The Compass

Michael Hastings, remembered

By The Week Staff — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:17:00 -0400

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's 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 e-mails a few times.

I do know that he was actively disliked by government higher-ups. He was a...

America Leaks! It started with a president

By The Week Staff — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:48:00 -0400

This is the first in a series of posts about leaking classified information in America. My aim is to add some context to the news of the day, to show a bit of continuity with history, and to try to assess what happens next.

Modern presidential press management traces its lineage to the failure of Woodrow Wilson to tend to the journalists who followed him as he crafted the League of Nations Treaty in Versailles.

The Bob Woodward of the time was a bombastic dandy named Herbert Swope, who wrote for the New York World.

The sojourn to France was Swope's first big assignment, and he couldn't comprehend...

DNI: NSA can't spy on Americans without a warrant

By The Week Staff — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:49:00 -0400

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:

The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress. Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans...

Minimize this!

By The Week Staff — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:20:00 -0400

Before 9/11, if the NSA was in close pursuit of a terrorist who wanted to do harm to the United States, and that terrorist happened to book an airline that was owned by a U.S company, the agency was legally obligated to black out the name of the airline from any and all reports it sent on to the FBI. Why? As Kurt Eichenwald, who has written cogently about NSA data collection, points out, the NSA had to minimize, or excise, any incidental information about U.S. citizens, corporations, or legal residents that its analysts found.

In practice, the NSA would probably have found a way to verbally alert...

Deep State excerpt: The NSA's expensive, Orwellian choice

By The Week Staff — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:42:00 -0400

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.

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...

Generating the nuclear codes and more

By The Week Staff — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:44:00 -0400

The National Security Agency is now infamous, perhaps, for its global signals intelligence mission. But the agency, since its inception, has had many other important national security functions under its very large umbrella. Here are six:

1. The NSA generates and distributes all nuclear weapon unlock and launch codes. In a secure, hardened, and largely underground tank of sorts near Finksberg, Maryland, workers at the NSA's "Key Support Central Facility" preside over an automated process that produces and packages physical keys, transmits encryption algorithms for systems that can be coded "over...

How a single IT tech could spy on the world

By The Week Staff — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:56:00 -0400

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. As a systems administrator...

Deep State excerpt: Why the NSA keeps everything so secret

By The Week Staff — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:10:00 -0400

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...

Solving the mystery of PRISM

By The Week Staff — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:40:00 -0400

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...

Deep State excerpt: The NSA is the largest factory of secrets in the world

By The Week Staff — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:55:00 -0400

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...

Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:02:00 -0400

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

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...

Congress' intel heads endorse NSA program

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:06:00 -0400

Just got this statement from the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers, and the ranking Democrat, Dutch Ruppersberger. They contend that the NSA's collection programs are legal because Congress knows about them and the courts sanction them, and that they're necessary. It does not provide any additional information on how the government uses the data it collects and stores. How and when? It may be hard for the government to answer, but I suspect it will not get away with evasion.

The collection described with yesterday's disclosure of a purported court...

How the NSA uses your telephone records

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:07:00 -0400

Now that we have irrefutable proof that the National Security Agency collects and stores all of Verizon's telephone records, before we can use the "s" word — "spy" — we ought to get a better sense of what the agency, which is charged, you should know, with foreign intelligence collection, uses it for.

Of course, the rules are classified. They're probably classified at a higher level than the document provided to The Guardian because they're part of a specific compartmented NSA program that, government officials say, bears the code name "RAGTIME."

Ragtime is a SAP — a special...

Secrecy: The big unanswered questions

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:13:00 -0400

While Bradley Manning's disclosures to WikiLeaks did not appreciably harm national security, the government decided early on to use his case as a warning. The government absolutely has a stake in making sure that government employees don't feel free to share classified information because they disagree with a policy. But Manning's prosecution and treatment go well beyond anything reasonable. I suspect that the size and scope of his disclosures contributed to the decision to prosecute him to the hilt, as did the explicit and available evidence that he intended to disclose classified information...

U.S. responds to NSA disclosures

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:52:00 -0400

All through the night, the National Security Council worked with the intelligence community to come up with a formal response to Glenn Greenwald's story in the Guardian about NSA telephone record collection.

A senior government official sends along the combined talking points:

* The article discusses what purports to be an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes the production of business records. Orders of the FISA Court are classified.

* On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not...

Source: Panetta wasn't aware of Mark Boal's attendance at CIA ceremony

By The Week Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:11:00 -0400

When CIA Director Leon Panetta ebulliently thanked members of SEAL Team Six at an agency ceremony honoring participants in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, he was not aware that the CIA's public affairs shop had allowed writer Mark Boal to attend, an associate of Panetta's said today.

A report published by the Project for Government Oversight implied that Panetta knowingly disclosed classified information to someone who was not cleared to hear it because Panetta had endorsed the project that Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow had proposed.

But the associate, who asked not to be identified because...

Your telephone records belong to us

By The Week Staff — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:58:00 -0400

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald has published what appears to be a top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over to the National Security Agency all telephone call records for all American customers in real time. The document bears the classification "TOP SECRET//SI//NO FORN, indicating that it deals with signals intelligence and cannot be shared with foreign countries.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under...

Why am I in the Pentagon report on Zero Dark Thirty?

By The Week Staff — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:21:00 -0400

In late May of 2011, I received an unusual call from Doug Wilson, the undersecretary of defense for public affairs.

He wanted to introduce me to Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning writer of the Hurt Locker. Boal, he said, was working on a new film about the manhunt that led to the death of Osama bin Laden.

Why me?

And yes, I asked that.

He told me it was because I had reported on the Joint Special Operations Command, and had written about the raid for National Journal, so Wilson thought the connection would be mutually beneficial.

Wilson sent me Boal's contact info.

I met him twice, once in Washington...

Zero Dark Thirty's access to secret-keepers revealed

By The Week Staff — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:54:00 -0400

An draft internal Pentagon report suggests that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers revealed to filmmakers the name of a special operations planner who participated in the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden even though the head of the Special Operations Command, Adm. Eric Olson, had specifically asked that the man's name and the fact of his participation in the raid not be revealed.

The report, about information provided by the government to Zero Dark Thirty's writer and director, concludes that no "classified" or sensitive special operations tactics, techniques...

Using child porn to catch child porn collectors

By The Week Staff — Thu, 30 May 2013 20:30:00 -0400

It's hard not to sympathize with the FBI. It's impossible to go after purveyors of child pornography one by one, and the bureau doesn't have the time or resources to full enforce the law. Where it can, it focuses on big traffickers — the owners and operators of private websites who cater to the (mostly) men who view the images and videos for sexual gratification. From there, it uses service records, including credit cards, IP addresses, and other content obtained from its seizure of a site's hard drives to identify the people who trade the porn.

Recently, some enterprising FBI agents took...