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We don’t know what they mean, but there are a bunch of NSA code names on LinkedIn profiles.
ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA
Here’s a transcript of a panel discussion about NSA surveillance. There’s a lot worth reading here, but I want to quote Bob Litt’s opening remarks. He’s the General Counsel for ODNI, and he has a lot to say about the programs revealed so far in the Snowden documents.
I’m reminded a little bit of a quote that, like many quotes, is attributed to Mark Twain but in fact is not Mark Twain’s, which is that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And unfortunately, there’s been a lot of misinformation that’s come out about these programs. And what I would like to do in the next couple of minutes is actually go through and explain what the programs are and what they aren’t.
I particularly want to emphasize that I hope you come away from this with the understanding that neither of the programs that have been leaked to the press recently are indiscriminate sweeping up of information without regard to privacy or constitutional rights or any kind of controls. In fact, from my boss, the director of national intelligence, on down through the entire intelligence community, we are in fact sensitive to privacy and constitutional rights. After all, we are citizens of the United States. These are our rights too.
So as I said, we’re talking about two types of intelligence collection programs. I want to start discussing them by making the point that in order to target the emails or the phone calls or the communications of a United States citizen or a lawful permanent resident of the United States, wherever that person is located, or of any person within the United States, we need to go to court, and we need to get an individual order based on probable cause, the equivalent of an electronic surveillance warrant.
That does not mean and nobody has ever said that that means we never acquire the contents of an email or telephone call to which a United States person is a party. Whenever you’re doing any collection of information, you’re going to—you can’t avoid some incidental acquisition of information about nontargeted persons. Think of a wiretap in a criminal case. You’re wiretapping somebody, and you intercept conversations that are innocent as well as conversations that are inculpatory. If we seize somebody’s computer, there’s going to be information about innocent people on that. This is just a necessary incident.
What we do is we impose controls on the use of that information. But what we cannot do—and I’m repeating this—is go out and target the communications of Americans for collection without an individual court order.
So the first of the programs that I want to talk about that was leaked to the press is what’s been called Section 215, or business record collection. It’s called Section 215 because that was the section of the Patriot Act that put the current version of that statute into place. And under that this statute, we collect telephone metadata, using a court order which is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under a provision which allows a government to obtain business records for intelligence and counterterrorism purposes. Now, by metadata, in this context, I mean data that describes the phone calls, such as the telephone number making the call, the telephone number dialed, the data and time the call was made and the length of the call. These are business records of the telephone companies in question, which is why they can be collected under this provision.
Despite what you may have read about this program, we do not collect the content of any communications under this program. We do not collect the identity of any participant to any communication under this program. And while there seems to have been some confusion about this as recently as today, I want to make perfectly clear we do not collect cellphone location information under this program, either GPS information or cell site tower information. I’m not sure why it’s been so hard to get people to understand that because it’s been said repeatedly.
When the court approves collection under this statute, it issues two orders. One order, which is the one that was leaked, is an order to providers directing them to turn the relevant information over to the government. The other order, which was not leaked, is the order that spells out the limitations on what we can do with the information after it’s been collected, who has access, what purposes they can access it for and how long it can be retained.
Some people have expressed concern, which is quite a valid concern in the abstract, that if you collect large quantities of metadata about telephone calls, you could subject it to sophisticated analysis, and using those kind of analytical tools, you can derive a lot of information about people that would otherwise not be discoverable.
The fact is, we are specifically not allowed to do that kind of analysis of this data, and we don’t do it. The metadata that is acquired and kept under this program can only be queried when there is reasonable suspicion, based on specific, articulable facts, that a particular telephone number is associated with specified foreign terrorist organizations. And the only purpose for which we can make that query is to identify contacts. All that we get under this program, all that we collect, is metadata. So all that we get back from one of these queries is metadata.
Each determination of a reasonable suspicion under this program must be documented and approved, and only a small portion of the data that is collected is ever actually reviewed, because the vast majority of that data is never going to be responsive to one of these terrorism-related queries.
In 2012 fewer than 300 identifiers were approved for searching this data. Nevertheless, we collect all the data because if you want to find a needle in the haystack, you need to have the haystack, especially in the case of a terrorism-related emergency, which is—and remember that this database is only used for terrorism-related purposes.
And if we want to pursue any further investigation as a result of a number that pops up as a result of one of these queries, we have to do, pursuant to other authorities and in particular if we want to conduct electronic surveillance of any number within the United States, as I said before, we have to go to court, we have to get an individual order based on probable cause.
That’s one of the two programs.
