I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners’ names and covering the story of America’s not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the “American Gulag.” Later, as hundreds more nameless “enemy combatants” were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantánamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why — and when the “war on terror” would end.

I collected boxes of files and spreadsheets of data, building a trove of Guantánamo research as I moved to new jobs and new cities. Along the way, I encountered other reporters and researchers with similar habits and disparate methods, all seeking to understand what was going on down there.

Some 780 Muslim men have been held at Guantánamo since 2002. More than 500 were released during the Bush administration, about 200 under President Barack Obama, one by President Donald Trump, and one so far by President Joe Biden. Many have been repatriated, while others have been transferred to countries that negotiated with the U.S. to accept them. Nine died in custody. Thirty-nine remain at Guantánamo today. Of those, 18 have been approved for transfer to other countries, including five approved by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

In 2004, the Post appended my list of detainees and added my name to the Page 1 byline of a story headlined “Guantánamo — A Holding Cell In War on Terror.” Reporters Scott Higham and Joe Stephens had visited the U.S. enclave in Cuba while I stayed behind in the newsroom. They brought me back a baseball cap with the logo of the Joint Detention Operations Group, known as JDOG, from the Guantánamo gift shop.

In September 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA’s secret detention program, saying that 14 “high-value detainees” in CIA black sites had been brought to Guantánamo. (“I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture,” Bush pledged in the same speech. “It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”)

“So I’m announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay,” the president said to applause from a supportive audience in the White House. “They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense. As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice.”

Fifteen years later, the organizers of the 9/11 attacks still have not faced justice.

The Obama Years

On January 22, 2009, Obama’s second day in office, he signed an executive order to shut down Guantánamo within a year. He wanted to try the 9/11 architects in U.S. federal courts, but a Democratic-controlled Congress blocked him. In 2011, the government initiated a new procedure for reviewing the status of the remaining detainees, and the military commission trials were reset. I was following the “war on terror” as it came home.

At NPR, where I had by then joined a new investigative team, I worked with criminal justice reporter Carrie Johnson to expose another secretive prison system right here in the U.S., where convicted terrorists, mostly Muslim, were segregated in facilities known as Communications Management Units. Our editors dubbed these prisons “Guantánamo North.”

We could not visit the facilities, but we met with prisoners who had been released, including one man at his home in Washington, D.C. (The only former Guantánamo detainee I’ve met in real life, as opposed to via Zoom, is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned there for six years. We talked when I was seated at his table at an awards banquet during a journalism conference in Norway in 2008.)

In April 2011, NPR and the Times collaborated to publish a trove of secret Guantánamo documents obtained by WikiLeaks. I went up to New York to read and process them for inclusion in the Guantánamo Docket database while reporting on the revelations for NPR.

Finally, on May 5, 2012, the 9/11 defendants were arraigned in the military courtroom in Guantánamo. I was watching on closed-circuit TV from a building in Fort Meade with a large group of reporters who had not made it onto the military-approved media trip to Guantánamo. As the hours passed, we glimpsed the accused when the camera panned over the defense tables. It was our first look at a gray-bearded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — known to everyone as “KSM” — who would appear worldwide the next day in sketch artist Janet Hamlin’s amazing drawing.

Torture was always the subtext. As months and years of pretrial hearings dragged on, the defense lawyers continued to demand evidence about the conditions under which the captives had been held, details of their “enhanced interrogations,” and the reliability of admissions made while being held underwater, locked in a box, or standing naked and sleep-deprived in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Guantánamo.

After I joined The Intercept in 2014, I continued to trek to Fort Meade for the military commission hearings and to the Pentagon to watch the Periodic Review Board process launched during the Obama administration. Detainees who have not yet been charged — despite being held for 15 to 20 years — can make their case to a panel of U.S. defense and intelligence officials as to whether they still “pose a threat.” The “open” portion, which observers can watch on live video at the Pentagon, lasts at most 15 minutes, and the detainee doesn’t speak. I attend these so that I can see the prisoners and report back, and so that the Pentagon knows that yes, the press is still interested in how they look and the aging of the detainee population. It goes without saying that there are very few in the media room for these ongoing hearings.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the torture regime was released in December 2014, my Intercept colleagues and I mined the text and footnotes to map the black sites and looked for the CIA detainees who didn’t get to Guantánamo.

The banality of the torture system shone through in 2016 as we developed Guantánamo stories from The Intercept’s archive of NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2003, an NSA staffer described an assignment there. As we reported:

“On a given week,” he wrote, he would “pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.”

Outside work, “fun awaits,” he enthused. “Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA.” If water sports were “not your cup of tea,” there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. “Relaxing is easy,” he concluded.

The Trump Era

In January 2017, I went to Guantánamo for the first time, as a reporter for The Intercept covering the 9/11 military commission hearings. Under the guidance of Rosenberg, the doyenne of the Gitmo press corps who was then writing for the Miami Herald, I was introduced to the amenities of the press room, the media sleeping tents, latrines, showers, and the confusing, ever-changing rules of the road. No Wi-Fi except at the supermarket complex, pay-by-the-week internet access in the press room, and don’t forget your ethernet connector. Military minders accompanying us everywhere on base. Operational security — OPSEC — reviews of every photo taken every day. Notebooks and pens only in the visitor gallery at the back of the courtroom, where we sat separated by glass from the defendants, legal teams, and judge. No drawing or doodling allowed.

I was excited to be there, in the room as the 9/11 defendants walked in, surrounded by military guards until they took their seats, then turning to chat among themselves. Five defendants, each with a legal defense team headed by “learned counsel,” meaning an attorney experienced in death penalty cases.

Also in the visitor gallery, separated from the press and nongovernmental organization representatives by a curtain, were relatives of the victims, bearing witness to the proceedings.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers “faking it.”

In June 2018, I went on the Joint Task Force Guantánamo media tour. JTF GTMO is in charge of the detention center. We were able to go inside the prison, although mostly to see a Potemkin village reproduction of a cellblock, complete with a prison library. With my former Intercept colleague Miriam Pensack and a crew from Voice of America, we were given access to parts of the mysterious facility, including lots of institutional kitchens. We even briefly glimpsed one detainee from inside the guard center, a man I was later able to identify from his physical description in the files I’d been compiling for the previous 16 years.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers “faking it.” We also went on a drive to the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held in 2002 and the location of those infamous photos of men in orange jumpsuits and shackles. We took photos of the fences and weeds and drove to the lonely border with Cuba, where more photos were allowed and then OPSEC’d.

On September 11, 2019, reporters and victims’ relatives joined sailors, soldiers, their families, and military commission attorneys at the base for the annual 9/11 evening run that commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fallen jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At sunset, near the turnaround mark, I saw the Windward Point Lighthouse, built in 1904 by the 1898 U.S. occupiers of Guantánamo. I was the last person to finish the race on that beautiful tropical night. The next day, back in the courtroom, motion hearings about classified evidence and discovery and potential witnesses continued.

Returning in January 2020, I watched as the defense called a reluctant and antagonistic witness, James Mitchell, a psychologist known as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques. He testified just yards from the defendants waterboarded under his orders in the black sites. “I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us,” Mitchell said, holding back tears. “I’d get up today and do it again.”

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. The military commissions were suspended for more than a year and a half. When they restarted, the media tents were gone and public health restrictions prevailed. Wary, I watched from Fort Meade in August 2021 as the arraignment of the three alleged Bali bombers, 18 years after their capture, dissolved into disagreements over the quality of the Malaysian interpreters.

In November 2021, there were required Covid tests, masks, and takeout meals in hotel rooms and on backyard patio tables. Camp X-Ray was now off-limits, no photos were allowed, and we had to agree that any selfies from the border gate would not be published or posted. There was a new judge in the 9/11 case — the fourth — and he had a lot of catching up to do. The chief prosecutor was gone, and the chief defense officer was retiring. Some of the victims’ families were now speaking out about possible plea agreements, instead of a capital trial after 20 years of waiting.

The Biden administration could take some relatively simple steps to increase transparency around Guantánamo. To begin with, it could declassify the 6,000-page Senate torture report. A second courtroom now being built at Guantánamo for $4 million could have facilities for press to observe the proceedings in person, which are not in the current plans. And it could speed up the Freedom of Information Act process. My 2017 request for State Department documents relating to the detainee transfer process is still open, with a projected delivery date in 2023.

I signed up for this month’s session at Guantánamo so that I could be there on the 20th anniversary of the first detention, which was Tuesday. But the hearings in the 9/11 case were canceled. So I didn’t take an Uber to Joint Base Andrews at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday for a Covid test and a charter flight to Cuba a few hours later. I didn’t need my ethernet connector or my bug spray or my T-Mobile phone because that’s the only carrier on the base.

And my press ID? I hung it on a hook with an old Capitol Hill pass, where it’ll stay until the trial of the 9/11 defendants begins in 2023.

The post I Spent 20 Years Covering America’s Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawyers, including one representing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told a war court in Guantánamo Bay this month that the sanitized summaries of CIA cables provided to defense attorneys for the five alleged attackers do not contain critical details such as dates and which torture techniques were used. Meanwhile, journalists for The Intercept and other publications, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, have received fuller access to the cables by requesting them directly from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.

“We have a distinct difference between what’s available to the defendants in this capital case in discovery on the one hand and to the general public under FOIA in another,” David Nevin, an attorney for Mohammed, told the court. “And apparently there are situations in which security-cleared lawyers defending people in this capital case on trial for their life are entitled to less information than is available to the general public.”

The omissions – the result of a numbing bureaucratic process by which government prosecutors essentially rewrite the cables before sharing them with lawyers for the accused, leaving out material they view as overly sensitive or unimportant – are the latest sign of the government’s failures to ensure a robust defense for the men charged in the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people more than 20 years ago.

The CIA cables documenting the interrogation and torture of Mohammed and the other defendants are redacted before being released, meaning that some information is blacked out, with indications of the legal justification, which can include concerns about national security, personal privacy, or that the release could compromise trade secrets. But even those redacted documents often include more detail than the sanitized summaries produced by the prosecution in the 9/11 case.

For example, summaries provided to the defense about the CIA’s interrogations of Mohammed at black sites between his capture on March 1 and March 22, 2003 — a critical three-week interval — include no dates. Yet independent journalist and Intercept contributor Daniel DeFraia used FOIA to obtain more than 50 CIA documents related to Mohammed’s questioning and torture with dates prior to March 22. The cables provided under FOIA also include details and original narratives in the words of the CIA interrogation teams; in the sanitized summaries, those words have been rephrased by the prosecution. In 2019, The Intercept published cables from DeFraia’s trove containing information that is still not available to defense lawyers in the military commission case charging Mohammed and his four alleged accomplices with plotting the September 11 attacks.

“Inconsistent redactions demonstrate that the government is not taking real care to redact only what is necessary, and it’s in fact very clearly over-redacting things that are public,” Dror Ladin, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, told The Intercept.

“What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

The omissions are particularly important in the 9/11 case because the defendants could face the death penalty if convicted. Their sentence could depend in large part on what U.S. intelligence agencies did to them, Ladin said.

“For the defense counsel to fully investigate that question, they need a full picture of what was done to them. When the CIA obstructs the dates, the locations, the people who were involved, the people responsible, it becomes very, very difficult to make that a really concrete picture,” Ladin said. “It’s one thing to just throw around the words ‘torture’ or ‘degrading treatment.’ It’s another thing to really walk through what it was like every day for a person who is being waterboarded over and over and over, or being starved, or being hung from his hands.”

James Connell, lead attorney for 9/11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, has used documents provided to the public under FOIA and other declassification orders to supplement the court-regulated discovery and challenge gaps in the information he received from prosecutors.

“Sometimes [the cables released under FOIA] have information in them that the government has invoked national security privilege over,” Connell told The Intercept. “In those situations, the public gets more access to once-classified information than the defense does.”

So why is the government withholding this information, under the eyes of attorneys and judges, in a high-profile capital case?

“The records ultimately show the bad acts of the government,” said Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed News reporter whose FOIA lawsuits have led to the release of thousands of redacted pages of CIA documents related to the Senate torture report. “What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

In Guantánamo earlier this month, pretrial hearings in the 9/11 case focused on efforts to discover more information about coordination among government agencies in the interrogation and torture of the five men being tried jointly.

“If documents turn up after a representation that there’s nothing there, it wouldn’t be the first time,” said David Bruck, lead attorney for Ramzi bin al-Shibh. “It wouldn’t be the 50th time in the course of these proceedings, as near as I’ve been able to reconstruct.”

The defense teams have been seeking documents and witnesses from the prosecution since the pretrial hearings began in 2012. The prosecution has turned over more than a half-million pages, including 23,000 relating to the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, or RDI, program. But discovery litigation continues into its ninth year, as the government controls what the defense will see. The issue of national security classification further restricts access to the full record of events that took place in the black sites and later. Arguments over what can be produced are frequently heard in closed sessions, which neither the defendants nor the public may attend, and the filings are not available on the docket.

