SUMMARY: Almost 20 years after American embassies in Africa were attacked by al-Qaida, a double agent who infiltrated the terror group is unmasking himself. Jonathan Rugman of Independent Television News reports.
SUMMARY: Who people tell you they are is often different from how they act, says award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, whose latest film, "Risk," looks at WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. By observing subjects like Edward Snowden make decisions in real time, she gets to experience the immediate drama of her story and change her opinion. Poitras gives her Brief but Spectacular take on making documentaries.
SUMMARY: WikiLeaks published thousands of pages on Tuesday of what it says are files about the CIA and its hacking activities. The material comes reportedly from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence and includes a range of documents which describe cyber tools for hacking cellphones, computers, television and even vehicles. Jeffrey Brown speaks Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times about the revelations.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The material comes from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. It includes a range of documents from 2013 to 2016 which describe cyber-tools for hacking cell phones, computers, television, and even vehicles.
The documents also contain computer code. One program, dubbed Weeping Angel, entails infecting Samsung smart TVs, turning them into bugging devices. Another program is aimed at hacking Apple and Android cell phones, undercutting encryption on services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
WikiLeaks also says these documents show that when the CIA discovered flaws in computer code written by Apple, Google, or Samsung, [and] it failed to notify those companies about the vulnerabilities to allow fixes to be made.
Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times has been covering this, and joins us now.
Mark, welcome to you.
So, the CIA hasn't said much so far. What do we know about the authenticity of the documents and where they came from?
MARK MAZZETTI, The New York Times: Well, we're still trying to confirm the authenticity.
We have several people we have spoken to today who say they believe they're authentic. We have heard nothing thus far from the government indicating that they are not. Some people we have spoken to have said that some of the code names that were cited in the documents are, indeed, legitimate.
So it does appear at the moment — and I should say at the moment — that they are legitimate.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, when you look at the totality, Mark, of all of these cyber-tools that being described, help us understand, what are they aimed at? What is this program about?
MARK MAZZETTI: Well, they're a series of — and we're talking about thousands of documents that are laying out some of the tools the CIA allegedly has to carry out hacking of any number of different devices (as you said, [for example] cars) against foreign adversaries or people overseas.
I should stress that there is — unlike the Snowden disclosures, there were not specific mentions of where these have been used. But they're more sort of like the toolkit the CIA has. And it's pretty expansive, if the documents are to be believed.
And in terms of where they came from, you asked. I mean, that's another thing we're still trying to figure out. WikiLeaks said today that they had a source come to them who was concerned about the use of these tools. We don't know anything about the source. And there's a lot of questions still at the moment.
SUMMARY: A day after WikiLeaks published documents on the CIA's tools for hacking into personal electronics, Reuters reported that intelligence officials are focused on contractors as the likeliest source of the leak. How is the CIA likely responding to the revelations? Former CIA Director Leon Panetta joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the consequences for counterterrorism efforts and more.
SUMMARY: WikiLeaks' release of a trove of documents about the CIA's ability to breach smartphone and TV encryption was a revelation of potential vulnerabilities that surprised many. Hari Sreenivasan separates fact from fiction about their capabilities to take advantage of those devices with Brian Barrett, news editor of Wired, and how to be mindful about the reality of today's “internet of things.”
Steven Spielberg’s movie captures the essence of the Cold War in the tale of a man whose “legend” was so encompassing, U.S. agents did not learn his true identity until the Soviet Union started to collapse.
Hollywood loves the smoke and mirrors of espionage. For decades, it has made a dirty, dangerous business look glamorous on silver screens.
“Bridge of Spies,” the cold-war epic directed by Steven Spielberg, contends for six Academy Awards Sunday, including best picture. The brilliant Briton Mark Rylance is up for best supporting actor. He plays the Soviet spook who the FBI knew as Col. Rudolf Abel before and after his arrest in New York in 1957. Tom Hanks stars as the noble lawyer James Donovan, who defended the mysterious colonel up to the Supreme Court. In 1962, at the behest of the CIA, Donovan handed his imprisoned client over to the Russians in exchange for the captured pilot of a U–2 spy plane shot down over Sverdlovsk. The swap took place at the Berlin bridge connecting communist East Berlin to the West — thus the title.
The movie tries to be true to life. But it reconstructs five grim years in two hours and twenty-one minutes. As it often is, the truth was stranger than its fictional portrayal.
I’ve written on American intelligence over three decades, as a reporter for The New York Times and as the author of histories of the CIA ("Legacy of Ashes") and the FBI ("Enemies"). I see Rylance, an actor’s actor, as the heart of the film. He bears an astonishing resemblance to Abel; his silence and cunning captures the essence of espionage. A gray man in a gray suit slips through the shadows in a black-and-white world carrying encrypted secrets.
Now to the story’s facts and fictions:
J. Edgar Hoover had been on the warpath against Soviet spies for a decade when a drunken KGB courier walked into the U.S. Embassy in Paris in April 1957. Reino Hayhanen feared for his life, having fouled up to a fare-thee-well. He had taken $5,000 intended for the American Communist underground in New York, gone on a bender, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. The CIA station chief delivered him to the custody of the FBI in New York. After the defector dried out, he gave the Bureau its first deep look inside a Soviet spy operation in the United States. Hoover’s nightmare came to life.
