Kessler: FBI Break-In Undercuts NSA Critics

Ronald Kessler, veteran journalist and author of The Secrets of the FBI, offers a good piece in the Washington Times on the differences between the FBI's past abuses and NSA's current surveillance programs.

Now that the burglars have come forward, critics of the National Security Agency surveillance programs have pounced on the 1971 Pennsylvania break-in that unearthed FBI abuses to bolster their argument that contractor Edward Snowden did a public service by publicly revealing NSA surveillance methods.

The truth is quite the opposite.

The FBI documents stolen from the bureau's resident agency in Media, Pa., opened a window on real abuses at a time when members of Congress not only did not conduct oversight of intelligence agencies, but affirmatively did not want to know what those agencies were doing.

Together with documents later obtained by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the material painted a picture of an FBI that was conducting surveillance of Americans to stifle political dissent. Instead of using the existing laws to prosecute violators, the FBI engaged in a range of improper or illegal acts to harass targets.

... The FBI abuses led to reforms that included congressional oversight. Today, not only the House and Senate intelligence committees, but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court scrutinize NSA and FBI surveillance programs.

The top four members of the intelligence committees have issued a bipartisan statement affirming that the NSA’s program to collect telephone metadata of Americans is a “valuable analytical tool” that allows the intelligence community to “connect the dots on emerging or current terrorist threats directed against Americans in the U.S.”

... In contrast to the FBI's activities under Hoover, no abuse — meaning actions taken for political or illegal reasons — has been found in the NSA programs. Critics say they could be abused.

So could any law enforcement action. To follow the critics’ logic, police officers and FBI agents should not carry weapons because they could potentially use them improperly.

... Those who fall for such spin to justify curtailing NSA surveillance programs will have only themselves to blame if the government is unable to connect the dots to stop the next attack, which could wipe out millions of Americans with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/4/kessler-fbi-break-in-undercuts-nsa-critics/?page=all#pagebreak

Note: I interviewed Ronald Kessler for Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the interview via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/02/q-with-ronald-kessler-author-of-secrets.html

Taking On The Snowdenistas

Edward Lucas offers a piece on NSA leaker Edward Snowden in the Wall Street Journal.

Most of my media colleagues think Edward Snowden is a saint and proto-martyr. The fugitive NSA contractor has bravely exposed American spy agencies' tricks and mischief. But the theft and publication of secret documents is not a heroic campaign. At best it is reckless self-indulgence, and at worst sabotage and treason.

 

Mr. Snowden has not proved systematic abuse by the NSA or partner agencies. The PowerPoint slides he stole are for the most part ambiguous and out-of-date. His story has been told naively and hysterically, with a huge dose of hypocrisy.

 

Espionage is inherently disreputable: It involves stealing secrets. Enemies of the West—notably Russia and China—are spying on us. France runs a mighty industrial espionage service. Germany has an excellent signals intelligence agency, the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung.

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224.html

Note: In my view, Snowden is a sneak thief, spy and traitor.

A Pre-9/11 Mindset: Obama Leads From Behind On NSA

Gary Schmitt at the Weekly Standard offers his take on the president's speech on NSA.

Thankfully, President Obama is not a doctor.  If he was and you happened to visit him in his office and mentioned that you were worried about the potential for lung cancer, he’d immediately put you under, open you up, and pull out a lung—or, at least, that’s the logic that seems to be guiding his decisions on NSA’s collection programs.  Yes, no one has found any evidence that NSA has broken the law, invaded constitutionally-protected privacy rights, or is about to.  But never mind, it’s the very possibility that someday, somehow, NSA will jump the tracks that requires the president now to unduly complicate the use of what he admits has been an important counterterrorism tool.

On the domestic front, the president has decided to modify substantially the 215 metadata collection program in which American telephony data (numbers called, numbers called from, and length of call) is currently stored in bulk by NSA and examined there to look for connections to foreign terrorists and terrorist organizations—all of which is done under the supervision of both congressional committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).  Starting now, however, the president will have the Justice Department go to the court for every discrete query of the database.  This is in contrast to the current process by which NSA can query the telephony database in any instance where an already FISC-approved, reasonably suspected terrorist number comes up on its screen.  Obviously, having to get court pre-approval for what have been a couple hundred queries annually will slow down the effort, make it far more burdensome and, in spirit, as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden recently said, return us to “a pre-9/11 mindset.”

... If there is any good news coming from the president’s speech it’s that he didn’t accept any of the presidential panel’s even wilder recommendations about breaking up NSA into offensive and defensive components—a sure fire way of making both less effective—nor did the president adopt perhaps the panel’s silliest recommendation of all: telling NSA to stop looking for ways to defeat encryption systems that, needless to say, terrorists, criminals, and rogue states might want to use.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-leads-behind-nsa_774826.html

NSA Intelligence-Gathering Programs Keep Us Safe

Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin explains why we need the NSA in a piece in the  Washington Post.

It’s time we all came to our senses about the National Security Agency (NSA). If it is true, as many allege, that the United States went a little nuts in its all-out pursuit of al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it is equally true that we are going a little nuts again in our dogged pursuit of the post-Snowden NSA.

Those who advocate sharply limiting the agency’s activities ought to consider that its work is the very foundation of U.S. intelligence.    

