NSA spin

[Magda Hassan]

How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say

A lexicon for understanding the words U.S. intelligence officials use to mislead the public.

By Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman

August 01, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Slate" - James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency's surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials' outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirectiona language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA's activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.

Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how longand it's been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label "surveillance" to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term, pointing out that this particular program doesn't involve the NSA actually listening to phone callsjust keeping track of them. Their crabbed definition of "surveillance" allows them to claim that the NSA isn't engaged in surveillance even when it quite plainly is.

Collect. If an intelligence official says that the NSA isn't "collecting" a certain kind of information, what has he actually said? Not very much, it turns out. One of the NSA's foundational documents states that "collection" occurs not when the government acquires information but when the government "selects" or "tasks" that information for "subsequent processing." Thus it becomes possible for the government to acquire great reams of information while denying that it is "collecting" anything at all.

Relevant. The NSA's call-tracking program is ostensibly based on the Patriot Act's Section 215, a provision that allows the government to compel businesses to disclose records that are "relevant" to authorized foreign intelligence investigations. The theory, it seems, is that everybody's phone records are relevant today because anybody's phone records might become relevant in the future. This stretches the concept of "relevance" far beyond the breaking point. Even the legislator who wrote Section 215 has rejected the government's theory. If "relevance" is given such a broad compass, what room is left for "irrelevance"?

Targeted. The call-tracking program is only one of the NSA's surveillance efforts. Another is what's been branded PRISM, a program that involves the acquisition of the contents of phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. Americans need not worry about the program, the government says, because the NSA's surveillance activities are "targeted" not at Americans but at foreigners outside the United States. No one should be reassured by this. The government's foreign targets aren't necessarily criminals or terroriststhey may be journalists, lawyers, academics, or human rights advocates. And even if one is indifferent to the NSA's invasion of foreigners' privacy, the surveillance of those foreigners involves the acquisition of Americans' communications with those foreigners. The spying may be "targeted" at foreigners, but it vacuums up thousands of Americans' phone calls and emails.

Incidental. Because the government's surveillance targets are foreigners outside the United States, intelligence officials describe the acquisition of Americans' communications as "incidental." But the truth is that the statute behind PRISMthe FISA Amendments Act of 2008was intended to let the government conduct warrantless surveillance of these very communications. In the debate that preceded passage of the law, intelligence officials told Congress that it was Americans' communications that were of most interest to them. Indeed, when some legislators introduced bills that would have barred access to these communications without a warrant, President Bush said he would veto them. (One of those bills, incidentally, was introduced by thenSen. Barack Obama.)

Inadvertent. The PRISM program sweeps up Americans' purely domestic communications, too. Officials have said that the collection of domestic communications is "inadvertent," but PRISM's very design makes the collection of Americans' domestic communications perfectly predictable. This is in part because the NSA presumes that its surveillance targets are foreigners outside the United States unless it has specific information to the contrary. In 2009, the New York Times reported that the NSA's collection of purely domestic communications under the 2008 statute had been "significant and systemic."

Minimize. What does the NSA do with communications that are acquired "incidentally" or "inadvertently"? As intelligence officials have told the courts and Congress, so-called "minimization" procedures limit the NSA's retention and use of information about American citizens and permanent residents. Here again, though, the terminology is grossly misleading. The 2008 statute gives the NSA broad latitude to retain Americans' communications, share them with other agencies, and even share them with foreign governments. The NSA's own documents suggest that the agency retains Americans' communications indefinitely if they include "foreign intelligence information," a term defined so broadly that it encompasses any conversation relating to foreign affairs. Even communications that don't include foreign intelligence information are retained for as long as five years.

No. When James Clapper was asked at a March Senate hearing whether the NSA was collecting information about millions of Americans, he answered, "No," and then, after a pause, "not wittingly." As Clapper has now conceded, the correct answer was simply "yes."