Hayhanen told the agents an astounding story. He had a legend — a false identity — and a forged American passport when he boarded the Queen Mary for New York. He served as a courier carrying money and encoded microfilm messages sent to and from Moscow. Many messages were hidden in hollowed-out coins, secreted in New York’s parks and sidewalks. (A trick nickel makes a cameo appearance in the movie.) Hayhanen named his top superior as the First Secretary of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations — who had just left New York, never to return — and his main contact as Col. Abel, alias “Emil Goldfus,” an artist with a studio in Brooklyn.
The FBI’s Edmund J. Birch led a squad trailing the artist. Carrying a hidden camera in a briefcase outside a Manhattan restaurant, he got a clear shot — “one beautiful picture of his face,” Birch remembered. Haynahen identified the face as Abel’s. The FBI watched the suspect around the clock. He never did anything suspicious. The evidence was hearsay.
The Bureau wanted to make an espionage case but they lacked clues. Hoover was livid. On his orders, without a warrant, and outside the law, his agents grabbed Abel, tossed his apartment, and found extensive evidence of spy craft.
But unless the FBI broke Abel, the illegally seized evidence was likely to be inadmissible in court. He was initially charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the immigration statute that the Justice Department used when an espionage case could not be made.
FBI agents grilled him for more than two years — first in a broiling prison for illegal immigrants outside McAllen, Tex., on the Mexican border, at “a wetback camp, in a wire cage,” said the FBI’s Ed Gamber, who interrogated Abel for six weeks and later testified in court. “He was a gentleman, he was polite; he was a nice guy.” And he never broke. Then teams of FBI agents braced him at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States. “I’ll talk with you about art, mathematics, photography, anything you want to talk about, but don’t ask me about my intelligence background,” Abel said. “I have not said anything, and I’m not going to now.”
Playing Abel in “Bridge of Spies,” Rylance has a great line eliding that silence in three words. If he cooperated, he asks, “Would it help?” History suggests not.
In real life, prosecutors persuaded a federal judge to allow use of the evidence they had seized. Abel was quickly convicted and sentenced to thirty years. Donovan almost immediately won an appeal before the Supreme Court, which granted an extraordinary 90 minutes for argument. He cited the Constitution’s ban against warrantless searches and jailing, arguing that Abel’s arrest and imprisonment were an affront to American justice.
Anyone who follows the court may be shocked to read that, after long deliberation, only five justices sided with the government. The minority of four wrote: “This is a notorious case, with a notorious defendant. Yet we must take care to enforce the Constitution without regard to the nature of the crime.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was outraged. “We would have to expose all our intelligence sources and methods in order to obtain a conviction,” Eisenhower fumed at a National Security Council meeting attended by Vice President Richard M. Nixon in May 1960, seven weeks after the decision– and shortly after the U–2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. “About all the FBI can do is keep spies under surveillance.”
The only thing of import Abel ever said to the FBI was an insult: “American intelligence walks in baby shoes.” And he had a point. Not until the end of the cold war did the CIA and the FBI learn that the man they knew as Abel was an entirely different person.
He was born in 1903 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, as Willie Fisher, the son of a Bolshevik. He went to the Soviet Union, became a committed Communist, and was given training, a legend, and a role in Moscow’s spy network before World War Two. He came to the United States after the war and worked in silence, undetected, for nearly a decade. And he lived on for nearly a decade after the great swap, dying on November 15, 1971.
Twenty years on, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. And today another colonel trained by its vicious spy service rules in the Kremlin.
Hollywood would never greenlight that movie. No one would believe the script.
SUMMARY: For years, the British government has reportedly tracked and stored billions of records of Internet use by British citizens and those outside the UK in an effort to track every visible user on the Internet. Ryan Gallagher of "The Intercept" joins Hari Sreenivasan via Skype from Brighton, England, with more on UK cyber surveillance.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): For years, the British government has reportedly tracked and stored billions of records of Internet use by British citizens and people outside the U.K., in an effort to track every visible user on the internet. That finding comes from “The Intercept” Web site, which is publishing findings from National Security Agency contractor (traitor) Edward Snowden’s leak on government surveillance practices.
“Intercept” reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote the story and joins me now via Skype from Brighton, England.
First of all, explain the scale of surveillance that was happening from the British equivalent of the NSA, the GCHQ.
RYAN GALLAGHER, THE INTERCEPT: Well, the skill is quite phenomenal. I mean, it’s hard to translate it when you just see the numbers. But you’re talking about 50 (ph) to 100 billion metadata records of phone calls and e-mails every single day. So vast, vast quantities of information they’re sweeping up. And they were talking by 2030 having in place the world’s largest surveillance system, so, a system that surpasses even what the NSA and U.S. has built itself.
HARI SREENIVASAN: OK, when somebody hears that there’s millions and billions and possibly trillions of pieces of data, they’re going to say, you know, what, how do you actually identify this is specifically me that’s doing this, or going to the site, or saying this thing in a chat room?
