Counter-Propaganda Fail
We actually broke out in loud laughter when coming across this headline of a recent Christian Science Monitor article posted at Yahoo: “NSA chief fires back: European spying reports 'completely false'”.
His colleague James Clapper, who was recently forced to 'apologize to Congress for lying to it' basically admitted in the same hearing that spying on the leaders of allied countries was indeed going on. Besides, said Clapper, there is nothing to it, since 'everybody is doing it'. We can certainly believe that; in fact, Clapper has a refreshingly outspoken approach to these hearings these days. The thing he lied about in March? He denied that the NSA did/does in fact collect the data of millions of US citizens. Now the NSA is telling us it isn't spying on Europeans either? Well, the good General Alexander did divulge something that sounds quite credible to us – namely, that they are all in on it, including the secret services of allied countries (in short, there are cases in which someone else is doing the spying for him):
“The head of the National Security Agency on Tuesday adamantly denied recent reports that his agency is collecting millions of phone records across Europe.
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said in congressional testimony that reports of the US gathering information on tens of millions of phone calls in France and Spain were “completely false.” The comment was one highlight of a House Intelligence Committee hearing about how to improve information gathering and privacy protections.
[...]
The hearing took place amid an international uproar over reports last week that the NSA monitored the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a decade – part of a pattern of the agency eavesdropping on friendly countries’ leaders.
Asked by Chairman Mike Rogers (R) of Michigan if the US would consider it important to get access to the communications of foreign leaders, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper responded that knowing “leadership intentions” was “one of the first things I learned in intelligence school in 1963.” When asked further by Chairman Rogers if America’s allies “conduct espionage on us,” Mr. Clapper responded “absolutely” – before summarizing that the brouhaha over friends-on-friends spying reminded him of a scene from the movie “Casablanca.”
“My God, there’s gambling going on here,” Clapper said, offering his own version of the famous line in which a policeman expresses “shock” at finding gambling in the movie’s snazzy club and gambling den. “It’s the same sort of thing.”
As for the “false” reports of the NSA gathering millions of European phone records, General Alexander said that the data in question – part of documents divulged by Edward Snowden to European media – were actually collected by foreign intelligence agencies. Moreover, to a large extent, they were gathered outside of Europe, often in war zones of crucial security interest to the US and its European allies.
“This is not information we collected on European citizens,” Alexander said, defining it instead as “information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations.” The documents Mr. Snowden provided European media were actually screenshots of data and were not the documents themselves, Alexander said.
Some committee members asked why European leaders would offer such harsh judgments of US intelligence practices if their services are doing the same thing.
Some European parliamentarians and policymakers “may not have familiarity with exactly how their intelligence operations work,” Clapper said, adding that officials are often unaware of “everything” their own intelligence agencies do.”
(emphasis added)
Two important factoids are contained in this testimony. For one thing the 'regulatory arbitrage' we recently discussed is what Mr. Alexander no doubt refers to when he says “we didn't collect that stuff, other intelligence agencies did!”. This is how they seemingly operate – if there is anything one agency cannot do due to legal restrictions, it simply gets the data from one that can (like the GCHQ in the UK, which everybody loves because it can essentially do as it pleases). This method provides both the data and deniability. What's not to love? Mr. Alexander was incidentally the man who when visiting the NSA's station at Menwith in the UK in 2008 said:
“Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”
The man's obsession with 'collecting everything' is legendary – so legendary, that “even his defenders say Alexander's aggressiveness has sometimes taken him to the outer edge of his legal authority”, as Glenn Greenwald reported in July. Indeed, what immediately springs to mind when considering people like Keith Alexander, his adlatus James Clapper or former NSA chief Michael Hayden is Dr. Strangelove. These people are possessed by a rampant megalomania, and their view of the world in general and the internet in particular can only be characterized as pathologically paranoid (read the swill Hayden spewed forth in the context of the internet, which he apparently hates with a passion and is proud to have 'militarized').
The other interesting factoid was pointed out by James Clapper, namely that many “European parliamentarians and policymakers may not have familiarity with exactly how their intelligence operations work”.
