SUMMARY: The Wall Street Journal reported that Russia obtained classified information about how the U.S. military protects its computer networks and conducts electronic spying. The breach occurred when data was stolen by an NSA contractor, then hacked by Russia. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with The Wall Street Journal's Shane Harris.
SUMMARY: Governments and industries the world over are trying to deal with a new cyberattack, originating Tuesday in Ukraine and spreading rapidly through Europe and beyond. The new attack shows signs of greater technical sophistication than one in early May, but both apparently used a leaked tool developed by the NSA. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Rodney Joffe of Neustar, Inc., about what's at stake.
SUMMARY: Former CIA Director John Brennan, National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, and NSA chief Mike Rogers appeared before congressional hearings on Tuesday, amid reports that President Trump asked Coats and Rogers to help him push back against an FBI investigation into whether his campaign coordinated with the Russian government. Margaret Warner offers a recap of their testimony.
SUMMARY: Nearly 100 countries around the world worked to restore services after a massive cyber attack on Friday. The ransomware attack appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, which was identified by the U.S. National Security Agency and later leaked to the internet. Former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin joins Hari Sreenivasan for more on the attack.
SUMMARY: The National Security Agency contractor accused of mishandling massive amounts of classified data has been deemed a flight risk. In August, Harold Martin was arrested at his home in Maryland, where the equivalent of half a billion pages of documents and electronic data was found, some allegedly taken from NSA headquarters. William Brangham speaks with Matt Apuzzo of The New York Times for more.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A judge ruled today that a Maryland man accused of stealing massive amounts of information from the National Security Agency was a flight risk and will remain in federal custody.
William Brangham has the story.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): This past August, Harold Martin III was arrested at his home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. In his house, investigators discovered the equivalent of half-a-billion pages of documents and electronic data, some allegedly taken from the NSA's headquarters at nearby Fort Meade.
Among the documents were ones marked top-secret and also tools used by the NSA to hack into the computer networks of foreign governments.
Joining me now for more on this case is Matt Apuzzo, who's been covering this story for The New York Times.
Matt Apuzzo, welcome.
I wonder if you would just start off by laying out the case against this gentleman, and what is his defense?
MATT APUZZO, The New York Times: Well, I mean, what is fascinating is there is the case that's been brought.
And the case that's been brought, as you said, is; hey, this guy had terabytes, billions of pages of documents in his house, in his shed, in the back seat of his car, in the trunk of his car, and, obviously, you're not supposed to do that. So, there is that case.
But then there is this other case that's kind of looming over all this, and the question is, is he the guy who, not too long ago, facilitated the release of NSA documents, basically for ransom, put them up for sale online? These were hacking tools, the way the government, the United States government, hacks into other countries and businesses and whatnot?
And so that's really what's going on here, is, there's, OK, he mishandled classified information. He has basically admitted that. But is he the guy, is he part of some network that's putting information up for sale?
SUMMARY: On Saturday, programming code for National Security Agency hacking tools was shared online. The content appears to be legitimate, but it is not clear if it was intentionally hacked or accidentally leaked. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima and Paul Vixie of Farsight Security about where this development fits in the context of other recent cybersecurity breaches.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The National Security Agency's primary mission is to spy on the electronic communications of countries and people overseas.
Over the weekend, though, sophisticated code the NSA developed to penetrate computer security systems was posted online. This serious breach comes amid the ongoing revelations of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other organizations, allegedly by groups linked to Russian intelligence.
For more on this, we turn to The Washington Post national security correspondent Ellen Nakashima, and Paul Vixie. He designed and built some of the software that is the backbone of the Internet today. He is now chairman and CEO of Farsight Security, a computer security firm.
Ellen Nakashima, what happened this weekend? What got released?
ELLEN NAKASHIMA, The Washington Post: Over the weekend, apparently on Saturday, mysteriously, a cache of NSA hacking tools was released online through file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent and Dropbox.
It really wasn't noticed until about Monday, when the computer security community started commenting on it and questions arose as to whether or not the NSA had been hacked.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Paul Vixie, if these lock picks, these digital tools to try break into different systems out are out in the open now, these are the tools that the American government was using, what is the consequence, if it is in the public sphere?
PAUL VIXIE, Farsight Security: Well, I think, every day, everybody is trying to hack everybody. So, this is not huge news.
