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NSA

NSA’s Phone Data Collecting is Worse than Illegal, It’s Ineffective

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NSA, Manhattan Digest
Credit to: Watchdog

 

Civil libertarians on the right and the left have latched onto the report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board into the NSA’s program that collects data on phone calls. The NSA’s collection of phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act “implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report argued. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

Those who dislike the NSA and its program have started screaming that it’s illegal, just like they have said all along. The fact that the Board approved this report on a vote of 3-2 makes that a bit less certain. Moreover, the two dissenters served in the administration of George W. Bush, so they have the interests of the security community in mind.

Those who defend the program argue that the Board went beyond its brief in declaring the program illegal. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) chairman of the House intelligence committee, sent out an email today that read in part, “In 38 times over the past seven years, 17 federal judges have examined this issue and found the telephone metadata program to be legal, concluding this program complies with both the statutory text and with the U.S. Constitution. I don’t believe the Board should go outside its expertise to opine on the effectiveness of counterterrorism programs.”

I happen to think the congressman is onto something here. Rather than worry about whether the Board went too far or whether the program is illegal or unconstitutional, let’s start with whether or not it works.

The term “has shown only limited value” is a Beltway manner of saying, “ain’t worth spit.” It leaves enough wiggle room in case, by some miracle, the program does find a bad guy. However, since it hasn’t (or they’d point to the case or cases where it did), the Board is OK with shutting it down.

When it comes to fighting terrorism, we have done a pretty lousy job at fighting smart. We’re good at sending the marines everywhere, and drone attacks are safe and satisfying if your blood lust is up. But when it comes to saying “that’s a waste of resources,” America has a lousy record. That’s why we’re building another air craft carrier and more submarines when our enemies are hiding in the mountains of Pakistan.

The first question is to ask is “will this work?” If the answer is “no,” then we need not go any further. When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, a strategy that makes the haystack bigger (as the gathering of all the phone data does) is not going to work. Indeed, it will prove counterproductive. That being the case, who cares if it’s legal? We shouldn’t bother with it anyway.

Did the Russians Dupe Snowden?

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A new book by a writer who has covered eastern Europe for 30 years suggests that Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, could have been an unwitting agent for the Russian security service, the SVR. The Snowden Operation: Inside the West’s Greatest Intelligence Disaster is a must read if you have any interest in this case at all.

Did Russia Dupe Snowden?

Edward Lucas is senior editor at the Economist and was the only English-language reporter in Prague when the anti-communist revolution swept Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. He knows how that part of the world works and is particularly knowledgeable about how espionage services operate there. He never produces a smoking gun, but his argument is consistent with the facts and with the known behavior of the SVR and its forerunner the KGB.

There are four ways an intelligence officer (a person who works for the SVR, CIA, MI6 whatever) can recruit an agent (someone who supplies information – note the distinction. James Bond was an intelligence officer not an agent). The acronym is MICE: money, ideology, compromise and ego. You can bribe someone, ask them to “help the cause,” blackmail them with whatever you can find, and/or appeal to their sense of pride (“they don’t appreciate you, but we do.”).

In the case of Snowden, Lucas posits that he was motivated by ideology, but under a “false flag.” A false flag means that a person is recruited by an intelligence service but believes he is helping a different organization or cause. One of the most common ways the KGB did this during the Cold War was recruiting Jews by pretending to be from Israel’s Mossad. False flag recruitments are rather common in the espionage world and are favored by the Russians (and the Soviets before them).

Did the Russians Dupe Snowden?

The hypothesis here is that Snowden was tricked into believing he was helping the cause of open government, personal freedom, Mom and apple pie. In this, he was a “useful idiot” to borrow Lenin’s term.

Lucas then traces timelines and connections to Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, illustrating how these individuals could have unwittingly helped the SVR develop Snowden as an agent.

Would a prosecutor get a conviction with this evidence in a court of law? I don’t think so, and to be fair, neither does Lucas. However, the facts as we know them all fit. The conclusion is that you can’t rule out the possibility and this explanation of what happened is more likely to be true than any other.