The Edward Snowden Affair (37 page)

Gellman then decided to take a day off.
Der Spiegel
took the disclosure helm with the uncredited exposé, “NSA Spied on Al Jazeera Communications.”
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It is a brief overview of the NSA’s surveillance of the Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera. The news outlet has broadcast al-Qaeda video messages for more than 10 years. A March 23, 2006 classified document shows American intelligence hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal network. The espionage effort was considered a “notable success.” The agency accessed and read communications by many “interesting targets.” In the process it had gained access to Russia’s Aeroflot flight reservation service database. It is possible the U.S. government knew Snowden was en route to Cuba via Russia before his flight made headlines.

Gellman returned the next day to publish the fifth editorial in the Black Budget series, “U.S. intelligence agencies spend millions to hunt for insider threats, document shows.”
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Following his report on the NSA’s success and failures, Gellman devotes more time to the threat of internal spies within the intelligence community. The sudden alarm was the result of Manning having given thousands of documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. Congress demanded Clapper conduct an investigation of current employees. Interestingly, Capitol Hill had given the director of national intelligence an October 2012 deadline to install an automated detection system. If he had met the project’s cut-off date, the world might not have heard of Edward Snowden.

The previously cited investigation of 4,000 current intelligence employees was the result of keystroke monitoring raising eyebrows. The NSA discovered agents were irregularly accessing databases and downloading multiple documents. Though Snowden had done the latter, he failed to arouse suspicion because of his job title and by masking his identity under other employee’s accounts. Gellman suggests the administration’s anxiety applies to a previous budget year because it took place “long before” Snowden leaked his information. Even if the proposed reevaluations were for the present year under discussion, 2012, Snowden’s USIS background check had occurred in 2011. Strangely, if the timeframes were aligned, the whistleblower wouldn’t have needed to worry. An anonymous NSA representative stated “contractors like Snowden” weren’t being put under the magnifying glass. No further explanation was given why he would have been automatically exempt from suspicion.

However, the intelligence community’s primary concern was not whistleblowers. It was infiltration. It is reported that one in five CIA applicants within a particular employment “subset” are turned down because something in their background suggests a potential terrorist element or, in the agency’s terms, the candidates possess “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections.”

The report reveals Washington freely and unapologetically views all leaks as a treasonous or terrorist act. Obama instituted an insider threat policy through an Executive Order issued in November 2012.
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It designates the unauthorized release of classified material as “espionage” and equates it with terrorism. Gellman quotes Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert, “It’s disturbing, because they [whistleblowing and terrorism] are not the same. There are such things as a good leak. Some classified things should be public. The official policy does not admit that distinction.”

Sixth in the collection of exposés is “U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones.”
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It premiered on September 2. An accompanying document
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maintained by the
Post
reports 358 drone attacks have occurred in Pakistan since 2004, averaging a bombing every nine days. There have been a total of 70 in Yemen and Somalia since 2002, averaging one attack every two months. The Snowden disclosures report Al-Queda is attempting to develop and implement antidrone tactics because of the persistent threat. These include satellite interference “with GPS signals and infrared tags that drone operators rely on to pinpoint missile targets.” Gellman makes sure to add he is not revealing delicate classified information. As researchers at the University of Texas proved in 2012, radar confusion is as simple as replicating a drone’s GPS signal and redirecting the aircraft. However, to date al-Qaeda has been unsuccessful in disrupting a single attack. The satellite transmissions are encrypted.

Unfortunately, the U.S. military has failed to encrypt drones’ video relays. In 2009 Iraqi insurgents on the ground could see where a drone was traveling the same as the Americans who were flying the aircraft. Video feed encryption for drones will not be completed until 2014. Gellman also relays that a drone’s inherent weak point is identical to the Achilles Heel of a remote controlled car. Once it moves out of range, a drone cannot be manually navigated. American intelligence must wait for the autopilot program to return the aircraft to a receiving area. On rare occasions drones have crashed before intelligence regained control.

Classified documents show the intelligence community is also concerned with public opinion. In the same manner that the phrase “The War on Iraq” was consciously changed to eliminate the human element and replaced with the more abstract “The War on Terror,” military intelligence was aware the term “drone” possesses a cold, apathetic sensibility. Amongst the lexicon substitutions offered was “robot warfare” despite the opposition having no aerial weaponry. Gellman refrains from noting similarities in intelligence labeling an individual under surveillance a “target”—an inanimate object which is designed to be fired upon—as opposed to a “suspect” who has yet to be convicted of a crime.

Gellman closed the Black Budget series on September 3 with “Top-secret U.S. intelligence files show new levels of distrust of Pakistan.”
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In lieu of the United States bombing the nation almost weekly, Washington considers Pakistan an ally but keeps it at arm’s length much like Germany and Israel. Paradoxically, and perhaps due to a guilty conscience, the U.S. has given the country an average of two billion dollars in aid per year over the course of the last decade. Still, America’s actions reveal its attitude. As Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, observed, “The mistrust now exceeds the trust.”

Though it would serve American intelligence well to remain on good terms with the Middle Eastern country due to its proximity to centralized Islamic concentrations, the United States is apprehensive about Pakistan because of its estimated 120 nuclear arms, human rights abuses and biological and chemical weapons stores. The root of the intelligence community’s trepidation is the security of the foreign land. Washington worries that if Islamic militants were to take over, Pakistan’s weapons would be turned toward America. One of the most critical intelligence gaps regarding Pakistan is how the country transports and builds its nuclear weaponry. Because of this, the U.S. intelligence is making full use of its surveillance abilities in Afghanistan in order to keep an eye on the country’s eastern neighbor.

