IC chiefs Pushes Back Against the White House

"America’s top intelligence official acknowledged Tuesday that President Obama and other senior White House officials were well aware of U.S. surveillance activities targeting leaders of friendly foreign nations — a stark contradiction of the administration’s insinuation in recent days that the president was unaware of such spying.  Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper described the targeting of foreign leaders, including American allies, as a “fundamental” aspect of intelligence gathering, and said neither the CIA nor the National Security Agency can tap into a given leader’s private communications without White House oversight.  His testimony, made during a series of tacit exchanges Tuesday with members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, came as all sides in Congress have begun seriously examining legislative proposals that would rein in the legal framework surrounding the NSA’s snooping programs. "  Washington Times

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 It appears to me that James Clapper, the DNI, and Michael Haydon, former DCI and NSA director, have decided that the Obama White House has been trying to "stake them out" as sacrificial goats in the kerfluffle over NSA intercepts in Europe. 

The Obama Administration has been trying to claim that such intercepts are a new development brought on by technological advances in the last decade.  They are also trying to imply that NSA and the IC generally have been "off the reservation" and conducting intercept operations that BHO (the commander in chief of the IC) did not know of.

Yesterday, Clapper made it clear in public testimony before a House committee that such operations have been conducted for many decades.  I suspect that Eisenhower was probably president when they began.  The technology required is not terrribly complex and de-cryption software for things like GSM circuits has steadily advanced and is easily available to many different countries.  Clapper also insisted that the very countries who are complaining of our actions have cooperated with the US in collecting the same kind of data against their own citizens and those of other countries. 

Clapper was asked if foreign countries including those complaining now have conducted operations against the United States.  His answer was "absolutely."  My personal experience supports this.

Clapper also insisted that such operations are a normal feature of intelligence operations and that the White House surely knew what NSA was doing and had been doing over a long period of time.

Today on "Morning Joe," Michael Haydon managed to get  past Mika B's attempts to defend Obama to support Clapper's statements that such operations are a necessary and frequent part of the information gathering process of mature states.

I support and salute both Clapper and Haydon for their honest answers and statements.  They are doing their duty.  It will be interesting to see if other IC chiefs like Brennan, Flynn and Alexander will also answer the call of duty.  pl    

http://www.skynews.com.au/world/article.aspx?id=919835

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/29/clapper-contradicts-white-house-says-obama-was-awa/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/29/clapper-foreign-agents-spy-us-leaders-too/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

Comments

[jon]

Feeding frenzies among the sharks is never a pretty sight. This is usually done more quietly and out of public view. Agency heads don't have lifetime tenure (except for Hoover, proving the rule), and it is common for presidents to fire them when too much adverse attentions falls on their work. Should Obama give greater defense to these fellows than he did for Van Jones? He was fired faster than I can blink.

My impression is that Obama has been rather supportive of the intelligence agencies and their leadership, including their activities of dubious constitutionality. Perhaps he has been a bit too expansive on professing shock or ignorance. However, I don't see what would be gained by Obama confirming any level of awareness, particularly for foreign activities.

Yesterday we learned that, on many occasions, EU security services were eager participants in the surveilling of their own citizens and passing on their intelligence to the US. This story seems to have a few more twists and turns left.

The progress of this train wreck does seem to indicate that US intelligence agencies still have a very incomplete knowledge of the documents in Snowden's possession.

[William R. Custmming]

At law there are both FOIA issues and state secrets issues arising from advice given to and by the President on National Security issues. The so-called "deliberative process" privilege arises under both. The theory being that communications between a President and his/her staff should be privileged and protected from disclosure.

I also believe a movie from long ago starring Robert Redford called "Sneakers" involved issues of encryption. Perhaps another for Alan F. to review.

And then of course the NIXON TAPES even though both JFK and LBJ also taped.

The theory is that both a President and his/her advisors will act differently if they know they are recorded or listened in upon and only with nondisclosure will there be a free give and take and deliberation.

Whatever the merits of the above "law" the American people should have the same access as foreign IC to discussions leading to any Presidential decision, but after the decision made and implemented.