What's big news about it is that these tools were built by the U.S. government. Some of the lock picks, as you call them, are now obsolete. They are relying on vulnerabilities that have since been closed, because the files are about 3 years old.
But at least one of them is active against a very current piece of equipment from Cisco. And it is going to lead to a lot of break-ins while the patches are prepared and shipped and then applied.
SUMMARY: How did the Paris terrorists communicate with each other and elude surveillance? Investigators are eyeing readily available cellphone technologies that defy cracking by intelligence agencies and even the companies that created them. Judy Woodruff takes a look at some of the encrypted apps and software being used to evade detection.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Since the Paris attacks, there’s been lots of concern in Washington and other world capitals over fears of how terrorists can communicate by going dark, namely, using an array of technologies to hide from law enforcement before and after attacks.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, investigators are still hunting for answers to how the terrorists communicated with each other and eluded surveillance. But their eyes are on the now ubiquitous cell phone, which can send coded information using free, readily available technologies that defy cracking by intelligence agencies and even the companies that created them.
In Washington yesterday, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Richard Burr, said that very technology was probably at play in Paris.
SEN. RICHARD BURR (R), North Carolina: Globally, we need to begin the debate on what we do on encrypted networks, because it makes us blind to communications and to the actions of potential adversaries.
JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s called end-to-end encryption, meaning data gets encrypted or locked away with special codes on one device and is only decrypted when it reaches another.
Popular applications like WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, Threema and Telegram all operate this way. Some of the encrypted apps, like Dstrux, also employ technology that makes messages disappear after they’re delivered, leaving no trace.
Terrorists conceal their work using other sites like JustPaste.it. It is one place the Islamic State group posts messages and claims of responsibility without having to register. The TOR browser bounces communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers, hiding both the user’s activity and location.
Terrorist groups have even created their own encrypted software specifically to evade detection by the National Security Agency.
SUMMARY: Would greater government access to messages sent through secure communication technology help intelligence agencies fight terrorism? Judy Woodruff gets views from Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security, and Kate Martin of the Center for American Progress.
SUMMARY: For the first time in nearly 14 years, the National Security Agency is no longer allowed to log every time an American picks up the telephone to call someone. Overnight, three key provisions of the Patriot Act were allowed by the Senate to expire, despite exhortations by the White House. Gwen Ifill talks to Charlie Savage of The New York Times about what happens now.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): After a weekend of intraparty wrangling, the Senate allowed three key provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act to expire at midnight.
The three National Security Agency programs targeted by Kentucky Republican Rand Paul permitted the NSA’s sweeping bulk collection of phone data, allowed the agency to use roving wiretaps to track terror suspects, and created a so-called lone wolf program to track suspects outside terror networks.
To examine what happens now, we turn to Charlie Savage, who covers national security for The New York Times.
So, Charlie, tell us as succinctly as you can what this lapse that we saw dramatically happen last night, what does it actually mean?
CHARLIE SAVAGE, The New York Times: Well, it means that right now, for the first time in nearly 14 years, when Americans pick up the phone and call somebody, call their friend, their lover, a businessman, a bank, a pizza place, the NSA is not taking a log of that contact and adding it to its government database to be stored and analyzed for the next five years.
And it means that when terrorism investigators find a newly suspicious number, they can’t just check their own database to see if anyone on U.S. soil has been in contact with that number. They have to use a subpoena to go to the phone company and see if they have seen a trace of that number before and kind of wait for that response.
GWEN IFILL: So, the subpoena is the backup plan, but it takes a lot longer for this to happen, presumably?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, it takes somewhat longer. Under the bulk phone program, they still had to go to the spy court for the last couple years and get the court’s permission to check the database. So, in that sense, it wasn’t an instantaneous thing either.
SUMMARY: Three U.S. intelligence tools are scheduled to expire Sunday, including the NSA's controversial bulk collection of Americans' phone metadata records. President Obama has urged lawmakers to renew the Patriot Act programs, but so far the Senate has failed to compromise on their extension. Judy Woodruff talks to Lisa Monaco, assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): This could prove to be a pivotal week for the future of both surveillance and privacy in the United States. Three key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire, and so far there is no compromise in the U.S. Senate over whether or how to extend them. That has the White House raising alarm bells.