RYAN GALLAGHER: Uh-huh. Well, I mean, we have — we don’t actually — one of the interesting parts of the story is that we had a bunch of specific cases where, for example, we had monitored something like 200,000 people from something like 185 different countries, so almost every country in the world, they have listened to radio source (ph) through their computer. In one case, they decided to pick out just one of these people. It seems like at random, and what web site he had been viewing.
So, it’s kind of an all-seeing system. When you’re gathering that amount of information, it’s going to be something that does have an impact and effect in all of us really.
Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack.
Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account.
The emails, which were posted on the internet in 2013, also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya’s civil war raged in 2011.
Blumenthal’s emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into Blumenthal’s account and have taken on new significance in light of the disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered by congressional investigators.
The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than 30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to Clinton.
The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton’s private email address were posted online after Blumenthal’s account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush’s sister, Colin Powell, and others. He’s now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.
The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya’s crisis and other foreign policy matters.
Blumenthal, a New Yorker staff writer in the 1990s, became a top aide to President Bill Clinton and worked closely with Hillary Clinton during the fallout from the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton family. She tried to hire him when she joined President Obama’s cabinet in 2009, but White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly nixed the idea on the grounds Blumenthal was a divisive figure whose attacks on Obama during the Democratic primary had poisoned his relationship with the new administration.
It’s unclear who tasked Blumenthal, known for his fierce loyalty to the Clintons, with preparing detailed intelligence briefs. It’s also not known who was paying him, or where the operation got its money. The memos were marked “confidential” and relied in many cases on “sensitive” sources in the Libyan opposition and Western intelligence and security services. Other reports focused on Egypt, Germany, and Turkey.
Indeed, though they were sent under Blumenthal’s name, the reports appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in 2005. Since then, he has established a consulting firm called Tyler Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated with a firm called DMC Worldwide, which he co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney Danny Murray and former general counsel to the U.S. Capitol Police John Caulfield. DMC Worldwide’s now-defunct website describes it at as offering “innovative security and intelligence solutions to global risks in a changing world.”
In one exchange in March 2013, Blumenthal emailed Drumheller, “Thanks. Can you send Libya report.” Drumheller replied, “Here it is, pls do not share it with Cody. I don’t want moin speculating on sources. It is on the Maghreb and Libya.” Cody is Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton family operative—his brother was an ambassador under Bill Clinton and his now-deceased sister was married to Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott — who was in close contact with Blumenthal. While it’s not entirely clear from the documents, “Moin” may refer to the nickname of Mohamed Mansour El Kikhia, a member of the Kikhia family, a prominent Libyan clan with ties to the Libyan National Transition Council. (An email address in Blumenthal’s address book, which was also leaked, was associated with his Facebook page.)
There’s no indication in Blumenthal’s emails whether Clinton read or replied to them before she left State on February 1, 2013, but he was clearly part of a select group with knowledge of the private clintonemail.com address, which was unknown to the public until Gawker published it this year. They do suggest that she interacted with Blumenthal using the account after she stepped down. “H: got your message a few days ago,” reads the subject line of one email from Blumenthal to Clinton on February 8, 2013; “H: fyi, will continue to send relevant intel,” reads another.
The memos cover a wide array of subjects in extreme detail, from German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s conversations with her finance minister about French president Francois Hollande – marked “THIS INFORMATION COMES FROM AN EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCE”—to the composition of the newly elected South Korean president’s transition team. At least 10 of the memos deal in whole or in part with internal Libyan politics and the government’s fight against militants, including the status of the Libyan oil industry and the prospects for Western companies to participate.
One memo was sent on August 23, 2012, less than three weeks before Islamic militants stormed the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. It cites “an extremely sensitive source” who highlighted a string of bombings and kidnappings of foreign diplomats and aid workers in Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, suggesting they were the work of people loyal to late Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi.
While the memo doesn’t rise to the level of a warning about the safety of U.S. diplomats, it portrays a deteriorating security climate. Clinton noted a few days after the Benghazi attack, which left four dead and 10 people injured, that U.S. intelligence officials didn’t have advance knowledge of the threat.
On September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal sent a memo that cited a “sensitive source” saying that the interim Libyan president, Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf, was told by a senior security officer that the assault was inspired by an anti-Muslim video made in the U.S., as well as by allegations from Magariaf’s political opponents that he had CIA ties.
Blumenthal followed up the next day with an email titled “Re: More Magariaf private reax.” It said Libyan security officials believed an Islamist radical group called the Ansa al Sharia brigade had prepared the attack a month in advance and “took advantage of the cover” provided by the demonstrations against the video.
An October 25, 2012 memo says that Magariaf and the Libyan army chief of staff agree that the “situation in the country is becoming increasingly dangerous and unmanageable” and “far worse” than Western leaders realize.
Blumenthal’s email warnings, of course, followed a year of Libyan hawkishness on the part of Clinton. In February of 2011, she told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that "it is time for Gaddafi to go.” The next month, after having described Russian reluctance over military intervention as “despicable,” Clinton met with rebel leaders in Paris and drummed up support for a no-fly zone while in Cairo. On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council voted to back Libyan rebels against Gaddafi.
It’s this buildup, which Clinton still proudly recalled in her 2014 memoir, that Blumenthal appears to join in on 2011. In addition to the intel memos, his emails also disclose that he and his associates worked to help the Libyan opposition, and even plotted to insert operatives on the ground using a private contractor.