And just as much policy background and information and decisions is "leaked" "off the record" to the MSM and now bloggers and others all communications from the government and its personnel should be considered on the record and disclosed. This would IMO end many leaks.
But perhaps the awkwardness of the "whistelblower" system and its meager protections means as long as disclosures on previously disclosed information are premised as personnel opinions perhaps that should also be subject to disclosure.

Clearly this WH has no idea of the complexity of modern technology or its implications for governance in a democracy [republic]!

And because most appointees and high ranking civil servants do their current jobs with a view towards their next "non-government" jobs no one is guarding the store or the federal fisc.

[The Twisted Genius]

The Snowden revelations and the ongoing aggressive reporting on these revelations are giving the world a close up tour of the sausage factory of SIGINT. A lot of people don't like the way the sausage is made… but a lot of people still like the sausage. Obama has a habit of getting mad at his administration for screw ups, real and perceived. Attempts at portraying the IC and the NSA in particular as rogue elements are bullshit. The IC is doing exactly what this and previous administrations want it to do. Clapper and Haydon are telling the administration and the American people that if they like the sausage, they will have to accept how that sausage is made.

On the other hand, the IC has also screwed itself. It gladly engaged in mass collection of Americans' personal communications and stored this data for later use. Clapper, Alexander and others clumsily denied this was going on, only to be later proven to be liars. It screamed bloody about the massive Chinese SIGINT efforts targeting us as if the efforts were somehow unnatural and immoral. Now that our robust and very capable SIGINT efforts are revealed, many people wonder why there efforts are not also unnatural and immoral.

Clapper is right. Countries have spied on other nations and will continue to do so to the best of their abilities. To do otherwise would be a dereliction of duty. Get used to it. Now he and the rest of the IC should embrace the reforms coming down the road. Get collection operations in line with the Constitution and take a harder look at the risk vs. gain of SIGINT collection operations. Collect it all will not suffice as a guiding mantra in the future.

[Michael McCarthy]

So we are believing Clapper today?

[Ken Halliwell]

Of course nations gather intelligence on each other -- whether considered friend or foe -- using any means possible regardless of invasion-of-personal-privacy etiquette or "agreements" to the contrary. Any national leader who doesn't know and guard against this is either stupid or naïve -- maybe both.

The current side-show is all a political PR stunt to satisfy the stupid and naïve. Also known as: hand-caught-in-cook-jar song and dance routine.

Quoting Samuel L Jackson: "Wake the f!@k up!"

[turcopolier]

Michael McCarthy

Yes, because he speaks this time of what I know to be the truth. pl

[turcopolier]

jon

"...The progress of this train wreck does seem to indicate that US intelligence agencies still have a very incomplete knowledge of the documents in Snowden's possession." I know that to be so. The IC has no idea when this might end. pl

[b]

@Pat - "The IC has no idea when this might end. pl"

That was one of my first assertions when Snowden went public.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/06/some-thoughts-on-the-snowden-fallout.html

You need system admins who know all systems. When one of them, leaks or screws with your systems you are in deep dark s***. Good sysadmins are gods. They can see and get anything they want and no one will ever know the what, where and how of what they do. As a CIO I would never outsource such powers.

I wonder how the NSA knows its systems are "clean". Snowden may well have laid a code bomb here or there. That may very well be the reason why he is still alive.

As for Obama, Alexander, Clapper and all such liars. That is to be expected. The first is a politicians, the others are spies. Lying is part of their job descriptions.

Alexander did this just again today in Congress. The Washington Post reported that the NSA snoops on internal Google cloud traffic between Goggle datacenters. Alexander was asked if that was true. He answered that the NSA does not spy within Google datacenters. Well, no one had asserted that. A cloud is by definition and for backup reasons distributed over several datacenters. Spying between those datacenters is spying within all of them. The NSA graphic the WaPo posted shows exactly that. The cloud that is spies on is shown as containing all the datacenters.

I don't trust anything Obama, Alexander or Clapper say. All of them can go to hell.

