Leaky Washington - Who Is To Blame?

Updated November 2018

With Julian Assange's future looking increasingly desperate, a 2017 interview with former CIA, NSA boss and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Michael Hayden, on the United Kingdom's BBC network is particularly pertinent given the odds that Mr. Assange will face American justice.  When Mr Hayedn was asked about his opinion on the WikiLeaks Vault 7 revelations which spill the beans on the CIA's snooping programs, he was very clear about who he blames for the intelligence community leaks of the past few years.

Here's what he had to say:

Here's the transcript of the key sentences:

"There is another dynamic at work here.  In order to do this kind of stuff, we have to recruit from a certain demographic and I don't mean to judge them at all (even though I am) but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words "loyalty, secrecy and transparency" than certainly my generation did.  And so we bring these folks into the agency, good Americans all I can only assume, but again, culturally, they have different instincts than the people who made the decision to hire them.  We may be running into this different cultural approach that we saw with Chelsea Manning, with Edward Snowden and now, perhaps, with a third actor."

Here's what he really meant to say: "Just imagine, all of those young whippersnappers who think that they can get away with telling the world how the CIA snooped on the world.  Where is their sense of right and wrong?  Back in my day, those of us who worked as spies were able to do whatever we wanted and nobody asked any questions."

In case you were curious, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center, while 67 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 (i.e. baby boomers and those slightly younger) felt that the National Security Agency's program of tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans was acceptable if it was used to investigate possible terrorist threats, only 51 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 felt that it was acceptable.  There is an obvious generational difference in Americans' approach to privacy.

So, in other words and as a refreshing change, rather than blaming Russia for making America and its allies "less safe", Mr. Hayden is pointing the fickle finger of fate at those nasty millennials that the intelligence community is forced to hire because they are the only demographic that is actually capable of creating the product and gathering the data that the Central Intelligence Agency and its peers seem to need so badly in the era of the "internet of things". 

Just in case you forgot, it was Michael Hayden who oversaw the massive expansion in the National Security Agency's communication surveillance programs during his tenure as Director of the NSA between 1999 and 2005.  Obviously, he has a vested interest in blaming outsiders for Leaky Washington.

The National Security Agency's Definition of Success in Iraq

Other than this:

...what did it take to make the leadership at the NSA think that the United States efforts in Iraq had been successful?

Thanks to the liberating efforts of Edward Snowden, we now have a glimpse into the mindset of the NSA in February 2005 from this writeup, composed by Major General Richard Quirk, Signals Intelligence Director, which appeared on the SIDtoday internal website:

There you go, another confirmation that the Iraq war was "Mission Accomplished" as early as the first "democratic election" held in Iraq during January 2005.  This, despite the fact that the January 2005 election is widely believed to have led to the disenfranchisement of the Sunni population because of their lack of participation/boycotting of what was seen to be a flawed electoral procedure in which, ultimately, only 58 percent of eligible voters turned out.  It was this disenfranchisement that led to increased Shi'ite - Sunni tensions and made it exremely difficult for the coalition forces to quell the post-election insurgency.  Interestingly, the situation in Iraq prior to and during voting was so violent that the International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE), the monitoring organization for the January 2005 election chose to remain in Amman, Jordan, leaving the in-country ground work up to volunteers who represented the various political parties competing in the election along with non-partisan volunteers who were recruited by non-governmental organizations.   Despite that little setback, here are some of IMIE's observations about this day that was so emotional for Major General Quirk:

"While democratic media norms were not always fully respected, some coverage of opposition parties and candidates on both state and private media was visible or audible. Government events were excessively covered on the pretext of "government business," but the opposition was not totally excluded. There were a number of appearances by opposition candidates. While none of the people contacted to write this report totally condemned Iraqi media election coverage, in future events this coverage needs to be monitored more closely, and equity in access to media must be enforced.

Many newspapers, television and radio stations claim to be independent but have strong links with political parties. Al Iraqiya (IMN), the state television station, seems to have received pressure from authorities outside the station to cover specific stories. However, some radio and television stations with political connections seem to have given their political opponents an opportunity to buy air time and broadcast their messages.