A May 14, 2011 email exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer shows that they were negotiating with Drumheller to contract with someone referred to as “Grange” and “the general” to place send four operatives on a week-long mission to Tunis, Tunisia, and “to the border and back.” Tunisia borders Libya and Algeria.
“Sid, you are doing great work on this,” Drumheller wrote to Blumenthal. “It is going to be around $60,000, covering r/t business class airfare to Tunis, travel in country to the border and back, and other expenses for 7–10 days for 4 guys.”
After Blumenthal forwarded that note to Shearer, he wrote back questioning the cost of the operation. “Sid, do you think the general has to send four guys. He told us three guys yesterday, a translator and two other guys. I understand the difficulty of the mission and realize that K will be repaid but I am going to need an itemized budget for these guys.”
“The general” and “Grange” appear to refer to David L. Grange, a major general in the Army who ran a secret Pentagon special operations unit before retiring in 1999. Grange subsequently founded Osprey Global Solutions, a consulting firm and government contractor that offers logistics, intelligence, security training, armament sales, and other services. The Osprey Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm of Osprey Global Solutions, is listed as one of the State Department’s “global partners” in a 2014 report from the Office of Global Partnerships.’
Among the documents in the cache released by Lazar is an August 24, 2011, memorandum of understanding between Osprey Global Solutions and the Libyan National Transition Council—the entity that took control in the wake of Qadaffi’s execution—agreeing that Osprey will contract with the NTC to “assist in the resumption of access to its assets and operations in country” and train Libyan forces in intelligence, weaponry, and “rule-of-land warfare.” The document refers to meetings held in Amman, Jordan between representatives of Osprey and a Mohammad Kikhia, who represented the National Transition Council.
Five months later, according to a document in the leak, Grange wrote on Osprey Global letterhead to Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro, introducing Osprey as a contractor eager to provide humanitarian and other assistance in Libya. “We are keen to support the people of Libya under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Finance and the Libyan Stock Exchange,” Grange wrote. Shapiro is a longtime Clinton loyalist; he served on her Senate staff as foreign policy adviser.
Another document in the cache, titled “Letter_for_Moin,” is an appeal from Drumheller to then-Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan offering the services of Tyler Drumheller LLC, “to develop a program that will provide discreet confidential information allowing the appropriate entities in Libya to address any regional and international challenges.”
The “K” who was, according to Shearer’s email, to be “repaid” for his role in the Tunisia operation appears to be someone named Khalifa al Sherif, who sent Blumenthal several emails containing up-to-the-minute information on the civil war in Libya, and appears to have been cited as a source in several of the reports.
Contacted by ProPublica and Gawker, Drumheller’s attorney and business partner Danny Murray confirmed that Drumheller “worked” with Blumenthal and was aware of the hacked emails, but declined to comment further.
Shearer said only that "the FBI is involved and told me not to talk. There is a massive investigation of the hack and all the resulting information.” The FBI declined to comment.
Blumenthal, Grange, and Kikhia all did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them. Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton had no comment on Blumenthal’s activities with Drumheller.
Whatever Blumenthal, Shearer, Drumheller, and Grange were up to in 2011, 2012, and 2013 on Clinton’s behalf, it appears that she could have used the help: According to State Department personnel directories, in 2011 and 2012—the height of the Libya crisis—State didn’t have a Libyan desk officer, and the entire Near Eastern Magreb Bureau, which covers Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya, had just two staffers. Today, State has three Libyan desk officers and 11 people in the Near Eastern Magreb Bureau. A State Department official wouldn't say how many officers were on the desk in 2011, but said there was always "at least one" officer and "sometimes many more, working on Libya."
Reached for comment, a State Department public affairs official who would only speak on background declined to address questions about Blumenthal’s relationship to Clinton, whether she was aware of the intelligence network, and who if anyone was paying Blumenthal. Asked about the Tunisia-Libya mission, the official replied, “There was a trip with the secretary in October of 2011, but there was also a congressional delegation in April, 2011. There were media reports about both of these at the time." Neither trip involved traveling via Tunis.
The un-vetted computer engineer plugged into law enforcement networks and a database of 5 million Arizona drivers in a possible breach that was kept secret for years.
Lizhong Fan’s desk was among a crowd of cubicles at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center in Phoenix. For five months in 2007, the Chinese national and computer programmer opened his laptop and enjoyed access to a wide range of sensitive information, including the Arizona driver’s license database, other law enforcement databases, and potentially a roster of intelligence analysts and investigators.
The facility had been set up by state and local authorities in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, and so, out of concerns about security, Fan had been assigned a team of minders to watch him nearly every moment inside the center. Fan, hired as a contract employee specializing in facial recognition technology, was even accompanied to the bathroom.
However, no one stood in Fan’s way when he packed his equipment one day in early June 2007, then returned home to Beijing.
There’s a lot that remains mysterious about Fan’s brief tenure as a computer programmer at the Arizona counterterrorism center. No one has explained why Arizona law enforcement officials gave a Chinese national access to such protected information. Nor has anyone said whether Fan copied any of the potentially sensitive materials he had access to.