[ISL]

Dear Colonel,

My assessment too, based on official missteps in responding to the evolving crisis, which a complete picture should have prevented.

Further, to me, this indicates

1. Snowden was very good at covering his digital tracks.

2. The IC computer system likely has evolved to the point where no one really has a grasp of its complexity and weaknesses,

3. Snowden would have been a fool not to have left a number of back doors hidden in the system. Since he was not a fool....

4. Snowden is using encryption that cannot be broken.

The latter assertion is interesting, as it could explain what Snowden brought to the Russian table.

[Allen Thomson]

> The IC has no idea when this might end.

It might be useful, or at least interesting, to keep up a running archive of the revelations as they come out, accompanied by a damage assessment. The assessment might be done in wiki form as, having participated in a few such exercises in the past, I've seen very divergent opinions as to how much damage revelations have caused, or might in the future cause.

[JohnH]

Deutsche Welle reported earlier this week that allied spying was a condition for German independence in the mid-1950's. Other German lawyers claim that such laws would no longer be operative. Their opinions don't really matter.

Either Merkel is either trying to save face or to wrest a little more independence from the United States.

[turcopolier]

JohnH

"to wrest a little more independence from the United States." I don't know what thqt means. pl

[William R. Cumming]

b is correct! Who guards the guards? Avery primitive and opaque OMB Circular A-130 governs computer security and has almost no enforcement of its provisions.

Computer security and cyber security are separately administered through most of the federal government.

[William R. Cumming]

CRS [Congressional Research Service] reported on October 25, 2013 that Congress had failed to act substantively on cyber security since 2002!

Cyber security was a principle stated reason for creating DHS.

[Bandolero]

turcopolier

I may help out to build understanding here. When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, it was not completely sovereign. There were some reservations on German sovereignty by the Allied Forces. Some of these reservations were public, some were secret. On intelligence matters, there were secret reservations on German sovereignty, mainly reserving the secret right for the IC of the Allied forces to do what they want in Germany. After some decades, I believe I read it was in 1969, some of these special rights for the allied IC were formalized in a secret basic US-German intelligence agreement.

Back then, it was not a problem that this agreement was seen as uneven, besically an agreement between an occupier and a protectorate. The US was seen as a benign hegemon, because it's major interest was to have a good, wealthy and smoothly working democracy in the FRG as a global showcase to point out that capitalism was better than communism. And the very most people of the FRG loved it, and the US, too, and highly valued the American efforts to prevent Germany from "falling into the hands of communism."

With the German reunification, which was last not least due to sovereignty reservation issues negotiated in the 4+2 frame (4 allies + 2 Germanys), so it is credibly reported, the allied forces dropped all their remaining sovereignty reservations on Germany. Some fringe figures in germany however claim that there still exist secret allied sovereignty reservations, which I believe is the basis for parts of JohnH's comment.

But what undoubtedly remained basically unchanged are the German-US intelligence agreements from the time, when the US was the benign hegemon over the FRG. However, times have changed. The US is not seen so much as the benign hegemon over Germany anymore than some decades ago. And so, at least I think, it would be quite logical to adapt the quite onesided basic US-German intelligence agreements to the new realities of the post cold war world. And as far as I understand what's currently going on, I think that's what might come out of the current IC row. The German side wants better guarantees in a modified US-German intelligence agreement for some privacy rights, as they are defined by the German high court as constitutional right of German citizens.

Btw: Regarding the US and the independence of Germany or German sovereignty, I see a factual issue instead of a legal issue. As a result of the allied occupation, there exists a powerful "American lobby" in Germany, quite influential and in a way similar to the "Israel lobby" in the US. That "American lobby" or "Transatlantic lobby" in Germany may be seen as not always advocating in the best interest of Germany, but instead more in the best interest of America.

Using the current intel row to renegotiate the German-US intelligence agreement in regard to German privacy rights may also be seen as a strategy of Merkel to curb the influence of that very powerful "American lobby" in Germany a bit.