At best, the Pakistani-U.S. alliance is an uncomfortable one. Washington has been caught more than once turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s human rights abuses. A September 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad to Washington reported extrajudicial militant killings by the Pakistan army. The Obama administration sought to silence the incident for fear of bad press because of America’s political affiliation. When the message was leaked and later disclosed on WikiLeaks the following year, the White House informed the public it had remained quiet in order to keep the foreign nation’s military from suffering retaliation. In November 2010, a video appeared online showing six bound and blindfolded men being executed by the Pakistani militia. Only “low-level Pakistani army units” the White House believed to have been responsible were refused their regular financial support. U.S. intelligence discovered in May 2012 that Pakistani officers aimed to “eliminate” human rights activist Asma Jahangir “to quiet public criticism of the military.” Neither the U.S. military nor U.N. intervened. Once Jahangir was told of the plot, she quickly conducted a series of interviews to raise public awareness. She is still alive.

As Gellman was informing the world of the NSA’s internal trust issues,
Der Spiegel
presented a very brief disclosure, “NSA Targeted French Foreign Ministry.”
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With the exception of the Morales plane incident and U.N. spying allegations, France had avoided the disclosure spotlight. The article states that a June 2010 classified document shows the NSA was monitoring French diplomats’ computer networks and, like the U.N. offices in New York and Washington, did so by exploiting the VPN. The hack granted access to diplomatie.gouv.fr and resulted in a “collection of computer screens.” It is unclear if this is intelligence jargon for multiple screenshots or continued, open access to a number of computers. Though a medium intelligence priority at best, the NSA was data mining America’s ally in hopes of stealing information relating to France’s weapons trade and economics. The nation’s president, Francois Hollande, had already threatened to suspend free-trade talks with the U.S. after the initial U.N. spying reports were released.

Rounding out September 1 was an 11-minute
Fantastico
news report.
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Using an internal NSA document dated June 2012, the news program displayed intercepted text messages by then-Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The purloined intelligence included the then-candidate’s considerations for cabinet members. The nine other presidential candidates were also placed under surveillance over a course of two weeks. A program called “Mainway” collected bulk data, and “Dishfire” filtered the communications. The NSA had also surveilled Brazil’s leader, Dilma Rousseff, and her chief advisors. During the production of the news broadcast, Greenwald set up an encrypted chat with Snowden and the
Fantastico
staff. (Knowing he would be quoted, Snowden made sure to state he was unable to comment directly on the contents of the classified documents lest he hurt Russia’s ally.)

The NSA viewed the espionage assignment as proof it could “find a needle in a haystack.” Another series of confidential slides show that after a “hop,” the intelligence community attempts to establish connections and associations between secondary targets. This is referred to as “Hop 1.5.” Another slide asks, “Friends, Enemies, or Problems?” and lists Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey, Yemen and “others” for the project years 2014 to 2019. An internal newsletter dated May 2005 states, “ISI (the International Security Issues division of the NSA) is responsible for [the surveillance of] 13 individual nation states in three continents. One significant tie that binds all these countries together is their importance to U.S. economic, trade, and defense concerns. The Western Europe and Strategic Partnerships division [of the NSA] primarily focuses on foreign policy and trade activities of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, as well as Brazil, Japan and Mexico.” It goes on to add, “The Aegean and Ukraine division works all aspects of the Turkish target” including diplomatic relations. ISI is also tasked with gathering “financial intelligence.” The newsletter announces the NSA intends to establish ISI divisions outside of its Washington bases. The expansion includes ISI technicians in Georgia, Hawaii, Texas and the European Security Command. ISI workers were scheduled to begin arriving in Texas in June.

As had been the case with previous exclusives, the news station’s timing was deliberate.
Fanastico
’s latest exposé premiered shortly after Mexico’s minister of justice, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, had returned home following talks with vice president Biden about the
O Globo
disclosure reports. Biden was slated to travel south shortly after the newscast to discuss Mexico’s economic policy. Rousseff was scheduled to arrive in Washington in October. It was a highly anticipated visit signifying Brazil’s growing stature on the world’s stage. The day after
Fanastico
aired its report, Rousseff summoned Brazil’s U.S. ambassador.
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She demanded answers.

In 2010,
The Guardian
,
Times
and
Der Spiegel
blanketed the globe with headline-grabbing news. They simultaneously reported on the U.S. government’s “War Logs,” a data dump consisting of 91,731 files pertaining to the Afghanistan War which WikiLeaks posted online on July 25.
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Three news sources came together again, this time with
ProPublica
filling in for
Der Spiegel
, to issue one of the biggest exposés within the Snowden files. The reports took two months to produce.
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Greenwald reemerged on September 5 to present, “Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security.”
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Not content with having access to only Microsoft’s operating systems, Greenwald reports that GCHQ and the NSA developed and are using technology that cracks encryption codes across the Internet. A classified 2010 GCHQ documents states, “For the past decade, NSA has lead (sic) an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies. Vast amounts of encrypted internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.” Despite Internet companies’ assurances that their transmissions were secure, the intelligence agencies have access to the contents of protected email, web searches, online chats, banking transactions and even medical records.

Both spy agencies view encryption as a domestic war, as evidenced by the chosen code names for their collection and decoding programs. The NSA’s is “Bullrun,” the namesake of one of the primary battles fought during the American Civil War. GCHQ’s is “Edgehill,” the first major conflict of the English Civil War.

The intelligence communities use many decryption methods. One is the standard brute force attack. As previously noted, a supercomputer runs all of the possible permutations of numbers, letters and symbols until it finds the correct password or phrase. But this time-consuming technique is not their primary weapon against encoding. Gellman hinted at it six days before when presenting the various cyberattack techniques deployed by the NSA.