Over the 20 years since the attacks, documents and information on the 9/11 plots and the CIA rendition program in the hunt for Al Qaeda have been publicly released in government reports like the 2005 9/11 Commission Report and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. They have also entered the public record as evidence in criminal and civil trials; through FOIA requests by journalists, human rights organizations, and citizens; through declassification requests to government agencies; and in records maintained at the National Archives and books published by members of the intelligence community, like CIA contract psychologist James E. Mitchell’s “Enhanced Interrogation.”

Just this September, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to oversee the declassification of documents related to the FBI’s September 11 investigations. Among the documents posted on the agency’s web site in response was an FBI intelligence requirements document that has come up previously in the 9/11 military commission testimony. According to Connell, Baluchi’s attorney, the newly released version differs from the one he was able to use in court in October 2019.

“The FBI intelligence requirement released under the Executive Order includes more than a dozen elements redacted from the version provided by the prosecution in discovery, including what appears to be the code name of the investigation,” Connell told The Intercept this month.

Getting any documents at all is often a long and exhausting process for the 9/11 defendants. Defense lawyers file motions to compel the government to give them information, which are then argued in court for months before a judge decides. And then, as heard in court this month, the documents may not be provided after all.

“The government is taking the approach that they’re not going to turn over discovery unless we fight everything document by document with motions to compel and document requests,” Sean M. Gleason, attorney for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, told Col. Matthew N. McCall, who was appointed in August and is the fourth judge to preside over the case. “If that is their tact, Your Honor, we’re going to be trying this case forever.”

When the hearings resumed this September, at the 20th anniversary of the attacks, McCall faced a trial record with more than 10,500 filings on the docket. This month’s hearings, which adjourned on November 19 at Guantánamo Bay, are the 43rd pretrial session since the five defendants were arraigned in May 2012.

In January 2020, before the proceedings came to a halt due to the pandemic, the psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture techniques, Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, testified as the defendants watched just yards away, and 9/11 victim family members and reporters viewed from a glass-walled gallery. The methods, including waterboarding, were designed to “condition” prisoners to provide information to interrogators and debriefers.

Any statements and confessions the defendants made while they were in the black sites from 2002 to September 2006 have already been suppressed from the trial record. Now the defense is seeking to suppress statements the accused made in January 2007, when a so-called clean team from the FBI restarted the interrogation process in Guantanamo. The court learned this month that FBI agents were detailed to the CIA’s RDI program, a fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee that produced the 2014 torture report apparently did not know.

Defense attorneys told the court that the FBI interrogations should be thrown out, arguing that statements the accused made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture. The prosecution’s stance is that the men’s statements to the FBI should be allowed because four months passed between the end of their black site torture and their reinterrogation at Guantánamo.

Connell is pursuing his own FOIA lawsuits to produce documents he has been denied in discovery. On October 18, in a U.S. District Court filing in Washington, D.C., the CIA stated it had identified 765 responsive documents, representing 3,125 pages of material that it will process and release to Connell on a quarterly basis starting in January 2022.

In the Guantánamo courtroom, lead prosecutor Clayton G. Trivett Jr. volunteered to review classified CIA documents previously provided to the defense. “In no circumstance should the public be getting more information about the same topic than a capital defendant does,” he stated. “We are in violent agreement on that.”

Daniel DeFraia contributed reporting.

The post Lawyers for Accused 9/11 Plotters Say Government Withheld Public Information appeared first on The Intercept.

Welcome to Guantánamo Bay, where an unused shackle is a small reminder of the abnormal fusing into the normal, nearly two decades after the first prisoners of the “war on terror” began arriving here. The defendants now are not chained, and they appear for court in clothing of their choice, often camouflage jackets or traditional garments worn in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen; there are no more government-issued jumpsuits.

At the U.S. naval base that hosts the extraordinary military commissions for the prosecution of post-9/11 detainees, a view of the Sierra Maestra in the distance is one of the few reminders that you are in Cuba. There’s also a souvenir shop with trinkets that show sites in Havana you can’t drive or fly to from here. This is not that Cuba.

The U.S. military has attempted for years to devise a system for trying the men accused of organizing or aiding the terror attacks against America, but without giving them the benefit of a trial in federal court. This case has dragged on for almost eight years without a trial formally getting underway. There have been 40 pretrial hearings and extended arguments over what evidence can be introduced — and, for instance, whether the word “torture” can be used in relation to the interrogations that took place at the CIA’s notorious “black sites.”

The large contingent of prosecution attorneys and staff are on the right, led by Martins, always crisply uniformed, with a chest full of medals and badges. His pedigree is unassailable: Martins has degrees from West Point, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Air Force military judge Col. W. Shane Cohen, sitting on the bench, is the third judge to preside in this case; he was appointed last June.

The jury box is empty for now. These hearings on pretrial motions have been going on since 2012. When the trial begins, now set by Cohen for January 11, 2021, the panel will be made up of military officers flown in for the proceedings.

At the rear of the court, behind a glass wall, is a gallery with four rows of seats for media, nongovernmental observers, and their military escorts. There is also a section reserved for the families of the victims of the attacks. Ten family members attended daily last week, and a curtain was drawn between them and the other observers.

The gallery sees the live scene, but hears the proceedings on a 40-second delay, with the exchanges switching to white noise if classified issues are mentioned. It’s a confusing spectacle: Gestures seen on the monitors in the gallery, and the words that go with them, lag behind what’s happening in front of your eyes. When the judge calls for a break, we’re told by our escorts to rise, even though the monitors above our heads show the judge still seated.

It is a strict atmosphere. Observers are monitored by cameras mounted on the walls and military minders in the gallery. No electronic devices are permitted. Reporters scribble furiously in their notepads as a sketch artist wields her pastels (her sketches must be approved and stamped by an information security officer before she can take them out of the courtroom, and they can’t be altered afterwards).

Last week, Connell, the defense lawyer, pursued questions taken from Mitchell’s 2016 book “Enhanced Interrogation,” and other books by former CIA employees which had undergone prepublication review by the agency. But in a strange twist, a new classification guidance redacts categories of information in those books. This means that although the books contain information that is available to anyone with a library card or enough money to buy a copy, the defense lawyers try not to mention the forbidden categories.

The countries where the accused and others were held at black sites are cloaked by the classification guidance as Location 2, Location 3, Location 4, and so on. They are identified in the Senate’s 2014 torture report by colors, for instance, COBALT, GREEN, and BLUE. News stories and books about the CIA torture program place those three black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, and Poland (there were at least five others in various countries).

The black site that held some of these prisoners in Guantánamo in 2003-2004 was only a rumor until the Senate’s report, but now can be named in court. Mitchell was a debriefer at that site for several months, making a distinction from the locations  where, in his words, “enhanced interrogation techniques” were “applied.” Mitchell and Jessen’s multiple roles as interrogator, debriefer, and psychologist, and their status as contractors in the black sites, are questioned by the defense as potential conflicts.

Euphemism is a foundation of the torture structure. Even Mitchell railed against some of the words used by the government to describe the program he was pursuing: “You want to watch the use of euphemism for what you’re doing. Don’t be fooled by ‘enhanced interrogation,’ you are doing coercive physical techniques,” he said last week. So there is a euphemism for the euphemism, which in plain English is torture.

Euphemism is a foundation of the torture structure.

As the testimony continues, euphemisms abound. There are code words for locations as well as code numbers and pseudonyms for names. An overlay of psychological terminology tries to give method and reason to examples of physical abuse. These phrases are used: “intelligence requirements,” “abusive drift,” “countermeasures to resistance,” “Pavlovian response,” “learned helplessness,” “negative reinforcement,” “conditioning strategy,” a chart of “moral disengagement.” Torturers used a technique known as “walling,” in which a detainee is thrown against a wall that is described as “safe” because it is made of plywood and constructed to have “bounce.” When walling was used, a beach towel was protectively wrapped around the prisoner’s neck and later became a “Pavlovian” tool that the detainee could be shown to remind him of the suffering he’d endured. This is how torturers speak, cloaking their actions in anodyne language.

During the hearings, CIA cables were either flashed on the overhead monitor if they had been declassified, or remained hidden from our view if they were still secret, recounting the number of slaps, the hours and days of sleep deprivation, the stopwatch counts of waterboard drownings, the rounds of “walling.” The effect is deadening to the observer; it seems part of a bureaucracy of nightmares.

Just yards away from the witnesses, the accused are listening to an Arabic translation of the proceedings. What are they thinking? A lawyer for Hawsawi, Walter Ruiz, said that when he asked his client for a reaction to Mitchell as a witness, Hawsawi said: “Arrogant.”

On Friday, Hawsawi had to leave the courtroom to receive a dose of Tramadol for the pain he has suffered since his detention at a black site in Afghanistan (known as COBALT in the Senate report, or Location 2 in the courtroom’s lingo). Other defense lawyers had no comment from their clients, but said that seeing the interrogator was difficult for them, even more than a decade after their torture.

Mitchell’s testimony last week focused on the treatment of Ammar al Baluchi at a CIA black site in Afghanistan. Mitchell did not participate in that interrogation and was willing to discuss the “abusive drift” of another CIA interrogator. This man, who died soon after his retirement in 2003, was identified by the Washington Post more than five years ago as Charlie Wise, but was not named in court during multiple questions and answers about his actions. In court he was referred to only as “NX2,” and Mitchell called him the “new sheriff.” Wise conducted this session of “walling” along with four of his trainees.

“It looked like they used your client as a training prop,” Mitchell told Baluchi’s lawyer. Mitchell sought to put distance between his team and Wise, saying: “We didn’t have them practice on detainees.”

A declassified CIA report, shown to the witness and on monitors in the courtroom and gallery, described what happened that day: “After the session Ammar was returned to his cell naked and placed in the standing sleep deprivation position, hands at eye level, where he will remain until the next interrogation session the following day.” Baluchi apparently stood in that position for 44 hours.

On Friday, after many allusions to an October 2001 statement by an anonymous George W. Bush administration official that “the gloves are off,” the word “torture” was finally spoken by Ruiz, learned counsel for Hawsawi, over objections by the prosecution.

“I know torture’s a dirty word,” Ruiz said. “I’ll tell you what, judge, I’m not going to sanitize this for their concerns.”

Ruiz described what was done to Hawsawi during his interrogations (not by Mitchell, but allegedly by another CIA interrogator). Hawsawi underwent a “bath” where his “ass” and “balls” (the words used by Ruiz in court) and then face were scrubbed with a stiff brush; he was hung naked from the ceiling; his face was slapped; he was placed in stress positions; and he was doused with cold water. Mitchell subsequently participated in a psychological assessment of Hawsawi, which was displayed in the courtroom. Hawsawi was the only defendant in the courtroom watching at the time.

“Did it matter in your assessment that Mr. Al Hawsawi had been tortured in this many ways?” Ruiz asked. “Did it matter to you?”

Mitchell objected to the characterization of Hawsawi’s treatment as “torture.”

Cohen, the judge, responded, “Of course he says no because he doesn’t think it is torture.”

Ruiz then showed a video clip of a 2018 podcast in which Mitchell said: “We never used the word torture. Because torture’s a crime.”

Guantánamo is on a tropical island that tends to be balmy, but extreme weather is not unknown. On Wednesday and Thursday last week, the canvas tents housing nongovernmental observers and journalists were whipped by apocalyptic winds, and on Tuesday at 2:10 pm, tremors from an earthquake in the Caribbean sea rocked the courtroom. After a brief pause, the hearing continued.

The post At Guantánamo Bay, Torture Apologists Take Refuge in Empty Code Words and Euphemisms appeared first on The Intercept.

“I suspected from the beginning that I would end up here,” James Mitchell told a Guantánamo Bay courtroom. Dressed in a charcoal suit and bright red tie, Mitchell stated that although he could have testified over a video link, he had chosen to come in person. “I did it for the victims and families,” he told James G. Connell III, an attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the accused plotters. “Not for you.”

He added: “You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. [Bruce] Jessen for years.”

Mitchell and his colleague Jessen were previously questioned in videotaped depositions in a civil case, but the proceedings underway at the military court complex in Guantánamo represent the first courtroom appearances by the two psychologists as witnesses. On Tuesday, the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sat just yards from the men who waterboarded him 183 times in a CIA black site in Poland in March 2003.

The topic of Tuesday’s hearing was a motion to suppress statements made by the 9/11 defendants while they were being held in detention, even after they were brought from the CIA’s black sites to Guantánamo. The defense attorneys allege that the statements the men made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture, which was overseen by Mitchell and Jessen.

