y Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras
June 7, 2013
from
WashingtonPost Website
|
Poitras is a documentary
filmmaker and MacArthur Fellow. Julie Tate, Robert O’Harrow Jr.,
Cecilia Kang and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report. |
Video: The U.S. government is accessing top Internet
companies’ servers to track foreign targets. Reporter
Barton Gellman talks about the source who revealed this
top-secret information and how he believes his
whistleblowing was worth whatever consequences are
ahead.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are
tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet
companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails,
documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign
targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The
program, code-named PRISM, has not been
made public until now. It may be the first of its kind.
The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and
breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it
divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google
or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of
valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
See 'Graphic
- NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program.'
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the
document:
“Collection directly from the servers of
these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook,
PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
London’s Guardian newspaper reported Friday that
GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering
intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by
the NSA.
According to documents obtained by The Guardian, PRISM would appear to allow
GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required in Britain to seek
personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company
based outside of the country.
PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret
program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media
disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced
the president to look for new authority.
Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated
voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection.
PRISM recruited
its first partner, Microsoft, and began six
years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling
national debate on surveillance and privacy.
Late last year, when critics in Congress sought
changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM
were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.
The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic,
which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas
location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers
persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a
fundamentally new form.
Until then the government had to show probable
cause that a particular “target” and “facility” were both connected to
terrorism or espionage.
In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data
sets as “facilities” and agreed to certify periodically that the government
had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of “U.S. persons”
data without a warrant.
In a statement issue late Thursday, Director of National Intelligence
James R. Clapper said,
“information collected under this program is
among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information
we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of
threats.
The unauthorized disclosure of information
about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and
risks important protections for the security of Americans.”
Clapper added that there were numerous
inaccuracies in reports about PRISM by The Post and the Guardian newspaper,
but he did not specify any.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said:
“I would just push back on the idea that the
court has signed off on it, so why worry? This is a court that meets in
secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and publishes
almost none of its opinions. It has never been an effective check on
government.”
Several companies contacted by The Post said
they had no knowledge of the program, did not allow direct government access
to their servers and asserted that they responded only to targeted requests
for information.
“We do not provide any government
organization with direct access to Facebook servers,” said Joe Sullivan,
chief security officer for Facebook.
“When Facebook is asked for data or
information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such
request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information
only to the extent required by law.”
“We have never heard of PRISM,” said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for
Apple.
“We do not provide any government agency
with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting
customer data must get a court order.”
It is possible that the conflict between the
PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the
part of the NSA author.
In another classified report obtained by The
Post, the arrangement is described as allowing,
“collection managers [to send] content
tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at
company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.
Government officials and the document itself
made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as
PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw
from the program if exposed.
“98 percent of PRISM production is based on
Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these
sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides
on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s
Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most
prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data
in 1,477 items last year.
According to the slides and other supporting
materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM”
as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7
intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the
trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA,
whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the
machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of
American-held accounts on American soil.
The technology companies, whose cooperation is essential to PRISM
operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley,
according to the document.
They are listed on a roster that bears their
logos in order of entry into the program:
-
Microsoft
-
Yahoo
-
Google
-
Facebook
-
PalTalk
-
AOL
-
Skype
-
YouTube
-
Apple
PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted
traffic of substantial intelligence interest during the Arab Spring and in
the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as
“coming soon.”
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had
classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012,
floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a
“back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were
swept up in a search for someone else.
The National Security Agency secretly collected phone records of millions of
Verizon customers.
“As it is written, there is nothing to
prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of
communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been
collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls
or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.
Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the
number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected,
and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted
there was no way to find out.
Eventually Inspector General I. Charles
McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the
privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.
Roots in the ’70s
PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with
as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s.
The NSA calls these Special Source Operations,
and PRISM falls under that rubric.
The Silicon Valley operation works alongside a parallel program,
code-named BLARNEY, that gathers up
“metadata” - technical information about communications traffic and network
devices - as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the
Internet.
BLARNEY’s top-secret program summary, set down
in the slides alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun
hat, describes it as,
“an ongoing collection program that
leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to
gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global
networks.”
But the PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource
Integration, Synchronization, and Management) program appears to more nearly
resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders
issued by President
George W. Bush after the 'al-Qaeda'
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Its history, in which President Obama presided
over exponential growth in a program that candidate Obama
criticized,* shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have
shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass
collection techniques.
* Candidate Obama's explicit
pledge to protect whistleblowers.
"Often the best source of information
about waste, fraud, and abuse in government," Obama then
said, "is an existing government employee committed to public
integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and
patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have
been during the Bush administration."
Source
The Obama administration points to ongoing
safeguards in the form of,
“extensive procedures, specifically approved
by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are
targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination
of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.”
And it is true that the PRISM program is not a
dragnet, exactly.
From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is
capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency
does not try to collect it all.
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade, Md., key in
“selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51
percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent
test.
Training materials obtained by The Post instruct
new analysts to make quarterly reports of any accidental collection of U.S.
content, but add that,
“it’s nothing to worry about.”
Even when the system works just as advertised,
with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a
great deal of American content.
That is described as “incidental,” and it is
inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To
collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that
everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in.
Intelligence analysts are typically taught to
chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases
“incidental collection” exponentially.
The same math explains the aphorism, from the
John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from
any other person.
A ‘directive’
The National Security Agency secretly collected phone records of millions of
Verizon customers.
In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are
obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director
of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept
Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA.