But the people responsible for hiring Fan say one thing is clear: The privacy of as many as 5 million Arizona residents and other citizens has been exposed. Fan, they said, was authorized to use the state’s driver’s license database as part of his work on a facial recognition technology. He often took that material home, and they fear he took it back to China.
Under Arizona law, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose agencies admitted Fan into the intelligence center, were required to disclose to the public any “unauthorized acquisition and access to unencrypted or unredacted computerized data” that includes names and other personal information.
To this day, they have not.
Terry Goddard, attorney general of Arizona in 2007, said Fan’s access and disappearance should have been reported to his office, but it was not. Arizona law puts the attorney general in charge of enforcing disclosure.
The state was supposed to have scrubbed drivers' names and addresses from the license data. State officials denied requests to discuss the extent of the data breach, including what personal information was in the files.
In fact, a review of records shows that David Hendershott, who was second-in-command at the sheriff’s office, moved aggressively to maintain silence, a silence that has now lasted some seven years. Two weeks after Fan departed, Hendershott directed others in writing not to discuss Fan and the possible breach. In an email to the outside contractor that had hired Fan, Hendershott wrote: “Keep this between us and only us.”
Even among administrators at the Phoenix center, very few learned that the Chinese programmer had left the country or that their own personal information might have traveled with him. Mikel Longman, the former criminal investigations chief at the Arizona Department of Public Safety, said he received no warning about the incident.
“That really is outrageous,” Longman said. “Every Arizona resident who had a driver’s license or state-issued ID card and all that identifying stuff is potentially compromised. That’s a huge breach.”
Napolitano, who went on to serve as President Barack Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, did not reply to multiple interview requests.
Hendershott, Arpaio’s longtime chief deputy, hung up on a reporter when reached by telephone. The sheriff’s office fired Hendershott in 2011 over an array of alleged misconduct. And he in turn filed suit in 2012, saying his legitimate law enforcement work had been mischaracterized as abuses of power. His suit was dismissed earlier this year. Today, he sells real estate in west Phoenix.
Col. Robert Halliday, the director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety who formally oversaw the operations of the intelligence center at the time Fan worked there, also did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Current officials with a handful of agencies involved with the intelligence center offered a variety of reasons for declining to answer questions about Fan and the possible breach.
The public safety agency initially denied that any potential breach had happened, then said the matter was the subject of a confidential FBI investigation. Later still, the department argued the case was a personnel matter, and thus the agency would not comment as a matter of policy. The sheriff’s office said that during the time that Hendershott was still working for the agency, he never reported anything about Fan – his hiring, his work or his flight.
Seven years after the potential breach, then, it is still unclear how closely law enforcement looked into the incident or what steps, if any, it took as a result. The FBI opened a probe shortly after Fan’s disappearance, according to records and a former federal investigator, but the bureau has never made its findings public.
Perryn Collier, spokesman for the FBI’s Phoenix office, said the bureau won’t comment on investigations involving Fan.
Chinese espionage has made news in recent months as federal investigators have revealed successful assaults by hackers against businesses and government. Last March, homeland security officials in Washington discovered that cyber attackers later traced to China had accessed data on federal workers who’ve applied for top-secret clearance. These electronic break-ins were conducted remotely, continents away from the servers holding the data.
How the Phoenix intelligence center found itself vulnerable to a serious security breach, however, was neither much of a technological feat nor, it seems, the result of masterful espionage. Indeed, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica – built on more than 50 interviews and the examination of thousands of pages of federal investigative reports, criminal and civil court filings, internal correspondence and immigration records – shows the episode at the intelligence center came off rather easily.
John Lewis arrived as the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Phoenix division in the spring of 2006. Lewis, now director of security for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a vague recollection of a contractor or subcontractor working at the center. But he said he did not specifically recall that the person was a foreign national, nor did he have any “immediate recollection” of a security breach.
“No one ever sat in my office and asked about having a foreign national inside the fusion center. That’s nuts,” Lewis said, adding that if he had been asked, his response would have been, “Can we do a little bit better guys?”
The chance that Fan made off with a raft of sensitive material was made possible by a set of cozy relationships – among a tainted sheriff’s official, a dubious technology startup company and a woman who U.S. government officials think is a Chinese spy.
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.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Germany announced today that it is kicking America’s top spy out of the country after new allegations of U.S. espionage. Local media there have reported that a German Defense Ministry worker who dealt with international security issues was also being investigated because of his close contacts to U.S. spies.
And last week, a 31-year-old intelligence employee was arrested on suspicion of spying for foreign powers, reportedly the CIA, since 2012. The allegations come on the heels of last fall’s revelation that the U.S. was intercepting the Internet traffic of millions of German citizens, and tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
Before the expulsion request was made public today, the chancellor told reporters that Germany and the U.S. have — quote — “very different approaches to intelligence.”
CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL, Germany (through interpreter): Spying on allies is a waste of energy in the end. We have so many problems, and I think we should focus on the important things. Just look at the challenges posed in Syria regarding ISIS. If you look at the fight against terrorism, there are huge problems. That is of the highest priority, from my point of view, and not spying among allies.
Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.
As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.
After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.
Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.
A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.
But governments are fighting back, harder than ever. The cellphone giant Vodafone reported on Friday that a “small number” of governments around the world have demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.
