History > 2013 > USA > Terrorism (IV)

Carrie Bergonia of Pennsylvania looks over the name of her fiance, firefighter Joseph Ogren,

at the 9/11 Memorial during ceremonies marking the 12th anniversary

of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Chris Pedota/Associated Press/pool photo

Boston Globe > Big Picture > 9/11: United States marks 12th anniversary of attacks

September 11, 2013
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/09/911_united_states_marks_12th_a.html

Despair at Guantánamo

December 27, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In April, when a hunger strike by detainees at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was in its third month, Pentagon officials agreed with defense lawyers that the underlying cause was a growing despair among prisoners who have been in detention for a decade with no hope of getting out. The protest, which at its height involved 106 of the 166 prisoners there this summer, served to put the Guantánamo issue back on the radar in Washington.

The National Defense Authorization Act for 2014, signed on Thursday by President Obama, includes a long-sought provision easing the Pentagon’s ability to transfer to countries other than the United States detainees rated as low threats. Mr. Obama, who has wavered on his early vows to shut down the prison, praised Congress for this change, though he stressed that the prison remained a blight on the nation’s reputation.

The improved transfer policy helps, but a petty policy change at the prison this month shows how perverse the situation has become. The military says it will no longer report the number of prisoners on hunger strike, according to a report in the Miami Herald. A spokesman for the facility said the military “will not further their protests by reporting the numbers to the public.” The numbers of detainees being force-fed by prison authorities, which dropped into the teens in recent months, offered the world a window into the prison, which has been shrouded in secrecy even though its motto is “safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.”

Eighty-six of the remaining prisoners — more than half — were designated three years ago for transfer to another country, provided that security concerns could be satisfied. Yet the transfer plan was left adrift in the face of political combat. Even if the new defense bill spurs progress in reducing the detainee population, the delivery of credible justice for those at the Guantánamo prison camp is far from complete.

    Despair at Guantánamo, NYT, 27.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/opinion/despair-at-guantanamo.html

Release the Torture Reports

December 19, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is appalling that official reports about the extent and nature of the rendition, detention and torture that came in their aftermath are still being kept from the American public and even members of Congress charged with overseeing intelligence activities.

The program was abandoned years ago. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive 6,000-page report was completed last December. But it has yet to be declassified. Likely the closest to a full accounting the nation is going to get, the report is said to contain unsparing criticism of the program. News reports have said it chronicles the Central Intelligence Agency’s repeated misleading of the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal and lawless methods that yielded little valuable intelligence despite the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other defenders of torture.

The C.I.A. wrote a 122-page rebuttal to the Senate’s report, which was delivered by the agency’s current director, John Brennan, in June, four months after the committee’s deadline. It, too, remains under wraps.

The C.I.A. and the committee’s staff have conducted some 60 hours of negotiations on the agency’s proposed changes to the report. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, has expressed frustration with the delay. She has said she aims to have the committee vote in January to begin a formal declassification process at least for those sections of the report. That process could take weeks or it could take many months, depending on how long the C.I.A. drags it out.

The lack of transparency was underlined on Tuesday during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, disclosed the existence of an internal study done by the C.I.A. under Mr. Brennan’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, that contradicted the agency’s response to the Senate study. Mr. Udall said he believed it was “consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report.” Mr. Udall said: “This raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

The committee must insist on the Obama administration’s cooperation in making public all three documents — the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the official C.I.A. response to it, and the internal C.I.A. study.

Rendition, illegal detention and torture did not arise on President Obama’s watch. He has repeatedly denounced the use of torture and ended the detention program as one of his first White House acts. But his expansive claims of secrecy have succeeded in blocking victims’ lawsuits and helping to keep details of rendition and torture secret, denying the country a reckoning necessary for the historical record, establishing accountability and avoiding similar human rights violations in the future.

Mr. Obama has a duty to ensure prompt public release of the documents — minimally redacted to protect genuine national security secrets, not to avoid embarrassment.

    Release the Torture Reports, NYT, 19.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/opinion/release-the-torture-reports.html

Bad Times for Big Brother

December 21, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

It has been a long week for the National Security Agency. Last Monday, a federal judge ruled for the first time that the agency’s continuing sweep of Americans’ phone data — a once-secret program legally sanctioned for seven years and illegally conducted for five years before that — was very likely unconstitutional. Judge Richard Leon denounced the agency’s activities in collecting data on all Americans’ phone calls as “almost Orwellian.”

Two days later, the Obama administration released a comprehensive report that found “the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy and civil liberty.” And last Friday, the latest release of classified documents from Edward Snowden revealed surveillance efforts that included the office of the Israeli prime minister and the heads of international companies and aid organizations.

If the N.S.A. had not already gotten the message, the 300-plus-page advisory report, by a panel of intelligence and legal experts selected by President Obama, surely drove it home. All three branches of the federal government are now on record as recognizing that the agency has repeatedly misused, if not plainly abused, its powers, and that it must be reined in. The report’s 46 wide-ranging recommendations include stopping the bulk collection and storage of phone data, reforming the structure and processes of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, installing a civil liberties advocate to argue against the government’s position in that court, and introducing stricter oversight of the agency’s actions across the board.

Most of these would be welcome reforms, and some of them Mr. Obama can put in place on his own. In fact, when he was a member of the Senate Mr. Obama supported many reforms that were similar or identical to the ones now on his desk. Yet as president, he has allowed the surveillance programs to continue and even grow.

That isn’t entirely shocking; the executive branch’s responsibility to protect national security is unique. But no matter who occupies the Oval Office, it has always tested and often transgressed the limits of its power. Over the long run, the nation cannot bank on presidential self-restraint or timely and favorable court rulings to stop the invasion of privacy on a mass scale.

Meanwhile, Congress has the power to change the surveillance laws, and now it has the support of a presidential commission, whose recommendations line up nicely with the provisions of the U.S.A. Freedom Act, a bill co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Representative James Sensenbrenner.

As that bill recognizes, one of the most urgent tasks for lawmakers will be to amend the law to stop the government’s collection and analysis of bulk data. Under the Patriot Act as it stands, the government needs only to show that the data it seeks are “relevant” to an authorized investigation concerning international terrorism — a vague standard that the intelligence court has interpreted so broadly as to make it meaningless. Any amendment should at the very least raise the standard to require a more direct connection between the data the government seeks and the wrongdoing it is trying to prevent.

Preventing terrorist attacks is a critical and complex job. But as the advisory report rightly emphasizes, a free society must have another kind of security as well: the security of its citizens from the “fear that their conversations and activities are being watched, monitored, questioned, interrogated, or scrutinized.” Without this security, “individual liberty, self-government, economic growth, and basic ideals of citizenship” all are jeopardized.

It has been more than six months since Mr. Snowden’s leaks began to expose breathtakingly broad surveillance activities that even monitored the communications of world leaders. The damage done to privacy rights, to the public’s trust in government and to diplomatic relationships is unlikely to be repaired for a long time.

In his news conference last Friday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that some reforms could be done, but he insisted that there was no evidence that the phone surveillance program was being abused — a truly disturbing assessment given all the revelations since June. He said there’s a need to restore Americans’ trust in their government. The way to restore that trust is not through cosmetic touch-ups, but by Congress and the courts setting firm limits on all surveillance programs and ensuring that the administration complies.