The torture techniques, approved by the George W. Bush administration, were used by the CIA as part of the rendition, detention, and interrogation program from 2002 to 2008. These methods, including waterboarding, were designed to “condition” prisoners to provide information to interrogators and debriefers.

The CIA renounced the harsh interrogation techniques in 2009, and the Senate’s torture report later found that the program was a violation of U.S. and international law that failed to generate usable information for counterterrorism operations.

Mitchell and Jessen ran a contracting company that provided interrogators and security personnel to the CIA program at a cost of $81 million over several years. During that time, the psychologists personally conducted interrogations, trained interrogators, participated in debriefings, and observed interrogations.

In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the pair in federal court in Spokane, Washington, on behalf of two former detainees, as well as the family of another prisoner who died in custody at a black site. The two psychologists provided testimony in that case, which was settled out of court in 2017. The terms of the settlement remain confidential. In a joint statement released by the parties, Mitchell and Jessen acknowledged “that they worked with the CIA to develop a program … that contemplated the use of specific coercive methods to interrogate certain detainees,” but asserted that the abuses occurred without their knowledge or involvement and that as a result, they were not responsible.

Mohammed’s co-defendants Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and Mohammed’s nephew Baluchi also endured torture techniques proposed by Mitchell and Jessen, and they, too, were present in the courtroom on Tuesday. There were no audible reactions from the defendants during the morning testimony, which is expected to continue through next week.

Questioning on Tuesday morning focused on Mitchell’s 2016 book “Enhanced Interrogation,” written with former CIA chief spokesperson Bill Harlow, in which Mitchell vehemently objects to the findings of the Senate’s 2014 torture report. In a bizarre twist, the book contains information that defense attorneys in the 9/11 case may be barred from using under a new “classification guidance” delivered by the government last Thursday and revised Tuesday morning.

The guidance — which is itself classified — contains a restriction on presenting information deemed a threat to national security. For example, although the names of countries where black sites were located are now known from books and European court proceedings, they cannot be mentioned in the courtroom at Guantánamo.

Mitchell proved an antagonistic witness. He confirmed that his book had undergone an intensive pre-publication review by the CIA and the Department of Defense, and said that prior to the new restrictions, no one had suggested that he had disclosed classified information. The book has sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, Mitchell estimated.

When asked what his reaction would be to the claim that the information in his book could harm national security, he responded, “My reaction would be: Buy the publication rights and take it off the market.”

Separated by a curtain from the press and observers from nongovernmental organizations, relatives of 9/11 victims could be heard voicing their agreement with some of Mitchell’s testy responses.

The post Architect of CIA’s Torture Program Testifies Just Yards From Accused 9/11 Plotter He Waterboarded appeared first on The Intercept.

In the second row, Mohammed’s co-defendant Walid bin Attash, a native of Yemen, draped a scarf displaying a Palestinian flag over his computer monitor. Rows three to five were occupied by defendants Ramzi bin al-Shibh; Mohammed’s nephew Ammar al-Baluchi; Mustafa al-Hawsawi; and their defense teams.

The word haunting the austere courtroom, and the impending 18th anniversary of the catastrophic attacks, was torture. Thanks to the CIA’s harsh interrogations of Mohammed and his associates, torture has replaced the deaths of 2,976 people as the focus of the quasi-judicial proceedings. Torture not only tormented the perpetrators; it has delayed justice for the victims’ families.

On Monday, nine relatives of 9/11 victims sat behind glass in the back of the high-security courtroom. One by one, they walked up to the window for a closer look at the accused. Media, nongovernmental observers, and military service members filled the seats in the gallery.

The five defendants on trial for planning the attacks listened but did not speak out loud except to acknowledge their voluntary participation in the session. In muted tones, they spoke animatedly with their American lawyers. It was the 38th pretrial hearing in their war crimes trial, and it focused on the prospect of scheduled testimony from FBI witnesses, prompting a series of arguments over which questions can and cannot be asked. Col. W. Shane Cohen, the third judge to preside in this case since the defendants were arraigned on May 5, 2012, recently set a trial date for January 2021.

Late last week, the prosecution sent out a 25-page “classification guidance” revealing a number of new facts that had previously been classified, but also invoking national security restrictions to censor words that had been spoken in prior open or closed sessions. The most startling revelation from this classified document, described in open court by James Connell, attorney for defendant Baluchi, is that FBI agents were detailed to the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, or RDI, program, a fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee that investigated the programs and produced the 2014 torture report apparently did not know.

By contrast, the torture report said that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller “began seeking direct FBI access to [Mohammed] in order to better understand CIA reporting indicating threats to U.S. cities.” Then-CIA Director George Tenet made “personal commitments … to Director Mueller that access would be forthcoming,” the report noted, but “the CIA’s [Counterterrorism Center] successfully formulated a CIA position whereby the FBI would not be provided access to [Mohammed] until his anticipated transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” which did not happen until September 2006.

But according to Connell, the FBI did have access to Mohammed and other black site detainees between 2003 and 2006, when then-President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA’s secret prisons and brought 14 detainees to Guantánamo to face military tribunals. During that period, Connell said, the FBI sent well over 1,000 questions to the CIA for the agency to ask detainees, including Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times.

For years, the defense had been seeking access to witnesses who could testify about whether detainees’ statements to FBI “clean teams” were sufficiently separated in time from their “enhanced interrogations” to make their statements voluntary. But the structural integration of the FBI into the RDI described by Connell casts doubt on the “cleanliness” of those teams.

Connell intends to call Mueller to testify in the case.

Additional unclassified information Connell pulled from the new classification guidance included confirmation that detainees Hawsawi, bin al-Shibh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were held and questioned at a specific black site in Guantánamo called Echo 2 between late 2003 and early 2004. That is the same location where they were questioned after being returned to Guantánamo in September 2006 and where detainee meetings with defense attorneys are still held.

The post The FBI Was Deeply Involved in CIA Black Site Interrogations Despite Years of Denials, Guantánamo Defense Lawyer Says appeared first on The Intercept.

The problem had been brewing for nearly a decade, intelligence sources had warned, as the National Security Agency vacuumed up more and more surveillance information into computer systems at its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters: There just wasn’t enough power coming through the local electric grid to support the rate at which the agency was hoarding other people’s communications.

“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” a former NSA manager told the Baltimore Sun in August 2006.

“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today.”

It turns out that manager, and other sources quoted in the Sun piece, were even more correct than was publicly known at the time: The NSA had, just the prior month, already experienced a major power outage and been forced for the first time to switch over its most critical monitoring — its nerve center, the National Security Operations Center — to a backup facility in Augusta, Georgia, according to an internal report classified “secret.” The culprit: hot weather and electric company problems generating sufficient power, according to an article posted on the internal agency news site known as SIDtoday.

For the NSA, the relatively smooth handoff was a triumph. But the incident marked an important turning point, underlining how the NSA was collecting too much information for its facilities to handle. The agency would go on to build a massive data center in a barren stretch of Utah desert, estimated to be capable of holding billions of gigabytes of information.

Indeed, the story of the 2006 Fort Meade brownout is one of several stories of overwhelming mass surveillance to emerge from a review of 287 SIDtoday articles, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Other tales, collected below, include how an NSA intern working in the English countryside marked for killing or capture nine people in Iraq; how a secret team of NSA commandos deployed to foreign countries to break codes; and how the NSA spied on satellite internet systems in the Middle East.

The Intercept is publishing three other articles taken from this cache of documents, including an investigation by Henrik Moltke into how revolutionary intelligence pooling technology first used by the U.S., Norway, and other allies in Afghanistan spread to the U.S.-Mexico border — raising questions about over-sharing at home and abroad. In another article, Miriam Pensack reveals how the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 was closely monitored by Norwegian (and eventually U.S.) intelligence, which knew more about the tragedy than was initially revealed. And Murtaza Hussain shows how the NSA drew up new rules in response to a request from its Israeli counterpart, which had sought to use U.S. intelligence to target killings, apparently at Hezbollah.

NSA Commando Unit Promised “Any Target, Anywhere, Any Time”

In 1966, a new NSA project was hatched to figure out why an electronic signal under surveillance was “exhibiting parameters outside normal operating conditions,” as an NSA history later put it. Members of “WEREWOLF,” as the project was to be called, concluded that the equipment used to monitor the signal was causing the abnormalities.

The team behind WEREWOLF would go on to conduct other “special deployment” missions, but not before a change of cover name. The unit chief decided that WEREWOLF, atop a list of automatically generated possibilities, wasn’t quite right and, reading further down, settled on the more heroic-sounding “MUSKETEEER.” At some point, the unit took on the credo “Any Target, Anywhere, Any Time.”

While technology, as well as the NSA’s mission, would change dramatically over the next 40 years, MUSKETEER teams would steadily “deploy on special collection and survey missions,” according to the NSA history, which ran in SIDtoday. They fixed signal monitoring problems, ran boutique surveillance operations from inside U.S. embassies, and surveyed transmissions in far-off places, often invited by other U.S. government entities.

In more colorful moments, they foiled an assassination attempt against a U.S. special operations commander in the Philippines and discovered vulnerabilities in a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile system, known as SA-6, as used by Bosnia during the Balkans conflict. The latter work resulted in the “neutralization of multiple batteries” of the missiles by U.S. fighter aircraft, according to the history. (The article does not mention whether MUSKETEER’s involvement was linked to the 1995 downing of U.S. fighter pilot Scott O’Grady by a Serbian SA-6 missile. The NSA was harshly criticized for failing to relay intelligence that could have prevented the shoot-down. )

One SIDtoday article recounts how a MUSKETEER team, having deployed to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, struck gold during a survey of Wi-Fi signals from “the embassies of India, Singapore, Pakistan, Colombia, and Mongolia.” At the Indian Embassy, the team discovered that someone, possibly sponsored by the Chinese government, had hacked computers inside and was transmitting “approximately 10 sensitive diplomatic documents” every day (“often Microsoft Office-compatible files or Adobe PDF documents”) to drop boxes on the “public internet.” The NSA began regularly collecting the information from these drop boxes for itself and “analyzing the Indian Embassy’s diplomatic communications,” according to SIDtoday.

Later, by analyzing “how the Chinese conduct computer-to-computer (C2C) operations against foreign targets,” the team was able to find hacking by China “in several other locations.”

This type of operation, in which a spy agency piggybacks off the work of a different spy agency against a shared target, is referred to as “fourth-party collection.”

Snooping on diplomatic communications is a violation of Article 27 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that the “the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.”

The Secret History of the NSA’s Joint Venture with the CIA

A two–part interview in SIDtoday provides new details about the Special Collection Service, the covert NSA joint effort with the CIA to collect signals intelligence from U.S. embassies abroad. The revelations include information on SCS’s history and examples of its missions.

Der Spiegel disclosed important details about SCS in 2013 using Snowden documents, including that SCS tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Before SCS was created in 1979, the NSA and CIA ran independent, covert signals intelligence programs — sometimes “at opposite ends” of the same building — serving different missions, the director and deputy director of SCS told SIDtoday in the interview. Congress intervened, directing the CIA and NSA to run the SCS program together, presumably to save money and avoid duplicated efforts.

At the Indian Embassy in Beijing, the NSA discovered that someone, possibly the Chinese government, had hacked computers inside. The NSA began regularly collecting the information for itself.

Since then, the number of SCS sites has ebbed and flowed depending on budgets and operational needs. In 1988, before the Berlin Wall came down, SCS reached a peak of 88 sites worldwide, the director said. In the following years, the number decreased, only to drastically increase in the aftermath of 9/11, when no fewer than 12 new sites were added. At one point, the SCS Caracas site was shut down when it was no longer needed, only to be reopened when “anti-American Venezuelan President” Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998.

A separate SIDtoday article, written by two NSA managers, described an SCS operation conducted against Venezuelan communications. For years, an NSA facility in Yakima, Washington, had been spying on Venezuelan satellite signals, but the “large regional satellite beams” visible from there provided “only moderately successful results.” So agents from SCS, along with an NSA analyst from Yakima, traveled to an undisclosed location, presumably close to or in Venezuela, for a clandestine three-week survey of narrow “spot beam” satellite signals sent to the country. As they collected data from over 400 newly discovered signals, team members sent this information back to analysts in Yakima, as well as San Antonio, Texas, where “dozens of links carrying traffic for Venezuelan targets of interest” were discovered.

The most important SCS site is probably its headquarters, located in an “attractive (…) rural location outside Laurel, MD,” according to the interview. While the address of the “tree-lined corporate campus” was included in James Bamford’s 2008 book “The Shadow Factory,” and is identified as “Special Collection Service” on Google Maps, the SIDtoday article is the first public document confirming the existence of the joint NSA-CIA facility.

“You can’t tell NSAers and the CIA people here apart” as all SCS staff wear “purple badges, a sign of our status as a joint organization,” Ron Moultrie, the deputy SCS director, told SIDtoday.