President Obama on Tuesday pressed the Senate to renew Patriot Act surveillance programs that are set to expire late Sunday.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It’s necessary to keep the American people safe and secure.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Three different intelligence tools are scheduled to expire, roving wiretaps that allow monitoring of terror suspects’ calls even when they switch phones, the so-called lone wolf provision that permits surveillance of individuals not affiliated with terrorist organizations, and, finally, the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata records. It’s authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The Senate failed to pass a temporary extension Saturday. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was among those objecting to the metadata collection.
SEN. RAND PAUL, R-Ky.: This is a debate about whether or not a warrant with a single name of a single company can be used to collect all the records, all the phone records of all of the people in our country with a single warrant.
SUMMARY: What will happen if Congress allows key portions of the Patriot Act to expire? Judy Woodruff gets views from James Bamford, author of “The Shadow Factory,” and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on what’s at stake, and whether the USA Freedom Act offers a better alternative.
SUMMARY: On June 1, the NSA will lose legal authority to collect bulk phone records, as key provisions of the Patriot Act expire. The House has passed a new bill replacing bulk collection with more targeted searches. But some senators, including the majority leader, want to extend the Patriot Act, leaving lawmakers scrambling before the holiday. Judy Woodruff talks to Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We now turn to the heated debate over government security and individual privacy.
Three key provisions of the Patriot Act that allow for government surveillance are set to expire soon, but the U.S. Senate is planning to be out of Washington next week, leaving lawmakers scrambling to find agreement on this controversial issue.
Senators came to work this morning confronting an impasse on surveillance and a looming deadline.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY, (D) Vermont: Unfortunately, the clock’s been run out.
JUDY WOODRUFF: On June 1, the National Security Agency loses legal authority to collect bulk phone records, as key provisions of the Patriot Act expire. But the Senate is leaving for the Memorial Day recess and won’t return until June 1, leaving Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy to point across the Capitol.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: The House worked very hard on this. They completed their work and they left. They’re not coming back until after the surveillance authorities are set to expire. And the House leadership has made clear they will not pass an extension, even if they’re in.
MAN: On this vote, the yeas are 338 and the nays are 88. The bill is passed.
SUMMARY: The government program that collects the phone data of millions of Americans is illegal and not sanctioned by the Patriot Act, according to a ruling by a U.S. appeals court. Gwen Ifill discusses the case with former Homeland Security Department official Stewart Baker and Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The debate between privacy and security returned to center stage today, after a federal appeals court ruled a National Security Agency program that allowed bulk collection of millions of U.S. phone records went too far. But where is the line?
And, as a deadline approaches for renewing the underlying Patriot Act, what happens now?
Joining me to discuss the value of such government surveillance are Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, and Stewart Baker, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency and former assistant secretary of homeland security.
Welcome to you both.
Kate Martin, was this the dropped shoe that privacy advocates were waiting on?
KATE MARTIN, Center for National Security Studies: Yes. This is the first time that a federal appeals court has looked at what was a secret interpretation by the government that allowed it to collect massive amounts of records on Americans under a secret interpretation of the law.
And the court said that secret interpretation of the law wasn’t, in fact, authorized by the Congress and so held the program to be a violation of the law.
GWEN IFILL: So what does this do? Does this stop the program in its tracks, Stewart Baker?
STEWART BAKER, Former Homeland Security Department official: No, actually. It’s remarkably without consequence.
It, at the end of the day, says Congress, in the view of this court, didn’t authorize exactly what the program is, and unless Congress says that it’s authorized, it’s not going to continue. And then they send it back to the judge, letting the judge in the district court determine whether to enjoin it.
But really that just underlines what we already knew, which is that Congress has to act in the next three weeks, because, if it doesn’t, the program goes away automatically. If it does, it’s going to have to say, yes, we’re approving this program.
After more than a decade of wrenching national debate over the intrusiveness of government intelligence agencies, a bipartisan wave of support has gathered to sharply limit the federal government’s sweeps of phone and Internet records.
On Thursday, a bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the so-called metadata surveillance exposed by (traitor IMO, Tecknomage) Edward J. Snowden was overwhelmingly passed by the House Judiciary Committee and was heading to almost certain passage in that chamber this month.
An identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader.
The push for reform is the strongest demonstration yet of a decade-long shift from a singular focus on national security at the expense of civil liberties to a new balance in the post-Snowden era.