The other program is very different. This is a program that’s sometimes referred to as PRISM, which is a misnomer. PRISM is actually the name of a database. The program is collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a public statute that is widely known to everybody. There’s really no secret about this kind of collection.
This permits the government to target a non-U.S. person, somebody who’s not a citizen or a permanent resident alien, located outside of the United States, for foreign intelligence purposes without obtaining a specific warrant for each target, under the programmatic supervision of the FISA Court.
And it’s important here to step back and note that historically and at the time FISA was originally passed in 1978, this particular kind of collection, targeting non-U.S. persons outside of the United States for foreign intelligence purposes, was not intended to be covered by FISA as at all. It was totally outside of the supervision of the FISA Court and totally within the prerogative of the executive branch. So in that respect, Section 702 is properly viewed as an expansion of FISA Court authority, rather than a contraction of that authority.
So Section 702, as I—as I said, it’s—is limited to targeting foreigners outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information. And there is a specific provision in this statute that prohibits us from making an end run about this, about—on this requirement, because we are expressly prohibited from targeting somebody outside of the United States in order to obtain some information about somebody inside the United States. That is to say, if we know that somebody outside of the United States is communicating with Spike Bowman, and we really want to get Spike Bowman’s communications, we’ve got to get an electronic surveillance order on Spike Bowman. We cannot target the out the person outside of the United States to collect on Spike.
In order to use Section 702, the government has to obtain approval from the FISA Court for the plan it intends to use to conduct the collection. This plan includes, first of all, identification of the foreign intelligence purposes of the collection; second, the plan and the procedures for ensuring that the individuals targeted for collection are in fact non-U.S. persons who are located outside of the United States. These are referred to as targeting procedures. And in addition, we have to get approval of the government’s procedures for what it will do with information about a U.S. person or someone inside the United States if we get that information through this collection. These procedures, which are called minimization procedures, determine what we can keep and what we can disseminate to other government agencies and impose limitations on that. And in particular, dissemination of information about U.S. persons is expressly prohibited unless that information is necessary to understand foreign intelligence or to assess its importance or is evidence of a crime or indicates a—an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.
And again, these procedures, the targeting and minimization procedures, have to be approved by the FISA court as consistent with the statute and consistent with the Fourth Amendment. And that’s what the Section 702 collection is.
The last thing I want to talk about a little bit is the myth that this is sort of unchecked authority, because we have extensive oversight and control over the collection, which involves all three branches of government. First, NSA has extensive technological processes, including segregated databases, limited access and audit trails, and they have extensive internal oversight, including their own compliance officer, who oversees compliance with the rules.
Second, the Department of Justice and my office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are specifically charged with overseeing NSA’s activities to make sure that there are no compliance problems. And we report to the Congress twice a year on the use of these collection authorities and compliance problems. And if we find a problem, we correct it. Inspectors general, independent inspectors general, who, as you all know, also have an independent reporting responsibility to Congress, also are charged with undertaking a review of how these surveillance programs are carried out.
Any time that information is collected in violation of the rules, it’s reported immediately to the FISA court and is also reported to the relevant congressional oversight committees. It doesn’t matter how small the—or technical the violation is. And information that’s collected in violation of the rules has to be purged, with very limited exceptions.
Both the FISA court and the congressional oversight committees, which are Intelligence and Judiciary, take a very active role in overseeing this program and ensuring that we adhere to the requirements of the statutes and the court orders. And let me just stop and say that the suggestion that the FISA court is a rubber stamp is a complete canard, as anybody who’s ever had the privilege of appearing before Judge Bates or Judge Walton can attest.
Now, this is a complex system, and like any complex system, it’s not error free. But as I said before, every time we have found a mistake, we’ve fixed it. And the mistakes are self-reported. We find them ourselves in the exercise of our oversight. No one has ever found that there has ever been—and by no one, I mean the people at NSA, the people at the Department of Justice, the people at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the inspectors general, the FISA court and the congressional oversight committees, all of whom have visibility into this—nobody has ever found that there has ever been any intentional effort to violate the law or any intentional misuse of these tools.
As always, the fundamental issue is trust. If you believe Litt, this is all very comforting. If you don’t, it’s more lies and misdirection. Taken at face value, it explains why so many tech executives were able to say they had never heard of PRISM: it’s the internal NSA name for the database, and not the name of the program. I also note that Litt uses the word “collect” to mean what it actually means, and not the way his boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr., used it to deliberately lie to Congress.
Two weeks ago, the Guardian published two new Snowden documents. These outline how the NSA’s data-collection procedures allow it to collect lots of data on Americans, and how the FISA court fails to provide oversight over these procedures.
