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Leaked ISIS Documents

Looks like tens of thousands of ISIS documents have been leaked. Where did they come from? We don’t know:

Documents listing the names of Islamic State fighters have been touted around the Middle East for months, dangled in front of media outlets for large sums of money.

[…]

Ramsay said he met the source of the documents in Turkey, an individual calling himself Abu Hamed who had been in the Free Syrian Army rebel group and switched to Isis before becoming disillusioned with it.

Sky said the documents were on a memory stick stolen from the head of Isis’s internal security police.

The Syrian opposition news website, Zaman al-Wasl, in a report billed as “exclusive” and published before Sky’s, said it had the personal data on 1,736 fighters and that its documents had come from Isis’s general administration of borders.

Posted on March 11, 2016 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

WikiLeaks Publishes NSA Target List

As part of an ongoing series of classified NSA target list and raw intercepts, WikiLeaks published details of the NSA’s spying on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy, and key Japanese and EU trade reps. WikiLeaks never says this, but it’s pretty obvious that these documents don’t come from Snowden’s archive.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Spying on foreign leaders is exactly what I expect the NSA to do. It’s spying on the rest of the world that I have a problem with.

Other leaks in this series: France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Italy, the European Union, and the United Nations.

BoingBoing post.

Posted on March 1, 2016 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

"The Declining Half-Life of Secrets"

Several times I’ve mentioned Peter Swire’s concept of “the declining half-life of secrets.” He’s finally written it up:

The nature of secrets is changing. Secrets that would once have survived the 25 or 50 year test of time are more and more prone to leaks. The declining half-life of secrets has implications for the intelligence community and other secretive agencies, as they must now wrestle with new challenges posed by the transformative power of information technology innovation as well as the changing methods and targets of intelligence collection.

Posted on September 3, 2015 at 8:43 AM • View Comments

NSA German Intercepts

On Friday, WikiLeaks published three summaries of NSA intercepts of German government communications. To me, the most interesting thing is not the intercept analyses, but this spreadsheet of intelligence targets. Here we learn the specific telephone numbers being targeted, who owns those phone numbers, the office within the NSA that processes the raw communications received, why the target is being spied on (in this case, all are designated as “Germany: Political Affairs”), and when we started spying using this particular justification. It’s one of the few glimpses we have into the bureaucracy of surveillance.

Presumably this is from the same leaker who gave WikiLeaks the French intercepts they published a week ago. (And you can read the intelligence target spreadsheet for France, too. And another for Brazil that WikiLeaks published on Saturday; Intercept commentary here.) Now that we’ve seen a few top secret summaries of eavesdropping on German, French, and Brazilian communications, and given what I know of Julian Assange’s tactics, my guess is that there is a lot more where this came from.

Der Spiegel is all over this story.

Posted on July 6, 2015 at 5:13 AM • View Comments

Yet Another Leaker—with the NSA's French Intercepts

Wikileaks has published some NSA SIGINT documents describing intercepted French government communications. This seems not be from the Snowden documents. It could be one of the other NSA leakers, or it could be someone else entirely.

As leaks go, this isn’t much. As I’ve said before, spying on foreign leaders is the kind of thing we want the NSA to do. I’m sure French Intelligence does the same to us.

EDITED TO ADD (6/25): To me, more interesting than the intercepts is the spreadsheet of NSA surveillance targets. That spreadsheet gives us a glimpse into the US process of surveillance: what US government office initially asked for the surveillance, what NSA office is tasked with analyzing the intelligence collected, where a particular target is on the priorities list, and so on.

Posted on June 25, 2015 at 12:51 PM • View Comments

Counting the US Intelligence Community Leakers

It’s getting hard to keep track of the US intelligence community leakers without a scorecard. So here’s my attempt:

