could use a grand jury subpoena or a “national security letter” to obtain the same information directly from a phone company.

And while Mueller did claim that the dragnet program would have prevented 9/11 (ignoring that the FBI had authority to get the information in question at the time, and that a number of other bureaucratic failures may have contributed to the intelligence community’s failure to prevent the attack, too), his favorite justification for gathering all the metadata from all US phone calls amounts to “because we can”. [Continue reading…]

James Bamford writes: Inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh.

This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.

Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.” [Continue reading…]

Washington Post columnist, Matt Miller, is offended by Edward Snowden’s “grandiose” conscience:

An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.

The conversation would be entirely different today if we’d had a series of attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page (with which I don’t usually nod in agreement) wrote, if the nation suffered another 9/11 or an attack with weapons of mass destruction, “the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups.” Practices like data mining, the Journal added, “protect us against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.”

What Miller and the Wall Street Journal are appealing to is exactly the same line of reasoning employed by Bashir al-Assad and every other authoritarian leader: if I don’t limit your freedom, then you will lose it altogether.

Dissenters duly rebuked are then expected to shut their mouths in recognition of the greater good. (H/t Philip Weiss.)

Ai Weiwei, one of China’s leading contemporary artists, writes: Even though we know governments do all kinds of things I was shocked by the information about the US surveillance operation, Prism. To me, it’s abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals’ privacy. This is an important moment for international society to reconsider and protect individual rights.

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

Of course, we live under different kinds of legal conditions – in the west and in developed nations there are other laws that can balance or restrain the use of information if the government has it. That is not the case in China, and individuals are completely naked as a result. Intrusions can completely ruin a person’s life, and I don’t think that could happen in western nations.

But still, if we talk about abusive interference in individuals’ rights, Prism does the same. It puts individuals in a very vulnerable position. Privacy is a basic human right, one of the very core values. There is no guarantee that China, the US or any other government will not use the information falsely or wrongly. I think especially that a nation like the US, which is technically advanced, should not take advantage of its power. It encourages other nations. [Continue reading…]

Ron Fournier writes: Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? I don’t care. You read right: I don’t give a whit about the man who exposed two sweeping U.S. online surveillance programs, nor do I worry much about his verdict in the court of public opinion.

Why? Because it is the wrong question. The Snowden narrative matters mostly to White House officials trying to deflect attention from government overreach and deception, and to media executives in search of an easy storyline to serve a celebrity-obsessed audience. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: More than half of Americans approve of a former intelligence contractor’s decision to leak classified details of sprawling government surveillance programs, according to the results of a new TIME poll.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said the leaker, Edward Snowden, 29, did a “good thing” in releasing information about the government programs, which collect phone, email, and Internet search records in an effort, officials say, to prevent terrorist attacks. Just 30 percent disagreed.

But an almost identical number of Americans — 53 percent — still said he should be prosecuted for the leak, compared to 28% who said he should not. Americans aged 18 to 34 break from older generations in showing far more support for Snowden’s actions. Just 41 percent of that cohort say he should face charges, while 43 percent say he should not. Just 19 percent of that age group say the leak was a “bad thing.”

TIME POLL 6-12-13

The Guardian reports: China has warned that revelations of electronic surveillance on a huge scale by American intelligence agencies will “test developing Sino-US ties” and exacerbate their “soured relationship” on cybersecurity.

The assessment in an article and editorial carried by the state-run China Daily represents the first official comment in state media as China grapples with the presence in Hong Kong of Edward Snowden, the US analyst who revealed himself as the source of the Guardian exposé.

Quoting analysts, the China Daily said the “massive US global surveillance programme … is certain to stain Washington’s overseas image” and pointedly referred to Washington recently levelling claims of hacking at other governments, including China’s.

“Observers said how the case is handled could pose a challenge to the burgeoning goodwill between Beijing and Washington given that Snowden is in Chinese territory and the Sino-US relationship is constantly soured on cybersecurity,” the paper said. [Continue reading…]

Ricahrd A. Clarke writes: None of us want another terrorist attack in the United States. Equally, most of us have nothing to hide from the federal government, which already has so many ways of knowing about us. And we know that the just-revealed National Security Agency program does not actually listen to our calls; it uses the phone numbers, frequency, length and times of the calls for data-mining.

So, why is it that many Americans, including me, are so upset with the Obama administration gathering up telephone records?