The documents are complicated, but I strongly recommend that people read both the Guardian analysis and the EFF analysis—and possibly the USA Today story.
Frustratingly, this has not become a major news story. It isn’t being widely reported in the media, and most people don’t know about it. At this point, the only aspect of the Snowden story that is in the news is the personal story. The press seems to have had its fill of the far more important policy issues.
I don’t know what there is that can be done about this, but it’s how we all lose.
Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.
More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pretargeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.
Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.
Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued last October and released by Edward Snowden, outlines US cyberwar policy. Most of it isn’t very interesting, but there are two paragraphs about “Offensive Cyber Effect Operations,” or OCEO, that are intriguing:
OECO can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging. The development and sustainment of OCEO capabilities, however, may require considerable time and effort if access and tools for a specific target do not already exist.
The United States Government shall identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power, establish and maintain OCEO capabilities integrated as appropriate with other US offensive capabilities, and execute those capabilities in a manner consistent with the provisions of this directive.
These two paragraphs, and another paragraph about OCEO, are the only parts of the document classified “top secret.” And that’s because what they’re saying is very dangerous.
Cyberattacks have the potential to be both immediate and devastating. They can disrupt communications systems, disable national infrastructure, or, as in the case of Stuxnet, destroy nuclear reactors; but only if they’ve been created and targeted beforehand. Before launching cyberattacks against another country, we have to go through several steps.
We have to study the details of the computer systems they’re running and determine the vulnerabilities of those systems. If we can’t find exploitable vulnerabilities, we need to create them: leaving “back doors,” in hacker speak. Then we have to build new cyberweapons designed specifically to attack those systems.
Sometimes we have to embed the hostile code in those networks—these are called “logic bombs”—to be unleashed in the future. And we have to keep penetrating those foreign networks, because computer systems always change and we need to ensure that the cyberweapons are still effective.
Like our nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, our cyberweapons arsenal must be pretargeted and ready to launch.
That’s what Obama directed the US Cyber Command to do. We can see glimpses of how effective we are in Snowden’s allegations that the NSA is currently penetrating foreign networks around the world: “We hack network backbones—like huge Internet routers, basically—that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one.”
The NSA and the US Cyber Command are basically the same thing. They’re both at Fort Meade in Maryland, and they’re both led by Gen. Keith Alexander. The same people who hack network backbones are also building weapons to destroy those backbones. At a March Senate briefing, Alexander boasted of creating more than a dozen offensive cyber units.
Longtime NSA watcher James Bamford reached the same conclusion in his recent profile of Alexander and the US Cyber Command (written before the Snowden revelations). He discussed some of the many cyberweapons the US purchases:
According to Defense News’ C4ISR Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, Endgame also offers its intelligence clients—agencies like Cyber Command, the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence—a unique map showing them exactly where their targets are located. Dubbed Bonesaw, the map displays the geolocation and digital address of basically every device connected to the Internet around the world, providing what’s called network situational awareness. The client locates a region on the password-protected web-based map, then picks a country and city—say, Beijing, China. Next the client types in the name of the target organization, such as the Ministry of Public Security’s No. 3 Research Institute, which is responsible for computer security—or simply enters its address, 6 Zhengyi Road. The map will then display what software is running on the computers inside the facility, what types of malware some may contain, and a menu of custom-designed exploits that can be used to secretly gain entry. It can also pinpoint those devices infected with malware, such as the Conficker worm, as well as networks turned into botnets and zombies—the equivalent of a back door left open…
The buying and using of such a subscription by nation-states could be seen as an act of war. ‘If you are engaged in reconnaissance on an adversary’s systems, you are laying the electronic battlefield and preparing to use it’ wrote Mike Jacobs, a former NSA director for information assurance, in a McAfee report on cyberwarfare. ‘In my opinion, these activities constitute acts of war, or at least a prelude to future acts of war.’ The question is, who else is on the secretive company’s client list? Because there is as of yet no oversight or regulation of the cyberweapons trade, companies in the cyber-industrial complex are free to sell to whomever they wish. “It should be illegal,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in cyberwarfare. “I knew about Endgame when I was in intelligence. The intelligence community didn’t like it, but they’re the largest consumer of that business.”
That’s the key question: How much of what the United States is currently doing is an act of war by international definitions? Already we’re accusing China of penetrating our systems in order to map “military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.” What PPD-20 and Snowden describe is much worse, and certainly China, and other countries, are doing the same.