In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department
authority for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence
Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”
In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When
a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry, said a
lawyer with experience in bridging the gaps, neither side wants to risk a
public fight. The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such
complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed
to build in back doors without active help from each company.
Apple demonstrated that resistance is possible when it held out for more
than five years, for reasons unknown, after Microsoft became PRISM’s first
corporate partner in May 2007.
Twitter, which has cultivated a reputation for
aggressive defense of its users’ privacy, is still conspicuous by its
absence from the list of “private sector partners.”
Google, like the other companies, denied that it permitted direct
government access to its servers.
“Google cares deeply about the security of
our users’ data,” a company spokesman said.
“We disclose user data to government in
accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From
time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back
door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the
government to access private user data.”
Microsoft also provided a statement:
“We provide customer data only when we
receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a
voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for
requests about specific accounts or identifiers.
If the government has a broader voluntary
national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate
in it.”
Yahoo also issued a denial.
“Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very
seriously,” the company said in a statement. “We do not provide the
government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.”
Like market researchers, but with far more
privileged access, collection managers in the NSA’s Special Source
Operations group, which oversees the PRISM program, are drawn to the wealth
of information about their subjects in online accounts.
For much the same reason, civil libertarians and
some ordinary users may be troubled by the menu available to analysts who
hold the required clearances to “task” the PRISM system.
There has been,
“continued exponential growth in tasking to
Facebook and
Skype,”
according to the PRISM slides.
With a few clicks and an affirmation that the
subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear
proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s,
“extensive search and surveillance
capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”
According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM
Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of
the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio,
video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone.
Google’s offerings include,
Firsthand experience with these systems, and
horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to
provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The
Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion
on privacy.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas
form as you type,” the officer said.
Inner Workings of...
A Top-Secret Spy Program
by Barton Gellman and Todd
Lindeman
June 29, 2013
from
WashingtonPost Website
The National Security Agency’s PRISM progam, which collects intelligence
from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants, is “targeted” at
foreigners.
But it also collects the e-mail, voice, text and
video chats of an unknown number of Americans - “inadvertently,”
“incidentally” or deliberately if an American is conversing with a foreign
target overseas.
Here are new details on how the program works,
from top-secret documents and interviews.
How the PRISM program works
|
Targeting a “selector”
An NSA analyst
types one or more search terms, or “selectors.” Selectors
may refer to people (by name, e-mail address, phone number
or some other digital signature), organizations or subjects
such as the sale of specialized parts for uranium
enrichment.
Along with the selectors, the analyst must fill out an
electronic form that specifies the foreign-intelligence
purpose of the search and the basis for the analyst’s
“reasonable belief” that the search will not return results
for U.S. citizens, permanent residents or anyone else who is
located in the United States.
Accessing private companies’
data
The search request, known as a “tasking,” can be sent to
multiple sources - for example, to a private company and to
an NSA access point that taps into the Internet’s main
gateway switches.
A tasking for Google,
Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to
equipment installed at each company. This equipment,
maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private
company’s system.
Depending on the
company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address
books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio
or video chats and “metadata” that identify the locations,
devices used and other information about a target.
Data processed by NSA
computers
The same FBI-run equipment sends the search results to the
NSA. The results are first sent for processing by the NSA’s
automated system code-named PRINTAURA.
This system combines
the roles of librarian and traffic cop. PRINTAURA sorts and
dispatches the data stream through a complex sequence of
systems that extract and process voice, text, video and
metadata |
|
Checks and balances
The program as a whole is authorized once a year in a secret
order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
There are no individual warrants, even for access to full
content.
Before an analyst may conduct live surveillance using PRISM,
a second analyst in his subject area must concur. In this
“validation” process, the second analyst confirms that the
surveillance has a valid foreign-intelligence purpose, that
there is a “reasonable belief” that the target is neither
American nor on U.S. territory, and that the surveillance
complies with NSA regulations and the classified judicial
order interpreting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.
For stored content, a similar review takes place in the
NSA’s office of Standards and Compliance.
There is a second
review by the FBI to ensure that the target does not match a
U.S. citizen or U.S. resident in FBI files.
Other spy programs
Most “metadata,” or records of the people, locations, equip-
ment, times, dates and durations of communications, are
collected in programs other than PRISM. Some come from what
NSA calls Upstream: interception at the biggest junctions of
the internet and telephone networks.
Others come directly
from telephone companies - AT&T, Verizon Business Services
and Sprint - who keep detailed calling records.
|
|
Chats |
E-mail |
File
transfers |
Internet
telephone |
Login/ID |
Metadata |
Photos |
Social
networking |
Stored
data |
Video |
Video
conferencing |
|
|
What the analyst sees
For example, a completed PRISM search may yield e-mails,
login credentials, metadata, stored files and videos.
After processing, they
are automatically sent to the analyst who made the original
tasking. The time elapsed from tasking to response is
thought to range from minutes to hours.
A senior intelligence
official would say only,
“Much though we
might wish otherwise, the latency is not zero.”
|
|
Information collected on
Americans
If a target turns out to be an American or a person located
in the United States, the NSA calls the collection
“inadvertent” and usually destroys the results.
If the target is
foreign but the search results include U.S. communications,
the NSA calls this “incidental” collection and generally
keeps the U.S. content for five years. There are
“minimization” rules to limit the use and distribution of
the communications of identifiable U.S. citizens or
residents.
The NSA discloses the
identities to other agencies if it believes there is
evidence of a crime or that the identities are essential to
understanding an intelligence report. |
|