    Bad Times for Big Brother, NYT, 21.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/bad-times-for-big-brother.html

Obama Panel Recommends

New Limits on N.S.A. Spying

December 18, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A panel of outside advisers urged President Obama on Wednesday to impose major oversight and some restrictions on the National Security Agency, arguing that in the past dozen years its powers had been enhanced at the expense of personal privacy.

The panel recommended changes in the way the agency collects the telephone data of Americans, spies on foreign leaders and prepares for cyberattacks abroad.

But the most significant recommendation of the panel of five intelligence and legal experts was that Mr. Obama restructure a program in which the N.S.A. systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts. Instead, the panel said, the data should remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and a court order should be necessary each time analysts want to access the information of any individual “for queries and data mining.”

The experts briefed Mr. Obama on Wednesday on their 46 recommendations, and a senior administration official said Mr. Obama was “open to many” of the changes, though he has already rejected one that called for separate leaders for the N.S.A. and its Pentagon cousin, the United States Cyber Command.

If Mr. Obama adopts the majority of the recommendations, it would mark the first major restrictions on the unilateral powers that the N.S.A. has acquired since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They would require far more specific approvals from the courts, far more oversight from the Congress and specific presidential approval for spying on national leaders, especially allies. The agency would also have to give up one of its most potent weapons in cyberconflicts: the ability to insert “back doors” in American hardware or software, a secret way into them to manipulate computers, or to purchase previously unknown flaws in software that it can use to conduct cyberattacks.

“We have identified a series of reforms that are designed to safeguard the privacy and dignity of American citizens, and to promote public trust, while also allowing the intelligence community to do what must be done to respond to genuine threats,” says the report, which Mr. Obama commissioned in August in response to the mounting furor over revelations by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, of the agency’s surveillance practices.

It adds, “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”

White House officials said they expected significant resistance to some of the report’s conclusions from the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, which have argued that imposing rules that could slow the search for terror suspects could pave the way for another attack. But those intelligence leaders were not present in the Situation Room on Wednesday when Mr. Obama met the authors of the report.

The report’s authors made clear that they were weighing the N.S.A.’s surveillance requirements against other priorities like constitutional protections for privacy and economic considerations for American businesses. The report came just three days after a federal judge in Washington ruled that the bulk collection of telephone data by the government was “almost Orwellian” and a day after Silicon Valley executives complained to Mr. Obama that the N.S.A. programs were undermining American competitiveness in offering cloud services or selling American-made hardware, which is now viewed as tainted.

The report was praised by privacy advocates in Congress and civil-liberties groups as a surprisingly aggressive call for reform.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance, said it echoed the arguments of the N.S.A.’s skeptics in significant ways, noting that it flatly declared that the phone-logging program had not been necessary in stopping terrorist attacks.

“This has been a big week for the cause of intelligence reform,” he said.

Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology called the report “remarkably strong,” and singled out its call to sharply limit the F.B.I.’s power to obtain business records about someone through a so-called national security letter, which does not involve court oversight.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, while praising the report’s recommendations, questioned “whether the president will have the courage to implement the changes.”

Members of the advisory group said some of the recommendations were intended to provide greater public reassurances about privacy protections rather than to result in any wholesale dismantling of the N.S.A.’s surveillance powers. Richard A. Clarke, a cyberexpert and former national security official under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said the report would give “more reason for the skeptics in the public to believe their civil liberties are being protected.”

Other members included Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A.; Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who ran the office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama White House; Peter Swire, a privacy law specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Geoffrey R. Stone, a constitutional law specialist at the University of Chicago Law School, where Mr. Obama once taught.

Mr. Obama is expected to take the report to Hawaii on his vacation that starts this week and announce decisions when he returns in early January. Some of the report’s proposals could be ordered by Mr. Obama alone, while others would require legislation from Congress, including changes to how judges are appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he was skeptical that any changes passed by Congress would go far enough. “It gives me optimism that it won’t be completely brushed under the rug,” he said. “However, I’ve been here long enough to know that in all likelihood when there’s a problem, you get window dressing.”

The FISA court, which oversees national security surveillance inside the United States, has been criticized because it hears arguments only from the Justice Department without adversarial lawyers to raise opposing views, and because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has unilateral power to select its members. Echoing proposals already floated in congressional hearings and elsewhere, the advisory group backs the view that there should be a “public interest advocate to represent the interests of privacy and civil liberties” in classified arguments before the court. It also says the power to select judges for the surveillance court should be distributed among all the Supreme Court justices.

In backing a restructuring of the N.S.A.’s program that is systematically collecting and storing logs of all Americans’ phone calls, the advisers went further than some of the agency’s backers in Congress, who would make only cosmetic changes to it, but stopped short of calling for the program to be shut down, as its critics have urged. The N.S.A. uses the telephone data to search for links between people in an effort to identify hidden associates of terrorism suspects, but the report says it “was not essential to preventing attacks.”

Currently, the government obtains orders from the surveillance court every 90 days that require all the phone companies to give their customers’ data to the N.S.A., which commingles the records from every company and stores it for five years. A small group of analysts may query the database — examining records of everyone who is linked by up to three degrees of separation from a suspect — if the analyst has “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the original person being examined is linked to terrorism.

Under the new system proposed by the review group, such records would stay in private hands — either scattered among the phone companies or pooled into some kind of private consortium. The N.S.A. would need to make the case to the surveillance court that it has met the standard of suspicion — and get a judge’s order — every time it wanted to perform such “link analysis.”

“In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” the report said.

The report recommended new privacy protections for the disclosure of personal information about non-Americans among agencies or to the public. The change would extend to foreigners essentially the same protections that citizens have under the Privacy Act of 1974 — a way of assuring foreign countries that their own citizens, if targeted for surveillance, will enjoy at least some protections under American law.

It also said the United States should get out of the business of secretly buying or searching for flaws in common computer programs and using them for mounting cyberattacks. That technique, using what are called zero-day flaws, so named because they are used with zero days of warning that the flaw exists, were crucial to the cyberattacks that the United States and Israel launched on Iran in an effort to slow its nuclear program. The advisers said that the information should be turned over to software manufacturers to have the mistakes fixed, rather than exploited.

Regarding spying on foreign leaders, the report urged that the issue be taken out the hands of the intelligence agencies and put into the hands of policy makers.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

    Obama Panel Recommends New Limits on N.S.A. Spying, NYT, 18.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/us/politics/
    report-on-nsa-surveillance-tactics.html

Judge Questions Legality

of N.S.A. Phone Records

December 16, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans’ phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as “almost Orwellian” and suggesting that James Madison would be “aghast” to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,” allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Andrew Ames, a Justice Department spokesman, said government lawyers were studying the decision, but he added: “We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found.”

The case is the first in which a federal judge who is not on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized the once-secret program, has examined the bulk data collection on behalf of someone who is not a criminal defendant. The Justice Department has said that 15 separate judges on the surveillance court have held on 35 occasions that the calling data program is legal.

It also marks the first successful legal challenge brought against the program since it was revealed in June after leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.

In a statement from Moscow, where he has obtained temporary asylum, Mr. Snowden praised the ruling.

“I acted on my belief that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts,” Mr. Snowden said in his statement. It was distributed by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who received leaked documents from Mr. Snowden and wrote the first article about the bulk data collection. “Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights,” the statement said. “It is the first of many.”

The case was brought by several plaintiffs led by Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist. Mr. Klayman, who represented himself and the other plaintiffs, said in an interview on Monday that he was seeking to turn the case into a class action on behalf of all Americans. “I’m extremely gratified that Judge Leon had the courage to make this ruling,” he said. “He is an American hero.”