Officials who describe the NSA's activities using strategically idiosyncratic terminology presumably believe that they are telling the truth. In a certain formal sense, they usually arethough Clapper's statement is a glaring exception. It shouldn't need to be said, though, that their duties as public officials go beyond the avoidance of perjury charges. They have an obligation to ensure that the courts, Congress, and the public fully understand the policies that they are being asked to accept. They could start by using the same dictionary the rest of us do.

[Jan Klimkowski]

No. When James Clapper was asked at a March Senate hearing whether the NSA was collecting information about millions of Americans, he answered, "No," and then, after a pause, "not wittingly." As Clapper has now conceded, the correct answer was simply "yes."

Clapper has a case of The Clap.

If you don't know what Brits mean by "The Clap", look it up.

One etymology suggests it's derived from a whorehouse known as Clapier.

Another suggests it means moral and physical collapse.

Clap - er.

[Peter Lemkin]

No. When James Clapper was asked at a March Senate hearing whether the NSA was collecting information about millions of Americans, he answered, "No," and then, after a pause, "not wittingly." As Clapper has now conceded, the correct answer was simply "yes."

Clapper has a case of The Clap.

If you don't know what Brits mean by "The Clap", look it up.

One etymology suggests it's derived from a whorehouse known as Clapier.

Another suggests it means moral and physical collapse.

Clap - er.

Being rather hard on the man, eh Jan? :mexican: The man's mouth simply said 'No' when his heart, rest assured [cough, cough], :angeldevil: told him he really should say 'Yes' . Spies are professional liars. His believability 'factor', along with the entire 'intelligence apparatus', is the irrational number of the square root of negative ZERO! :alberteinstein::fullofit:

[Keith Millea]

Clapper has a case of The Clap.

If you don't know what Brits mean by "The Clap", look it up.

One etymology suggests it's derived from a whorehouse known as Clapier.

Another suggests it means moral and physical collapse.

Clap - er.

Tetracycline........:nurse:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Clapper has a case of The Clap.

If you don't know what Brits mean by "The Clap", look it up.

One etymology suggests it's derived from a whorehouse known as Clapier.

Another suggests it means moral and physical collapse.

Clap - er.

Tetracycline........:nurse:

pinwheels:

Tetracycline might address the physical pus-ridden decay.

Won't do anything for Clapper's soul though....

[Magda Hassan]

By Kevin Collier on August 16, 2013


I can't shake the feeling that the National Security Agency thinks I'm a chump.
I mean, I've written a lot about them. I've talked to their media contacts. I've been denied clarifications. I've pored over their press releases and page after page of NSA documents that former contractor Edward Snowden took from them and leaked to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald.
Yet when I sent the NSA a formal request through the Freedom of Information Act, asking what the agency had collected on me through two big programsa telephone metadata collection program and PRISMthey acted like I was a total newbie at this stuff.
Metadata collection refers to tracking every phone call in the United States and pairing it with call times and durations. The government openly admits this practice now, though it insists nobody's name gets attached to those numbers. On the other hand, they say PRISMthe ability to tap American companies like Google for their users' communicationscan only be used on foreigners. These were the first two programs to be leaked, though we've since learned of much bigger ones, XKeyscore and Fairview in particular.
Soon after Snowden's revelations, I filed my FOIA request through Jonathan Corbitt's incredible My NSA Records site, which the NSA has since asked him to cease.
"Although these two programs have been publicly acknowledged," the NSA wrote to me a few weeks later, "details about them remain classified and/or protected from release by statutes to prevent harm to the national security of the United States."
Oh, really? I'm skeptical that my country's national security will be threatened if the agency share what its got on me. The NSA clarified:
"Our adversaries are likely to evaluate all public responses related to these programs," the NSA continued. "Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries' compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."
In a pre-Snowden world, I might have bought that. But I've been drawing conclusions from Snowden's disclosures, and the NSA's own admissions, and some members of Congress's statements, for a while now. I've been putting those pieces together, and the NSA certainly hasn't asked me to stop.
As for the question of whether any of the NSA's individual data collection programs is vital for national security, our knowledge is still limited, and it's impossible to make a truly educated call. NSA chief Keith Alexander has claimed these programs have helped stop more than 50 terror attacks worldwide; plenty of others have convincingly argued that they actually didn't play a crucial role.
My response from the agency involved a lot of that kind of complete and total question dodging. Like when it said "any positive or negative response ... would allow our adversaries to accumulate information and draw conclusions about NSA's technical capabilities, sources, and methods."
All this secrecy, even though Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance have turned into the biggest hard news story of 2013, the NSA has admitted the practices, and primary documents about various programs are readily available on the Internet. It's reminiscent of how the Army blocked access to the Guardian so soldiers wouldn't see the information Snowden released, even though nearly everybody else in the world could.
But it wasn't until page two that I got to the truly frustrating stuff. In trying to assure me that it wouldn't actually look my phone calls stored in their databases, the NSA claimed:
"NSA cannot review any metadata unless strict requirements are met, i.e., the data may be queried only when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that a phone number is associated with a foreign terrorist organization."
About that: The NSA has admitted, separately, that it employs a practice called "contact chaining." That means that if one of their targets calls someone, who in turn calls someone else, who in turn calls you, agency's checking you out.
"But I'm probably not even three degrees away from a terrorist!" you might cry. Doesn't matter. You just have to be what the NSA calls a "target," or person of interest. And thanks to Snowden, we know the agency has a rather broad definition of what constitutes a target, like you're in the same online phone directorythe Yellow Pages, perhaps?as another target. Anyone who's worked for any foreign government is on the list. So is anyone who tries to use standard, legal techniques to avoid being tracked onlinelike using the Tor browser.

