by WashingtonsBlog
October 15, 2013
from
WashingtonsBlog Website
Tattered Flag With
Surveillance Camera
(Photographer Unknown)
Debunking Government’s
Justification for Mass Surveillance
Preface
The Bush and Obama administrations have
claimed for more than a decade that spying on Americans was justified by
9/11.
Senator Diane Feinstein - head of the Senate Intelligence Committee - is
now trotting out the
same old tired justification.
However - as
demonstrated below - that claim is totally false.
No Stopped Terrorist Plots
TechDirt
notes:
Feinstein goes on to make… claims that have
already been debunked:
Working
in combination, the call-records database and other NSA programs
have aided efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to disrupt
terrorism in the U.S. approximately a dozen times in recent years,
according to the NSA.
This
summer, the agency disclosed that 54 terrorist events have been
interrupted - including plots stopped and arrests made for support
to terrorism. Thirteen events were in the U.S. homeland and nine
involved U.S. persons or facilities overseas.
Twenty-five were in Europe, five in Africa and 11 in Asia.
[The NSA chief himself
admits the numbers are wildly inflated,
and there were only "one or two" terrorist plots foiled. The NSA’s
deputy director says that -
at the
most - one (1) plot might have
been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone.]
Note the all important "and other NSA
programs" language here.
Also the use of "terrorist events" not
plots. And, remember, those "thirteen events… in the U.S. homeland,"
have since been whittled down to
only one
that actually relied on the call records program that she’s defending -
and that wasn’t a terrorist plot but a cab driver in San Diego sending
some cash to a Somali group judged to be a terrorist organization.
Specifically, the cab driver and 3 other men
raised a
total of $8,500 and sent it to
Somalia.
While the group the money was sent to was, in
fact, designated as a terrorist organization in 2008 by the U.S.,
the FBI itself admits that the cab driver’s
donation was more in the nature of a political - or even
tribal - affiliation, rather than a terrorist one.
Yochai Benkler
explained at the Guardian:
This single successful prosecution, under a
vague criminal statute, which stopped a few thousand dollars from
reaching one side in a local conflict in the Horn of Africa, is the
sole success story for the NSA bulk domestic
surveillance program.
The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez
writes that Feinstein’s argument:
Is simply an attempt to exploit the tragedy
of 9/11 to deflect criticism of massive domestic surveillance that would
not have been any use in preventing that attack."
So there’s not a single terrorist attack proven
to have been thwarted by the NSA. Instead, the entire
Orwellian surveillance program is being
justified by one San Diego cabbie sending his loose change ($8,500 divided
by 4 is $2,125) to the other side of the world as a political/tribal
contribution?
The Government Actually DID Spy On the Bad Guys Before
9/11
ProPublica
notes:
In defending the NSA’s sweeping
collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration
officials have
repeatedly
pointed out how it could have
helped thwart the 9/11 attacks:
If only the surveillance program
been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have
been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living
in San Diego [named Khalid al Mihdhar].
Last weekend, former Vice President Dick
Cheney
invoked the same argument.
***
Indeed, the Obama administration’s
invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument
made by the Bush administration eight
years ago when it defended the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.
The reality is different.
Initially, an
FBI informant hosted and rented a room to
Mihdhar and another 9/11 hijacker in 2000.
Investigators for the Congressional Joint
Inquiry
discovered that an FBI informant had hosted
and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry
sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid
him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these
blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.
As the New York Times
notes:
Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who
is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the
White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence...
The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau
of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional
inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an
informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of
two Sept. 11 hijackers.
So mass surveillance of Americans isn’t
necessary, when the FBI informant should have apprehended the hijackers.
Moreover, the NSA actually
did intercept
Mihdhar’s phone calls before 9/11.
We
reported in 2008:
The U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans
from the hijackers’ own mouth. Most of what we wrote about involved the
NSA and other intelligence services tapping top Al Qaeda operatives’
phone calls outside the U.S.
However, as leading NSA expert James
Bamford - the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News
Tonight with Peter Jennings for almost a decade, winner of a number of
journalism awards for coverage national security issues, whose articles
have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the
New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles
Times Magazine, and the only author to write any books (he wrote 3) on
the NSA -
reports,
the NSA was also tapping
the hijackers’ phone calls inside the U.S.
Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar
and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before
9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar
and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a
high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.
The
NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen
phone for years. So NSA recorded
all of these phone
calls.
Indeed, the CIA knew as far back as 1999
that al-Mihdhar was coming to the U.S. Specifically, in 1999, CIA
operatives tailing al-Mihdhar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, obtained a copy
of his passport.