The CIA uses SCS sites as places from which to monitor foreign intelligence services as they attempt to track CIA assets, a practice known as counterintelligence, according to the SCS directors. The NSA, meanwhile, uses SCS sites as a “platform” for a number of operations, including computer hacking, carried out in 2006 by a unit known as Tailored Access Operations (and today called Computer Network Operations).

Throughout the nine years of the SIDtoday archive, SCS is promoted as an assignment for those with “a sense of adventure” and a taste for “attractive” locations. Sometimes, as was the case at SCS Damascus on September 12, 2006, things get “a little hectic.”

According to a firsthand account by an SCS staffer of an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, published in SIDtoday, the sound of an explosion sent the SCS staff into lockdown mode and triggered “full emergency destruction” preparations. The attack was eventually subdued by Syrian security forces and the attackers killed. One casualty was SCS’s microwave search system: Bullets penetrated “maintenance sheds” on the embassy roof, which were actually concealing SCS antennas. One slug “severed a control cable” for the microwave searcher, “rendering the antenna inoperable,” according to SIDtoday.

The SCS staffer’s account stated that “two explosive-laden cars” were involved in the attack.

Publicly available media reports describing the incident painted a dark picture of what would have happened if a truck “loaded with pipe bombs strapped to large propane gas canisters outside the embassy” had not failed to detonate.

NSA Pioneers Use of “Stingray” Cellphone Spy Towers

In May 2006, the NSA made an early — and largely fruitless — attempt to use so-called Stingray devices to monitor local mobile phone conversations in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, where Vice President Dick Cheney had traveled to attend a conference with regional leaders, according to an account in SIDtoday.

Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking mobile phones into connecting to them instead of to legitimate towers. This allows the Stingrays to intercept calls and texts. Two NSA linguists, as part of an SCS team, used this Stingray-type device to try and eavesdrop on local cellular networks. They did not have much luck; SIDtoday noted that the device “did not provide a capability against the primary cellular systems found,” although agents were able to identify “relevant airport communications and police networks.”

It is not clear if the effort violated laws against wiretapping in Lithuania, a U.S. ally and member of NATO.

Unlike similar operations in which “teams need to work from unsecured hotel rooms or out-of-the-way locations such as unimproved attics,” SIDtoday said, this team worked from the comfort of a shielded enclosure within the U.S. Embassy, from which they could survey the “local wireless and [radio frequency] environment.”

Beginning a few days before Cheney landed in Vilnius, the SCS team monitored police communication 24 hours a day looking for “any indications of threats or problems on which the Secret Service might need to act.”

It didn’t find any.

Weather Takes Down NSA Headquarters

In summer 2006, a heat wave rendered the intelligence nerve center within the NSA’s headquarters inoperable. As the record-setting wave toasted the East Coast and brought triple-digit temperatures to the spy agency’s home in Fort Meade, Maryland, conditions “in the Baltimore area and problems with Baltimore Gas and Electric power generation caused server and communications failures around the NSA Washington complex,” SIDtoday reported. For the first time, the agency’s time-sensitive watch center functions were taken over by a backup installation of the National Security Operations Center at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia.

The story of the NSA’s overall struggle to supply power to Fort Meade was reported by the Baltimore Sun around the time of the outage. Author James Bamford further discussed the issue in his book “Body of Secrets,” noting that energy problems at the NSA dated to the late 1990s and seemed to be coming to a head by 2006. Bamford wrote that abundant power and a “less vulnerable” electric grid in Texas led the NSA to decide in 2007 to place a new data center there.

“Problems with Baltimore Gas and Electric power generation caused server and communications failures around the NSA Washington complex.”

But the 2006 outage and the switchover to Fort Gordon are revelations.

The National Security Operations Center, or NSOC, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, managing critical functions concerning possible foreign threats to national security.

What could have been a calamity was avoided by the emergency switch over to NSA Georgia, located at the Fort Gordon Army base near Augusta. On August 1, 2006, a backup high-priority operations center there, codenamed DECKPIN, was activated at 4:00 Zulu (Greenwich Mean Time), according to the SIDtoday story, written by the DECKPIN coordinator at Fort Gordon. Four hours later, Baltimore-area power was stabilized, and operations switched back to the NSOC at Fort Meade. The Georgia staff was put on standby again on August 3, “to ensure availability while the [electric company] work was completed.” The NSA around this time was Baltimore Gas and Electric’s biggest customer, using the same amount of power as half the city of Annapolis, according to Bamford.

Since 2006, new NSA facilities in Texas, Hawaii, Georgia, and Utah are sharing the load of the agency’s enormous power requirements.

U.K. Base, and NSA Intern, Facilitated Death or Capture of “Chicken Man” and Other Iraq Militants

In mid-2006, the NSA was closely watching a “most wanted” militant organization with a presence in Iraq, known as the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group. The agency was struggling to eavesdrop on the group’s communications, which it said had led to a “critical gap” in intelligence.

However, the NSA got lucky when an intern working at the agency’s Menwith Hill surveillance base in England uncovered a network associated with the group. By tracking the communications of an Algerian bombmaker associated with the Moroccan organization, the NSA was able to identify other Islamist fighters working to manufacture explosives in Iraq, according to a July 2006 SIDtoday article. The NSA discovered chatter between militants, who were apparently fighting with the Moroccan jihadis against the U.S. and its allies in Iraq. One of the militants on an intercepted phone call referred to “chickens” falling from the sky, an apparent coded reference to the downing of U.S. helicopters that previous May. The man on the phone call became known to the NSA as “Chicken Man,” and his communications proved invaluable to the U.S. spies who were listening in.

The NSA passed the intelligence it gathered from the phone calls to U.S. forces in Iraq. The analysts at Menwith Hill — working with NSA employees at the agency’s base in Augusta, Georgia — continued to keep tabs on the jihadis. Then, between May 23 and May 25, 2006, the U.S. military launched operations that resulted in the killing and capture of nine mostly foreign fighters, including Chicken Man, according to the SIDtoday article.

Menwith Hill is the NSA’s largest overseas surveillance base and continues to play a key role in U.S. military operations around the world. As The Intercept has previously reported, the spy hub has been used to aid “a significant number of capture-kill operations” across the Middle East and North Africa, according to NSA documents, and is equipped with eavesdropping technology that can vacuum up more than 300 million emails and phone calls a day. Human rights groups and some British politicians have demanded more information about the role of Menwith Hill in controversial U.S. drone strikes and other lethal operations, arguing that the base is unaccountable to British citizens and is shrouded in too much secrecy.

Breakthroughs in Locating Internet Cafes in Iraq

During the Iraq War, suspected insurgents often accessed the internet from public computers at internet cafes, as previous SIDtoday reporting described. Even when the NSA could intercept internet traffic from a cafe, the agency couldn’t always determine where the cafe was located. But in 2006, the NSA had two separate breakthroughs in how it conducted surveillance against internet service providers in Iraq, allowing them to pinpoint the exact location of many more cafes.

“We’ve had success in targeting cafes over the past year,” a July 2006 article stated, “but until recently there was a major gap in our capabilities.” The network run by a popular provider of internet service to cafes across Iraq was so complicated that, even when analysts knew the IP addresses of the cafes, they couldn’t narrow down their locations beyond what city they were in.

By surveilling satellite signals, and with the help of hackers at a division known as Tailored Access Operations, the NSA managed to intercept the internet service provider’s customer database. The agency also installed its system for searching signals intelligence, XKEYSCORE, at a new field site in Mosul, allowing it to conduct bulk surveillance of internet traffic traveling through the region. With the knowledge of who the ISP’s customers were, combined with internet surveillance, “previously un-locatable cafes have been found and at least four ‘wanted’ [alleged] terrorists have been captured.”

Another SIDtoday article, from December 2006, credited analysts working in the NSA’s British base at Menwith Hill with locating internet cafes in the Iraqi city of Ramadi that were allegedly used by associates of Al Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub Al-Masri. It did this through an intiative known as GHOSTHUNTER, which mapped locations of small, “VSAT” satellite dishes throughout the region.

“Terminals from the current top three VSAT technologies in the Middle East — DirecWay, Linkstar, and iDirect — have
all been successfully located as part of the GHOSTHUNTER initiative,” the article said, including 150 terminals “on networks of interest… in Baghdad, Ramadi, and neighboring cities.”

Intellipedia: the Intelligence Community’s Classified Wiki

A November 2006 article in SIDtoday described Intellipedia, a wiki for analysts throughout the intelligence community, with information limited based on clearance level. At the time, the tool had “only about 20 registered users” from the NSA, compared with over 200 at the CIA, which had been leading the charge to promote the wiki, even offering staff a six-day sabbatical to study it and other collaboration tools.

After hearing “rave reviews” about a CIA’s Intellipedia sabbatical, plans to adopt the training for NSA employees were in the works, according to an early 2007 article, and one of the CIA’s Intellipedia “pioneers” gave presentations to NSA analysts about the platform.

On January 28, 2014, the top-secret version of Intellipedia had 255,402 users and 113,379 pages; the secret version had 214,801 users and 107,349 pages; and the unclassified version had 127,294 users and 48,274 pages, according to the NSA’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

As part of an investigation into cyberattacks that target hardware supply chains, The Intercept published multiple top-secret Intellipedia wiki pages. These include the “Air-Gapped Network Threats” page, the “BIOS Threats” page, and “Supply Chain Cyber Threats” page.

According to SIDtoday, Intellipedia was introduced alongside two other tools to bring classified information into the internet age: a classified instant messaging system linking the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, as well as blog platform “for sharing your knowledge and your point of view with others.”

The post Meltdown Showed Extent of NSA Surveillance — and Other Tales From Hundreds of Intelligence Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

Most of these laws were created in response to the 9/11 attacks. In all, 27 states passed anti-terrorism legislation in 2002.

In some states, terrorism is vaguely defined. Arkansas outlaws “terroristic acts” but does not say that such acts must be ideologically motivated, a requirement under the federal terrorism law. Maine prohibits what lawmakers term a “catastrophe” of “terroristic intent,” which can include releasing a chemical or biological toxin or causing an explosion, fire, flood, building collapse, or even an avalanche.

Since 9/11, state lawmakers have continued to be reactionary in drafting and amending anti-terrorism laws. Georgia created a law in 2017 to define “domestic terrorism” following Dylann Roof’s mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina. After Omar Mateen’s massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, lawmakers amended the state’s 2002 anti-terrorism law to strengthen criminal penalties for acts of terrorism, adding a life sentence for terrorists whose violence results in death, among other changes. Kentucky and Michigan provide even harsher penalties: life in prison for anyone convicted of committing an act of terrorism.

Here’s a look at anti-terrorism laws in the 50 states and the District of Columbia:

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, Justia

The post How Individual States Have Criminalized Terrorism appeared first on The Intercept.

It began not by tapping enemy insurgents’ phones or capturing their emails, but by following the money.

When the National Security Agency discovered that Iran may have been buying computer chips from the United States, routing them through a U.S. ally, and potentially supplying them to detonate bombs against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it credited so-called economic intelligence with the find.

And the solution was not a death blow delivered by the military, but rather a new regulation on the export of certain technologies via the Commerce Department, which the spy agency said would end up “saving American and coalition lives.”

The unusual strategy of tracing monetary flows to stop explosions is one of many significant disclosures contained in a batch of 328 internal NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and released by The Intercept today after research and redaction.

Also included in the material, which originates from SIDtoday, the newsletter of the agency’s core Signals Intelligence Directorate, is the untold story of how intelligence related to Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was finally acquired; an assessment that a “vast … network of Iranian agents”  operated in Iraq and influenced its government; a major push to hone the agency’s voice identification technology; details on how NSA staff deployed abroad viewed, and sometimes stereotyped, their host countries; and grumbling about having to comply with public-records laws.

Those stories and others are detailed in the highlights below; the NSA declined to answer questions about them. Also with this SIDtoday release, drawing on the same set of documents, Peter Maass profiles the NSA’s “SIGINT Curmudgeon,” Rahe Clancy, who wrote a beloved set of articles for SIDtoday, trying to instigate change from within the agency and riling up his fellow spies against its corporatization. Alleen Brown and Miriam Pensack, meanwhile, detail instances in which the NSA has spied on environmental disputes and around issues like climate change, overfishing, and water scarcity. And Micah Lee reveals that the NSA infiltrated virtual private computer networks used by various airlines, the Al Jazeera news network, and the Iraqi government.

U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., commander for Multi-National Force-Iraq, speaks with U.S. Army Maj. Sean Bastian, commanding officer of a military transition team, during a Thanksgiving Day visit Nov. 23, 2006, at Combat Outpost Rawah in Iraq’s Al Anbar province.

