GailForce: Aspen Security Forum Part II

Source: CBS Evening News

As I watched the Snowden saga unfold, I found myself concerned on several levels but what frustrated me most, was the lack of balanced reporting early on.  It seemed to me that much of the initial coverage was in the: “Are you still beating your wife?” tabloid type reporting.  Don’t get me wrong — tabloid reporting is a long time guilty pleasure of mine, but I draw the line on things like national security topics.  Here’s the “so what” factor for me:  It is hard to get people to accept additional information on a topic once they form an opinion.  A quote by Winston Churchill comes to mind:  “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” How can you have a real public debate with only part of the information?

For instance, during the Aspen Security Forum last week, former Congresswoman Jane Harmon pointed out that people have known about this program for some time.  The New York Times did an article about the program in 2005 and President Bush partially declassified it.  She went on to state that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed in 1978 in response to abuses in the Nixon administration.  The program set up a careful system of the FISA Court, a system of federal judges along with intelligence committees on the Hill meant to monitor the FISA applications.  There has been robust oversight over the years.

There was quite a bit of time spent on the Snowden situation by senior officials during last week’s forum.  I thought I’d use this blog to pass on some of the things that seemed significant to me on this topic.  Many of the key current and former players on this issue were in attendance at the Aspen Security Forum as speakers to include:

• Dr. Ashton Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense
• General Keith Alexander, Director National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command
• Raj De, General Counsel, National Security Counsel
• Jeh Charles Johnson, Former General Counsel, Department of Defense
• Jane Harmon, Former Congresswoman and current head of the Woodrow Wilson Center

All of the sessions were moderated by well-known and respected members of the press. Pete Williams of NBC was the moderator for the talk with General Alexander.  He opened up by asking the general about some of the misunderstandings that he had seen as the programs became public.  In response, General Alexander made the following points:

• First and foremost is to put out what’s our mission in doing this. His mission, the mission of NSA and Cyber Command is to defend this country.  In order to do that we need programs that we didn’t have prior to 9/11.
• One of the biggest misunderstandings is the focus on what these programs do and what they don’t do.  This is where the press can help out.  The most important thing we can do is inform the American public on what these programs do.
• Case in point: He gets a lot of questions on regarding reading email and listening to phone calls. This is flat not true.
• The answer is to solve 9/11, and we needed some capabilities to connect the dots that we couldn’t do prior to 9/11.  He says if you think in order to do that we need to listen to everyone’s phone calls and read everyone’s email, the reality is that would be a waste of our resources to get there.
• From his perspective what you need is a way to focus on looking at the “bad guy.”  What they’re doing is using metadata based only on numbers.  Our job is to stop them with losing civil liberties or privacy, and these programs are set up to do that.
• The court restricts what they can do with the collected data.  You can only look at a specific number if you show some reasonable suspicion that the number is associated with Al Qaeda or another terrorist group.

I thought Raj De provided the best understanding of the legalities of the programs.  Highlights of his comments:

• Two major programs: 702 and 215.
• 702 is about the collection of content of communications, emails and phone calls, but it may only be targeted at non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located abroad.
• That is not what we’re talking about with the 215 program. To target the communications of a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world requires a demonstration of probable cause to a federal judge.
• In the aftermath of 9/11, one of the problems exposed was a seam between foreign and domestic counter terrorism collection efforts, the foreign/domestic divide.  The 9/11 Commission focused on the issue, and the government has taken a number of efforts to address the divide.
• The idea behind telephone metadata program is to help connect when there is a foreign threat that may have a domestic nexus.
• Program is about the bulk collection of telephone metadata and what that means is things like numbers dialed, date, time and duration of call.
• It does not include any subscriber information and there are no names associated with the numbers that are submitted to the FBI and NSA.  There is no locational data provided.
• Most importantly, there is no content provided.

Another thing that has bothered me is that as a systems administrator Snowden obviously had access to sensitive information; however, since he was not a trained intelligence analyst, did he understand the how, why, and the legality of the NSA program?  Did he not know about the legality of it?  If he did know, was it a case of not agreeing with the legal rulings?  Also, did he understand how intelligence analysis works and the significance of leaking a major collection program, or did he think he knew and was not as informed as he thinks he was?  I don’t know the answers but will continue to watch as the investigation continues to unfold.

Shortly before this current scandal broke out I blogged about the significance during World War II of the fact the U.S. naval intelligence was able to read about 20 percent of the Japanese Navy’s messages and asked would the media have leaked that capability if they found out about it.  If they had, I submit there is a good chance we might not have won the war in the Pacific.  With hindsight, it’s easy to look at scenario like that one and understand what the impact would have been if that capability had been leaked.

In today’s environment of skepticism and mistrust of the government, it’s far more difficult to get that point across, especially when you’re playing catch up.  Dr. Carter stated they are doing an assessment, and it looks like the damage will be substantial.  General Alexander said what Snowden did was essentially give our enemies our playbook.

Think I’ll end here. I’ll be blogging more about the Aspen Security Forum in the coming days.  As always my views are my own.