I don’t mean to diminish the role of other intelligence agencies, and I say this as a 30-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who is “CIA” through and through. But in most cases, the NSA is the starting point for determining what holes need to be filled through other means of intelligence-collection. That’s because its information on foreign developments is so comprehensive and generally so reliable. It is the core of intelligence support to U.S. troops in battle. Any efforts to “rein in” the agency must allow for the possibility that change risks serious damage to U.S. security and the country’s ability to navigate in an increasingly uncertain world.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nsa-intelligence-gathering-programs-keep-us-safe/2014/01/02/0fd51b22-7173-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Media Reports Mischaracterize What NSA Does, Says Director

Cheryl Pellerin at the American Forces Press Service offers the below piece:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2013 - Media reports detailing secret National Security Agency collection of data from companies such as Google and Yahoo from overseas data centers mischaracterize what NSA does, the agency's director said in an Oct. 31 speech to an audience at the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs.

The reporting, which began last week, was based on documents stolen from NSA and periodically leaked to the media beginning this summer by former NSA information technology contractor Edward Snowden.

"There are some recent articles -- recent meaning this morning -- about our collection operations that mischaracterize exactly what we do and how we do it," Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander said.

NSA is a global organization, noted the general, who also commands U.S. Cyber Command.

"In order to understand what the terrorists are doing, in order to handle those foreign intelligence issues that we get, we have to have collection," he said. "But it is not targeted against a company. ... These are [data] flows that you would expect our agency to go after and to work with our partners."

Alexander said that when NSA works with foreign partners, the agency follows U.S. law and the laws of the partner's country.

"We have to follow both, and where it says to protect a U.S. person's data, we do that, and [the foreign partner has] to do that too, wherever we partner," the general said.

"That's a huge step forward, ... and it's all to collect the data that we need -- not targeting specific companies, although some data we do collect from some of those companies, because terrorists are using that and you expect us to get that," he said.

Alexander said he spoke with a group of chief executive officers last week who told him that "they keep getting spun in the papers with what's going on, and it's hurting their business."

The NSA director also said the companies' reputations are being hurt unjustly with the public, because they're being compelled by court orders through what NSA calls the FAA 702 program to produce emails and other records of suspected foreign agents.

The FISA Amendment Act 702, or FAA 702 -- FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- authorizes electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence information. The act also created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees FBI requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States.

Because such court orders are infrequent, the companies want to be able to make these numbers public "so the American people and the rest of the world know this is a small number analogous to what other countries would do in law-enforcement type programs," Alexander said.

"These aren't relationships where industry is coming up and dumping data on our doorstep," the general added. "It is compelled by a court order, [and] ... we need to get that out. We're working with the companies and the Department of Justice so the American people will know exactly what is shared in volume."

Another NSA collection effort leaked by Snowden is the business record FISA program, or Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which consists of the bulk collection of U.S. and other phone records into a database overseen by NSA.

"In there we put all our phone numbers -- the to-from, the date, time and the duration of the call -- and that's it. No names, no content, no emails. We don't need that," Alexander explained.

"We're looking from the foreign side. Are one of those numbers talking to one of those things that we see in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere out there?" he added. "All we need to do is tell the FBI that the number in the States ... is talking to something that is a true threat to this country. The FBI uses their authorities to take it from there."

An example of how the two programs work took place in 2009, Alexander said, when the NSA got insights from some of its collection in Pakistan under FAA 702.

"We lawfully intercepted an email [in which] there were discussions about recipes, weddings and a bomb ... so we shared that with the FBI. In that email was a [telephone] number, and the FBI came back and said the number is Najibullah Zazi and is associated with this al-Qaida person," he said.

"Given that number, and only that number, we were able to look into the business record FISA and see a number in New York and a number in Raleigh, N.C., and another number, ... and we were able to tell the FBI that number in New York was extremely important," the general added. "They had insights to parts of that already, but we could tell them that there were terrorist groups associated with these numbers."

Bosnian immigrant Adis Medunjanin was connected to the number in New York, Alexander said, and he and Najibullah Zazi were planning a mass attack on the New York City subway that would have been the biggest attack since 9/11.

"The great FBI, in a matter of six days, stopped the whole thing, because they had the intelligence and we had the tools and the insights to stop it," he added.

In October alone, the general said, 2,336 people were killed and 1,510 were injured in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Nigeria in terrorist acts.

"Over the past decade, we've had no mass casualties here, and that's not by accident. That's not luck, that's great work, great partnership, and the tools that we need to prevent terrorist acts," he added.

"We have to have intelligence," Alexander said. "We have to have partnerships, we have to work together, and we believe we can defend the country and protect our civil liberties and privacy."

Spying Is The One Thing Obama's Doing Right

The New York Post's editorial board says that spying is the one thing that the president is doing right.

Give President Obama a round of applause.

He seems to be doing a good job on at least one front in the War on Terror: spying. And we’re not being sarcastic.

True, we don’t often applaud Obama’s policies, especially when it comes to fighting terrorists.

But when so many foreign leaders are whining about US National Security Agency surveillance, it suggests the president must be doing something right.

Complaints such as those German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly raised in a “furious” call to the White House were sparked by disclosures about NSA data collection targeting perhaps the leaders themselves. Other allies angry over US spying include France, Mexico and Brazil.

But what did these leaders expect? At the Brandenburg Gate during the 2008 campaign, Obama promised a cheering crowd he represented a new era of “allies who will listen to each other.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2013/10/27/spying-is-the-one-thing-obamas-doing-right/