BackNo morsel is too minuscule for all-consuming NSA
The NSA seems to be listening everywhere, gathering everything that might add to the US government's knowledge of the world
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When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations (UN) secretary-general, sat down with US President Barack 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 (NSA) nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted 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 Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the NSA’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 NSA 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.
Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of NSA eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union (EU), Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined US 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 NSA, 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 NSA, the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and 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 NSA? 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 NSA, said there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all directions.
“From NSA’s point of view, it’s a disaster," 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 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 NSA seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the US 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.
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 NSA—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 NSA technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers.
No investment seems too great if it adds to the agency’s global phone book. The aspirations are grandiose: to “utterly master" foreign intelligence carried on communications networks. 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 NSA documents taken by 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 (GCHQ).
The agency and its many defenders among senior government officials who have relied on its top secret reports say it is crucial to US security and status in the world, pointing to terrorist plots disrupted, nuclear proliferation tracked, and diplomats kept informed.
But the documents released by Snowden sometimes also seem to underscore the limits of what even the most intensive intelligence collection can achieve by itself. Blanket NSA eavesdropping in Afghanistan, described in the documents as covering government offices and the hideouts 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.
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.
That creates intense pressure not to miss anything. When that is combined with an ample budget and near-invisibility to the public, the result is aggressive surveillance of the kind that has sometimes got the agency in trouble with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a US federal court that polices its programmes for breaches of Americans’ privacy.
In the funding boom that followed the 11 September attacks, the agency expanded and decentralized far beyond its Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland, building or expanding major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington state and Utah. Its officers also operate out of major overseas stations in England, Australia, South Korea and Japan, at overseas military bases, and from locked rooms housing the Special Collection Service inside US missions abroad.
The agency, using a combination of jawboning, stealth and legal force, has turned the nation’s Internet and telecommunications companies into collection partners, installing filters in their facilities, serving them with court orders, building back doors into their software, and acquiring keys to break their encryption.
But even that vast American-run web is only part of the story. For decades, the NSA has shared eavesdropping duties with the rest of the so-called Five Eyes, the Sigint agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More limited cooperation occurs with many more countries, including formal arrangements called Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes, and Nacsi, an alliance of the agencies of 26 NATO countries.
Today, with personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones in most homes and government offices in the developed world, hacking has become the agency’s growth area.
Some of Snowden’s documents describe the exploits of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the prim name for the NSA division that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind. TAO is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not encoded.
The NSA’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, such as thieves who follow other housebreakers around and go through the windows they have left ajar.
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 Brenner added that he believes “technology has outrun policy" at the NSA, 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 NSA official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets such as Brazil’s President or German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does," he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy." But 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 US 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 NSA 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." ©2013/THE NEW YORK TIMES
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