We would submit that the same is true for many Congressmen in the US. The intelligence agencies have simply become a state-within-the-state, apparently a completely lawless zone where anything goes. As noted in a previous update on this topic, former NSA employee Russell Tice alleges that the NSA wiretaps all those who it believes could be dangerous to itself, from journalists to judges to politicians, and that it can and does blackmail people when deemed necessary. This is an unproved allegation we hasten to add, but it sure doesn't sound overly far-fetched.
Keep in mind that if 'no-one knows' how these agencies work and what exactly they are doing, one no longer lives under the rule of law. There can be no 'rule of law' when everything happens in secret. Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan recently remarked in the WSJ:
“What Woodward calls “this secret world” I have come increasingly to think of as the deep state—again, the vast, unfathomable and not fully accountable innards of the permanent U.S. intelligence and national-security apparatus. I have been wondering if it isn’t true that presidents change and directors change—you can keep changing the showbiz side, the names on the marquee—but the ways, needs, demands, imperatives, secrets and strategies of The Agencies stay pretty much the same, except for one thing: They always want more. The dynamic is always toward growth, toward more reach and more power. (We see some of this too in the permanent regulatory and administrative class in all the domestic agencies, EPA, HHS and IRS. You know why Lois Lerner more or less operated as if she had impunity? Because she more or less had impunity.) And it’s all gotten too big, too dark, too impenetrable. I’m not talking about “Homeland”-type darkness and shadows. It is more bureaucratic than that, more banal, less colorful, less dramatic. It is more James Clapper than James Angleton, more Vienna, Va., than mildly sinister McLean dinner party.”
(emphasis added)
Of course that is true of all bureaucracies: they always strive to grow and arrogate more power to themselves. There is simply no 'limit' where the people heading a bureaucracy would ever say 'no, this is too much power for us'. Note that no-one can accuse Ms. Noonan of being a bleeding-heart liberal, but even she is beginning to get spooked by the vast power these agencies evidently possess.
The Fail Becomes Bigger Within a Day
What made this 'we would never!' show by General Alexander even funnier was that not even a day later, it was revealed that the “NSA broke into Yahoo, Google data centers”. And wouldn't you know, the UK's GCHQ is right in the thick of it.
“The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records — ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.
The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws. "Although there's a diminished standard of legal protection for interception that occurs overseas, the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center. The reference to 'clouds' refers to sites where the companies collect data.
The new details about the NSA's access to Yahoo and Google data centers around the world come at a time when Congress is reconsidering the government's collection practices and authority, and as European governments are responding angrily to revelations that the NSA collected data on millions of communications in their countries. Details about the government's programs have been trickling out since Snowden shared documents with the Post and Guardian newspaper in June.
The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.”
(emphasis added)
And here is what Alexander said in an interview given to Bloomberg on Wednesday, while he was apparently still unaware of these latest reports:
“In an interview with Bloomberg News Wednesday, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander was asked if the NSA has infiltrated Yahoo and Google databases, as detailed in the Post story. "Not to my knowledge," said Alexander. "We are not authorized to go into a U.S. company's servers and take data. We'd have to go through a court process for doing that."
It was not clear, however, whether Alexander had any immediate knowledge of the latest disclosure in the Post report. Instead, he appeared to speak more about the PRISM program and its legal parameters.”
(emphasis added)
PRISM is the program for which FISA court permissions have to obtained, which are incidentally never denied. The secret court is apparently rubber-stamping the requests so it seems they are mainly relayed to it to keep up appearances. Of course all involved are sotto voce denying this 'rubber stamp' allegation. 'Breaking into data centers worldwide' evidently happens without anyone asking for permission though. It sure is emblematic of the 'let's collect everything' philosophy – a philosophy that makes no sense to us: how can this possibly help to 'catch terrorists', as the NSA's representatives keep claiming? On occasion of the 9-11 attacks, the fact that apparently a number of the terrorists involved were known to various security agencies and the fact that it was also known that they were in the US, did not suffice to stop the attacks. But recording practically every conversation in the world will somehow magically stop future attacks? Something doesn't compute there.
Still, due to our diminished capacity to believe in coincidences, we keep wondering why all of this is coming out, and why now? It will be interesting to see where all of this is going; the default expectation should probably be 'nowhere'.
NSA chief Keith Alexander: 'I swear we didn't have relations with these data'.
(Photo via AP / Charles Dharapak)
Well-known terrorist (deceased) in his cave: “What's a 'Google'?”
(Photo via EPA)