Vodafone refused to name the nations on Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives from 14 companies, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic, because “the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”
The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments’ requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.
Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.'s own behavior invited the new arms race.
“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.
“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.
In Washington, officials acknowledge that covert programs are now far harder to execute because American technology companies, fearful of losing international business, are hardening their networks and saying no to requests for the kind of help they once quietly provided.
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.
“Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.
In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”
Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.
Many point to an episode in 2012, when Russian security researchers uncovered a state espionage tool, Flame, on Iranian computers. Flame, like the Stuxnet worm, is believed to have been produced at least in part by American intelligence agencies. It was created by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s operating systems. Companies argue that others could have later taken advantage of this defect.
Worried that such an episode undercuts confidence in its wares, Microsoft is now fully encrypting all its products, including Hotmail and Outlook.com, by the end of this year with 2,048-bit encryption, a stronger protection that would take a government far longer to crack. The software is protected by encryption both when it is in data centers and when data is being sent over the Internet, said Bradford L. Smith, the company’s general counsel.
Mr. Smith also said the company was setting up “transparency centers” abroad so that technical experts of foreign governments could come in and inspect Microsoft’s proprietary source code. That will allow foreign governments to check to make sure there are no “back doors” that would permit snooping by United States intelligence agencies. The first such center is being set up in Brussels.
Microsoft has also pushed back harder in court. In a Seattle case, the government issued a “national security letter” to compel Microsoft to turn over data about a customer, along with a gag order to prevent Microsoft from telling the customer it had been compelled to provide its communications to government officials. Microsoft challenged the gag order as violating the First Amendment. The government backed down.
Hardware firms like Cisco, which makes routers and switches, have found their products a frequent subject of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, and their business has declined steadily in places like Asia, Brazil and Europe over the last year. The company is still struggling to convince foreign customers that their networks are safe from hackers — and free of “back doors” installed by the N.S.A. The frustration, companies here say, is that it is nearly impossible to prove that their systems are N.S.A.-proof.
Most American companies said they never knowingly let the N.S.A. weaken their systems, or install back doors. But Mr. Snowden’s documents showed how the agency found a way.
In one slide from the disclosures, N.S.A. analysts pointed to a sweet spot inside Google’s data centers, where they could catch traffic in unencrypted form. Next to a quickly drawn smiley face, an N.S.A. analyst, referring to an acronym for a common layer of protection, had noted, “SSL added and removed here!”
Google was already suspicious that its internal traffic could be read, and had started a program to encrypt the links among its internal data centers, “the last chink in our armor,” Mr. Grosse said. But the slide gave the company proof that it was a regular target of the N.S.A. “It was useful to have proof, in terms of accelerating a project already underway,” he said.
Facebook and Yahoo have also been encrypting traffic among their internal servers. And Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been moving to more strongly encrypt consumer traffic with so-called Perfect Forward Secrecy, specifically devised to make it more labor intensive for the N.S.A. or anyone to read stored encrypted communications.
One of the biggest indirect consequences from the Snowden revelations, technology executives say, has been the surge in demands from foreign governments that saw what kind of access to user information the N.S.A. received — voluntarily or surreptitiously. Now they want the same.
At Facebook, Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer, said it had been fending off those demands and heightened expectations.
Until last year, technology companies were forbidden from acknowledging demands from the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But in January, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft brokered a deal with the Obama administration to disclose the number of such orders they receive in increments of 1,000.
As part of the agreement, the companies agreed to dismiss their lawsuits before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“We’re not running and hiding,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We think it should be a transparent process so that people can judge the appropriate ways to handle these kinds of things.”
The latest move in the war between intelligence agencies and technology companies arrived this week, in the form of a new Google encryption tool. The company released a user-friendly, email encryption method to replace the clunky and often mistake-prone encryption schemes the N.S.A. has readily exploited.
But the best part of the tool was buried in Google’s code, which included a jab at the N.S.A.'s smiley-face slide. The code included the phrase: “ssl-added-and-removed-here-; - )”
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): During the past year, we have learned a lot about the U.S. government’s surveillance program.
But those efforts are not limited to the National Security Agency. Local law enforcement agencies are also gathering and mining unprecedented amounts of data. Privacy advocates worry police can use this information to track anyone at any time without a warrant.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with KQED San Francisco, has been looking into these new tools for fighting crime.
The center’s Amanda Pike has this report.
AMANDA PIKE, Center for Investigative Reporting: Officer Rob Halverson of the Chula Vista Police Department is testing the technology that could change how police fight crime.
He’s on a call to verify the identity of a woman just arrested for possession of narcotics. He doesn’t need to ask her name or check her I.D. He just takes her picture.
OFFICER ROB HALVERSON, Chula Vista Police Department: Just look here, please.
AMANDA PIKE: His tablet uses facial recognition software to find the suspect’s mug shot and criminal history.
OFFICER ROB HALVERSON: You can lie about your name. You can lie about your date of birth. You can lie about your address, but tattoos, birthmarks, scars don’t lie.
AMANDA PIKE: Police have access to more data than ever before, raising questions about how that information is used and stored. The tablet is part of a pilot program in San Diego County.