Under the bipartisan bills in the House and Senate, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection, and sweeps that had operated under the guise of so-called National Security Letters issued by the F.B.I. would end. The data would instead be stored by the phone companies themselves, and could be accessed by intelligence agencies only after approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
The legislation would also create a panel of experts to advise the FISA court on privacy, civil liberties, and technology matters, while requiring the declassification of all significant FISA court opinions.
The debate has resulted in a highly unusual alliance of House Speaker John A. Boehner, the White House, the Tea Party and a bipartisan majority in the House. They are in opposition to Mr. McConnell, his Intelligence Committee chairman, and a small group of defense hawks. In addition, two Republican presidential candidates in the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have made it clear they will not accept a straight extension of the current Patriot Act.
Unlike last year, when a similar bill passed the House overwhelmingly but failed in the Senate, this year’s USA Freedom Act was drafted in delicate negotiations among the House Judiciary Committee, House Intelligence Committee, House Republican leaders and supporters in the Senate. The Senate, now in Republican control, includes four freshmen who supported the bill in the House last year.
The act, which expires June 1, is up for its first reauthorization since the revelations about bulk data collection. That impending deadline, coupled with an increase of support among members of both parties, pressure from technology companies and a push from the White House have combined to make changes to the provisions more likely.
The overhaul bill passed the Judiciary Committee 25 to 2, uniting the likes of politicians who rarely agree, like Representatives Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, and Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. An identical measure, by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, was unveiled Tuesday, a week after Mr. McConnell proposed a blanket five-year extension of the Patriot Act passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“I don’t think he’s listening to America,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, said of Mr. McConnell. “The seminal question is how much liberty are we going to give up for security? People are on the brink. They’re scared out of their wits.”
But Mr. McConnell holds powerful levers as the Senate leader that could halt the momentum or eventually alter the legislation.
For the moment, Mr. McConnell and Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina and Intelligence Committee chairman, seem to be increasingly isolated.
The Snowden disclosures, along with data breaches at Sony Pictures, Target and the insurance giant Anthem, have unsettled voters and empowered those in Congress arguing for greater civil liberties protection — who a few years ago “could have met in a couple of phone booths,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.
That has proponents of the metadata collection straining to gain support. “I think people are reacting to a program they don’t know,” Mr. Burr said. Asked about turning back the momentum against him, he conceded, “I’ve got a big task.”
Mr. Snowden’s disclosures prompted a public backlash that ultimately convinced President Obama to back an end to that part of the program. But since the President declared an end to “bulk metadata program as it currently exists” in January 2014, little has changed, Intelligence Committee members said.
Lawmakers on the Intelligence Committee pushed for changes in the legislation to allow intelligence agents to continue to track suspected foreign terrorists when they enter the United States, even though at that point they are supposed to get a warrant. Agencies could continue their surveillance for 72 hours while they obtain legal authority.
The Intelligence Committee also insisted on a new procedure to use the Patriot Act to sweep up data in an emergency, but that information would have to be destroyed if the FISA court subsequently denies the request.
Mostly, though, the committee insisted the bill steer clear of the amendments of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, added in 2008, which legalized warrantless surveillance so long as the target is a noncitizen abroad. The current legislative effort in Congress would not stop surveillance of noncitizens overseas.
“I believe that the work of the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee has produced a very good package,” Mr. Boehner said just before the Judiciary Committee vote.
The government would still be able to conduct some bulk data collection. The N.S.A. has used a section of the law that created the FISA court for vast sweeps of phone and email data. Judiciary Committee members from both parties sought to end that data-collection avenue as well, but leaders of the committee beat that effort back, saying the Republican leadership would torpedo the bill if it passed.
“If the perfect defeats the good, then bad prevails,” said Representative James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, an author of the Patriot Act who is now leading efforts to change it.
Mr. McConnell’s allies are trying to build support. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas who voted for a similar bill last year as a House member, met with freshman senators on Thursday to try to sway them to the leader’s side.
Along with Mr. Cotton, four other Republican Senate freshmen supported last year’s failed House bill.
Besides Mr. Lee, the Senate USA Freedom Act has four other Republican co-sponsors, including Mr. Cruz.
Another White House hopeful, Mr. Paul, does not think the bill goes far enough.
Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said, “After 9/11 I have been a supporter of the Patriot Act.” But he added, “At the end of the day you have to look at what you can craft with the current majority.”