Leaker #1: Chelsea Manning.
Leaker #2: Edward Snowden.
Leaker #3: The person who leaked secret documents to Jake Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, and others in Germany: the Angela Merkel surveillance story, the TAO catalog, the X-KEYSCORE rules. My guess is that this is either an NSA employee or contractor working in Germany, or someone from German intelligence who has access to NSA documents. Snowden has said that he is not the source for the Merkel story, and Greenwald has confirmed that the Snowden documents are not the source for the X-KEYSCORE rules. This might be the “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany” from this story—or maybe that’s someone else entirely.
Leaker #4: “A source in the intelligence community,” according to the Intercept, who leaked information about the Terrorist Screening Database, the “second leaker” from the movie Citizen Four. Greenwald promises a lot from him: “Snowden, at a meeting with Greenwald in Moscow, expresses surprise at the level of information apparently coming from this new source. Greenwald, fearing he will be overheard, writes the details on scraps of paper.” We have seen nothing since, though. This is probably the leaker the FBI identified, although we have heard nothing further about that, either.
Leaker #5: Someone who is leaking CIA documents.
Leaker #6: The person who leaked secret information about WTO spying to the Intercept and the New Zealand Herald. This isn’t Snowden; the Intercept is very careful to identify him as the source when it writes about the documents he provided. Neither publication give any indication of how it was obtained. This might be Leaker #3, since it contains X-KEYSCORE rules.
Leaker #7: The person who just leaked secret information about the US drone program to the Intercept and Der Spiegel. This also might be Leaker #3, since there is a Germany connection. According to the Intercept: “The slides were provided by a source with knowledge of the U.S. government’s drone program who declined to be identified because of fears of retribution.” That implies someone new.

Am I missing anyone?

Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing. I wrote about the value of whistleblowers in Data and Goliath.

Way back in June 2013, Glenn Greenwald said that “courage is contagious.” He seems to be correct.

This post was originally published on the Lawfare blog.

EDITED TO ADD (4/22): News article.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have included Manning in this list. I wanted it to be a list of active leaks, not historical leaks. And while Snowden is no longer leaking information, the reporters who received his documents are still releasing bits and pieces.

Posted on April 20, 2015 at 11:18 AM • View Comments

New Zealand's XKEYSCORE Use

The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald have reported that New Zealand spied on communications about the World Trade Organization director-general candidates. I’m not sure why this is news; it seems like a perfectly reasonable national intelligence target. More interesting to me is that the Intercept published the XKEYSCORE rules. It’s interesting to see how primitive the keyword targeting is, and how broadly it collects e-mails.

The second really important point is that Edward Snowden’s name is mentioned nowhere in the stories. Given how scrupulous the Intercept is about identifying him as the source of his NSA documents, I have to conclude that this is from another leaker. For a while, I have believed that there are at least three leakers inside the Five Eyes intelligence community, plus another CIA leaker. What I have called Leaker #2 has previously revealed XKEYSCORE rules. Whether this new disclosure is from Leaker #2 or a new Leaker #5, I have no idea. I hope someone is keeping a list.

Posted on March 26, 2015 at 9:46 AM • View Comments

Leaked CIA Documents

I haven’t seen much press mention about the leaked CIA documents that have appeared on WikiLeaks this month.

There are three:

The CIA review of high-value target assassination programs, classified SECRET, from 2009.
The CIA’s advice for agents going through airport security and surviving secondary screening, classified SECRET, from 2011.
The CIA’s advice for agents traveling into the Schengen area of the EU, classified SECRET, dated 2012.

These documents are more general than what we’ve seen from Snowden, but—assuming they’re real—these are still national-security leaks. You’d think there would be more news about this, and more reaction from the US government.

Posted on December 29, 2014 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

US Intelligence "Second Leaker" Identified

There’s a report that the FBI has identified a second leaker:

The case in question involves an Aug. 5 story published by The Intercept, an investigative website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who first published sensitive NSA documents obtained from Snowden.

Headlined “Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers,” the story cited a classified government document showing that nearly half the people on the U.S. government’s master terrorist screening database had “no recognized terrorist affiliation.”

The story, co-authored by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, was accompanied by a document “obtained from a source in the intelligence community” providing details about the watch-listing system that were dated as late as August 2013, months after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and revealed himself as the leaker of thousands of top secret documents from the NSA.

I think this is “Leaker #3” on my list, even though it’s probably the “second leaker” discussed in the documentary Citizen Four.

Posted on October 27, 2014 at 4:08 PM • View Comments

New Snowden Interview in Wired

There’s a new article on Edward Snowden in Wired. It’s written by longtime NSA watcher James Bamford, who interviewed Snowden in Moscow.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in the article, but I want to highlight two new revelations. One is that the NSA was responsible for a 2012 Internet blackout in Syria:

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible….

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”