OFFICER ROB HALVERSON: It’s been very helpful. And some people just have to have the threat of, OK, you don’t want to tell us who you are? We are just going to take a photo and we’re going to be able to compare. And then when people kind of realize the technology we now have, they’re more likely to tell us their real name in that.
AMANDA PIKE: More and more, police are using biometrics, biological markers from face scans and palm prints, in addition to fingerprints, to identify suspects.
SUMMARY: A report from the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED delves into a wide-scale surveillance system being developed for police forces. How can the trade off between safety and privacy be negotiated as technology gets more and more sophisticated?
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): You might have heard yesterday about changes to America’s intelligence gathering procedures. Tonight we want to examine how that announcement is playing overseas. particularly among American allies. As you’ll recall, some of them, including German Chancellor Angela Merkle, were targeted by American spy operations. For more we’re joined now from Washington with Geoff Dyer, Foreign Policy correspondent of the Financial Times. Thanks for joining us. So, I guess the initial reaction to President Obama’s speech, what are you hearing?
GEOFF DYER, Foreign Policy correspondent of the Financial Times: Well, it seems to be a cautious welcome. It’s a welcome because this is actually the first time the President has really raised, addressed some of the concerns that people in Europe and Latin America had by the way the NSA was collecting data on ordinary citizens. There’s been almost this slightly bizarre, parallel conversation going on throughout this whole debate. In the U.S., politicians have been focused on the question of whether or not Americans rights have been violated or not. And that’s absolutely appropriate, that’s what they should be focused on, that’s their constitutional responsibility. But that did give the impression to lots of people around the world, there was almost a free for all on non-Americans. Their emails and their text messages were just fair game. So by addressing some of those concerns in the speech, that was really the first time the president had done that. But it’s a cautious welcome because there was very little real detail or substance in there. A lot of that’s gonna be fleshed out in the weeks and months ahead, and so I think people who are focused on this issue are going to be watching very closely to see the actual specifics of what the White House outlines for them.
SUMMARY: President Obama called for several changes to U.S. spying practices including ending the NSA's storage of bulk phone metadata. Kwame Holman reports on the president's reforms and Hari Sreenivasan gets reaction from Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies and John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA.
When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.
The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the N.S.A.’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)
But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
Mr. Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A. eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart. “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.
Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in 1952. The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and its foreign intelligence collection. While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’ privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.
If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for email and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the N.S.A.? Will the American Internet giants’ collaboration with the agency, voluntary or otherwise, damage them in international markets? And are the agency’s clandestine efforts to weaken encryption making the Internet less secure for everyone?
Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of a 2009 book on the N.S.A., said there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all directions.
“From N.S.A.’s point of view, it’s a disaster,” Mr. Aid said. “Every new disclosure reinforces the notion that the agency needs to be reined in. There are political consequences, and there will be operational consequences.”
A review of classified agency documents obtained by Mr. Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offers a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations and culture. (At the agency’s request, The Times is withholding some details that officials said could compromise intelligence operations.) The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.
The C.I.A. dispatches undercover officers overseas to gather intelligence today roughly the same way spies operated in biblical times. But the N.S.A., born when the long-distance call was a bit exotic, has seen its potential targets explode in number with the advent of personal computers, the Internet and cellphones. Today’s N.S.A. is the Amazon of intelligence agencies, as different from the 1950s agency as that online behemoth is from a mom-and-pop bookstore. It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones around the globe.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Newly published information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is reinforcing the notion that U.S. spying spreads wide and goes deep.
The latest bombshell, partly denied by the Obama administration, appears in The Washington Post. It says U.S. intelligence agencies have gained access to hundreds of millions of Google and Yahoo! user accounts by secretly tapping into company data centers. Late today, six top tech companies Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, sent a letter to Congress, calling for enhanced privacy protections.
Barton Gellman broke the story for The Washington Post.
Welcome, Bart Gellman. How are you? Welcome to the NewsHour.
What is the difference between what you're reporting that happened and what the White House and the administration is pushing back at and saying didn't happen?
----
GWEN IFILL: In -- so, in this case, what you're saying is what they did is not illegal because it was -- involved international networks?
BARTON GELLMAN, The Washington Post: Well, it's a bit of a rough analogy, but if your -- your accountant would say you're allowed to avoid taxes. You're not allowed to evade them.
So they're taking full advantage of the rules as they interpret them. There are some outside surveillance lawyers who say it may raise some interesting questions about lawfulness, but on its face I don't see any evidence that they're flouting the law here. They're using it in ways that the companies and the public didn't expect.
WASHINGTON: The past week has been a wretched one for the US National Security Agency (NSA), with revelations of large-scale trawling of phone call data in France and Spain, as well as of eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
During these months, since thousands of files copied by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden started leaking into the public domain, the US has been compared to an Orwellian Big Brother state.
But I cannot help wondering, if the NSA is as powerful as its critics have claimed, why has it been so useless at protecting its secrets?
Where are the worm viruses unleashed into the computer systems of newspapers that have published US secrets? The court orders to prevent additional disclosures? And, if you enjoy spy fiction, the deniable operators climbing over balconies in Brazil or Hong Kong to steal laptops or indeed terminate their owners?
The American system of official secrecy has for years operated on the basis of targeting the leaker "pour decourager les autres".
