Edward Snowden's dissent from orthodoxy about what Americans should know about government secrets has been incredibly important. It might also become dangerous. What happens when you blow the whistle so loudly that everyone not only hears you but becomes deaf?

When the 29-year-old former contractor gave reporters the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's directive Verizon Business, the NSA could no longer conceal the fact that it collected American telephone records. The legal, political and national security justifications for the practice are all intertwined, and the leak tore one strand from another: The FISA court provided "directives," not...  More»

Michael Hastings was the type of national security reporter I didn't have the guts to be.

"A dick?"

I guess — well, yes. A dick. A dick to those in power. Fearless. Someone who didn't care what others thought of him.

I had given the news of Hastings' death to a military contact of mine, someone who venerated one of the men that Hastings did not, and my contact was very rude and blunt in his assessment. Hastings had been, apparently, a dick to him.

I didn't know Hastings well. We exchanged emails a few times.

I do know that he was actively disliked by government higher-ups....  More»

A rare Sunday afternoon statement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responds to news reports that Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) was told in a Congressional briefing that the NSA could listen to Americans' phone calls without a warrant:...  More»

This is an excerpt from Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Over the next few weeks, we'll be running a series of NSA-related excerpts from the book here on The Compass.

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The effectiveness of the special programs of the NSA is a mystery. There are a couple of cases where they provided real assistance to investigators. But the FBI claims that early on the NSA added needless complications to the bureau's efforts to determine whether sleeper cells actually existed inside the United States. It was difficult to segregate data that came from the special programs from data that came from normal NSA FISA...  More»

One of NSA contractor Edward Snowden's more stunning claims is that a single individual has the ability to eavesdrop on anyone in the world, and that he could access and download information about all of the C.I.A's station chiefs and undercover case officers.

If true, it means that the system the NSA has built to connect analysts with the data it collects and distributes is both extremely powerful, well beyond what is publicly known, and also, at the same quite, brittle, if it can truly be subject to single-point failures.

I don't know if Snowden's claim is accurate....  More»

This is an excerpt from Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Over the next few weeks, we'll be running a series of NSA-related excerpts from the book here on The Compass.

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A dozen years after 9/11, former NSA director Michael Hayden, now retired, remains accessible. He answers questions sent to his AOL email address. "Can the UK task the U.S. with listening to British citizens? Can the U.S. task the Brits with collecting on U.S. citizens?"

"Absolutely not," he replies.

"Does the NSA maintain a database of potential political undesirables in the event of martial law in the U....  More»

What exactly is PRISM? How does it work? Who uses it?

Let's assume that the companies whose data is sucked in by a National Security Agency tool called PRISM are denying their knowledge of the word and its associations in good faith. And let us also accept their denials that they've given someone at the NSA "direct access" to their servers.

So where are we?

There are many types of nicknames and special words that the NSA uses.

Some refer to collection tools. Some refer to data processing tools.

Each data processing tool, collection platform, mission and source for raw intelligence is given a specific numeric signals activity/address designator, or a SIGAD....  More»

This is an excerpt from Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Over the next few weeks, we'll be running a series of NSA-related excerpts from the book here on The Compass.

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In the early part of 2000, the National Security Agency was "up" on a known al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. It had intercepted cell phone calls between a known terrorist and persons unknown in San Diego. Because the conversations were not themselves evidence of terrorist plots, and because the identities and locations of the persons inside the United States were not known, the NSA did not have the probable cause necessary to seek a...  More»

Ambinder is co-author of a new book about government secrecy and surveillance, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry.

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Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.

Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures...  More»