"As you may also be aware," the NSA wrote to me, "there has been considerable speculation about two NSA intelligence programs in the press/media."
I am aware of that, because I contributed to that speculation. Of the 702 programa term the FBI has used interchangeably with PRISM at least once, though everybody in the government seems to go to great pains to not ever actually say "PRISM"I wrote in June that it was likely a program that automated court orders for surveillance.
Now, I'm not so sure. It remains quite confusing: The actual content of those NSA slides says PRISM gives the NSA "direct access" to companies like Gmail, but the NSA has said that it's a multi-step process, authorized by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that goes through real courts each time.
I've also written about the 215 program, a part of the Patriot Act that authorizes the NSA to collect metadata on each and every American. The government says that means phone records: every number called, the time of the call, and how long you talked. The government says that it used to track Americans' emails in the same way but hasn't since 2011.
That's what the government's admitted, not speculation. But I have speculated that the government keeps a similar database of where everyone is via their cell phone. I don't have explicit proof, but I can put two and two together. If it existed, such a location-tracking program would be classified and hidden, as the phone metadata collection program was until Snowden revealed it. Sen. Ron Wyden, who I've previously lauded as one of the world's most important Internet activists, keeps winking and nudging that that exact program is in place.
Wyden has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since before 9/11, so he's certainly in a position to access that classified knowledge. Americans "will be stunned and they will be angry" when they learn how the Patriot Act has been interpreted, he's said. Oh, and he keeps awkwardly stopping his speeches that warn Americans to be paranoid, then reminding listeners that "most of us here have a computer in our pocket that potentially can be used to track and monitor us 24/7."
Though it took two and a half pages to do so, the NSA denied my application. "[Y]our request is denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter," it wrote.
Oh. Thanks anyway, NSA.
This is the full letter, if you care to read it:
NSA FOIA response
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/foia-re...n-collier/

[Peter Lemkin]

Slight aside - After working for several years with and researching the JFK assassination and very specifically the covert history of Plumlee, Ayers and persons related to them and the assassination, gernally, I filed a FOIA with CIA and FBI on what they had on myself and got a total denial disguised in 'bureaucratise language'. They said they had nothing - which I can NOT believe - given the death threats, phone taps, electronic bugs, who I was contacting, legal attacks, etc. They are all, along with NSA, in the business of total collection - not dissemination of any information and not wanting anyone to have clues as to on who and how they collect information. They ignore the laws on FOIA and it has gotten worse since 9-11 and worse still under Obama.