In August, the trial of Private Bradley Manning ended with a 35 year sentence for passing classified material to Wikileaks.
As for this latest bout of revelation, involving information about phone and internet spying that is much more highly classified than anything Pte Manning had access to, on the surface it seems only the British authorities have acted in an attempt to stop further publication.
British intelligence officers have watched journalists destroying some computers at the Guardian newspapers.
'Aspects of incompetence'
And David Miranda, the partner of one of the journalists holding the largest amount of Snowden files, was also stopped in August as he changed planes at Heathrow airport, questioned and had memory devices confiscated.
Indeed, the Miranda episode is pretty much the only one since the publication of the Snowden stories that suggests some kind of joined up response aimed at frustrating further publication.
It had the hint, with its foreknowledge of Mr Miranda's travel plans and the fact that he was carrying these files, of an operation based on precisely the kind of intelligence gathering that Mr Snowden has warned of.
In the US though there has been pretty much nothing. And this is despite the fact that it is common journalistic knowledge that the Guardian journalists sitting on a great many more files, drip feeding them into the public domain, have been operating in New York.
There are aspects of incompetence to it.
Mr Snowden was part of an army of more than 800,000 people with clearance to access such damaging material, and was able to get it again when working with a contractor despite concerns having been expressed at the CIA about his motives.
Some "lessons learned" studies have been launched within the intelligence community, but not yet with any result in terms of cutting the numbers given access to such secrets, or barring from similar work the contractor that employed him.
As for the media, well this crisis should put to bed the idea that that a call from the White House to the editor of the Washington Post or New York Times can simply squash a story like this.
There have been no US legal attempts to force journalists to destroy or turn over what they have, and in the UK a DA Notice on the subject has been widely ignored.
Even the PR response has been limited and ill co-ordinates. Monday's New York Times comments that "the administration has seemed uncertain about how to handle the reports", concerned the interception of the German leader's mobile phone. Last week, the attempts of one former NSA director to fight back turned into farce when his briefings to journalists by phone were overheard by a fellow passenger on a train who started tweeting updates.
Spying allegations
The latest revelations, about tapping world leaders phone calls, also leave one wondering what use the content of Ms Merkel's calls were to US policy makers?
The White House has tied itself in knots over whether to admit the president was actually briefed on what she was saying, but it can hardly be said that it gave the US some amazing advantage in the bilateral relationship with Germany.
Some in Washington have detected in the President's unwillingness to take stronger action in defence of the NSA, a desire to see the vast intelligence bureaucracies that grew up after 9/11 cut down to size.
Whether or not that is the case, any attempt to halt the revelations by legal action would inevitably have brought accusations of an assault on cherished constitutional freedoms.
So the leaks continue and today we discover that the NSA recorded the call data (i.e. the numbers dialed and duration, rather than the actual content) of 60m Spanish calls during one month.
Perhaps Kafka rather than Orwell provides the better literary template for this ongoing story.
The NSA has grown into a huge data-mining bureaucracy driven by its own organizational imperatives.
It pursues ever greater coverage, storage of data, staff and budget.
In many cases it does things because it can, rather than because somebody has asked whether the information is useful, whether it is worth the potential price if discovered, or whether the activity can actually be prevented from coming into the public domain.
SUMMARY: Intelligence officials defended the NSA's spying programs in a House committee hearing, insisting that monitoring the intentions of foreign leaders is "fundamental" and that surveillance helped to protect American citizens. But some lawmakers underscored concerns that spying on allies has going too far. Judy Woodruff reports.
SUMMARY: A bipartisan group of lawmakers are calling for an end to most of the NSA's phone and email surveillance. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., says he believes the president "ought to draw a line" that NSA shouldn't cross. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss why he believes there should be reform of the scope of U.S. spying programs.
SUMMARY: European governments lodged new complaints about U.S. surveillance after learning of new disclosures that the NSA tracked millions of phone calls in Spain, reports Kwame Holman. For more on the continuing fallout, Gwen Ifill speaks with former CIA official John McLaughlin and Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): European governments lodged new complaints on both sides of the Atlantic today over U.S. surveillance. They followed more disclosures linked to the National Security Agency.
NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman begins our coverage.
KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour): In Madrid, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, James Costos, ignored shouted questions about how his meeting at the Foreign Ministry went. He had been summoned after the newspaper El Mundo reported the NSA tracked more than 60 million phone calls in Spain just from December 2012 to January 2013.
Meanwhile, in Washington, members of the European Parliament met with the House Intelligence Committee on U.S. surveillance.
CLAUDE MORAES, European Parliament Delegation: This is just a knock in trust. And there's a real appetite in the European Union to try and restore this trust, to make sense of why this NSA surveillance was necessary, why it was so disproportionate.
SUMMARY: At a European Union summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel characterized the reported American monitoring of her cellphone as a "severe breach of trust." Jeffrey Brown gets background from Margaret Warner and Luke Baker of Reuters about how European leaders are responding to U.S. spying allegations.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): And they believe it's explained by the fact that every country knows that even friendly countries spy on one another's leaders, but the fact that it is so very public. That said, it has been embarrassing to the White House. The President has had to spend this time making phone calls to Hollande, President Hollande, to President Merkel, promising this review of the way intelligence is collected.