In Iraq, a “Vast and Disperse Network of Iranian Agents”

The NSA caught Iran smuggling American microprocessors that may have been used to bomb U.S. troops in Iraq, according to a May 2006 SIDtoday article. To import the chips, Iran set up front companies in the United Arab Emirates, an agency staffer wrote; the front companies then sent the microprocessors to customers in Iran and Syria.

The chips had both civilian and military capabilities and “have been used or are capable of being used” in the improvised explosive devices used extensively against U.S. forces in Iraq, the report concluded. Intelligence on the chip smuggling came not from intercepted military or diplomatic communications, as is typical at the agency, but rather through “economic reporting.”

Earlier the same year, an NSA representative who was embedded with U.S. Special Operations Command stated in a top-secret SIDtoday report that analysts had discovered “a vast and disperse network of Iranian agents in Iraq serving the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”

In Kuwait, different NSA units deployed a satellite interception system to hear conversations between Iranian agents, according to SIDtoday. This produced new intelligence reports that “have focused on Iran’s (and specifically Iran’s external paramilitary and intelligence forces’) activities in Iraq and the influence they wield on important figures in the new Iraqi Government.”

SIDtoday’s 2006 reporting on Iran’s involvement in Iraq buttressed comments by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American military commander in Iraq, who told reporters in June that year that the military was “quite confident that the Iranians, through their covert special operations forces, are providing weapons, I.E.D. technology and training to Shia extremist groups in Iraq.” By 2017, the New York Times would say that Iran dominated Iraq: Iran-sponsored militias dominated in Iraq’s south, and cabinet politicians who resisted Iran lost their jobs, while U.S. efforts in Iraq primarily focused on chasing the Islamic State in the country’s north.

U.S. Army soldiers make radio contact after arriving by helicopter at night at an undisclosed location south of Baghdad, where they believed a top leader of the insurgency and close associated of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hiding, June 5, 2005.

How Key Al-Zarqawi Intelligence Was Obtained

In Iraq, at a strategic level, the U.S. was concerned about Iran; at the ground level, its top priority in 2006 was finding the Jordanian Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the most wanted terrorist in the country. Al-Zarqawi was the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq and a fugitive from a Jordanian death sentence. The reward for information resulting in his capture or death reached $25 million.

Zarqawi was brutal to Iraqis as well as Americans. According to Joby Warrick, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” “The Jordanian also would seek to strike fear into Americans and other Westerners in Iraq with a series of kidnappings and videotaped beheadings. The first victim, Pennsylvania businessman Nicholas Berg, was butchered on camera by a hooded Islamist that CIA officers later confirmed was Zarqawi himself.”

NSA specialists were able to figure out the location of the internet cafe in Baghdad where the courier was about to access an email account.  An important message from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi, “outlining al-Qaeda’s strategic vision for Iraq,” was obtained.

A major breakthrough had come in 2005, when NSA analysts intercepted, via a courier in Iraq, emails that were intended for al-Zarqawi from Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in Pakistan. In partnership with U.S. forces, NSA specialists in geospatial intelligence and counterterrorism were able to figure out the location of the internet cafe in Baghdad where the courier was about to access an email account. The courier and a “traveling partner” were caught, and an important message from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi, “outlining al-Qaeda’s strategic vision for Iraq,” was obtained. The 15-page document was made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005, but the circumstances under which it was obtained appear to have not been previously reported. (Warrick’s book said “the CIA’s acquisition of the letter was a closely-guarded secret” and stated only that “the surveillance net” around al-Zarqawi “had snagged a singular piece of correspondence.”)

By early 2006, SIDtoday continued to report on how signals intelligence successes helped capture lesser-known figures. But the primary target remained at large and continued to issue propaganda videos. An intelligence analyst described the intensity of an assignment to a task force in Mosul, Iraq: “We worked for 14 to 18 hours a day, pouring over traffic and piecing together data to find threats or information that would help us locate and go get bad guys. You would feel every minute of those days, but you’d wake up one morning and it would be August.” 

Back at NSA headquarters, new mathematical analysis tools supplemented old-school language expertise in the process of reviewing audio recordings of al-Zarqawi posted on the open web, confirming his voice.

At last, on June 7, 2006, the “primary PC,” which stands for “precious cargo,” was found and dealt a death blow. In SIDtoday, an analyst from the NSA Cryptologic Services Group described the work of the Special Operations Task Force leading up to the targeted bomb strike that killed al-Zarqawi and others, reportedly in a two-story house near Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, saying that a combination of signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, human intelligence, and “detainee reporting” uncovered the identity and location of al-Zarqawi’s “personal religious advisor,” Sheikh ‘Abd-al-Rahman, who was followed to al-Zarqawi’s hiding place and perished with him.

In this television image from Arab satellite station Al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden, right, listens as his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri speaks at an undisclosed location, in this image made from undated video tape broadcast by the station, April 15, 2002.

Fervor for Voice Matching Technology

By the end of 2006, the NSA had come to believe that audio fingerprinting as performed against al-Zarqawi could be used as a simple fix for a host of complex problems, from freeing hostages to curbing nuclear weapons proliferation, according to a series of SIDtoday articles.

Despite repeated setbacks, the NSA remained enthusiastic about voice matching technology, which identifies people by the sound of their voice. The agency had help: According to SIDtoday, voice matching techniques were developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory on the back of efforts to confirm the authenticity of broadcasts by Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

A February 2006 SIDtoday article described some of the difficulties inherent in voice matching, noting that Al Qaeda second-in-command al-Zawahiri displayed more “tonal diversity” than usual following a botched drone strike against him. (The attack killed at least 18 in the Pakistani village of Damadola but missed al-Zawahiri, reportedly due to faulty intelligence on his location.)

“During the 30 Jan message — lasting about three minutes — the terrorist never quite settled down, probably rattled by the attempt on his life and the vehement content,” the article stated. Despite al-Zawahiri’s shaky voice, “mathematical voice matching produced a perfect score of 99% upon comparison with previous soundfiles on this speaker from the same source.”

Six weeks later, another article described how two of five transmissions by al-Zawahiri in a nine-month span failed to yield a high-confidence voice match with previous transmissions. This was solved with new technology from MIT, which “allows optimal combination of vocal-tract models from contentious intercepts,” according to SIDtoday. The lesson to NSA: “Careful modeling” is “critical” for making voice identification actually work — and particularly important once voice matching is applied on a “large scale” to identify those “bent on terrorist activities against U.S. forces or the local populace.”

The same article goes on to describe a hand-held device, close to going into production, which would provide field access to MIT’s “mathematical engine” and voice matching estimates in “hostile environments.”

A May 2006 article describes another voice recognition stumble, when an October 2003 audio recording of bin Laden could not identify the Al Qaeda chief’s voice because it “proved to be of too low quality.” The file was later “enhanced” using software from a “local vendor … to yield a perfect match.” Still, there were successes, credited to the MIT software, with which “voice matching has become simplicity itself.” For example, an April 2006 recording of bin Laden was successfully matched against a January 2005 recording of bin Laden and against multiple other recordings.

The May SIDtoday article included references to screenshots of the MIT software’s “Speaker Comparison Algorithm” interface. Though those screenshots were not included in the SIDtoday articles as provided by Snowden, two images from an article on Lincoln Laboratory’s webpage — which were removed during the course of reporting this article — refer to a similarly named interface:  

Screenshots of MIT Lincoln Lab’s VOCALinc tool, which was “sponsored by the Department of Defense” and developed “utilizing U.S. government operational data.”

The MIT voice identification software was so important to the NSA that the agency approved a four-hour course on it based on MIT documentation and added the class to the National Cryptologic School syllabus, according to a July 2006 SIDtoday article.

The code, or an MIT-updated version of it, appears to have still been in use nearly eight years later. According to publicly available documentation from 2014, MIT Lincoln Lab’s VOCALinc tool was “already in use by several entities,” including “intelligence missions concerning national security” in areas such as terrorism. The document also references the development of “unseen devices such as body microphones and multirecording systems.” (Lincoln Lab did not provide responses to questions in the weeks leading up to publication of this article, although a spokesperson indicated he would try to get a response from a staffer “if sponsors allow him to discuss these topics.”)

Perhaps the clearest example of the enthusiasm for audio fingerprinting at the NSA in 2006 comes from an article written in March by the agency’s “Technical Director, Operational Technologies,” Adolf Cusmariu.

In the article — titled “Nuclear Sleuthing — Can SIGINT Help?” — Cusmariu took the idea at the base of the NSA’s voice matching technology to a new level of optimism.

What if, Cusmariu asked, the NSA scanned intercepted phone calls for the distinct sound generated by centrifuges used in uranium enrichment facilities? Could this help identify hidden nuclear weapons facilities in “rogue states like Iran and North Korea?”

What if, Cusmariu asked, the NSA scanned intercepted phone calls for the distinct sound generated by centrifuges used in uranium enrichment facilities?

There were several problems with the idea. First, there was the issue of background noise — the sound of the centrifuges inevitably mixing with other audio sources — “making unequivocal fingerprinting problematic.” Then, there was the fact that “the person making the call would have to be located inside, or at least near, the centrifuge compound for the acoustical signature to be audible.”

“Yes, a needle in a haystack!” Cusmariu admitted, but nonetheless, “algorithms have been developed … looking for just such signatures.” Unfortunately, “no convincing evidence has been found so far.”

Public records show that, in the months following these articles, Cusmariu filed for patents on “identifying duplicate voice recording” and “comparing voice signals that reduces false alarms.” Both were granted and describe methods similar to those discussed in SIDtoday, but with different applications.

To be sure, there was reason for some level of optimism about voice recognition technology. A brief — and top secret — SIDtoday article from May 2006 suggested that voice identification helped free the Briton Norman Kember and two Canadian fellow peace activists, who were held hostage in Baghdad. The successful operation was widely reported at the time, but the fact that voice ID helped identify the hostage-takers was not made public.

The CIA and the NSA staff of the Special Collection Service site in Baghdad worked together to find the kidnappers for several nights leading up to March 23, 2006, the article disclosed. On the final night, British and American spies, working side by side “to eliminate incorrect targets through voice identification,” were able to isolate “the specific terrorist believed to be holding the hostages.” The article does not, however, state whether the match was made by a computer, human, or combination of the two.

Eventually, the NSA played a pivotal role in developing voice matching technology, as described in Ava Kofman’s exposé earlier this year in The Intercept.

 “Dragon Team” Helped NSA Thwart Cordless Phones Used by Insurgents

Although it lacked the technical glamour of voice matching, the NSA saw its effort against high-powered cordless phones as critical to protecting U.S. troops on the ground. Early on in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the simple, rugged devices, also known as HPCPs, were in common use by insurgents, including as a means of triggering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. SIDtoday articles from 2003 complained that these handsets, which could communicate with other handsets that were also within a 50-mile range of the radio base station, created an “intelligence gap,” and were such a problem that the NSA hosted a “Worldwide HPCP Conference” to understand, and design attacks against, this technology.

Less than three years later, the NSA had made significant progress. A SIDtoday article from May 2006 said a “dragon team” of NSA researchers developed a tool called “FIRESTORM” that supported a denial-of-service attack capability against cordless phone networks. FIRESTORM could prevent IED attacks and support an ability to “ping” a specific device, “forcing the targeted HPCP to emit an RF signal that can be geolocated by any asset in the area.” The dragon team had been “eagerly working with potential users to move this capability out of the development lab and into the fight.”

Sugar Grove station in West Virginia.

How NSA Staff Viewed the Rest of the World

The NSA needed staff paying attention to issues, like HPCPs, that resonated only once you were outside the bubble of Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland — or which could only be addressed effectively from another country. To do so, it needed to convince them of the benefits of relocation. The perennial “SID Around the World” series within SIDtoday described daily life on assignment to global NSA locations, often in glowing terms. With a substantial portion of agency postings in remote locations, where big satellite dishes can dominate empty landscapes, or in offices on military bases, or in the underground bunkers below them, the idea was to make working abroad for the NSA sound fun. But in just its third year, the series seemed to fall back on lazy stereotypes and imperious complaining.

The series seemed to fall back on lazy stereotypes and imperious complaining.

A lucky staffer in Bangkok, an “adventurous woman,” is most enthusiastic about the cost of living there. “You can hire a maid for less than $100 a month or $1200 per year as a single person,” she wrote. “Most domestic services include: cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and babysitting children and/or pets. Tell me where you find that kind of help so cheaply? And the Thai domestic help are kind and trustworthy; therefore, no need to worry about your valuables.” You can live like a queen.

In 2006, to one staffer, the Japanese “fascination with technology” was notable; they carried cellphones equipped with two-way video conferencing and web browsing, and drove cars equipped with GPS. 

Yet “[d]espite having one of the oldest cultures in the world, the Japanese seem very innocent and naive.” Really?