[The Twisted Genius]

WRC,

With only a very few exceptions, policy makers looking at cyber security are akin to pigs looking at a wristwatch... a lot of curiosity, but precious little comprehension. That leads to a lot of problems in defending our own networks, understanding the technology's impact on our Constitutional rights and the writing of terrible legislation.

[pbrownlee]

Are there revelations of bugging Cameron (and/or the other Anglophone staunch allies/toadies) in the wings and waiting to go?

[Richard Armstrong]

It's more probable that Snowden just walked his info out the front door. A determined man could keester 128 gigabytes of documents each trip without much discomfort and very probably without setting off any metal detector by using high capacity thumb drives.

128Gb of documents if my math is correct over 128,000 reams of paper.

[JohnH]

"During the postwar years, the United States was itself “becoming a European power,” as Richard Holbrooke once said (to the fury of French and other Gaullists). Not merely a European power but the leading West European power, and after communism’s collapse the leader as well of what had been Warsaw Pact Europe...Why should the enormous American military and political operational centers built in Germany during the past 50 years still exist? There no longer is a cold war with Russia, or anyone else, that lends logic to these facilities."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/spying_scandal_makes_clear_that_europe_must_declare_independence_20131029

[Babak Makkinejad]

Would not a public damage assessment itself be damaging?

[Babak Makkinejad]

It is their pretension again - you have to humor them.

[The Twisted Genius]

Oh for crying out loud! Is the NSA spying on Pope Francis? If this report is true, the NSA has too much capability and too much time on their hands for their own good. I think they can be downsized, put under stricter controls and given a more focused target list and they will still serve the nation well.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/30/us-vatican-usa-spying-idUSBRE99T11N20131030

[Amir]

From "Someone who has never done anything himself that was not just bullshit":

Does your salute for Clapper and co - whose resignation was a conditio sine qua non for you earlier on - mean that you are now supporting one bunch of liers against another bunch of liers just because the former's uniforme look nicer than the latter's suits?

P.S. If you mean by "doing anything" killing someone, the answer is a big no. If you mean whether throughnon-cooperation preventing timely use of Port of Antwerp by Cheney's gang, then the answer is a resounding YES.

Hitler couldn't do it with his Battle of The Bulge.

[seydlitz89]

Col. Lang-

Sir, while I greatly respect your views and agree on most of them, I see this all quite differently.

First, Hayden, Clapper and Alexander are looking out for the interests of the surveillance system, not what I would see as any "duty". They have been consistent in this regard, as when the latter two lied before Congress. Hayden's clearance should be taken away from him and Clapper and Alexander both fired.

Second, the arguments in favor of bugging Merkel's phone seem to boil down to "well what else could she have expected?" This avoids the central issues which for me are two: firstly there's the specific case of Merkel who having grown up in the GDR would have certain memories of Stasi activities and probably doesn't remember them fondly. Targeting her phone was worse than a bad call, it was a blunder. Of course she would take it very personally and from a strategic theory perspective the character of the political leadership has to be considered. Secondly, if we have in fact established the Sigint setup at Pariser Platz as reported in the German press, then we have the mother of all blunders regarding the Germans starring us in the face.

Third, Snowden imo is better seen as the latest of a sequence of NSA-related whistleblowers following in the wake of Binney, Wiebe, Tice and Drake. They support Snowden's actions and Snowden's actions were influence by their experiences. This means that given the unavoidable tension between what the NSA was set up to do and the actions/activities of the mass surveillance system there will undoubtedly be more Snowdens . . .

Fourth and finally, this scandal reflects our fundamental political dysfunctions, not any mode of statecraft or business as usual. Five years after the greatest economic crisis since 1929, we're still unable to reform or reign in Wall Street. The incoherent war on terror still lurches forward with us barely avoiding conflict in Syria where we would have been essentially acting as "Al Qaida's air force". Who's in control of our negotiations with Iran? Obama or the Israeli lobby? And then there the nature of our party politics and what goes on in Washington. We seem to be intent on destroying not only the very post-WWII order that we spent so much to establish, but the very fabric of our national political existence.

[turcopolier]

Amir

Your comment is insulting. Do it again and I will ban you. pl