All of this mapping of vulnerabilities and keeping them secret for offensive use makes the Internet less secure, and these pretargeted, ready-to-unleash cyberweapons are destabilizing forces on international relationships. Rooting around other countries’ networks, analyzing vulnerabilities, creating back doors, and leaving logic bombs could easily be construed as acts of war. And all it takes is one overachieving national leader for this all to tumble into actual war.
It’s time to stop the madness. Yes, our military needs to invest in cyberwar capabilities, but we also need international rules of cyberwar, more transparency from our own government on what we are and are not doing, international cooperation between governments, and viable cyberweapons treaties. Yes, these are difficult. Yes, it’s a long, slow process. Yes, there won’t be international consensus, certainly not in the beginning. But even with all of those problems, it’s a better path to go down than the one we’re on now.
We can start by taking most of the money we’re investing in offensive cyberwar capabilities and spend them on national cyberspace resilience. MAD, mutually assured destruction, made sense because there were two superpowers opposing each other. On the Internet there are all sorts of different powers, from nation-states to much less organized groups. An arsenal of cyberweapons begs to be used, and, as we learned from Stuxnet, there’s always collateral damage to innocents when they are. We’re much safer with a strong defense than with a counterbalancing offense.
This essay originally appeared on CNN.com. It had the title “Has U.S. Started an Internet War?”—which I had nothing to do with. Almost always, editors choose titles for my essay without asking my opinion—or telling me beforehand.
EDITED TO ADD: Here’s an essay on the NSA’s—or Cyber Command’s—TAO: the Office of Tailored Access Operations. This is the group in charge of hacking China.
According to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO’s mission is simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network exploitation (CNE).
TAO is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the president. The organization responsible for conducting such a cyberattack is US Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander.
None of this is new. Read this Seymour Hersh article on this subject from 2010.
This article, on the cozy relationship between the commercial personal-data industry and the intelligence industry, has new information on the security of Skype.
Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.
Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.
A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.
Reread that Skype denial from last July, knowing that at the time the company knew that they were giving the NSA access to customer communications. Notice how it is precisely worded to be technically accurate, yet leave the reader with the wrong conclusion. This is where we are with all the tech companies right now; we can’t trust their denials, just as we can’t trust the NSA—or the FBI—when it denies programs, capabilities, or practices.
Back in January, we wondered whom Skype lets spy on their users. Now we know.
Companies allow US intelligence to exploit vulnerabilities before it patches them:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
No word on whether these companies would delay a patch if asked nicely—or if there’s any way the government can require them to. Anyone feel safer because of this?
In an excellent essay about privacy and secrecy, law professor Daniel Solove makes an important point. There are two types of NSA secrecy being discussed. It’s easy to confuse them, but they’re very different.
Of course, if the government is trying to gather data about a particular suspect, keeping the specifics of surveillance efforts secret will decrease the likelihood of that suspect altering his or her behavior.
But secrecy at the level of an individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret. The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security. What kind of information is gathered? How is it used? How securely is it kept? What kind of oversight is there? Are these activities even legal? These questions can’t be answered, and the government can’t be held accountable, if surveillance programs are completely classified.
This distinction is also becoming important as Snowden keeps talking. There are a lot of articles about Edward Snowden cooperating with the Chinese government. I have no idea if this is true—Snowden denies it—or if it’s part of an American smear campaign designed to change the debate from the NSA surveillance programs to the whistleblower’s actions. (It worked against Assange.) In anticipation of the inevitable questions, I want to change a previous assessment statement: I consider Snowden a hero for whistleblowing on the existence and details of the NSA surveillance programs, but not for revealing specific operational secrets to the Chinese government. Charles Pierce wishes Snowden would stop talking. I agree; the more this story is about him the less it is about the NSA. Stop giving interviews and let the documents do the talking.
Back to Daniel Solove, this excellent 2011 essay on the value of privacy is making the rounds again. And it should.
Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell’s 1984 to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data. I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement’s monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.
I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.
The whole essay is worth reading, as is—I hope—my essay on the value of privacy from 2006.
I have come to believe that the solution to all of this is regulation. And it’s not going to be the regulation of data collection; it’s going to be the regulation of data use.
EDITED TO ADD (6/18): A good rebutttal to the “nothing to hide” argument.
Interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone’s phone calls, and not just metadata. Definitely worth reading.
I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone’s compressed voice calls is just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don’t know.
There’s a bit of a conspiracy-theory air to all of this speculation, but underestimating what the NSA will do is a mistake. General Alexander has told members of Congress that they can record the contents of phone calls. And they have the technical capability.
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls—in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. “They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record,” Binney said.
Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.