It contained visas for both Malaysia and the
U.S., so they knew it was likely he would go from Kuala Lumpur to
America.
We asked top NSA whistleblower William Binney
- a
highly-credible 32-year NSA veteran with
the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s digital data
gathering program (featured in a New York Times
documentary, and the source for much of
what we know about NSA spying) - what he thought of the government’s claim
that mass surveillance of Americans would have caught Mihdhar and prevented
9/11.
Binney responded:
Of course they could have and did
have data on hijackers before 9/11. And, Prism did not start
until 2007. But they could get the data from the "Upstream" collection.
This is the Mark Klein documentation of
Narus equipment in the NSA room in San Francisco and probably other
places in the lower 48. They did not need Prism to discover that. Prism
only suplemented the "Upstream" material starting in 2007 according to
the slide.
Details
here and
here.
Another high-level NSA whistleblower - Thomas
Drake -
testified in a declaration last year that
an NSA pilot program he and Binney directed:
Revealed the extent of the connections that
the NSA had within its data prior to the [9/11] attacks.
The NSA
found the array of potential connections among the data that it already
possessed to be potentially embarrassing. To avoid that
embarrassment, the NSA suppressed the results of the pilot program. I
had been told that the NSA had chosen not to pursue [the program] as one
of its methods for combating terrorism.
Instead, the NSA had previously chosen to
delegate the development of a new program, named "Trailblazer" to a
group of outside contractors.
Moreover, widespread spying on Americans began
before 9/11 (confirmed
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.)
And U.S. and allied intelligence
heard the 9/11 hijackers plans from their own mouths:
-
According to Le Monde, the
intelligence services of America’s close ally France and of other
governments had
infiltrated the highest levels
of Al-Qaeda’s camps,
and actually listened to the hijackers’ debates about which
airlines’ planes should be hijacked, and allied intelligence
services also intercepted phone conversations between Al-Qaeda
members regarding the attacks
-
According to various sources, on the day
before 9/11, the mastermind
told the lead hijacker "tomorrow is
zero hour" and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA
intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also
monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls
"In two days, you’re going to hear
big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while." U.S.
officials later
told CNN that "in recent years
they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone
communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was
using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted
and sometimes recorded."
Indeed, before 9/11, to impress
important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes
of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.
-
And according to
CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just
15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon,
"the National Security Agency, which
monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from
one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone
number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia",
...and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA
monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11,
that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as
well)
But even with all of that spying, the government
didn’t stop the hijackers … even though 9/11 was
entirely foreseeable.
ProPublica notes:
"There
were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata
system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,"
says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who
extensively investigated 9/11 as
chairman of the Senate’s
intelligence committee.
These missed opportunities are described in
detail in the joint congressional
report produced by Graham and his
colleagues as well as in the 9/11 Commission
report.
***
Mihdhar was on the intelligence community’s radar at least as early as
1999.
That’s when the NSA had picked up
communications from a "terrorist facility" in the Mideast suggesting
that members of an "operational cadre" were planning to travel to Kuala
Lumpur in January 2000, according to the
commission report.
The NSA picked up the first names of the
members, including a "Khalid." The CIA identified him as Khalid al
Mihdhar.
The U.S. got
photos of those attending the
January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of
Mihdhar, and the CIA also
learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S.
***
Using
their true names,
Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time
beginning in May 2000 even
lived
with an active FBI informant in San
Diego.
***
Let’s turn to the
comments of FBI Director Robert Mueller
before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
Mueller noted that intelligence agencies
lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting
but at the same time had identified an "Al Qaida safe house in Yemen."
He continued:
"They understood that that Al Qaida safe
house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling
into that particular safe house.
We came to find out afterwards that the
person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was
in the United States in San Diego.
If we had had this [metadata] program in
place at the time we would have been able to identify that
particular telephone number in San Diego."
In turn, the number would have led to
Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued.
(Media
accounts indicate that the "safe house" was actually the home
of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that
the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)
The congressional 9/11 report sheds some
further light on this episode, though
in highly redacted form.
The NSA had in early 2000 analyzed
communications between a person named "Khaled" and "a suspected
terrorist facility in the Middle East," according to this account. But,
crucially, the intelligence community "did not determine the location
from which they had been made."
In other words, the report suggests, the NSA
actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and
the "Yemen safe house" but was not able to figure out who was calling or
even the phone number he was calling from.
***
Theories about the metadata program aside,
it’s not clear why the NSA couldn’t or didn’t track the originating
number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to.
Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who
wrote the 2009 NSA history
Secret Sentry, says that the
agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to
determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from.
"Back
in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a
telephone call," [9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip
Zelikow] told ProPublica.
***
There’s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case:
In the years after 9/11,
media
reports also suggested that
there were multiple calls that went in
the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego.
But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were
going.
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times
quoted unnamed officials saying
the NSA had well-established legal
authority before 9/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the
U.S.
In that more targeted scenario, a metadata
program vacuuming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be
unnecessary.
And see below video:
Nova - The Spy Factory
Examine the high-tech eavesdropping
carried out
by the National Security Agency
and the pitfalls of surveillance
in an age of terrorism.
In other words, the NSA had the technical
ability and legal authority to intercept calls between Midhar and Yemen
before
9/11… and it actually did so.
In addition, Gawker
notes that Feinstein’s own
statement is illogical on its face, since the CIA had issued urgent alerts:
Feinstein includes this paragraph right up
front:
In the summer of 2001, the CIA’s
then-director, George Tenet, painted a dire picture for members of
the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified about the
terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda.
As Mr. Tenet later told the 9/11
Commission, "the system was blinking red" and by late July of that
year, it could not "get any worse."
Huh. So… the CIA did issue dire
warnings prior to 9/11… This directly contradicts Feinstein’s point
about the necessity of the NSA’s phone spying.
Moreover, Wikipedia
notes:
Mihdhar was placed on a CIA watchlist on August 21, 2001,
and a note was sent on August 23 to the Department of State and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that Mihdhar and
Hazmi be added to their watchlists.
***
On August 23,
the CIA informed the FBI that Mihdhar
had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah.
The FBI headquarters received a copy of
the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on August 24,
showing the New York
Marriott as Mihdhar’s destination.
On August 28,
the FBI New York field office requested
that a criminal case be opened to determine whether Mihdhar was still in
the United States, but the request was refused.
The FBI ended up treating Mihdhar as an
intelligence case, which meant that the FBI’s criminal investigators
could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence
and criminal case operations.
An agent in
the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying,
"Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the
public will not understand why we were not more effective and
throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’"
The reply from headquarters was,
"we [at headquarters] are all frustrated
with this issue … [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them
up."
The FBI contacted Marriott on August 30,
requesting that they check guest records, and on September 5, they
reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of Mihdhar checking in.
The day before the attacks, the New York
office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local
Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings,
because those were the two airlines Mihdhar had used to enter the
country.
Neither
the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the
FBI’s Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other
private financial records, were notified about Mihdhar prior to
September 11.
***
Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and
Congressman Curt Weldon alleged in 2005 that the Defense Department data
mining project Able Danger identified Mihdhar and 3 other 9/11 hijackers
as members of an al-Qaeda cell in early 2000.
Similarly, even though the alleged Boston
bombers’ phones
were tapped - and NBC News
reports,
"under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the
government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the
U.S.",
mass surveillance
did not stop the other terror attack on
U.S. soil since 9/11.
In reality - despite the government continually
grasping at straws to justify its massive
spying program - top security experts say that mass surveillance of
Americans
doesn’t keep us safe. Indeed, they
say that mass spying
actually hurts
U.S. counter-terror efforts (more
here and
here).
As one amusing example, the NSA’s databases are
getting
clogged with spam
emails from accounts they’re snooping on.
Veteran FBI agent
Colleen Rowley (the
one in the middle) - the one who tried to
warn her superiors about hijakckers taking flying lessons -
pointed out in June:
Think about how Bush administration
officials defended themselves from not following up on the incredibly
specific intelligence warnings urgently going to Director of Central
Intelligence George Tenet and National Counterterrorism Director Richard
Clark in the months leading up to 9/11.
Their common response back then was
something along the line of: intelligence is like a fire hose, and you
can’t get a sip from a fire hose. There was apparently too much for top
officials to even read the key memos addressed to them.
But if
intelligence was a fire hose before 9/11, it quickly became Niagara
Falls.
And now, with so much data (almost all of it
irrelevant) that has been sucked into government databases and
computers, one might liken the "intelligence flow" to a tsunami, with
analysts asked to find just the right drop of water. Good luck.
In fact, The Washington Post’s
well-researched series in 2010 on "Top Secret America" reported that the
NSA was collecting and storing around 1.7 billion pieces of information
every 24 hours, even back then.
To switch metaphors, it does not make it
easier to find a needle in a haystack if you continue to add hay. No one
has ever explained why it was left to fellow passengers or alert street
vendors, not the "intelligence" agencies, to stop the last four major
terrorist attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. soil.