It seems there were some ugly Americans on assignment.

Traffic was bad, or the roads are narrow, in England, Japan, and Turkey, too.

In Turkey, the cuisine was “world-class,” although lacking variety: “Probably 90 percent of Turkish restaurants offer no more than 4 or 5 traditional Turkish dishes.”

Indeed, culinary attractions, a staple of the series, seemed sparse. In fact, NSA staffers were introducing America’s Fourth of July fare and Italian dishes to the villagers of rural Yorkshire, where they tasted English boiled beef and potatoes with a “wilted sprig of parsley” on top. No really, “it is actually very good and certainly doesn’t deserve the bad reviews that it has been getting.”

But the shopping! In Ankara, the fruit was so fresh, the price was so cheap, and there were, again, “world-class” handicrafts. In Thailand, there were many “wonders for a single woman to enjoy,” like gorgeous silk fabrics, gems, and jewelry.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., one of the best parts of a Utah posting was the dusty road trip on I-15 to California. And from the Sugar Grove station in West Virginia, the nearest shopping was 40 miles away, in another state, over snow, black ice, and curvy roads in the winter. Nothing was said about the cuisine. Getting to work at the underground NSA site required driving to the top of a mountain from the U.S. Naval Information Operations Command center at Sugar Grove, a naval base in landlocked West Virginia. There were occasional bear sightings. Since its 2006 appearance in SIDtoday, the naval base has been decommissioned and sold, but the underground NSA facility continues to operate with its secret mission.

Through its sister publication Field of Vision, The Intercept covered Sugar Grove with a film and story last year. As Sam Biddle reported at the time, “antennas at the NSA listening post, codenamed TIMBERLINE, were built to capture Soviet satellite messages as they bounced off the moon, imbuing a pristine stretch of Appalachia with a sort of cosmic gravity.” The former base is scheduled to reopen in October as a substance abuse treatment center.

The most enthusiastic appraisal of daily signals intelligence life was contributed by a GCHQ staffer assigned to the NSA Fort Meade headquarters from the United Kingdom. The temporary Marylander loved the food (“crab cakes!! Maryland crab soup!”), the climate, the roads, the local countryside, and the cheap gas. They and their wife were delighted by football and baseball games, and even by deer nibbling on flower beds. The Britons also enjoyed the friendly neighbors and, in a turnaround, were the hosts for the Fourth of July barbecue, leading “several spirited renderings of the Star-Spangled Banner.” 

Informing the Public at the NSA: “A Dirty Job, But Someone’s Got To Do It”

It wasn’t just people in other countries who seemed foreign to some NSA staff; voluntarily providing information to the American public provoked some strange and not entirely welcome sensations as well. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reported in December 2005 that the NSA had been secretly authorized to spy on U.S. communications without a warrant. The Pulitzer Prize Board, in awarding the U.S.’s highest journalism honor, credited the pair with inspiring “a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.”

Fulfilling public information requests is a “disruption to … day-to-day operations.”

This debate, in turn, seems to have inspired a surge in Freedom of Information Act requests directed at the NSA. The requests, in which journalists and other citizens try and pry information from the notoriously secretive agency, spiked to more than 1,600 in the first half of 2006, from 800 in the course of an entire normal year, a member of the Intelligence Security Issues division disclosed in SIDtoday. The staffer did not mention Risen (now at The Intercept) or Lichtblau, but did cite “the agency appearing so frequently in the news” as the cause of the increase.

In SIDtoday, the Intelligence Security Issues staffer portrayed the NSA’s response to handling FOIA requests in terms typically reserved for a trip to the dentist for a root canal, describing his department’s work as “a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,” and promising to make fulfilling FOIA requests “as painless as possible,” even though fulfilling the requests is a “disruption to … day-to-day operations.” One wonders what adjectives the Intelligence Security Issues division deployed seven years later to explicate the process, when the Snowden revelations prompted an 888 percent rise in FOIA requests to the agency.  

The Skype internet phone program is seen on Sept. 1, 2009, in New York City.

NSA Decided It Was Legal To Spy on Some U.S. Phone Numbers

Sometimes, if a law became inconvenient, the NSA could do more than grumble; it could change its interpretation of the rule. For most people, the arrival of online phone call services like Skype and Vonage was a boon; it allowed them to dodge long-distance calling fees and to take their number with them anywhere around the world. The NSA, however, realized in 2006 that it had a big problem with such convenience: Online calling services might allow targets to acquire phone numbers with U.S. area codes and thus become off-limits to the agency, which is not supposed to conduct domestic spying.

“A target may be physically located in Iraq but have a US or UK phone number,” an NSA staffer grappling with the issue wrote in SIDtoday. NSA had previously interpreted a federal legal document, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, as barring the targeting of U.S. numbers, and built safeguards into various online systems, causing U.S. numbers to be “minimized upon presentation … and restricted from contact chaining,” a process in which a network of connected people is mapped, according to SIDtoday. In response to the rise of internet calling, the NSA developed techniques “for identifying the foreign status” of phone numbers, and the agency’s Office of General Counsel ruled that U.S. phone numbers affiliated with online calling services could be classified as foreign and targeted for surveillance if the number was “identified on foreign links” and was associated with an online calling service such as Vonage.

U.S. President George W. Bush holds a copy of a presidential commission’s report on pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction while flanked by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, co-chairs of the commission, during a press conference on March 31, 2005, in Washington, D.C.

Back to Basics: NSA Staff Instructed on Better Analyzing and Sharing Information

Whatever its success collecting and exploiting signals intelligence, the NSA was concerned its staff might not be communicating or disseminating this intelligence properly. “Write Right,” SIDtoday’s monthly column on authoring effective reports, brought to its 2006 edition a new focus on how to effectively route information to other intelligence agencies and federal entities, a process referred to officially (and dully) within NSA as “information sharing.”

The new attention to broad intelligence dissemination may have been a response to the scathing report of the so-called WMD Commission in March 2005, which stated, among other things:

The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.

A maxim on intelligence from Colin Powell, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is quoted twice in SIDtoday’s 2006 “Write Right” columns, once in May and again in December: “Tell me what you know, tell me what you don’t know, tell me what you think; always distinguish which is which.” Columns previously devoted to spell-checking or capitalization began giving advice on adding context (“collateral”) and analysis (“comment”) — and on how to provide analysis without editorializing. Warnings about the use of web research as “collateral” sources included a prohibition on citing Wikipedia.

With information sharing as the new norm, the “Write Right” author (and guest authors) repeated the need to understand and follow changing policies and to make sure that a report is releasable to the intended recipients. This guidance included what could or could not be discussed on the agency’s collaborative discussion forum, called “Enlighten.” No chit-chat: “The ENLIGHTEN system is an aid to professionals in doing their jobs,” according to the forum’s primer, which is quoted in an October 2006 “Write Right.” “All information posted on ENLIGHTEN must pertain to Agency-related (official) business. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS ENLIGHTEN AUTHORIZED FOR DISSEMINATING PERSONAL OR NON-OFFICIAL INFORMATION.”

Customers queue outside the Apple Store in London for the launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008.

The NSA Goes After Newer (3G!) Phones and “Social Networks”

Rapid change was buffeting not just NSA’s information-sharing practices but some of the core communications systems the agency surveilled as well, and in early 2006 the agency held multiple internal events to explain newly developed techniques to evolve its intelligence collection in parallel with these systems.

One SIDtoday article announced a “brown bag session” about exploiting video from third-generation, or 3G, cellphones, including “basic instructions on how best to search, analyze and use camera cell phone video data.” 3G mobile data networks first became commercially available in Japan in 2001, in South Korea and the United States in 2002, and in the United Kingdom in 2003. By 2008, the United States and Europe alone had over 127 million 3G users.

Another article announced an “open house” hosted by the “Social Network Analysis Workcenter” to show off “ASSIMILATOR,” a new web-based tool for analyzing the social networks of surveillance targets. In this case, “social network” refers to the list of people a target communicates with based on signals intelligence from a variety of sources, not social networking services.

Top photo: A U.S. soldier at a press conference in Baghdad takes down an older photo in order to display the latest image purporting to show the body of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda-linked militant who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and hostage beheadings in Iraq.

The post 328 NSA Documents Reveal “Vast Network” of Iranian Agents, Details of a Key Intelligence Coup, and a Fervor for Voice-Matching Technology appeared first on The Intercept.

According to JTF Guantánamo Commander Rear Adm. John Ring, that mission has shifted from “expeditionary” to “enduring” since President Donald Trump’s January 30 executive order mandating the continuation of detainment procedures at the military prison — a sharp contrast from former President Barack Obama’s unfulfilled campaign pledge to close it. “We were going away for eight years, and then we have a new president and our mission changed to something more enduring,” said Ring. “We have been putting Band-Aids on our infrastructure for a long time, trying to get it through the eight years until we close. And now we’re going to be enduring and stick around for a while, then we need to make some investments in infrastructure.”

To that end, a new hurricane-resistant galley that has been under construction since 2014 (under Obama, despite Ring’s insistence that “enduring” is new) is set to open on July 1, with state-of-the-art appliances for detainee halal meal prep, as well as standard meal prep to serve Joint Task Force personnel.

Forty detainees are still held at Guantánamo, some of whom have never been charged with a crime. Detainees’ food consumption has long been a contested issue – especially given that prisoners have engaged in on-and-off hunger strikes for years. At one point in 2013, 106 of the 166 detainees then at Guantánamo were on hunger strike — or engaging in what JTF euphemistically refers to as “non-religious fasting.” It’s one of many instances at Guantánamo of the rhetorical doublespeak that has enabled the legally and ethically contested detention of prisoners at the Navy base in perpetuity.

That doublespeak was particularly evident at a June 19 roundtable meeting for media with JTF leadership, during which the Task Force’s cultural adviser, Zak, a native Arabic speaker of Middle Eastern origin who doesn’t provide his last name out of concern for his family’s safety, made much of JTF’s accommodations for fasting during Ramadan. At the same time, he condemned those detainees who have gone on hunger strike or attempted suicide as “faking” in order to “discredit the United States.” This claim was difficult to square with a presentation from the chief medical officer at detention Camps V and VI, which acknowledged the practice of enteral feeding for those prisoners on hunger strike. (Former detainee Lakhdar Boumediene described the experience of being force-fed last year, writing that “a lengthy tube is jammed into your nose and snaked down your throat. You feel as though you are choking, being strangled, and yet somehow still able to breathe.” Physicians for Human Rights says the practice can amount to torture.)

When asked how one might fake a hunger strike, Zak compared detainee resistance to appeasing his parents’ demands to observe the Ramadan fast when growing up: “Just like I used to fake fasting with my parents, you say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m fasting,’ then you open up the fridge and eat quickly.” This claim, which Zak argued applied to all instances of hunger strikes at the base, did relate to one particular case the Miami Herald reported in November 2017. Forty-seven-year-old Pakistani national Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani was removed from forced tube feeding because, according to Trump administration lawyers, Rabbani had been cheating on his hunger strike. According to an unnamed physician overseeing “low-value” detainees like Rabbani, the forced-feeding procedure was “no longer medically indicated to preserve [Rabbani’s] life and health,” as he had been consuming a minimum of 1,200 calories per day.

Rabbani’s example, however, is very different from that of detainees who claimed last fall that JTF personnel were withholding force-feedings, in what lawyer David Remes called an intentional strategy to get them to abandon their hunger strikes. Remes, the New York Times reported, “accused the military of ‘playing chicken’ by withholding both force-feeding and medical care until the detainee was in danger of organ damage or even death.”

There were other inconsistencies in the way that different personnel portrayed the role of food on the base. Zak, for instance, was emphatic that food was never used as any kind of punishment or reward. But at the same roundtable, Ring stated that the task force continues to use meals from the base’s McDonald’s to incentivize detainees to provide information. JTF no longer carries out required interrogations of detainees – and at this point, many of them have been in so long, it’s unclear what kind of information they could provide.

For those who can’t exchange information for a Big Mac, the next best opportunity for some variety from the same food they’ve been eating for years is to demonstrate that they are “highly compliant.” Such detainees are permitted to enroll in a horticulture class, where they can cultivate an herb and vegetable garden in the recreation yard of Camp VI. Personnel asserted that gardening was but one of the detainees’ many learning opportunities that contributed to their high quality of life. During the roundtable, Joint Detention Group Commander Col. Stephen Gabavics emphasized that the meals detainees receive each day are an improvement over what conditions would be outside of the military prison, and that they are effectively better off at Guantánamo. “There are also certainly detainees here whose quality of life is better than what they had back where they were at,” he said.

Top photo: A task force member walks past the Camp VI detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, on June 5, 2018.

The post Force-Feeding, Fasting, and Big Macs: the Doublespeak of Food at Guantánamo appeared first on The Intercept.