Mr. Klayman argued that he had legal standing to challenge the program in part because, he contended, the government had sent inexplicable text messages to his clients on his behalf; at a hearing, he told the judge, “I think they are messing with me.”

The judge portrayed that claim as “unusual” but looked past it, saying Mr. Klayman and his co-plaintiff instead had standing because it was highly likely, based on the government’s own description of the program as a “comprehensive metadata database,” that the N.S.A. collected data about their phone calls along with everyone else’s.

Similar legal challenges to the N.S.A. program, including by the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, are at earlier stages in the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an unusual challenge to the program by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had sought to bypass lower courts.

The ruling on Monday comes as several government panels are developing recommendations on whether to keep, restructure or scrap the bulk data collection program, and as Congress debates competing bills over the program’s future.

Though long and detailed, Judge Leon’s ruling is not a final judgment on the program, but rather a preliminary injunction to stop the collection of data about the plaintiffs while they pursued their case.

He also wrote that he had “serious doubts about the efficacy” of the program, saying that the government had failed to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive.”

Judge Leon rejected the Obama administration’s argument that a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland, had established there are no Fourth Amendment protections for call metadata — information like the numbers dialed and the date, time and duration of calls, but not their content. The 1979 case, which involved collecting information about a criminal defendant’s calls, helped establish the principle that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for information they have exposed to a third party, like the phone company, which knows about their calls.

The surveillance court, which issues secret rulings after hearing arguments from only the Justice Department and without opposing lawyers, has maintained that the 1979 decision is a controlling precedent that shields the N.S.A. call data program from Fourth Amendment review. But Judge Leon, citing the scope of the program and the evolving role of phones and technology, distinguished the bulk collection from the 34-year-old case.

Last month, a federal judge declined to grant a new trial to several San Diego men convicted of sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia. Government officials have since acknowledged that investigators became interested in them because of the call records program. Citing Smith v. Maryland, the judge said the defendants had “no legitimate expectation of privacy” over their call data.

David Rivkin, a White House lawyer in the administration of the elder President George Bush, criticized Judge Leon’s reasoning.

“Smith v. Maryland is the law of the land,” Mr. Rivkin said. “It is not for a District Court judge to question the continuing validity of a Supreme Court precedent that is exactly on point.”

Judge Leon also pointed to a landmark privacy case decided by the Supreme Court in 2012 that held it was unconstitutional for the police to use a GPS tracking device to monitor a suspect’s public movements without a warrant.

Although the court decided the case on narrow grounds, five of the nine justices separately questioned whether the 1979 precedent was still valid in an era of modern technology, which enables long-term, automated collection of information.

    Judge Questions Legality of N.S.A. Phone Records, NYT, 16.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/us/politics/
    federal-judge-rules-against-nsa-phone-data-program.html

End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

November 25, 2013
The New York Times
By RON WYDEN, MARK UDALL and MARTIN HEINRICH

WASHINGTON — THE framers of the Constitution declared that government officials had no power to seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing, and they embedded this principle in the Fourth Amendment. The bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records — so-called metadata — by the National Security Agency is, in our view, a clear case of a general warrant that violates the spirit of the framers’ intentions. This intrusive program was authorized under a secret legal process by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so for years American citizens did not have the knowledge needed to challenge the infringement of their privacy rights.

Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

Despite this, the surveillance reform bill recently ratified by the Senate Intelligence Committee would explicitly permit the government to engage in dragnet collection as long as there were rules about when officials could look at these phone records. It would also give intelligence agencies wide latitude to conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ phone calls and emails.

This is not the true reform that poll after poll has shown the American people want. It is preserving business as usual. When the Bill of Rights was adopted, it established that Americans’ papers and effects should be seized only when there was specific evidence of suspicious activity. It did not permit government agencies to issue general warrants as long as records seized were reviewed with the permission of senior officials.

Congress has a crucial opportunity to reassert constitutionally guaranteed liberties by reforming the N.S.A.’s overbroad collection of Americans’ personal data. But the Intelligence Committee bill squanders this chance. It would enable some of the most constitutionally questionable surveillance activities now exposed to the public eye. The Senate should be reining in these programs, not giving them a stamp of approval.

As members of the Intelligence Committee, we strongly disagree with this approach. We had already proposed our own, bipartisan surveillance reform legislation, the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act, which we have sponsored with a number of other senators. Our bill would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless “backdoor searches” of Americans’ communications — including emails, text messages and Internet use — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It would also create a “constitutional advocate” to present an opposing view when the F.I.S.C. is considering major questions of law or constitutional interpretation.

Rather than adopt our legislation, the Intelligence Committee chose to codify excessively broad domestic surveillance authorities. So we offered amendments: One would end the bulk collection of Americans’ records, but still allow intelligence agencies to obtain information they legitimately needed for national security purposes by getting the approval of a judge, which could even be done after the fact in emergency situations. Another of our amendments sought to prevent the N.S.A. from collecting Americans’ cellphone location information in bulk — a capability that potentially turns the cellphone of every man, woman and child in America into a tracking device.

Each of these proposals represents real and meaningful reform, which we believe would have fulfilled the purpose of protecting our security and liberty. Each was rejected by the committee, in some cases by a single vote.

But we will continue to engage with our colleagues and seek to advance the reforms that the American people want and deserve. As part of this effort, we will push to hold a comprehensive reform debate on the Senate floor.

There is no question that our nation’s intelligence professionals are dedicated, patriotic men and women who make real sacrifices to help keep our country safe and free. We believe that they should be able to do their jobs secure in the knowledge that their agencies have the confidence of the American people.

But this trust has been undermined by the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance programs, as well as by senior officials’ misleading statements about surveillance. Only by ending the dragnet collection of ordinary Americans’ private information can this trust be rebuilt.

Congress needs to preserve the agencies’ ability to collect information that is actually necessary to guard against threats to our security. But it also needs to preserve the right of citizens to be free from unwarranted interference in their lives, which the framers understood was vital to American liberties.

Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all Democrats, are United States senators.

    End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now, NYT, 25.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/opinion/end-the-nsa-dragnet-now.html

New Leaks, New Repercussions

October 22, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Stunning new details continue to emerge from Edward Snowden’s leaks about the vast electronic data mining carried out by the National Security Agency, setting off one diplomatic aftershock after another.

The latest was spurred by reports in Le Monde this week that the agency had gained access to the records of more than 70 million calls inside France in one 30-day period. The American ambassador was summoned to the French Foreign Ministry for an explanation; President François Hollande told President Obama by telephone that the data sweep was “unacceptable,” and the matter has already become an issue in a visit to Paris by Secretary of State John Kerry intended to focus on Syria.

Previous reports based on Mr. Snowden’s information have alleged American eavesdropping on Germany, Britain, Brazil, Mexico, European Union offices and European diplomatic missions. More revelations are likely.

The Obama administration’s response has been that the United States seeks to gather foreign intelligence as other nations do. That is not in dispute, and no doubt much of the public indignation by France and other governments is largely rhetorical. Le Monde reported in July that the French intelligence agency has its own extensive electronic surveillance operation. Nor is there much dispute that intelligence is necessary to protect citizens against terrorists and other enemies.

But the very scale of America’s clandestine electronic operations appears to be undercutting America’s “soft power” — its ability to influence global affairs through example and moral leadership. Brazil has complained about the reach of American surveillance, while the European Parliament has revived an effort to enact privacy legislation that could impose restrictions on American Internet providers and further complicate talks on a trans-Atlantic trade and investment agreement.