If the use of indelible ink remains a check against duplicate voting for forthcoming electoral events, it may be useful to have the voters cast their ballot before dipping their finger to avoid stained ballots. It was also reported that the ink could be rubbed off with hand lotion or certain types of detergent. While a stain would remain, inexperienced observers and election officials may not have noticed this.

Problems and irregularities that were noted during the polling process resulted typically from a combination of the security conditions, inadequate training of IECI staff, human error and the novelty of, and the resulting unfamiliarity with, complex polling processes. Reported irregularities regarding voter eligibility, and illegal activities or deliberate manipulations by electoral staff and/or political actors, should not be discounted. However, to the extent that such problems occurred randomly through the polling process, they are unlikely to have undermined its integrity or diminished the legitimacy of the election results.

There were some local problems with the tamper evidence bags being used improperly (placed in with the ballots rather than in a separate box to be sent to IECI headquarters) or not being used at all. Also, some ballot boxes were not properly locked.

The reconciliation of all ballots remains a key area for improvement. For example, in Northern Iraq, there were reports of ballot boxes that had been obviously tampered with or stuffed. Specifically, there appear to have been 49 rigged ballot boxes in Ninewa (Mosul), which were sealed with the old seals from the Saddam Hussein regime. Some 10,000 ballots appear to have been stuffed in this way. Far more numerous were the 300 questionable ballot boxes from Erbil containing perhaps 200,000 dubious ballots. (These ballots were investigated at IECI headquarters and rejected, which was a positive final outcome.)

That said, the complaint process also experienced a number of problems. Despite the laudable decisions of the Board to accept complaints by e-mail, and to extend the submission deadlines, a number of remaining obstacles made it difficult for individuals, political entities and organizations to submit complaints. Among the most important were fears for personal safety, travel and communication difficulties, and lack of information about the complaint process. These obstacles might explain in part why so few complaints were filed." (my bold)

Actually, now that I think about it, some of these issues sound like they could have stemmed from the 2016 American presidential election!

It is interesting to see how quickly the NSA leadership was willing to pat itself on the back for a job well done in Iraq.  I guess they were blind to the possibility that their current actions would have a detrimental impact on the future of Iraq.

The Bombing of Iraq - The NSA's Viewpoint

Among the NSA documents that have seen the light of day there are a series of articles from the NSA's internal, private news site, SIDtoday which are being released in batches by The Intercept.  One of these internal documents from January 2004 provides us an insider's glimpse at how the American forces were using intercepted signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the Iraq War.

This top secret document entitled "A Lesson in Personal Accountability" was written by Charles Berlin, the Signals Intelligence Directorate Chief of Staff and was run in SIDtoday as part of its "InSIDer's View of History" series (don't you just love the clever use of the SID acronym?) with pertinent sections highlighted by me:

Mr. Berlin starts out by recounting his experiences with signals intelligence during the Balkans War (aka Operation Joint Endeavour) in the mid-1990s.  He notes that the job of the Signals Intelligence Directorate during the Balkans War was to select targets for the U.S. military, providing them with a range of options for attacks.  He notes that there had "been some mistakes in previous bombings (with civilian losses)".  After personally approving the targets provided by Mr. Berlin and his staff, the Commander in Chief, General Michael Ryan informed Mr. Berlin that commanders now had the legal responsibility for selecting military targets and that if a mistake was made, there was the possibility of a war crimes charge.

In light of his conversation with General Ryan, Mr. Berlin goes on to note the following:

"For us today this lesson is especially important.  The planning cycle for dropping a bomb has compressed from a day to minutes and the criterion for the aiming point has less and less review.  As many of you know, our forces in Iraq are dropping bombs on the strength of SIGINT alone.  We are proud of their confidence in us, but have you ever considered the enormous risk the commanders are assuming in this regard?  Are you ready to share that risk?" (my bold)

What SIGINT was being used to select targets for the U.S. and coalition military forces?  According to another document from the SIDtoday internal NSA news site we find this top secret document entitled "The Rewards of Metadata":

As we can see from this document, the NSA was using metadata (i.e. information about the communications such as time, geographic location, length of call)  rather than the content of those communications) in a process that they define as "information chaining".  In one type of metadata tracking, call chaining, analysts looked at which phone numbers were being called by phone numbers that they were tracking, giving them even more phone numbers to track.  This would allow analysts to determine the relationships between certain groups of people (i.e. in this case, suspected terrorists).  According to the author of the document, SID's use of communications metadata  had led to the capture of "bad guys" including al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

What is particularly interesting is the volume of metadata/signals intelligence that the NSA had collected.  According to the author, the NSA's corporate call event repository was known as FASCIA II and contained metadata records on telephone, wireless, billing data, high-powered cordless phones and mobile over internet protocol or MoIP.  By early 2004, FASCIA II contained over 85 billion metadata records with daily additions of 125 million records.  FASCIA II had over four years worth of online storage and it was anticipated that it would be able to handle over 205 million metadata records daily and store up to seven years of metadata records on-line and three years of metadata records in storage.

