An Ethos of ‘Why Not?’ for American Spy Agency
By SCOTT SHANE
The National Security Agency finds itself under intense pressure after
disclosures of spying on allies and rivals alike, but it defends the
wide net it casts.
N.S.A. Efforts to Spy on Both Enemies and Allies
Ayatollah Khamenei, via Twitter
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fourth from left, was tracked in the country’s north by the N.S.A.
The N.S.A.’s Evolution:
The National Security Agency was founded in 1952, and its surveillance
capabilities were limited by legislation in 1978. But with the attacks
of September 2001 came a new sense of urgency.
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: November 2, 2013
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.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
ALLIES AND SPY TARGETS President
Obama with other G-20 leaders in St. Petersburg, Russia, in early
September, standing between President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, left,
and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
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.
Ayatollah Khamenei, via Twitter
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fourth
from left, was tracked in the country’s north by the N.S.A.
Multimedia
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
SCOLDED John Emerson, left, the American envoy to Germany.
Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency’s role
in preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the
focus on counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an
agency with an almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are
breathtaking.
The agency’s Dishfire database — nothing happens without a code word at
the N.S.A. — stores years of text messages from around the world, just
in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card
purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet
cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze
to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially
active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad
agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which
figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.
The spy agency’s station in Texas intercepted 478 emails while helping
to foil a jihadist plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn pictures
of the Prophet Muhammad. N.S.A. analysts delivered to authorities at
Kennedy International Airport the names and flight numbers of workers
dispatched by a Chinese human smuggling ring.
The agency’s eavesdropping gear, aboard a Defense Department plane
flying 60,000 feet over Colombia, fed the location and plans of FARC
rebels to the Colombian Army. In the Orlandocard operation, N.S.A.
technicians set up what they called a “honeypot” computer on the web
that attracted visits from 77,413 foreign computers and planted spyware
on more than 1,000 that the agency deemed of potential future interest.
The Global Phone Book
No investment seems too great if it adds to the agency’s global phone
book. After mounting a major eavesdropping effort focused on a climate
change conference in Bali in 2007, agency analysts stationed in
Australia’s outback were especially thrilled by one catch: the cellphone
number of Bali’s police chief.
“Our mission,” says the agency’s current five-year plan, which has not
been officially scheduled for declassification until 2032, “is to answer
questions about threatening activities that others mean to keep
hidden.”
The aspirations are grandiose: to “utterly master” foreign intelligence
carried on communications networks. The language is corporate: “Our
business processes need to promote data-driven decision-making.” But the
tone is also strikingly moralistic for a government bureaucracy.
Perhaps to counter any notion that eavesdropping is a shady enterprise,
signals intelligence, or Sigint, the term of art for electronic
intercepts, is presented as the noblest of callings.
“Sigint professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as
terrorists or dictators seek to exploit our freedoms,” the plan
declares. “Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance
their cause; we will not.”
The N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times,
numbering in the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part
of a collection of about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British
counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.
While far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency’s
reach and abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio
transmissions as they cruise off the coast of China, to the satellite
dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland ingesting worldwide banking
transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American embassies and consulates
around the world from which the agency’s Special Collection Service aims
its antennas.
The agency and its many defenders among senior government officials who
have relied on its top secret reports say it is crucial to American
security and status in the world, pointing to terrorist plots disrupted,
nuclear proliferation tracked and diplomats kept informed.
Google Earth
EARS ON THE WORLD The National
Security Agency’s complex at Fort Gordon, Ga. Much of the agency’s
eavesdropping is run from stations at home and abroad, far beyond its
Maryland headquarters.
Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
SPY CHIEF James R. Clapper Jr., the
director of national intelligence, in September. He has strongly
defended intelligence gathering practices.