After arriving in Baghdad “grungy and tired,” the staffer would later write, he discovered that the CIA and its partner, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had moved beyond talking to locals and were now intent on looking through their computer files. Marines would bring the NSA man “laptops, hard drives, CDs, phones and radios.” Sometimes the devices were covered in blood — and quite often they contained pornography, deemed “extremely useful” in humiliating and “breaking down” for interrogation the people who owned them.

The story of how the National Security Agency harvested porn for use against prisoners in Iraq is just one of the revelations disclosed in the agency’s internal newsletter SIDtoday during the second half of 2005.

There’s also the tale of how some intercepts would be rushed almost instantly to the president at Camp David via golf cart “with virtually no oversight.”

Then there’s one about how the NSA declared it could find “not many” Arabic translators it could trust among “the largest Arabic-speaking population in the United States.”

Or the story of how the agency listened as the Egyptian government dictated through its communication channels the final results for an election that had barely begun.

Told in more detail below, these are highlights from some 297 SIDtoday articles published today by The Intercept as part of an ongoing project to release, after careful review, material provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

From the same SIDtoday release — our sixth thus far — we are publishing three other articles. One is an investigation into a secretive global intelligence-sharing alliance led by the NSA, comprising 18 members and known as the SIGINT Seniors. Another looks at increased surveillance in the United Kingdom following the London bombings in 2005 — and discloses for the first time a secret agreement to share metadata harvested from the vast data repositories of the NSA and its counterparts in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Also today, in collaboration with the Norwegian Broadcaster NRK, we shine light on a large spy base located outside Oslo. The base was built with the NSA’s help to aid Norway’s military and counterterrorism operations overseas. But it has also swept up Norwegian citizens’ phone and email records – and is now at the center of a dispute over illegal surveillance.

The NSA declined to comment for this article.

Porn Recovered by NSA Used to “Break Down Detainees” in Iraq

An NSA staffer deployed to Iraq led a counterterrorism and counterintelligence mission involving forensic investigations on computers seized in raids. The staffer’s “Media Exploitation” team found pornographic videos and photos alongside thousands of audio files of the Quran and sermons, and recruitment and training CDs with video of bombings, torture, and beheadings. The team “jokingly” referred to the content as the “three big ‘P’s – porn, propaganda and prayer.”

Reports and files were distributed to the NSA and other intelligence agencies; the staffer was detailed to the Iraq Survey Group, a joint venture between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to find weapons of mass destruction and disrupt terrorist activities. But among the customers of the material gathered by the NSA staffer were the military units interrogating captured insurgents and suspects. Special Forces interrogators found the pornography “extremely useful in breaking down detainees who maintained that they were devout Muslims, but had porn on their computers,” according to an account by the NSA staffer in SIDtoday. (The account makes no acknowledgment of the human rights abuses by staff at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which were in the news starting in April 2004, nearly four months before the account was published, and which were, at the time, still under investigation.)

As the conflict with insurgents escalated in Fallujah into Operation Phantom Fury/Al Fajr, NSA staff with “top-secret” clearances were deployed to the combat zone. Marines gave the NSA staff seized computers, CDs, phones, and radios directly from the battlefield, some “covered in blood.” This material, too, was used in interrogations that helped keep the “bad guys” behind bars. No “smoking WMD” evidence was found, according to the SIDtoday account.

A former interrogator at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said, in a statement obtained by the New Yorker, that pornography was used at the facility to reward some detainees and as a tool against others, who were forced to look at the material. The Associated Press has also reported on the use of pornography at Guantánamo as an inducement.

The intelligence community has also used seized pornography as a form of propaganda. In November 2017, the CIA released files recovered from the fatal raid of Osama bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan “in an effort to further enhance public understanding of al-Qa’ida.” The agency noted that the overall trove recovered from the compound contained pornography that it was not releasing with the other files. The discovery of pornography on bin Laden’s computers in 2011 was leaked to the media within days of the raid, and a New York Times story focused on the porn reported that the adult material “will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.”

Evidence of Election Fraud in Egypt

The NSA used signals intelligence to uncover apparent fraud in a referendum on how Egypt’s presidential elections would be run.

Rules supported by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would allow direct election of the president, abolishing the old system, in which the parliament forwarded a single candidate to voters for approval. But the rules also imposed major barriers to appearing on the ballot, including a requirement that independent candidates win support from 65 of 444 members of parliament and that other candidates come from a party with at least 5 percent representation in parliament — which at the time no opposition party held. These requirements engendered significant opposition, including a call to boycott the referendum.

The agency apparently intercepted government communications early on election day, instructing underlings to report a “yes” vote of about 80 percent and turnout of 40 to 50 percent. Official results then showed a “yes” vote of 83 percent and turnout of 54 percent, “pretty much in line with the instructions. Most foreign observers on the scene described actual voter turnout as very light, nowhere near 50 percent,” SIDtoday reported.

The referendum was followed by Egypt’s historic first multi-candidate presidential election, on September 7, 2005. Although the winner, Mubarak, was a “foregone conclusion,” there was “much interest” about whether this vote count would be honest. With only 23 percent voter turnout, Mubarak won 88.6 percent of the vote. The NSA’s analysis? “SIGINT provided good evidence that there was no massive fraud in the vote count,” according to the same “senior reporter/subject matter expert” who described the suspicious referendum. “Local vote totals reported on the day of the election by Egyptian authorities conformed closely to the final results.” Also, the runner-up, Ayman Nour, with 7.6 percent of votes, was a surprise to “top Egyptian officials” who had wanted a different candidate to come in second, the NSA staffer added. The opposition claimed there were irregularities, but Egypt’s electoral commission was satisfied with the process.

Just three months after the election, surprise favorite Nour was jailed on charges of election fraud and imprisoned for the next five years.

NSA Trusts Few Arabic-Speaking Americans It Finds at Detroit Job Fair

As the NSA swept up Arabic communications from Iraq and other hotspots in the “global war on terror,” it found its translation capabilities severely lacking. “This shortcoming must be rectified,” an NSA senior language authority wrote in 2004.  In September 2005, the agency convened a “career invitational” in Detroit, hoping to draw on the high proportion of Arabic-speaking residents in the area and recruit them as linguists for a language center on nearby Selfridge Army National Guard Base.

But the invitational “may not yield many hires” due to unspecified agency concerns about the candidates, an NSA assistant deputy directory wrote in SIDtoday. After gathering 750 resumes, the NSA homed in on 145 potential candidates through “preliminary processing,” and of these, at least 43 passed two placement exams. These finalists were subjected to “special source checks”; other documents throughout the Snowden archive use the phrase “special source” in connection with surveillance operations, including by the agency’s Special Source Operations unit, which at one point was said to be responsible for 80 percent of NSA collection, including its notorious PRISM program — implying that signals intelligence may have been used to vet the candidates. The “special source checks” caused eight individuals to be removed from the applicant pool and led to plans for “significant and lengthy investigation[s]” into at least some of the remaining candidates — investigations that “may not sufficiently resolve the identified issues,” SIDtoday noted. Although the language center on the Selfridge base could accommodate 85 linguists across four daily shifts, the assistant deputy director made clear that filling the seats was far from imminent and wrote, “We will continue to review other sites” to fill the need for linguists.

The NSA’s aggressive probing of Americans of Middle Eastern descent was not confined to job applicants or to Detroit; earlier Intercept reporting on documents supplied by Snowden revealed that the agency used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor the communications of prominent Muslim-American community leaders and politicians. Internally, the intelligence community continues to lag in employee diversity, with a 2015 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that racial and ethnic minorities comprise less than a quarter of the agencies’ staff.

“Smoking Gun Evidence” Against Yasser Arafat

In the course of arguing for more new hires, the deputy chief of the NSA’s Middle East and North Africa line told an interviewer in SIDtoday that intelligence provided by the unit had “shaped history.” One way this occurred was through “golf cart reporting.” During the 2000 peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David, the NSA intercepted communications on the stances of participating diplomats in “near real-time,” the deputy chief said, and would “stamp ‘draft’ on it and fax it to a CIA liaison officer up in Thurmont, Maryland who in his own golf cart would race across the grounds to give it directly to the President or Secretary of State. Imagine the thrill and the responsibility of providing — with virtually no oversight — intelligence going directly to the President!”

U.S. negotiators would know the Israeli and Palestinians’ positions prior to the teams’ arrival.

The deputy chief further credits his unit’s reporting as the basis for the U.S.’s refusal to negotiate with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, stating the division “had smoking-gun evidence that Arafat was still supporting terrorism.” It’s unclear to which precise chapter of Middle East peace talks this claim refers, but President George W. Bush formally refused to accept Arafat as a negotiation partner in 2002, amid speculation that the Palestinian leader was implicated in the 2000 outbreak of the second Intifada.

The Camp David talks were hardly the first instance of NSA diplomatic spying, a key activity for the agency. Previously published documents have shown the agency spying on heads of state, U.N. headquarters, and representatives to a climate change summit.

Czech Partnership

In 2006, then-U.S. Ambassador William J. Cabaniss was worried and unburdened himself to Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, saying he hoped intelligence-sharing between the two nations would not be adversely affected by structural changes in how Czech intelligence was managed. Topolánek assured the ambassador that things would be fine, despite a transition of a key spy agency to parliamentary control. As described in a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, “the Prime Minister said that UZSI, the foreign intelligence branch, ‘has been effective and we don’t want to change that.’”

U.S. concern over changes at UZSI was understandable, as at least one element of the American intelligence community had spent the prior year gushing over the benefits of newly secured access to UZSI intel. The NSA, as previously reported, was essentially let inside UZSI’s “SIGINT vault” in early 2005. By late 2005, the U.S. and Czech Republic appeared to have officially solidified their “Third Party” signals intelligence-sharing partnership and UZSI, over the course of at least three visits in six months, presented their American counterparts with a slew of information, largely about Russian government and business interests according to two articles in SIDtoday. These files included information about the communications of Russian and Belarusian arms dealers, banking networks, and counterintelligence targets. They also gave the Americans a program designed to identify Russian words in voice communications. “Our ability to jointly produce valuable SIGINT while enjoying each other’s company and learning about our cultural differences may indeed make this the start of a beautiful friendship,” wrote a staffer from the central European branch of the NSA’s foreign affairs directorate.

(One of the SIDtoday articles alleged that the Belarus company, BELTECHEXPORT, was involved in weapons proliferation. The U.S. State Department in 2011 imposed, but in 2013 lifted, sanctions against the company for weapons proliferation.)

Anti-Imperialist Camp

A previous SIDtoday release noted the NSA’s interest in a European leftist group called the Anti-Imperialist Camp. The NSA had accused the group of toeing a line between “legitimate political activity” and abetting terrorism. In a later SIDtoday article, titled “Terrorism or Political Action? The Anti-Imperialist Camp Crosses the Line,” a member of the NSA’s “indigenous European terrorism branch” describes the AIC as a “duplicitous organization” and touts the NSA’s interception of Anti-Imperialist Camp’s communications as a pathway into “[an] expansive network of extremists and terrorists.” The article alleged that the organization maintained contacts with such individuals, and said that “insights into [this] expansive network” led to the identification of “a Jordanian extremist with extensive links to other extremists,” “a new organization that calls itself the Resistant Arab People’s Alliance,” and several other individuals and groups.

Longtime Anti-Imperialist Camp member and spokesperson Wilhelm Langthaler told The Intercept that he could not “identify one single activity, participant, or interlocutor” from this list of what SIDtoday strongly implied were contacts of the group.

The SIDtoday article further stated that the U.S. government had “recent[ly],” as of August 2005, approached the Italian government and “demanded the arrest of individuals involved with the Italian wing of the AIC.” Several individuals associated with the AIC had been arrested in April 2004 as part of a multinational effort against the Turkish militant organization, DHKP-C. The three AIC members, initially charged with conspiracy or “subversive association” with an alleged member of the terrorist group, were released and ultimately absolved of all charges in September 2010. In her decision, Judge Beatrice Cristiani observed that if the AIC did indeed help the DHPK-C, it was because they intended to assist “a dissident and not a terrorist” —essentially verifying the group’s legitimate political intent, which the NSA so adamantly decried.

Breakthrough in Cellphone Tracking

NSA analysts can often identify and track particular mobile phones by monitoring cellular networks for 15-digit handset identifiers called the International Mobile Subscriber Identities. Events on the network, like making a call, receiving an SMS text message, or connecting to a new cell tower, are normally tagged with such numbers.

But starting in the 1990s, NSA analysts had struggled whenever cellular networks implemented Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identities (TMSIs), according to a July 2005 SIDtoday article. “TMSIs obscure the true identities of the cellular subscribers being referenced in call records, location events, and SMS,” the author wrote, because “TMSIs can change every few hours or even with every phone call.” And, to make matters worse, two cellular networks in Iraq had just implemented TMSIs, obscuring the NSA’s collection efforts there.