All of this suggests that the NSA was inundated with massive volumes of signals intelligence data that had to be processed extremely quickly so that targets could be selected and provided to coalition forces in Iraq so they could launch attacks before the targets changed location.  There was one significant fly in the ointment.  According to this document from SIDtoday in June 2004, the NSA simply did not have enough Cryptologic Language Analysts with skills in Arabic since that is the language of choice in the Muslim world:

Note that according to the author, in 2004, only half of the missions that were part of the Global War on Terror were being undertaken by NSA Crypotological Analysts that had the minimum qualifications necessary to understand the complex communications used by the "terrorists" that were being targeted.

Looking back to the first part of this posting, given what we know about the volume of data that the NSA was dealing with and the lack of linguistically capable analysts, it is rather shocking that the coalition forces in Iraq were comfortable using SIGINT alone to target where they wanted to drop their bombs.

The Cosy Relationship Between the NSA and Israel

Updated June 2015

The long history of hostilities in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas reminded me of something that I had read some months back, particularly because it concerns the United States, Israel and the privacy of Americans.

As we all recall, last year, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and the British newspaper, the Guardian, released a great deal of information about the National Security Agency and its infringements on our privacy.  Acting in conjunction with the United Kingdom's GCHQ and Canada's CSEC, the NSA supplies Israel with signals intelligence (SIGINT) that it can use to help it when it attacks its enemies, particularly the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.  The NSA supplies data to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) also known as Unit 8200, part of Israel's Intelligence Corps, that allows Israel to monitor its Palestinian neighbours.  This sharing is done under a top secret Memo of Understanding between ISNU and the NSA as you can see here:

 While much of the document is unreadable legalese, there is one important sentence right at the beginning of the document:

"This agreement between NSA and The Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) prescribes procedures and responsibilities for ensure that ISNU handling of materials provided by NSA - including, but not limited to, Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) technology and equipment and raw SIGINT data (i.e. signals information that has not been reviewed for foreign intelligence purposes or minimized)..." (my bold)

Note the use of the word "minimized".  As we've been reminded again and again, the NSA and  the communications security establishments of America's Five Eyes partners (Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand) are not allowed to spy on their own citizens.  This means that any data gathered by the NSA, for example, should technically be stripped of any communications between Americans (i.e. minimized) in order for the NSA to be operating within its supposed legal bounds, that is, protecting the privacy of American citizens.  According to this agreement, however, we can see that the raw data that the NSA supplies to Israel's ISNU is NOT minimized.  In other words, it is entirely possible that our personal information that is collaterally collected by the NSA (and its fellow Five Eyes partners) in its sweeping of data from the internet, telephone and cell phones, is shared with Israel.  In fact, the agreement states that the raw SIGINT includes, but is not limited to "...unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata and content.".  Not only is the NSA sharing American's metadata with Israel, they are providing them with the content of our communications.

This document also proves that the Obama Administration's stance of "standing with its hands in its pockets" while thousands are injured and killed in the Gaza are disingenuous at best, particularly in light of this 2013 document from the Central Security Service at the NSA which outlines the exchanging of information between the NSA and Israel's ISNU:

  

Notice that the second paragraph outlines the potential strategic threats to the United States and Israel; these include the countries of North Africa, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.  A "dedicated line between NSA and ISNU supports the exchange of raw material as well as daily analytic and technical correspondence.".  Once again, note the use of the words "raw material".

Here is a page outlining the "Success Stories" of this data exchange:

The next time you hear about another targeted attack on the Gaza, perhaps you'll keep the very cozy relationship between the NSA and Israel's ISNU in mind...and worry a bit more about your  own lack of privacy.