Mr. Kerry said the United States was working to find a balance between protecting privacy and providing security in a dangerous world. Mr. Obama has pledged to review electronic intelligence gathering, as well as the institutions charged with judicial and political oversight, a vow he must honor given the scope of the N.S.A.’s operations.

The fact is that most nations practice electronic surveillance and that citizens everywhere surrender personal data voluntarily to digital services and social networks. That is why free countries must place stern limits on the security institutions allowed to function in the shadows.

    New Leaks, New Repercussions, NYT, 22.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/new-leaks-new-repercussions.html

Privacy Fears Grow

as Cities Increase Surveillance

October 13, 2013
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

OAKLAND, Calif. — Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks at its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town — from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills.

The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life.

The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track commuters’ toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed, scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the United States.

Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland security money, something that Alameda County, which Oakland is part of, also tried but shelved after public protest.

Proponents of the Oakland initiative, formally known as the Domain Awareness Center, say it will help the police reduce the city’s notoriously high crime rates. But critics say the program, which will create a central repository of surveillance information, will also gather data about the everyday movements and habits of law-abiding residents, raising legal and ethical questions about tracking people so closely.

Libby Schaaf, an Oakland City Council member, said that because of the city’s high crime rate, “it’s our responsibility to take advantage of new tools that become available.” She added, though, that the center would be able to “paint a pretty detailed picture of someone’s personal life, someone who may be innocent.”

For example, if two men were caught on camera at the port stealing goods and driving off in a black Honda sedan, Oakland authorities could look up where in the city the car had been in the last several weeks. That could include stoplights it drove past each morning and whether it regularly went to see Oakland A’s baseball games.

For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete intelligence gathering. The police have traditionally made arrests based on small bits of data — witness testimony, logs of license plate readers, footage from a surveillance camera perched above a bank machine. The new capacity to collect and sift through all that information gives the authorities a much broader view of the people they are investigating.

For the companies that make big data tools, projects like Oakland’s are a big business opportunity. Microsoft built the technology for the New York City program. I.B.M. has sold data-mining tools for Las Vegas and Memphis.

Oakland has a contract with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. That company has earned the bulk of its $12 billion in annual revenue from military contracts. As the federal military budget has fallen, though, SAIC has diversified to other government agency projects, though not without problems.

The company’s contract to help modernize the New York City payroll system, using new technology like biometric readers, resulted in reports of kickbacks. Last year, the company paid the city $500 million to avoid a federal prosecution. The amount was believed to be the largest ever paid to settle accusations of government contract fraud. SAIC declined to comment.

Even before the initiative, Oakland spent millions of dollars on traffic cameras, license plate readers and a network of sound sensors to pick up gunshots. Still, the city has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. And an internal audit in August 2012 found that the police had spent $1.87 million on technology tools that did not work properly or remained unused because their vendors had gone out of business.

The new center will be far more ambitious. From a central location, it will electronically gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases, analyze that data and display some of the information on a bank of giant monitors.

The city plans to staff the center around the clock. If there is an incident, workers can analyze the many sources of data to give leads to the police, fire department or Coast Guard. In the absence of an incident, how the data would be used and how long it would be kept remain largely unclear.

The center will collect feeds from cameras at the port, traffic cameras, license plate readers and gunshot sensors. The center will also be integrated next summer with a database that allows police to tap into reports of 911 calls. Renee Domingo, the city’s emergency services coordinator, said school surveillance cameras, as well as video data from the regional commuter rail system and state highways, may be added later.

Far less advanced surveillance programs have elicited resistance at the local and state level. Iowa City, for example, recently imposed a moratorium on some surveillance devices, including license plate readers. The Seattle City Council forced its police department to return a federally financed drone to the manufacturer.

In Virginia, the state police purged a database of millions of license plates collected by cameras, including some at political rallies, after the state’s attorney general said the method of collecting and saving the data violated state law. But for a cash-starved city like Oakland, the expectation of more federal financing makes the project particularly attractive. The City Council approved the program in late July, but public outcry later compelled the council to add restrictions. The council instructed public officials to write a policy detailing what kind of data could be collected and protected, and how it could be used. The council expects the privacy policy to be ready before the center can start operations.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California described the program as “warrantless surveillance” and said “the city would be able to collect and stockpile comprehensive information about Oakland residents who have engaged in no wrongdoing.”

The port’s chief security officer, Michael O’Brien, sought to allay fears, saying the center was meant to hasten law-enforcement response time to crimes and emergencies. “It’s not to spy on people,” he said.

Steve Spiker, research and technology director at the Urban Strategies Council, an Oakland nonprofit organization that has examined the effectiveness of police technology tools, said he was uncomfortable with city officials knowing so much about his movements. But, he said, there is already so much public data that it makes sense to enable government officials to collect and analyze it for the public good.

Still, he would like to know how all that data would be kept and shared. “What happens,” he wondered, “when someone doesn’t like me and has access to all that information?”

    Privacy Fears Grow as Cities Increase Surveillance, NYT, 13.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/
    privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html

The Fight Against Al Shabab

October 6, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The raid by Navy SEALs on a Somali villa in search of a senior Shabab commander (his fate is unknown) and the capture by American commandos of a key terrorist suspect in Libya on Saturday were signs of a more assertive, targeted American role in trying to curb rising militancy and terrorist enclaves in North Africa.

Somalia, which had no central government for two decades, has long been a haven for terrorists, though there was some limited improvement in its political system and security earlier this year.

But the brutal terrorist attack on an upscale mall in Kenya last month has revived fears about Somalia’s homegrown Qaeda-linked extremists known as Al Shabab, which claimed responsibility for the attack, and about the group broadening its reach to Kenya and beyond.

Some experts say the four-day-long mall siege, which killed more than 60 people, shows the emergence of a more aggressive Shabab leadership, even though the group has lost territory and influence at home. The militants have threatened to intensify attacks on Kenya until Kenyan troops that are part of an African Union mission leave Somalia. That mission, authorized by the United Nations, is backed by American drone and aircraft strikes on targeted militant leaders. Over the last six years the United States government has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in military, humanitarian and development aid.

This support has enabled the African Union force, working with Somali Army units, to push Al Shabab out of the capital, Mogadishu, and given officials there a chance to govern, however imperfectly.

Since the mall attack, the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has said he has no plans to withdraw the Kenyan troops. Uganda, Ethiopia and Burundi, other major contributors to the anti-Shabab fight, should expand their involvement because Somalia’s weak, year-old government clearly needs the support. The United Nations special representative for Somalia says the mission requires helicopters and armored vehicles as well as more troops.

Military action alone won’t do the job, however. Al Shabab maintains support among some Somalians by presenting itself as protecting their country from predatory foreign forces. Countries with a stake in a more stable Somalia have to do a better job of counteracting that claim. Kenya, for instance, can help by ending abuses by its security forces in the African Union mission and its domestic police force against Somalis who do not support Al Shabab.

The fact is, Kenya has been utterly hostage to the decades-long collapse and lawlessness of Somalia, which sits on its border. But the government in Nairobi should not use the attack as a reason to close refugee camps in Kenya that house hundreds of thousands of Somalis or take other steps to indiscriminately crack down on Somalis in the country.