But the documents released by Mr. Snowden sometimes also seem to
underscore the limits of what even the most intensive intelligence
collection can achieve by itself. Blanket N.S.A. eavesdropping in
Afghanistan, described in the documents as covering government offices
and the hide-outs of second-tier Taliban militants alike, has failed to
produce a clear victory against a low-tech enemy. The agency kept track
as Syria amassed its arsenal of chemical weapons — but that knowledge
did nothing to prevent the gruesome slaughter outside Damascus in
August.
The documents are skewed toward celebration of the agency’s
self-described successes, as underlings brag in PowerPoints to their
bosses about their triumphs and the managers lay out grand plans. But
they do not entirely omit the agency’s flubs and foibles: flood tides of
intelligence gathered at huge cost that goes unexamined; intercepts
that cannot be read for lack of language skills; and computers that —
even at the N.S.A. — go haywire in all the usual ways.
Mapping Message Trails
In May 2009, analysts at the agency learned that Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was to make a rare trip to Kurdistan Province in
the country’s mountainous northwest. The agency immediately organized a
high-tech espionage mission, part of a continuing project focused on
Ayatollah Khamenei called Operation Dreadnought.
Working closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which
handles satellite photography, as well as G.C.H.Q., the N.S.A. team
studied the Iranian leader’s entourage, its vehicles and its weaponry
from satellites, and intercepted air traffic messages as planes and
helicopters took off and landed.
They heard Ayatollah Khamenei’s aides fretting about finding a crane to
load an ambulance and fire truck onto trucks for the journey. They
listened as he addressed a crowd, segregated by gender, in a soccer
field.
They studied Iranian air defense radar stations and recorded the
travelers’ rich communications trail, including Iranian satellite
coordinates collected by an N.S.A. program called Ghosthunter. The point
was not so much to catch the Iranian leader’s words, but to gather the
data for blanket eavesdropping on Iran in the event of a crisis.
This “communications fingerprinting,” as a document called it, is the
key to what the N.S.A. does. It allows the agency’s computers to scan
the stream of international communications and pluck out messages tied
to the supreme leader. In a crisis — say, a showdown over Iran’s nuclear program — the ability to tap into the communications of leaders, generals and scientists might give a crucial advantage.
On a more modest scale, the same kind of effort, what N.S.A. calls
“Sigint development,” was captured in a document the agency obtained in
2009 from Somalia — whether from a human source or an electronic
break-in was not noted. It contained email addresses and other contact
details for 117 selected customers of a Mogadishu Internet service,
Globalsom.
While most on the list were Somali officials or citizens, presumably
including some suspected of militancy, the document also included emails
for a United Nations political officer in Mogadishu and a local
representative for the charity World Vision, among other international
institutions. All, it appeared, were considered fair game for
monitoring.
This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the
agency’s “customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House,
Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of
State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States
Trade Representative.
By many accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence
nuggets delivered to the White House early each morning in the
President’s Daily Brief — a measure of success for American spies. (One
document boasts that listening in on Nigerian State Security had
provided items for the briefing “nearly two dozen” times.) In every
international crisis, American policy makers look to the N.S.A. for
inside information.
In Baghdad, T.A.O. collected messages left in draft form in email
accounts maintained by leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant
group. Under a program called Spinaltap, the division’s hackers
identified 24 unique Internet Protocol addresses identifying computers
used by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, making it possible to
snatch Hezbollah messages from the flood of global communications sifted
by the agency.
The N.S.A.’s elite Transgression Branch, created in 2009 to “discover,
understand, evaluate and exploit” foreign hackers’ work, quietly
piggybacks on others’ incursions into computers of interest, like
thieves who follow other housebreakers around and go through the windows
they have left ajar.
In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the
N.S.A. spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts
spotted suspicious emails being sent to a government office of great
intelligence interest in a hostile country and realized that an American
ally was “spear-phishing” — sending official-looking emails that, when
opened, planted malware that let hackers inside.
The Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting
documents and passwords from computers in the hostile country, an
elusive target. They got a look inside that government and
simultaneously got a close-up look at the ally’s cyberskills, the kind
of intelligence twofer that is the unit’s specialty.
In many other ways, advances in computer and communications technology
have been a boon for the agency. N.S.A. analysts tracked the electronic
trail left by a top leader of Al Qaeda in Africa each time he stopped to
use a computer on his travels. They correctly predicted his next stop,
and the police were there to arrest him.
And at the big N.S.A. station at Fort Gordon, technicians developed an
automated service called “Where’s My Node?” that sent an email to an
analyst every time a target overseas moved from one cell tower to
another. Without lifting a finger, an analyst could follow his quarry’s
every move.
The Limits of Spying
The techniques described in the Snowden documents can make the N.S.A.
seem omniscient, and nowhere in the world is that impression stronger
than in Afghanistan. But the agency’s capabilities at the tactical level
have not been nearly enough to produce clear-cut strategic success
there, in the United States’ longest war.
A single daily report from June 2011 from the N.S.A.’s station in
Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the
intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a
day’s work.
The agency listened while insurgents from the Haqqani network mounted an
attack on the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, overhearing the
attackers talking to their bosses in Pakistan’s tribal area and
recording events minute by minute. “Ruhullah claimed he was on the third
floor and had already inflicted one casualty,” the report said in a
typical entry. “He also indicated that Hafiz was located on a different
floor.”
N.S.A. officers listened as two Afghan Foreign Ministry officials
prepared for a meeting between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and
Iranian officials, assuring them that relations with the United States
“would in no way threaten the interests of Iran,” which they decided Mr.
Karzai should describe as a “brotherly country.”
The N.S.A. eavesdropped as the top United Nations official in
Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, consulted his European Union
counterpart, Vygaudas Usackas, about how to respond to an Afghan court’s
decision to overturn the election of 62 members of Parliament.
And the agency was a fly on the wall for a long-running land dispute
between the mayor of Kandahar and a prominent local man known as the
Keeper of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, with President Karzai’s
late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a mediator.
The agency discovered a Taliban claim to have killed five police
officers at a checkpoint by giving them poisoned yogurt, and heard a
provincial governor tell an aide that a district police chief was
verbally abusing women and clergymen.
A Taliban figure, Mullah Rahimullah Akhund, known on the United States
military’s kill-or-capture list by the code name Objective Squiz
Incinerator, was overheard instructing an associate to buy suicide vests
and a Japanese motorbike, according to the documents.
And N.S.A. listened in as a Saudi extremist, Abu Mughira, called his
mother to report that he and his fellow fighters had entered Afghanistan
and “done victorious operations.”
Such reports flowed from the agency’s Kandahar station day after day,
year after year, and surely strengthened the American campaign against
the Taliban. But they also suggest the limits of intelligence against a
complex political and military challenge. The N.S.A. recorded the hotel
attack, but it had not prevented it. It tracked Mr. Karzai’s government,
but he remained a difficult and volatile partner. Its surveillance was
crucial in the capture or killing of many enemy fighters, but not nearly
enough to remove the Taliban’s ominous shadow from Afghanistan’s
future.
Mining All the Tidbits
In the Afghan reports and many others, a striking paradox is the odd
intimacy of a sprawling, technology-driven agency with its targets. It
is the one-way intimacy of the eavesdropper, as N.S.A. employees
virtually enter the office cubicles of obscure government officials and
the Spartan hide-outs of drug traffickers and militants around the
world.
Venezuela, for instance, was one of six “enduring targets” in N.S.A.’s
official mission list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq,
Iran and Russia. The United States viewed itself in a contest for
influence in Latin America with Venezuela’s leader then, the leftist
firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself with Cuba, and one agency goal
was “preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership
objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global
interests.”
A glimpse of what this meant in practice comes in a brief PowerPoint
presentation from August 2010 on “Development of the Venezuelan Economic
Mission.” The N.S.A. was tracking billions of dollars flowing to
Caracas in loans from China (radar systems and oil drilling), Russia
(MIG fighter planes and shoulder-fired missiles) and Iran (a factory to
manufacture drone aircraft).