I believe that, to the extent that the NSA is analyzing and storing conversations, they’re doing speech-to-text as close to the source as possible and working with that. Even if you have to store the audio for conversations in foreign languages, or for snippets of conversations the conversion software is unsure of, it’s a lot fewer bits to move around and deal with.
And, by the way, I hate the term “metadata.” What’s wrong with “traffic analysis,” which is what we’ve always called that sort of thing?
Edward Snowden broke the law by releasing classified information. This isn’t under debate; it’s something everyone with a security clearance knows. It’s written in plain English on the documents you have to sign when you get a security clearance, and it’s part of the culture. The law is there for a good reason, and secrecy has an important role in military defense.
But before the Justice Department prosecutes Snowden, there are some other investigations that ought to happen.
We need to determine whether these National Security Agency programs are themselves legal. The administration has successfully barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit challenging these laws, on the grounds of national secrecy. Now that we know those arguments are without merit, it’s time for those court challenges.
It’s clear that some of the NSA programs exposed by Snowden violate the Constitution and others violate existing laws. Other people have an opposite view. The courts need to decide.
We need to determine whether classifying these programs is legal. Keeping things secret from the people is a very dangerous practice in a democracy, and the government is permitted to do so only under very specific circumstances. Reading the documents leaked so far, I don’t see anything that needs to be kept secret. The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn’t even pass the laugh test; there’s nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do. But in any case, now that the documents are public, the courts need to rule on the legality of their secrecy.
And we need to determine how we treat whistle-blowers in this country. We have whistle-blower protection laws that apply in some cases, particularly when exposing fraud, and other illegal behavior. NSA officials have repeatedly lied about the existence, and details, of these programs to Congress.
Only after all of these legal issues have been resolved should any prosecution of Snowden move forward. Because only then will we know the full extent of what he did, and how much of it is justified.
I believe that history will hail Snowden as a hero—his whistle-blowing exposed a surveillance state and a secrecy machine run amok. I’m less optimistic of how the present day will treat him, and hope that the debate right now is less about the man and more about the government he exposed.
This essay was originally published on the New York Times Room for Debate blog, as part of a series of essays on the topic.
EDITED TO ADD (6/13): There’s a big discussion of this on Reddit.
This 127-page report was just published by the UK Defence Academy. I have not read it yet, but it looks really interesting.
Executive Summary: This report presents a systematic way of thinking about cyberpower and its use by a variety of global players. The urgency of addressing cyberpower in this way is a consequence of the very high value of the Internet and the hazards of its current militarization.
Cyberpower and cyber security are conceptualized as a ‘Global Game’ with a novel ‘Cyber Gameboard’ consisting of a nine-cell grid. The horizontal direction on the grid is divided into three columns representing aspects of information (i.e. cyber): connection, computation and cognition. The vertical direction on the grid is divided into three rows representing types of power: coercion, co-option, and cooperation. The nine cells of the grid represent all the possible combinations of power and information, that is, forms of cyberpower.
The Cyber Gameboard itself is also an abstract representation of the surface of cyberspace, or C-space as defined in this report. C-space is understood as a networked medium capable of conveying various combinations of power and information to produce effects in physical or ‘flow space,’ referred to as F-space in this report. Game play is understood as the projection via C-space of a cyberpower capability existing in any one cell of the gameboard to produce an effect in F-space vis-a-vis another player in any other cell of the gameboard. By default, the Cyber Game is played either actively or passively by all those using network connected computers. The players include states, businesses, NGOs, individuals, non-state political groups, and organized crime, among others. Each player is seen as having a certain level of cyberpower when its capability in each cell is summed across the whole board. In general states have the most cyberpower.
The possible future path of the game is depicted by two scenarios, N-topia and N-crash. These are the stakes for which the Cyber Game is played. N-topia represents the upside potential of the game, in which the full value of a globally connected knowledge society is realized. N-crash represents the downside potential, in which militarization and fragmentation of the Internet cause its value to be substantially destroyed. Which scenario eventuates will be determined largely by the overall pattern of play of the Cyber Game.
States have a high level of responsibility for determining the outcome. The current pattern of play is beginning to resemble traditional state-on-state geopolitical conflict. This puts the civil Internet at risk, and civilian cyber players are already getting caught in the crossfire. As long as the civil Internet remains undefended and easily permeable to cyber attack it will be hard to achieve the N-topia scenario.
Defending the civil Internet in depth, and hardening it by re-architecting will allow its full social and economic value to be realized but will restrict the potential for espionage and surveillance by states. This trade-off is net positive and in accordance with the espoused values of Western-style democracies. It does however call for leadership based on enlightened self-interest by state players.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.