The mall assault showed new desperation by Al Shabab and perhaps growing cooperation with Al Hijra, an extremist cell in Kenya. With these kinds of looming threats, the Obama administration should increase its efforts to cut off financing for Al Shabab, including fund-raising in the United States.

Rumors that some Americans were among the mall attackers have not been proved, but in recent years several Somali-Americans have been prosecuted for terrorist financing and some Somali-American citizens have been indicted on suspicion of traveling to train and fight with Al Shabab. A Congressional Research Service report said more than 20 young men from Minnesota are believed to have gone to fight in Somalia.

The mall attack has demonstrated that Al Shabab remains a resilient and lethal adversary. Regional stability in North Africa will depend on the United States, Kenya and other partners finding effective ways to contain it.

    The Fight Against Al Shabab, NYT, 6.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/opinion/the-fight-against-al-shabab.html

U.S. Raids in Libya and Somalia

Strike Terror Targets

October 5, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK,
NICHOLAS KULISH
and ERIC SCHMITT

CAIRO — American commandos carried out raids on Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects. American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents seized a suspected leader of Al Qaeda on the streets of Tripoli, Libya, while Navy SEALs raided the seaside villa of a militant leader in a predawn firefight on the coast of Somalia.

In Tripoli, American forces captured a Libyan militant who had been indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The militant, born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Liby, had a $5 million bounty on his head; his capture at dawn ended a 15-year manhunt.

In Somalia, the Navy SEAL team emerged before sunrise from the Indian Ocean and exchanged gunfire with militants at the home of a senior leader of the Shabab, the Somali militant group. The raid was planned more than a week ago, officials said, after a massacre by the Shabab at a Nairobi shopping mall that killed more than 60 people two weeks ago.

The SEAL team was forced to withdraw before it could confirm that it had killed the Shabab leader, a senior American security official said. Officials declined to identify the target.

Officials said the timing of the two raids was coincidental. But occurring on the same day, they underscored the rise of northern Africa as a haven for international terrorists. Libya has collapsed into the control of a patchwork of militias since the ouster of the Qaddafi government in 2011. Somalia, the birthplace of the Shabab, has lacked an effective central government for more than two decades.

With President Obama locked in a standoff with Congressional Republicans and his leadership criticized for a policy reversal in Syria, the raids could fuel accusations among his critics that the administration was eager for a showy foreign policy victory.

Abu Anas, the Libyan Qaeda leader, was considered a major prize, and officials said he was alive in United States custody. While the details about his capture were sketchy, an American official said Saturday night that he appeared to have been taken peacefully and that he was “no longer in Libya.”

His capture was the latest blow to what remains of the original Qaeda organization after a 12-year American campaign to capture or kill its leadership, including the killing two years ago of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan.

Despite his presence in Libya, Abu Anas was not believed to have played any role in the 2012 attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, senior officials briefed on that investigation have said, but he may have sought to build networks connecting what remains of the Qaeda organization to like-minded militants in Libya.

His brother, Nabih, told The Associated Press that just after dawn prayers, three vehicles full of armed men had approached Abu Anas’s home and surrounded him as he parked his car. The men smashed his window, seized his gun and sped away with him, the brother said.

A senior American official said the Libyan government had been apprised of the operation and provided assistance, but it was unclear in what capacity. An assistant to the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government said the government had been unaware of any operation or of Abu Anas’s capture. Asked if American forces had ever conducted raids inside Libya or collaborated with Libyan forces, Mehmoud Abu Bahia, assistant to the defense minister, replied, “Absolutely not.”

Disclosure of the raid is likely to inflame anxieties among many Libyans about their national sovereignty, putting a new strain on the transitional government’s fragile authority. Many Libyan Islamists already accuse their interim prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, who previously lived in Geneva as part of the exiled opposition to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, of collaborating too closely with the West.

Abu Anas, 49, was born in Tripoli and joined Bin Laden’s organization as early as the early 1990s, when it was based in Sudan. He later moved to Britain, where he was granted political asylum as a Libyan dissident. United States prosecutors in New York charged him in a 2000 indictment with helping to conduct “visual and photographic surveillance” of the United States Embassy in Nairobi in 1993 and again in 1995. Prosecutors said in the indictment that Abu Anas had discussed with another senior Qaeda figure the idea of attacking an American target in retaliation for the United States peacekeeping operation in Somalia.

After the 1998 bombing, the British police raided his apartment and found an 18-chapter terrorist training manual. Written in Arabic and titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,” it included advice on car bombing, torture, sabotage and disguise.

Since the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, Tripoli has slid steadily into lawlessness, with no strong central government or police presence. It has become a safe haven for militants seeking to avoid detection elsewhere, and United States government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information, have acknowledged in recent months that Abu Anas and other wanted terrorists had been seen moving freely around the capital.

The operation to capture Abu Anas was several weeks in the making, a United States official said, and President Obama was regularly briefed as the suspect was tracked in Tripoli. Mr. Obama had to approve the capture. He had often promised there would be “no boots on the ground” in Libya when the United States intervened there in March 2011, so the decision to send in Special Operations forces was a risky one.

American officials said they would want to question Abu Anas for several weeks. But they did not dispute that New York, where an indictment is pending against him, was most likely his ultimate destination. Mr. Obama has been loath to add to the prisoner count at the American military facility at Guantánamo Bay, and there is precedent for delivering those suspected of terrorism to New York if they are under indictment there.

The operation will do nothing to quell the continuing questions about the events in Benghazi 13 months ago that led to the deaths of four Americans. But officials say the operation was a product of the decision after Benghazi to bolster the counterterrorism effort in Libya, especially as Tripoli became a safe haven for Qaeda leadership.

The capture of Abu Anas also coincided with a fierce gunfight that killed 15 Libyan soldiers at a checkpoint in a neighborhood southeast of Tripoli, near the traditional home of Abu Anas’s clan.

A spokesman for the Libyan Army general staff, Col. Ali Sheikhi, said five cars full of armed men in masks pulled up at the army checkpoint at 6:15 a.m. and opened fire at point-blank range. It was not clear if the assault at the checkpoint was related to the capture of Abu Anas or his removal from Libya.

The raid in Somalia was the most significant raid by American troops in that lawless country since commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Qaeda mastermind, near the same coastal town four years ago. The town, Baraawe, a small port south of Mogadishu, is known as a gathering place for the Shabab’s foreign fighters.

Witnesses described a firefight lasting over an hour, with helicopters called in for air support. A senior Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, “The attack was carried out by the American forces, and the Somali government was pre-informed about the attack.”

A spokesman for the Shabab said that one of their fighters had been killed in an exchange of gunfire but that the group had beaten back the assault. American officials initially reported that they had seized the Shabab leader, but later backed off that account.

A United States official said that no Americans had been killed or wounded and that the Americans “disengaged after inflicting some Shabab casualties.”

“We are not in a position to identify those casualties,” the official said.

The F.B.I. sent dozens of agents to Nairobi after the siege of the Westgate shopping mall to help the Kenyan authorities with the investigation. United States officials fear that the Shabab could attempt a similar attack on American soil, perhaps employing Somali-American recruits.

A witness in Baraawe said the house was known as a place where senior foreign commanders stayed. He could not say whether they were there when the attack began, but he said 12 well-trained Shabab fighters scheduled for a mission abroad were staying there at the time of the assault.

It was not clear what role if any the target of the American assault had played in the attack on the Nairobi mall.One United States official said it was still unclear whether any Americans had been involved in the Westgate siege, though several Kenyan officials said they now believed that there had been as few as four attackers — far fewer than the 10 to 15 the government had previously reported.

