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History > 2015 > USA > N.S.A. (I)
Senate Blocks Bill
on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Records
MAY 23, 2015
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — After vigorous debate and intense last-minute
pressure by Republican leaders, the Senate on Saturday rejected legislation that
would end the federal government’s bulk collection of phone records.
With the death of that measure — passed overwhelmingly in the House earlier this
month — senators then scrambled to hastily pass a short-term measure to keep the
program from going dark when it expires June 1 but failed. The disarray in
Congress appeared to significantly increase the chances that the government will
lose systematic access to newly created calling records by Americans, at least
temporarily, after June 1.
“This is a high-threat period,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the
majority leader, who was felled in his efforts to extend the program even for a
few days by the junior senator for his home state, Rand Paul.
The Senate will reconvene on May 31 to try again. But any extension is far from
certain to get approval from the House, which is in recess until June 1, with at
least one member threatening to block it.
“Any extension is going to be problematic in the House,” said Representative
Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee. Mr. Schiff noted that many of the votes against the measure in the
House were by members who didn’t think it went far enough. The matter is likely
to come up after the one-week recess.
Under the bipartisan House bill, which passed 338 to 88 last week, the Patriot
Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection by the National Security Agency
of metadata charting telephone calls made by Americans.
However, while the House version of the bill would take the government out of
the collection business, it would not deny it access to the information.
The measure failed in the Senate 57 to 42, with 12 Republicans voting for it,
shortly after midnight because Mr. Paul, a candidate for the White House,
dragged the procedure out as he promised to do in fund-raising tweets and
emails.
Another bill, which would have extended the program for two months, also failed.
Even if both chambers do agree to an extension of the statute, the program might
still lapse. President Obama would have to make the legal and political decision
to ask the nation’s intelligence court for a new order authorizing the bulk
phone logs program, and a Federal District Court judge on the court would have
to agree that he was authorized to issue such an order, even though a federal
appeals court recently ruled that the statute cannot be legitimately interpreted
to permit bulk collection.
Still, while a short-term lapse in the bulk phone records collection could have
large political repercussions, it might have only a limited operational impact
on counterterrorism investigations. Throughout the lifetime of the once-secret
program, which began in October 2001, it has never been the difference maker in
thwarting any terrorist attack, according to testimony and government reports.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, slowly and painstakingly brought
nearly every member of his caucus to support the House bill, losing only Senator
Angus King, an independent representing Maine. But Senator Mike Lee, Republican
of Utah, who was the point man for his side of the aisle, was unable to convince
a handful of wavering Republicans to support the bill and defy Mr. McConnell,
who with many senior Republicans on the Intelligence Committee spoke out against
the measure.
Mr. McConnell wanted to extend the program as it exists, but realized this week
that he had nowhere near the votes to get that done. On Friday, he held a
last-minute session before an extensive vote on a trade package to twist
senators’ arms and to convince them that a short-term extension would allow a
compromise to be hammered out in June.
The debate over the federal program, which became intense after the government’s
extensive surveillance efforts were exposed by Edward J. Snowden, was
complicated by a federal appeals court ruling last week that found the N.S.A.’s
bulk collection of phone records illegal.
Democrats rose to complain angrily after the vote Friday. “Let’s be clear,” said
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California. “We tried to protect this country
and Republicans rejected it.”
Senate Blocks Bill on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Records,
NYT,
MAY 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/politics/senate-nsa-surveillance.html
N.S.A. Tapped
Into North Korean Networks
Before Sony Attack, Officials Say
JAN. 18, 2015
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
and MARTIN FACKLER
WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North
Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November
winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into
the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable
targets on earth.
Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the
American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea
to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North
Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South
Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign
officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly
disclosed N.S.A. document.
A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort,
officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many
of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South
Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. Most are commanded
by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General
Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in
China.
The evidence gathered by the “early warning radar” of software painstakingly
hidden to monitor North Korea’s activities proved critical in persuading
President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony
attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation.
Mr. Obama’s decision to accuse North Korea of ordering the largest destructive
attack against an American target — and to promise retaliation, which has begun
in the form of new economic sanctions — was highly unusual: The United States
had never explicitly charged another government with mounting a cyberattack on
American targets.
Mr. Obama is cautious in drawing stark conclusions from intelligence, aides say.
But in this case “he had no doubt,” according to one senior American military
official.