[Magda Hassan]

Weasel words.

NSA statements to The Post

By Barton Gellman,

The National Security Agency offered these comments on The Washington Post's article about privacy violations.

Read the documents

NSA report on privacy violations

Read the full report with key sections highlighted and annotated by the reporter.

FISA court finds illegal surveillance

The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.

What's a 'violation'?

View a slide used in a training course for NSA intelligence collectors and analysts.

What to say (and what not to say)

How NSA analysts explain their targeting decisions without giving "extraneous information" to overseers.



More on this story:

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times, audit finds

Barton Gellman
Agency also has overstepped legal authority since Congress gave it broad new power in 2008.

FISA court judge: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited

Carol D. Leonnig
Spy court chief judge says it must rely on government to say when it improperly spies on Americans.

New demands for reform of NSA spy programs

Ellen Nakashima
Some lawmakers called Friday for greater transparency in the surveillance operations of the National Security Agency, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes committed by the agency were not intentional. The contrasting reactions came after The Washington Post reported that the NSA violated rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times in recent years.




Aug. 14
In July 2012, Director of National Intelligence [James R.] Clapper declassified certain statements about the government's implementation of Section 702 in order to inform the public and congressional debate relating to reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Those statements acknowledged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had determined that "some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
The FISC's finding was with respect to a very specific and highly technical aspect of the National Security Agency's 702 collection. Once the issue was identified and fully understood, it was reported immediately to the FISC and Congress. In consultation with the FISC, the Department of Justice, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence worked to address the concerns identified by the FISC by strengthening the NSA minimization procedures, thereby enhancing privacy protections for U.S. persons. The FISC has continued to approve the collection as consistent with the statute and reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Aug. 12
Obama administration statement on compliance incident' statistics.

The NSA communications office, in coordination with the White House and Director of National Intelligence, declined to answer questions about the number of violations of the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans, including whether the trends are up or down. Spokesmen provided the following prepared statement.
Looking over a 3-year period that includes the 1st first quarter 2010 through second quarter 2013, the data for that quarter are above the average number of incidents reported in any given quarter during that period. The number of incidents in a given quarter during that 3-year period ranged from 372 to 1,162. A variety of factors can cause the numbers of incidents to trend up or down from one quarter to the next. They include, but are not limited to: implementation of new procedures or guidance with respect to our authorities that prompt a spike that requires "fine tuning," changes to the technology or software in the targeted environment for which we had no prior knowledge, unforeseen shortcomings in our systems, new or expanded access, and "roaming" by foreign targets into the U.S., some of which NSA cannot anticipate in advance but each instance of which is reported as an incident. The one constant across all of the quarters is a persistent, dedicated effort to identify incidents or risks of incidents at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.
An NSA interview, rewritten
The Obama administration referred all questions for this article to John DeLong, the NSA's director of compliance, who answered questions freely in a 90-minute interview. DeLong and members of the NSA communications staff said he could be quoted "by name and title" on some of his answers after an unspecified internal review. The Post said it would not permit the editing of quotes. Two days later, White House and NSA spokesmen said that none of DeLong's comments could be quoted on the record and sent instead a prepared statement in his name. The Post declines to accept the substitute language as quotations from DeLong. The statement is below.

We want people to report if they have made a mistake or even if they believe that an NSA activity is not consistent with the rules. NSA, like other regulated organizations, also has a "hotline" for people to report and no adverse action or reprisal can be taken for the simple act of reporting. We take each report seriously, investigate the matter, address the issue, constantly look for trends, and address them as well all as a part of NSA's internal oversight and compliance efforts. What's more, we keep our overseers informed through both immediate reporting and periodic reporting. Our internal privacy compliance program has more than 300 personnel assigned to it: a fourfold increase since 2009. They manage NSA's rules, train personnel, develop and implement technical safeguards, and set up systems to continually monitor and guide NSA's activities. We take this work very seriously.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nati...story.html