A spokesman for the Kenyan military said Saturday that it had identified four of the attackers from surveillance footage as Abu Baara al-Sudani, Omar Nabhan, Khattab al-Kene and a man known only as Umayr.

The spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, said none of the militants had escaped the mall. “They’re all dead,” he said.

The footage, broadcast on Kenyan television on Friday night, showed four attackers moving about the mall with cool nonchalance.

At least one of the four men, Mr. Nabhan, was Kenyan, officials said, and believed to be a younger relative of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the Qaeda operative killed four years ago near Baraawe, the site of Saturday’s raid.

The elder Mr. Nabhan was a suspect in the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002 and the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Matt Bryden, a former head of the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, said the tactics used in the Westgate attack were similar to those used by the Shabab in a number of operations in Somalia this year. But he also said that local help had been needed to pull off an attack on that scale, and that several of the men identified as taking part in the attack had been connected to the group’s Kenyan affiliate, known as Al Hijra.

“We should certainly expect Al Hijra and Al Shabab to try again,” Mr. Bryden said. “And we should expect them to have the capacity to do so.”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo;

Nicholas Kulish from Nairobi, Kenya;

and Eric Schmitt from San Francisco.

Reporting was contributed by Suliman Ali Zway

and Carlotta Gall from Tripoli, Libya;

Michael S. Schmidt and David E.

Sanger from Washington; Josh Kron from Mombasa, Kenya;

and Mohammed Ibrahim from Mogadishu, Somalia.

    U.S. Raids in Libya and Somalia Strike Terror Targets, NYT, 5.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/world/africa/
    Al-Qaeda-Suspect-Wanted-in-US-Said-to-Be-Taken-in-Libya.html

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

September 5, 2013
The New York Times
By NICOLE PERLROTH, JEFF LARSON
and SCOTT SHANE

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no evidence its systems had been breached).

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

“The intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he said. “This is the golden age of spying.”

 

A Vital Capability

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.

The documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and other intelligence powers.

“In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American Civil War battle. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Ties to Internet Companies

When the N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by diplomats and military officers. Over the last 20 years, it has become ubiquitous. Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to a Web address.

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the acronym for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by exploiting security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.

At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with “lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was clearly coerced. Some companies have been asked to hand the government the encryption keys to all customer communications, according to people familiar with the government’s requests.

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had the key.

That proposal met a backlash from an unlikely coalition that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil Liberties Union. All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth Amendment, but also America’s global technology edge.

By 1996, the White House backed down. But soon the N.S.A. began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became mainstream.

Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety. When Mr. Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”

But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.

By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had set a goal of an additional 300.

But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document warned.

Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see as too cozy a relationship with the government. In response, some companies have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook have pressed for permission to reveal more about the government’s requests for cooperation. One e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, closed rather than comply with the agency’s demands for customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail service rather than face such demands.

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the companies surrendered.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

John Markoff contributed reporting.

    N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption, NYT, 5.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html

Breaking Through Limits on Spying

August 8, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Apparently no espionage tool that Congress gives the National Security Agency is big enough or intrusive enough to satisfy the agency’s inexhaustible appetite for delving into the communications of Americans. Time and again, the N.S.A. has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

It was bad enough in 2008 when Congress allowed the agency to spy without a warrant on e-mails and text messages between Americans and foreign targets of an investigation. That already strained the Fourth Amendment’s protections against illegal searches, but lawmakers decided it was justified as part of a terror investigation.

It turns out, as Charlie Savage revealed in The Times on Thursday, that the N.S.A. went far beyond those boundaries. Instead, it copies virtually all overseas messages that Americans send or receive, then scans them to see if they contain any references to people or subjects the agency thinks might have a link to terrorists.

That could very well include innocent communications between family members expressing fears of a terror attack. Or messages between an editor and a reporter who is covering international security issues. Or the privileged conversation between a lawyer and a client who is being investigated.

Data collection on this scale goes far beyond what Congress authorized, and it clearly shreds a common-sense understanding of the Fourth Amendment. It’s as if the government were telling its citizens not to even talk about security issues in private messages or else they will come to the attention of the nation’s spies. “By injecting the N.S.A. into virtually every crossborder interaction, the U.S. government will forever alter what has always been an open exchange of ideas,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Obama administration officials justified this unwarranted expansion of surveillance powers with the usual hairsplitting arguments over semantics. It’s not “bulk collection” of messages if the messages aren’t stored, they said (even if every message is analyzed by supercomputers as it is sent). It’s legitimate to search through conversations “about” a target, even if the target isn’t part of the conversation. Naturally, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these half-baked assertions with a secret opinion.

The disclosure of this practice makes it more urgent than ever that Congress clamp down on what is unquestionably the bulk collection of American communications and restrict it to clear targets of an investigation. Despite President Obama’s claim this week that “there is no spying on Americans,” the evidence shows that such spying is greater than the public ever knew.

    Breaking Through Limits on Spying, NYT, 8.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/opinion/breaking-through-limits-on-spying.html

N.S.A. Said to Search

Content of Messages to and From U.S.

August 8, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence.

Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the “target” was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said.

Asked to comment, Judith A. Emmel, an N.S.A. spokeswoman, did not directly address surveillance of cross-border communications. But she said the agency’s activities were lawful and intended to gather intelligence not about Americans but about “foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or international terrorists.”

“In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect,” she said. “Moreover, the agency’s activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests.”

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.

The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.”

The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government, the official said.

The disclosure sheds additional light on statements intelligence officials have made recently, reassuring the public that they do not “target” Americans for surveillance without warrants.

At a House Intelligence Committee oversight hearing in June, for example, a lawmaker pressed the deputy director of the N.S.A., John Inglis, to say whether the agency listened to the phone calls or read the e-mails and text messages of American citizens. Mr. Inglis replied, “We do not target the content of U.S. person communications without a specific warrant anywhere on the earth.”

Timothy Edgar, a former intelligence official in the Bush and Obama administrations, said that the rule concerning collection “about” a person targeted for surveillance rather than directed at that person had provoked significant internal discussion.

“There is an ambiguity in the law about what it means to ‘target’ someone,” Mr. Edgar, now a visiting professor at Brown, said. “You can never intentionally target someone inside the United States. Those are the words we were looking at. We were most concerned about making sure the procedures only target communications that have one party outside the United States.”

The rule they ended up writing, which was secretly approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, says that the N.S.A. must ensure that one of the participants in any conversation that is acquired when it is searching for conversations about a targeted foreigner must be outside the United States, so that the surveillance is technically directed at the foreign end.

Americans’ communications singled out for further analysis are handled in accordance with “minimization” rules to protect privacy approved by the surveillance court. If private information is not relevant to understanding foreign intelligence, it is deleted; if it is relevant, the agency can retain it and disseminate it to other agencies, the rules show.

While the paragraph hinting at the surveillance has attracted little attention, the American Civil Liberties Union did take note of the “about the target” language in a June 21 post analyzing the larger set of rules, arguing that the language could be interpreted as allowing “bulk” collection of international communications, including of those of Americans.

Jameel Jaffer, a senior lawyer at the A.C.L.U., said Wednesday that such “dragnet surveillance will be poisonous to the freedoms of inquiry and association” because people who know that their communications will be searched will change their behavior.