My concerns are twofold. First, the law under which President George W. Bush and now President Obama have acted was not intended to give the government records of all telephone calls. If that had been the intent, the law would have said that. It didn’t. Rather, the law envisioned the administration coming to a special court on a case-by-case basis to explain why it needed to have specific records.

I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing. [Continue reading…]

Tenacious questioning meets an even more resolute refusal to provide answers:

Note: This Bloomberg video will keep on running until you hit stop!

David Sirota writes: When introducing James Clapper as his director of national intelligence in 2010, President Obama specifically justified the appointment by saying Clapper is someone who “understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress (and) not merely to appear when summoned, but to keep Congress informed.” At the time, it seemed like a wholly uncontroversial statement; it was simply a president making a sacrosanct promise to keep the legislative branch informed, with the insinuation that previous administrations hadn’t.

Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden’s disclosures with this video of Clapper’s Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects “any type of data on millions (of Americans),” Clapper has become American history’s most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

Incredibly (or, alas, maybe not so incredibly anymore), despite the president’s original explicit promises about Clapper, transparency and Congress, the White House is nonetheless responding to this humiliating situation by proudly expressing its full support for Clapper. Meanwhile, as of today’s announcement by U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., the demands for Clapper’s resignation are finally being aired on Capitol Hill. [Continue reading…]

John Cassidy writes: As the repercussions of Edward Snowden’s leaks about domestic surveillance continue to be debated, law professors and lawyers for the Bush and Obama Administrations are out in force, claiming that the spying agencies have done nothing wrong and it’s all much ado about nothing.

In the Financial Times, Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations, argued that the National Security Agency, in sweeping up a big part of the nation’s phone records, was upholding the law rather than subverting it. At the influential Lawfare blog, Joel F. Brenner, a legal consultant who between 2006 and 2009 was the head of counterintelligence at the White House, trotted out similar arguments and claimed that the United States “has the most expensive, elaborate, and multi-tiered intelligence oversight apparatus of any nation on Earth.” On the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General in the Bush Administration, questioned whether there has even been a meaningful infringement of privacy, writing, “The claims of pervasive spying, even if sincere, appear not merely exaggerated, but downright irrational.”

To which, my reply is: Lord save us from lawyers, especially the big shots who graduate from élite law schools and advise administrations. (Brenner is a Harvard man; Bobbitt and Mukasey are Yalies.) With some honorable exceptions, their primary function is protecting the interests of the political and corporate establishments, often by finding some novel and tendentious way to legitimate their self-interested actions. When lesser mortals object, they turn around and accuse them of being ignorant of the law. [Continue reading…]

Matthew M. Aid writes: This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China’s newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour — cyber-espionage — a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The media has focused at length on China’s aggressive attempts to electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the “shirt-sleeves” summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way deep, deep into China’s networks.

When the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources, the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics to be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to dominate the discussions.

Then, two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of China’s widespread use of computer hacking to steal U.S. government, military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in Washington who spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting’s agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing about it.

So the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and have alleged that Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a front-page Washington Post article, which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese government’s top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back that Beijing possessed “mountains of data” showing that the United States has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government secrets. This weekend’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA undercover operative named Edward J. Snowden, who is now living in Hong Kong, only add fuel to Beijing’s position.

But Washington never publicly responded to Huang’s allegation, and nobody in the U.S. media seems to have bothered to ask the White House if there is a modicum of truth to the Chinese charges. [Continue reading…]

The South China Morning Post interviewed Snowden yesterday: Snowden believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.

“Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer. Every level of society is demanding accountability and oversight.”

Snowden said he was releasing the information to demonstrate “the hypocrisy of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries”.

“Not only does it do so, but it is so afraid of this being known that it is willing to use any means, such as diplomatic intimidation, to prevent this information from becoming public.”

The South China Morning Post reports: Edward Snowden says he wants to ask the people of Hong Kong to decide his fate after choosing the city because of his faith in its rule of law.

The 29-year-old former CIA employee behind what might be the biggest intelligence leak in US history revealed his identity to the world in Hong Kong on Sunday. His decision to use a city under Chinese sovereignty as his haven has been widely questioned – including by some rights activists in Hong Kong.

Snowden said last night that he had no doubts about his choice of Hong Kong.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality,” Snowden said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post.

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law,” he added.