“Attributing where attacks come from is incredibly difficult and slow,” said
James A. Lewis, a cyberwarfare expert at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington. “The speed and certainty with which the
United States made its determinations about North Korea told you that something
was different here — that they had some kind of inside view.”
For about a decade, the United States has implanted “beacons,” which can map a
computer network, along with surveillance software and occasionally even
destructive malware in the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The
government spends billions of dollars on the technology, which was crucial to
the American and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents
previously disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former security agency
contractor, demonstrated how widely they have been deployed against China.
But fearing the exposure of its methods in a country that remains a black hole
for intelligence gathering, American officials have declined to talk publicly
about the role the technology played in Washington’s assessment that the North
Korean government had ordered the attack on Sony.
The extensive American penetration of the North Korean system also raises
questions about why the United States was not able to alert Sony as the attacks
took shape last fall, even though the North had warned, as early as June, that
the release of the movie “The Interview,” a crude comedy about a C.I.A. plot to
assassinate the North’s leader, would be “an act of war.”
Dinner in Pyongyang
The N.S.A.’s success in getting into North Korea’s systems in recent years
should have allowed the agency to see the first “spear phishing” attacks on Sony
— the use of emails that put malicious code into a computer system if an
unknowing user clicks on a link — when the attacks began in early September,
according to two American officials.
But those attacks did not look unusual. Only in retrospect did investigators
determine that the North had stolen the “credentials” of a Sony systems
administrator, which allowed the hackers to roam freely inside Sony’s systems.
In recent weeks, investigators have concluded that the hackers spent more than
two months, from mid-September to mid-November, mapping Sony’s computer systems,
identifying critical files and planning how to destroy computers and servers.
“They were incredibly careful, and patient,” said one person briefed on the
investigation. But he added that even with their view into the North’s
activities, American intelligence agencies “couldn’t really understand the
severity” of the destruction that was coming when the attacks began Nov. 24.
In fact, when, Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence,
had an impromptu dinner in early November with his North Korean counterpart
during a secret mission to Pyongyang to secure the release of two imprisoned
Americans, he made no mention of Sony or the North’s growing hacking campaigns,
officials say.
In a recent speech at Fordham University in New York, Mr. Clapper acknowledged
that the commander of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, Kim Yong-chol, with
whom he traded barbs over the 12-course dinner, was “later responsible for
overseeing the attack against Sony.” (General Clapper praised the food; his
hosts later presented him with a bill for his share of the meal.)
Asked about General Clapper’s knowledge of the Sony attacks from the North when
he attended the dinner, Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for the director of national
intelligence, said that the director did not know he would meet his intelligence
counterpart and that the purpose of his trip to North Korea “was solely to
secure the release of the two detained U.S. citizens.”
“Because of the sensitivities surrounding the effort” to win the Americans’
release, Mr. Hale said, “the D.N.I. was focused on the task and did not want to
derail any progress by discussing other matters.” But he said General Clapper
was acutely aware of the North’s growing capabilities.
Jang Sae-yul, a former North Korean army programmer who defected in 2007,
speaking in an interview in Seoul, said: “They have built up formidable hacking
skills. They have spent almost 30 years getting ready, learning how to do this
and this alone, how to target specific countries.”
Still, the sophistication of the Sony hack was such that many experts say they
are skeptical that North Korea was the culprit, or the lone culprit. They have
suggested it was an insider, a disgruntled Sony ex-employee or an outside group
cleverly mimicking North Korean hackers. Many remain unconvinced by the efforts
of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to answer critics by disclosing some of
the American evidence.
Mr. Comey told the same Fordham conference that the North Koreans got “sloppy”
in hiding their tracks, and that hackers periodically “connected directly and we
could see them.”
“And we could see that the I.P. addresses that were being used to post and to
send the emails were coming from I.P.s that were exclusively used by the North
Koreans,” he said. Some of those addresses appear to be in China, experts say.
The skeptics say, however, that it would not be that difficult for hackers who
wanted to appear to be North Korean to fake their whereabouts. Mr. Comey said
there was other evidence he could not discuss. So did Adm. Michael S. Rogers,
the N.S.A. director, who told the Fordham conference that after reviewing the
classified data he had “high confidence” the North had ordered the action.
A Growing Capability
North Korea built its first computer with vacuum tubes in 1965, with engineers
trained in France. For a brief time, it appeared ahead of South Korea and of
China, which not only caught up but also came to build major elements of their
economic success on their hardware and software.