“They’ll hesitate before visiting controversial Web sites, discussing controversial topics or investigating politically sensitive questions,” Mr. Jaffer said. “Individually, these hesitations might appear to be inconsequential, but the accumulation of them over time will change citizens’ relationship to one another and to the government.”

The senior intelligence official argued, however, that it would be inaccurate to portray the N.S.A. as engaging in “bulk collection” of the contents of communications. “ ‘Bulk collection’ is when we collect and retain for some period of time that lets us do retrospective analysis,” the official said. “In this case, we do not do that, so we do not consider this ‘bulk collection.’ ”

Stewart Baker, a former general counsel for the N.S.A., said that such surveillance could be valuable in identifying previously unknown terrorists or spies inside the United States who unwittingly reveal themselves to the agency by discussing a foreign-intelligence “indicator.” He cited a situation in which officials learn that Al Qaeda was planning to use a particular phone number on the day of an attack.

“If someone is sending that number out, chances are they are on the inside of the plot, and I want to find the people who are on the inside of the plot,” he said.

The senior intelligence official said that the “about the target” surveillance had been valuable, but said it was difficult to point to any particular terrorist plot that would have been carried out if the surveillance had not taken place. He said it was one tool among many used to assemble a “mosaic” of information in such investigations. The surveillance was used for other types of foreign-intelligence collection, not just terrorism investigations, the official said.

There has been no public disclosure of any ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court explaining its legal analysis of the 2008 FISA law and the Fourth Amendment as allowing “about the target” searches of Americans’ cross-border communications. But in 2009, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel signed off on a similar process for searching federal employees’ communications without a warrant to make sure none contain malicious computer code.

That opinion, by Steven G. Bradbury, who led the office in the Bush administration, may echo the still-secret legal analysis. He wrote that because that system, called EINSTEIN 2.0, scanned communications traffic “only for particular malicious computer code” and there was no authorization to acquire the content for unrelated purposes, it “imposes, at worst, a minimal burden upon legitimate privacy rights.”

    N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S., NYT, 8.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/
    broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html

Terrorism and the Embassies

August 5, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Obama administration’s decision to close nearly two dozen embassies and issue a worldwide travel alert was difficult to quarrel with. We obviously do not have access to the intelligence that was the basis for the extraordinary closures, but American officials who do claim that they uncovered one of the most serious plots against United States and other Western interests since Sept. 11, 2001.

According to The Times, officials intercepted electronic communications in which the leader of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden, ordered Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of the terrorist group’s most lethal branch in Yemen, to carry out an attack as early as this past Sunday. That day, the State Department extended the closing of 19 diplomatic posts in the Middle East and North Africa through at least Saturday.

The information was credible enough that several European countries also closed embassies in the Middle East. It also was credible enough that Republican members of Congress who are among President Obama’s harshest critics on security and other issues have endorsed the administration’s response. Representative Peter King, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence, told ABC News that “the government would have been totally negligent if it did not take the actions taken.”

Still, both the administration’s acts, and the Republicans’ response are shaped by the recent political past. The administration, excoriated by Republicans for underestimating the deteriorating security environment in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the killing of four American diplomats last Sept. 11, is bending over backward to avoid a repeat. Republican lawmakers made such an issue of Benghazi and failed to prove any dark conspiracy that they can hardly fault Mr. Obama now for taking maximum precautions.

It’s no surprise that some politicians are trying to exploit the episode by arguing that it proves the value of the National Security Agency’s domestic intelligence sweeps. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the N.S.A. sweeps: “If we did not have these programs, then we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys.”

No one has questioned the N.S.A.’s role in collecting intelligence overseas, but the debate is about domestic efforts to vacuum up large volumes of data on the phone calls of every American that are legally questionable and needlessly violate Americans’ rights. A threat from Al Qaeda, no matter how serious, should not divert attention from a thorough investigation of the domestic spying.

The United States cannot fail to take reasonable precautions at its embassies, but neither can it be paralyzed and shut down its diplomatic functions for prolonged periods. The embassies should reopen as soon as possible and security should be hardened at high-risk stations. That will require Republicans in Congress, who have slashed embassy security budgets, to approve money for upgrades and other post-Benghazi recommendations.

The challenge is to manage risk while staying involved in the world. Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and elsewhere will be a threat for the foreseeable future.

    Terrorism and the Embassies, NYT, 5.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/opinion/terrorism-and-the-embassies.html

Qaeda Leader’s Edict to Yemen Affiliate

Is Said to Prompt Alert

August 5, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision last week to close nearly two dozen diplomatic missions and issue a worldwide travel alert came after the United States intercepted electronic communications in which the head of Al Qaeda ordered the leader of the group’s affiliate in Yemen to carry out an attack as early as this past Sunday, according to American officials.

The intercepted conversations last week between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of the global terrorist group, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

American officials said that it was highly unusual for senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan to discuss operational matters with the group’s affiliates. The communication between the two men seems to indicate that Mr. Zawahri — whom administration officials have portrayed as greatly diminished and hindered in running a global terror network while deep in hiding — still has a strong influence over a group in Yemen that has become Al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot.

In recent weeks, counterterrorism officials said, Mr. Zawahri has elevated Mr. Wuhayshi to what one official described as the new “general manager” of the global terror network, making him the second most important man in the organization.

The identities of the two Qaeda leaders whose discussions were monitored and the imminent nature of the suspected plot — in the intercepts, the terrorists mentioned Sunday as the day that the attacks were to take place — help explain why the United States, as well as other Western governments, took such extraordinary steps in the past few days to close embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa.

“This was significant because it was the big guys talking, and talking about very specific timing for an attack or attacks,” said one American official who had been briefed on the intelligence reports in recent days.

Yemen experts said that Mr. Wuhayshi, who was Bin Laden’s private secretary in Afghanistan, remains particularly loyal to the core group of Qaeda operatives who are believed to mostly be hiding in Pakistan.

“Wuhayshi was groomed by Osama bin Laden to take on a leadership role, and he was able to use his connections to Bin Laden to become head of AQAP,” said Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton and author of “The Last Refuge,” a book about Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Mr. Wuhayshi fled to Iran from Afghanistan in 2001, but was extradited to Yemen in 2003. In 2006, he was part of a mass breakout from a prison in Sana that led to a resurgence of Al Qaeda’s operations in Yemen. In recent years, the Qaeda group there, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has tried to carry out several high-profile attacks.

One was an attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet over Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009, using explosives sewn into a passenger’s underwear. Last spring, a C.I.A. double agent spirited out of Yemen an even more sophisticated explosive that was meant to blow up an American commercial airliner.

A campaign of American drone strikes and a Yemeni Army offensive have put the Qaeda affiliate under heavy pressure over the past 18 months, with militants pushed out of the territory they had been holding and back into hiding.

But even with these setbacks and the years of drone strikes, the group has continued to publish an English-language online magazine, Inspire. Yemen has been at the center of the recent uptick in threat levels, and Mr. Johnsen said American estimates of the group’s followers had actually increased.

“The question I have is, If the Obama administration is confident that its strategy in Yemen is correct, then why is Al Qaeda growing in Yemen and why is the group still capable of forcing the United States to shut down embassies in more than a dozen countries?” Mr. Johnsen said.

In an article posted on the Web on Friday and published on Saturday, The New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders whose conversations were intercepted after senior American intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. The names were disclosed Sunday by McClatchy Newspapers, and after the government became aware of the article on Monday, it dropped its objections to The Times’s publishing the same information.