A strong bipartisan House vote, expected as early as mid-May, “will send a strong message to the Senate that in the House, both sides of the aisle want reforms,” said Representative Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Facing a tight deadline, Mr. McConnell is also likely to bring his alternative bill to the Senate floor soon. It is unclear whether he would have the votes for his measure, although it is possible that with a slew of amendments, the Senate could produce a bill on the floor that could be melded with the House version.
SUMMARY: Filmmaker Laura Poitras captured the moment former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source behind a massive document leak of classified surveillance in 2013. Two years later, Snowden’s story is the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Citizenfour.” Jeffrey Brown speaks with Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald about how those pivotal moments came to life on screen.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): President Obama went to Silicon Valley today to call for more cooperation between private companies and the government when it comes to defending against cyber-attacks.
In the wake of major hacks against health insurer Anthem and Sony Pictures, the president told executives they need to share more information.
But today’s summit also comes amid growing tensions between tech companies and the administration over privacy and civil liberties, a point the president acknowledged.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: In all our work, we have to make sure we are protecting the privacy and civil liberty of the American people. Now, we grapple with these issues in government.
We have pursued important reforms to make sure we are respecting people’s privacy, as well as ensuring our national security. And the private sector wrestles with this as well.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Several CEOs of top tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, didn’t attend, reportedly over anger and disappointment about a lack of reform in the government’s broad surveillance programs.
The revelations about the government’s reach are the subject of a documentary nominated for an Academy Award.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson join Judy Woodruff to discuss this week’s news, including the state of race relations in America in the wake of continuing protests and the killing of two New York police officers, what the hacking of Sony Pictures means for cyber-security in the future and the balance of power between Congress and the President.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): In a vote on the Senate floor last night, lawmakers blocked a bill that would have drastically changed the way the National Security Agency currently monitors American citizens.
MAN: On this vote, the yeas are 58, the nays are 42.
GWEN IFILL: With that, the USA Freedom Act effectively died on the Senate floor last night, failing to garner the 60 votes needed to move to full debate.
The legislation would have ended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone call records, so-called metadata.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY, (D) Vermont, Chair, Judiciary Committee: Our bill protects Americans.
GWEN IFILL: The lead sponsor, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, spoke for most of his fellow Democrats.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: The USA Freedom Act provides for commonsense reforms to government surveillance. It promotes greater accountability and transparency of the government’s surveillance programs.
GWEN IFILL: Former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed the secret bulk collection program last year. It was authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. This new bill would have forced the agency to get court orders for specific data from telecom companies. Most Republicans opposed the measure.
Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it totally flawed.
SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS, (R) Georgia: But the fact is, there cannot be one single case pointed to by anybody who can show that as a result of the collection of metadata under 215, any American has had their privacy rights breached. It simply has not happened. It will not happen if we keep this program in place.
GWEN IFILL: President Obama had proposed curbing the NSA’s data gathering, and the House approved its own weaker version of the bill in may. The White House supported the Senate version, in part because the law authorizing the entire program expires next June.
What happens when the demands of national security collide with the rights of a free press? Lesley Stahl finds out
You've just heard FBI Director Comey discuss the NSA surveillance program with Scott.
This is a story about another facet of the NSA program, involving wiretaps, and what happens when the demands of national security collide with the public's right to know.
That dilemma is at the heart of the case of James Risen, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times.
Risen was the first to break the story about the NSA's secret wiretapping program that monitored Americans' phone calls without a court warrant. He's been subpoenaed to divulge his confidential sources in a separate federal criminal trial. He appealed the subpoena all the way up to the Supreme Court, but the court turned down his petition. Now, if he doesn't name names, he could go to jail.
The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.
The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.
ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.
ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.
The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.
“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”
The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication — such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called — but not the content of the message or audio of the call.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now to the new revelations from a fresh interview with NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The extensive profile, in “Wired” magazine is based on hours of interviews conducted over three days, including audio that captures Snowden’s voice.
EDWARD SNOWDEN (traitor): What I did wasn’t to benefit myself. I didn’t ask for money. I gave this information back to public hands. And the reason that I did that wasn’t to gain a label, but to give you back a choice about the country you want to live in.
GWEN IFILL: Snowden discloses that the U.S. government ran a top secret cyber-war program code-named MonsterMind. He said it could accidentally start a war. And he reveals that, in 2012, NSA hackers mistakenly shut down all of Syria’s Internet service.
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are cataloged and recorded nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance.