Defectors say that the Internet was first viewed by North Korea’s leadership as
a threat, something that could taint its citizens with outside ideas.
But Kim Heung-kwang, a defector who said in an interview that he helped train
many of the North’s first cyberspies, recalled that in the early 1990s a group
of North Korean computer experts came back from China with a “very strange new
idea”: Use the Internet to steal secrets and attack the government’s enemies.
“The Chinese are already doing it,” he quoted one of the experts as saying.
Defectors report that the North Korean military was interested. So was the
ruling Workers’ Party, which in 1994 sent 15 North Koreans to a military academy
in Beijing to learn about hacking. When they returned, they formed the core of
the External Information Intelligence Office, which hacked into websites,
penetrated fire walls and stole information abroad. Because the North had so few
connections to the outside world, the hackers did much of their work in China
and Japan.
While perhaps a coincidence, the failure, which lasted about 10 hours, began
after President Obama said the U.S. would respond to an act of “cybervandalism”
against Sony Pictures.
Chinese Annoyance With North Korea Bubbles to the Surface
Chinese Annoyance With North Korea Bubbles to the Surface
A retired general’s scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally
headed for collapse and unworthy of China’s support revealed how far relations
between the two countries have sunk.
According to Mr. Kim, the military began training computer “warriors” in earnest
in 1996 and two years later opened Bureau 121, now the primary cyberattack unit.
Members were dispatched for two years of training in China and Russia. Mr. Jang
said they were envied, in part because of their freedom to travel.
“They used to come back with exotic foreign clothes and expensive electronics
like rice cookers and cameras,” he said. His friends told him that Bureau 121
was divided into different groups, each targeting a specific country or region,
especially the United States, South Korea and the North’s one ally, China.
“They spend those two years not attacking, but just learning about their target
country’s Internet,” said Mr. Jang, 46, who was a first lieutenant in a
different army unit that wrote software for war game simulations.
Mr. Jang said that as time went on, the North began diverting high school
students with the best math skills into a handful of top universities, including
a military school specializing in computer-based warfare called Mirim
University, which he attended as a young army officer.
Others were deployed to an “attack base” in the northeastern Chinese city of
Shenyang, where there are many North Korean-run hotels and restaurants. Unlike
the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the cyberforces can be used
to harass South Korea and the United States without risking a devastating
response.
“Cyberwarfare is simply the modern chapter in North Korea’s long history of
asymmetrical warfare,” said a security research report in August by
Hewlett-Packard.
An Attack in Seoul
When the Americans first gained access to the North Korean networks and
computers in 2010, their surveillance focused on the North’s nuclear program and
its leadership, as well as efforts to detect attacks aimed at United States
military forces in South Korea, said one former American official. (The German
magazine Der Spiegel published an N.S.A. document on Saturday that provides some
details of South Korea’s help in spying on the North.) Then a highly destructive
attack in 2013 on South Korean banks and media companies suggested that North
Korea was becoming a greater threat, and the focus shifted.
“The big target was the hackers,” the official said.
That attack knocked out almost 50,000 computers and servers in South Korea for
several days at five banks and television broadcasters.
The hackers were patient, spending nine months probing the South Korean systems.
But they also made the mistake seen in the Sony hack, at one point revealing
what South Korean analysts believe to have been their true I.P. addresses. Lim
Jong-in, dean of the Graduate School of Information Security at Korea
University, said those addresses were traced back to Shenyang, and fell within a
spectrum of I.P. addresses linked to North Korean companies.
The attack was studied by American intelligence agencies. But after the North
issued its warnings about Sony’s movie last June, American officials appear to
have made no reference to the risk in their discussions with Sony executives.
Even when the spear-phishing attacks began in September — against Sony and other
targets — “it didn’t set off alarm bells,” according to one person involved in
the investigation.
The result is that American officials began to focus on North Korea only after
the destructive attacks began in November, when pictures of skulls and gruesome
images of Sony executives appeared on the screens of company employees. (That
propaganda move by the hackers may have worked to Sony’s benefit: Some employees
unplugged their computers immediately, saving some data from destruction.)
It did not take long for American officials to conclude that the source of the
attack was North Korea, officials say. “Figuring out how to respond was a lot
harder,” one White House official said.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Martin Fackler from Seoul, South
Korea. Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco.
N.S.A. Tapped Into North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack,
Officials Say,
NYT,
JAN. 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/nsa-tapped-into-north-korean-networks-before-sony-attack-officials-say.html
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