The State Department on Monday defended its decision on Sunday to extend the closing of 19 diplomatic posts in the Middle East and North Africa through at least Saturday because of continued fears of an imminent attack.

“We are going to keep evaluating information as it comes in, keep analyzing the various intelligence that we’re getting in in regards to this stream,” said a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf. “Over all, what we are doing is taking precautionary steps out of an abundance of caution to protect our people and our facilities and visitors to those facilities overseas.”

The embassies that will be closed include the ones in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the statement said.

Embassies in Algiers, Baghdad and Kabul reopened on Monday, as did the United States Embassy in Pakistan, even though the Qaeda threat that shuttered many other diplomatic missions emanated in part from that country. Still, rumors of an impending militant attack on Islamabad, the capital — and not necessarily on an American target — coursed through diplomatic and security circles last weekend.

One Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said his mission had received reports that militant attackers had congregated in the Margalla Hills, which overlook the city. But the diplomat stressed that those reports were unconfirmed, and that while the security situation in the city had tightened, there was little information to suggest an impending assault.

Britain and France said Monday that they had extended the closing of their embassies in Yemen until at least Thursday, after Washington announced that its embassy would stay shut until after Ramadan ends, which is to occur around Thursday in most places. The German mission was still closed Monday, while Norway had shut its embassies in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Counterterrorism analysts, as well as former intelligence official, said closing the embassies — and depriving Al Qaeda of targets, at least for now — may have deterred an attack.

“The announcement itself may also be designed to interrupt Al Qaeda planning, to put them off stride,” Michael V. Hayden, a former C.I.A. director, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “To put them on the back foot, to let them know that we’re alert and that we’re on at least to a portion of this plotline.”

Steven Erlanger, Katrin Bennhold

and Declan Walsh contributed reporting from London.

    Qaeda Leader’s Edict to Yemen Affiliate Is Said to Prompt Alert, NYT, 5.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/world/middleeast/
    qaeda-chiefs-order-to-yemen-affiliate-said-to-prompt-alert.html

U.S. Extends

Closing of Some Diplomatic Posts

August 4, 2013
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Nineteen American diplomatic outposts across the Middle East and North Africa will remain closed this week, the State Department said Sunday, despite what officials said was no new information about terrorist plots that they believe are in the works.

One day after President Obama’s top national security aides huddled at the White House, senior lawmakers appeared on television on Sunday with ominous warnings about intelligence “chatter,” first revealed on Thursday, similar to what American spy agencies picked up in the weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Such is the strange, wait-and-see climate surrounding a threat that appears to be both specific and maddeningly vague. American officials say that they are confident they have intercepted electronic communications discussing attacks in the coming days, but that they have no clear information about where they should try to defend against them.

“The assumption is that it’s probably most likely to happen in the Middle East,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, on the ABC News program “This Week.” “But there’s no guarantee of that at all.”

“It could basically be in Europe, it could be in the United States, it could be a series of combined attacks,” said Mr. King, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

The one aspect of the intelligence that officials appear to agree on is that Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is behind the plotting.

The group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has tried to carry out several high-profile attacks in recent years. One was a man’s attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet over Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009, using explosives sewn into his underwear. Months earlier, the group tried to kill the Saudi intelligence chief with a bomb surgically implanted in the attacker’s body.

American officials believe that both bombs were built by Ibrahim al-Asiri, one of the group’s leaders whom the Obama administration has been trying to kill as part of a campaign in Yemen using armed drones.

The State Department said Sunday that it was extending the closing of 19 diplomatic posts in the Middle East and North Africa through at least next Saturday because of continued fears of an imminent attack. Several European countries have also closed embassies in the Middle East.

A State Department spokesman said that the closings were not the result of new threat intelligence, but “merely an indication of our commitment to exercise caution and take appropriate steps to protect our employees and visitors to our facilities.”

The embassies that will be closed include ones in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the statement said.

Seth G. Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, said that the scope of the closings is a sign of how diffuse the terrorist threat has become, and how difficult it is to guard against.

“The U.S. has to deal with a number of terror groups across multiple continents who are generally not coordinating with each other,” Mr. Jones said.

“This is the new Al Qaeda. It is better understood as a loose movement, rather than a single organization.”

Senior lawmakers from both parties said Sunday that the embassy closings appeared justified. Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, said that the intelligence information added up to “a big deal.” He said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave members of Congress of classified briefing last week indicating that about 25 American embassies around the world were vulnerable.

Saxby Chambliss, the Georgia Republican who is the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the threat information was “very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.”

“We didn’t take heed on 9/11 in a way that we should, but here I think it’s very important that we do take the right kind of planning as we come to the close of Ramadan,” said Mr. Chambliss, referring to the Islamic holy month, on “Meet the Press.”

Lawmakers on Sunday gave credit for unmasking the threat to the National Security Agency, which has come under criticism after revelations about its extensive electronic monitoring programs in the United States and abroad.

In the days immediately after the N.S.A. revelations began, some American officials warned that terrorist leaders had already changed their communication methods and patterns of as a result of the exposure the revelations had brought. But the N.S.A.’s ability to intercept the recent discussions about plots seems to indicate that American spy agencies have not been hindered as much as some have asserted.

Senator Durbin indicated that what is perhaps the most contentious of the recent N.S.A. disclosures — a program to gather and store phone records of all calls made inside the United States — is not responsible for unearthing the recent plotting.

“In other words, do we need to collect all of the phone records of all of the people living in America for five years so that if we’re going to target one particular person, we’re ready to jump on it?” he said.

“That is being discussed and debated.”

Brian Knowlton contributed reporting.

    U.S. Extends Closing of Some Diplomatic Posts, NYT, 4.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/world/
    us-extends-closing-of-some-diplomatic-posts.html

Terror Threat Prompts U.S.

to Close Diplomatic Missions

August 1, 2013
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

A terrorism threat has prompted the United States to close dozens of American diplomatic missions in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere through the weekend, American officials said Thursday.

Officials gave few details about what prompted the move to close an unusually large number of American missions, but said there was “credible” information that an Al Qaeda regional affiliate might be plotting an attack sometime in the coming days.

“It’s not often that we close a bunch of embassies at once,” said one official, adding that the threat was being taken particularly seriously by American intelligence agencies.

The official said that the State Department was planning to have nearly all American diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia closed through the weekend, including missions in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In much of the Muslim world, diplomatic facilities are generally closed on Friday and Saturday, but open on Sunday.

A State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, told reporters on Thursday that the decision was taken “out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations.” The State Department did not announce on Thursday which terror group might be plotting an attack, but American officials indicated that the threat originated from one of Al Qaeda’s regional affiliates.

To date, the only Al Qaeda affiliate that has shown both a desire and an ability to attack American facilities overseas is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group based in Yemen.

In a meeting at the White House on Thursday, President Obama met with Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. American and Yemeni officials said that counterterrorism operations in Yemen were among the main topics of the meeting.

American drones have carried out three separate strikes in Yemen, over the past week according to Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks drone strikes. There have been 15 American drone strikes in Yemen this year, according to the site.

The closings come toward the end of the Ramadan holidays and the approaching one-year anniversary of the terror attack on Sept. 11, 2012, on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

“This seems to be a late-Ramadan threat,” one senior American diplomat said. “We don’t have information on the specific details.”

    Terror Threat Prompts U.S. to Close Diplomatic Missions, NYT, 1.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/us/
    some-american-embassies-to-close-on-sunday-over-security-concerns.html