But it was also getting up-close and personal with Venezuela’s Ministry
of Planning and Finance, monitoring the government and personal emails
of the top 10 Venezuelan economic officials. An N.S.A. officer in Texas,
in other words, was paid each day to peruse the private messages of
obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats, hunting for tidbits that might offer
some tiny policy edge.
In a counterdrug operation in late 2011, the agency’s officers seemed to
know more about relations within a sprawling narcotics network than the
drug dealers themselves. They listened to “Ricketts,” a Jamaican drug
supplier based in Ecuador, struggling to keep his cocaine and marijuana
smuggling business going after an associate, “Gordo,” claimed he had
paid $250,000 and received nothing in return.
The N.S.A., a report said, was on top of not just their cellphones, but
also those of the whole network of “buyers, transporters, suppliers, and
middlemen” stretching from the Netherlands and Nova Scotia to Panama
City and Bogotá, Colombia. The documents do not say whether arrests
resulted from all that eavesdropping.
Even with terrorists, N.S.A. units can form a strangely personal
relationship. The N.S.A.-G.C.H.Q. wiki, a top secret group blog that Mr.
Snowden downloaded, lists 14 specialists scattered in various stations
assigned to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group that carried
out the bloody attack on Mumbai in 2008, with titles including “Pakistan
Access Pursuit Team” and “Techniques Discovery Branch.” Under the code
name Treaclebeta, N.S.A.’s hackers at Tailored Access Operations also
played a role.
In the wiki’s casual atmosphere, American and British eavesdroppers
exchange the peculiar shoptalk of the secret world. “I don’t normally
use Heretic to scan the fax traffic, I use Nucleon,” one user writes,
describing technical tools for searching intercepted documents.
But most striking are the one-on-one pairings of spies and militants;
Bryan is assigned to listen in on a man named Haroon, and Paul keeps an
ear on Fazl.
A Flood of Details
One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his
eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of
the agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He “ran some
queries” to read intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba
members, he wrote in the wiki, but added: “Most of it is in Arabic or
Farsi, so I can’t make much of it.”
It is a glimpse of the unsurprising fact that sometimes the agency’s
expensive and expansive efforts accomplish little. Despite the agency’s
embrace of corporate jargon on goal-setting and evaluation, it operates
without public oversight in an arena in which achievements are hard to
measure.
In a world of ballooning communications, the agency is sometimes simply
overwhelmed. In 2008, the N.S.A.’s Middle East and North Africa group
set about updating its Sigint collection capabilities. The “ambitious
scrub” of selectors — essentially search terms — cut the number of terms
automatically searched from 21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages
added to the agency’s Pinwale database from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a
day.
The reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the
way for new collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian
diplomats, the report said.
And in a note that may comfort computer novices, the N.S.A. Middle East
analysts discovered major glitches in their search software: The
computer was searching for the names of targets but not their email
addresses, a rather fundamental flaw. “Over 500 messages in one week did
not come in,” the report said about one target.
Those are daily course corrections. Whether the Snowden disclosures will
result in deeper change is uncertain. Joel F. Brenner, the agency’s
former inspector general, says much of the criticism is unfair,
reflecting a naïveté about the realpolitik of spying. “The agency is
being browbeaten for doing too well the things it’s supposed to do,” he
said.
But Mr. Brenner added that he believes “technology has outrun policy” at
the N.S.A., and that in an era in which spying may well be exposed,
“routine targeting of close allies is bad politics and is foolish.”
Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities
than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William
E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken
critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like
Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s
pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation
of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws
and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of
“turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power,
now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.
“I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
Whatever reforms may come, Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own
turbulent period as N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his
hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. “My
advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out
yourself,” he said. “It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But
bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put
it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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