The ASSOCIATION program solved this problem. With advances in metadata collection, processing, and storage, the NSA discovered that it could use individual metadata records to work backward from a TMSI to obtain the original IMSI and thus, associate cellphone events with the exact phone that made them.

Early on, Skype Posed Challenges

At the end of 2005, the NSA faced serious new challenges in spying on Skype calls. At the time, Skype was a 2-year-old service that was growing in popularity. “At this time, SIGINT targets have a method to freely obscure their communications on the global Internet,” an analyst wrote in SIDtoday, “thus hindering our ability to collect vital communications intelligence.”

Unlike traditional phone calls, anyone with internet access anywhere in the world could make a free, anonymous Skype account, identified only by a username. And unlike the phone network, in which calls get routed through (and eavesdropped on) at central offices, Skype calls were peer-to-peer, making central eavesdropping impossible. On top of all this, Skype calls were also encrypted, and the NSA did not yet know how to decrypt them.

A reader wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that internet calling systems like Skype also complicate the NSA’s ability to comply with USSID-18, an NSA policy through which the agency attempts to not spy on Americans. “Anyone with any brains” will register a U.S. phone number for their account, they wrote, even though this phone number can be used from anywhere in the world.

The NSA’s troubles with spying on Skype calls were eventually resolved. New York Times reporting, based on Snowden documents, revealed that in 2008, Skype “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.”

Blast from the Past

“Social networking is truly the wave of the future,” Eric Mesa, a young software engineer at the NSA wrote in a December 2005 letter to the editor of SIDtoday. “A lot of you may not know this, but college students (of which I finally ceased to be in May 2005) have been voluntarily assembling their own social networks online!”

He went on to describe a service “known as The Facebook” and explained how it worked, including that “through the link ‘visualize my social network’ they can see a diagram similar to the ones we use to map terrorist networks.”

Top photo: U.S. Marines escort nine detainees captured in Fallujah, half of them from other countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states, to a local “prison” as other U.S. Marines of the 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, Alpha company engage four insurgents during house searches on Nov. 23, 2004 in Fallujah, Iraq.

The post NSA Used Porn to “Break Down Detainees” in Iraq — and Other Revelations From 297 Snowden Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

NSA agents successfully targeted “the entire business chain” connecting foreign cafes to the internet, bragged about an “all-out effort” to spy on liberated Iraq, and began systematically trying to break into virtual private networks, according to a set of internal agency news reports dating to the first half of 2005.

British spies, meanwhile, were made to begin providing new details about their informants via a system of “Intelligence Source Descriptors” created in response to intelligence failures in Iraq. Hungary and the Czech Republic pulled closer to the National Security Agency.

And future Intercept backer Pierre Omidyar visited NSA headquarters for an internal conference panel on “human networking” and open-source intelligence.

These stories and more are contained in a batch of 294 articles from SIDtoday, the internal news website of the NSA’s core Signals Intelligence Directorate. The Intercept is publishing the articles in redacted form as part of an ongoing project to release material from the files provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In addition to the aforementioned highlights, summarized in further detail below, the documents show how the NSA greatly expanded a secret eavesdropping partnership with Ethiopia’s draconian security forces in the Horn of Africa, as detailed in an investigation by longtime Intercept contributor Nick Turse. They describe the NSA’s operations at a base in Digby, England, where the agency worked with its British counterpart GCHQ to help direct drones in the Middle East and tap into communications through the Arab Spring uprisings, according to a separate article by Intercept reporter Ryan Gallagher. And they show how the NSA and GCHQ thwarted encryption systems used to protect peer-to-peer file sharing through the apps Kazaa and eDonkey, as explained here by Intercept technologist Micah Lee.

NSA did not comment for this article.

American Intelligence Agents Outed Themselves Online

Members of the U.S. intelligence community routinely thwarted a system designed to mask their identities online by using it for personal shopping and to log on to websites, according to an NSA information technology manager.

The system, called “AIRGAP,” was run by “one of the world’s largest ISPs” and created around 1998 at the behest of the NSA, according to NSA Internet Program Manager Charlie Speight, writing in SIDtoday. Its purpose was to allow “non-attribution internet access,” Speight added, meaning that intelligence analysts could surf the internet without revealing that they were coming from U.S. spy agencies. By 2005, it was used by the whole U.S. intelligence community.

One early concern about the firewall was that it funneled all internet traffic through a single IP address, meaning that if any activity on the address was revealed to be associated with U.S. spies, a broad swath of other activity could then be attributed to other U.S. spies. More IP addresses were subsequently added, but “occasionally we find that the ISP reverts to one address, or does not effectively rotate those assigned,” Speight wrote.

Speight added that the “greater security concern” was the very intelligence agents the system was designed to protect. “Despite rules and warnings to the contrary, all too frequently users will use AIRGAP for registering on web sites or for services, logging into other sites and services and even ordering personal items from on-line vendors,” Speight wrote in a classified passage. “By doing so, these users reveal information about themselves and, potentially, other users on the network. So much for ‘non-attribution.'”

This sort of sloppiness mirrors behavior that has undermined Russian intelligence operatives. A slide presentation by Canadian intelligence, dating to 2011 or later, labeled as “morons” members of a Russian hacking group code-named “MAKERSMARK,” who thwarted a “really well-designed” system to hide their identities by using it to log on to their personal social and email accounts.

The two situations are not perfectly comparable; the U.S. system was managed as part of a network for obtaining unclassified information, while the Russian system was used for the more sensitive activity of staging hack attacks. But Speight hinted at aggressive use of the U.S. system, writing in his piece that the NSA had begun “using AIRGAP for reasons and in volumes not intended in its formation” — the agency thus began developing its own separate firewall.

The NSA had systems with the same goal as AIRGAP — anonymization — but for phone calls. According to a February 2005 SIDtoday article, the NSA controlled 40,000 telephone numbers, but these were almost all prefixed with area- and exchange-code combinations that were publicly associated with the agency. An analyst who needed to make a public phone call without leaking their affiliation could use “anonymous telephones,” most of them registered to Department of Defense, or “cover telephones,” registered using alias names and P.O. boxes. No security protocol lapses were described in connection with the old-fashioned voice networks.

NSA Targeted “the Entire Business Chain” to Spy on Internet Cafes

While hiding, or at least trying to hide, its own online operations, the NSA launched an all-encompassing campaign to trace online activity in internet cafes, down to specific seats.

A program called “MASTERSHAKE” accomplished this by exploiting equipment used by the cafes, including satellite internet modems, according to top-secret information reported by SIDtoday. “MASTERSHAKE targets the entire business chain, from manufacturer to Internet café installation, to ascertain any and all available data regarding … geolocation, the network connectivity of the modem, as well as the actual physical location of the installation,” according to SIDtoday.

MASTERSHAKE data was “enriched” with other information, including “geolocatable phone events,” as well as intelligence from throughout the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate and from the agency’s XKeyscore search system.

The NSA knew the precise location of over 400 internet cafes. For over 50 of these cafes, it could locate a target to a specific seat within the cafe. One goal of the monitoring was to hunt down Al Qaeda leaders, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. SIDtoday focused on the use of MASTERSHAKE in Iraq, describing an incident in the city of Ramadi where two “counterterrorism targets” began using a messenger service at an internet cafe, and the two men were arrested. But it also indicated the system was used more broadly, “in the Middle East and Africa.”

As the Intercept previously reported, the NSA has surveilled internet cafes in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, as detailed in agency documents.

Sunni Arab member of Iraqi Transitional National Assembly and a candidate for the post of parliament speaker Misha’an al-Juburi speaks on the phone April 2, 2005 in Baghdad.

An “All-Out Effort” To Spy on Liberated Iraq

The NSA’s surveillance against Iraqis went far beyond cafe computers. Two years after President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech and a year after the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over the reins to the Iraqi Interim Government, the agency was trying to tap the nation’s communications — and enlist friendly Iraqis and the new government to do likewise.

In a top-secret SIDtoday report, an NSA “data acquisition lead” in Baghdad described “an all-out effort to penetrate Iraqi networks using everything in the tool box of the most sophisticated SIGINT agency in the world.” The “very forward-leaning and aggressive” collection effort brought “our technology to bear at the optimum access points” in the country. The identity of those access points is hinted at by the list of people the NSA staffer met with as the “field rep on a number of projects”: “Iraqi government personnel engaged in telecommunications and IT issues for Iraq; small and medium sized Iraqi communications contractors; the CEO’s and Chief Technical Officers of the major Iraqi telecommunications service providers; [and] Iraqi cabinet level officials,” among others.

Another article confirmed the NSA was spying on Iraqi telecommunications, describing a “dramatic drop” in information the agency collected from links carrying mobile phone traffic between Fallujah and northern Baghdad and a consequent gap in intelligence gathering. A team from the NSA and CIA was able to restore the collection within two weeks by targeting microwave signals carrying the traffic.

In addition to its own electronic spying within Iraq, the NSA sought to rebuild the country’s ability to spy on itself through another joint project with the CIA, along with GCHQ. The Western intelligence entities would build a new Iraqi spy agency, dubbed the Iraq SIGINT Element, according to another SIDtoday article. The Iraqi SIGINT Element’s expertise would come, of course, from veterans of Saddam Hussein’s regime; the NSA and GCHQ made a list of candidates “gleaned from years of targeting the Iraqi civil and military SIGINT units,” SIDtoday reported. The former targets were the new recruits. The CIA assisted in the vetting process with polygraphers, psychologists, and background checks, and the NSA trained the selected candidates on “how we do SIGINT.” The new intelligence agents’ first assignment was to find communications of former Saddam “elements” and insurgents in Baghdad. They went covertly into Baghdad neighborhoods, which U.S. and U.K. forces were unable to do.

It was at the behest of the director of central intelligence that the NSA “moved aggressively to help [Iraq] establish and enhance their signals intelligence capabilities,” SIDtoday reported separately. A similar effort was underway in Afghanistan. “Both relationships come with risks, but the overall benefit to U.S. objectives in the region outweighs these risks,” wrote an NSA foreign affairs staff officer.

Targeting Bombers in Iraq

Mass surveillance efforts in Iraq were part of a broader NSA effort to address the consequences of the coalition’s victory over Saddam Hussein. Immediately after the Ba’athist government fell to the invading forces in 2003, signals intelligence collection on the regime ceased to exist. NSA staff, some of whom had been monitoring the country for more than a decade, woke up to “no more audio cuts, no more transcripts … no more product reports,” according to an account in SIDtoday. One official wondered, “Will we lose resources because of our success?” Postwar insurgency and sectarian strife ensured this was not the case.

For example, an NSA team set about thwarting detonation systems for bombs set by insurgents. The bombs, known within the U.S. military as improvised explosive devices, were triggered from a distance, often using high-powered cordless phone systems, in which a common base station, controlled by a triggerman, connects to a cluster of wireless handsets. The team devised a way to locate triggermen: Intercepting and identifying security codes emitted by captured handsets. The codes, intended to tether a handset to a particular base station, could then be used to locate base stations, resulting in military targeting and “hopefully, the IED makers neutralized,” SIDtoday stated.

The NSA may have had a chance to deploy this technique at the end of January 2005, when Iraq’s first parliamentary elections took place. An article in SIDtoday said that signals intelligence helped prevent 50 to 60 suicide bombers from making it into polling centers. Still, 285 other insurgent attacks occurred that day, and CNN reported several incidents of suicide bombings that hit police officers and Iraqis waiting to vote.

How British Spies Were Made To Atone for Bad Iraq Intel

In Iraq and elsewhere, the NSA expanded the scope of its intelligence sharing to U.S. government “customers,” as described in a January 2005 article, in which an NSA staffer in Baghdad read a new sharing guideline aloud to a hesitant colleague: “It’s OK to talk about, show and share evaluated, minimized unpublished SIGINT to customers/partners in order to facilitate analytic collaboration.”

Even amid the aggressive intelligence sharing, the NSA was taking note of what could happen when such sharing went terribly wrong. A SIDtoday story about a British government inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, the Butler Review, describes how the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ was now required to provide “Intelligence Source Descriptors” on all intel reports. This requirement came in response to the finding that the British foreign spying agency, MI6, did not adequately check human sources and relied on third-hand reporting about Iraqi chemical weapons, including “seriously flawed” information from “another country’s intelligence service.”

The new British source descriptors would include identification of sources by name or role along with judgments on whether the source had direct or indirect access to the information reported. The GCHQ descriptor would also indicate whether a source is “reliable,” “unknown,” or “uncertain” as to reliability. “There are no plans at present to use a like program on NSA reports,” SIDtoday reported.

Despite reporting on fallout from the U.K. postwar review, SIDtoday did not cover a U.S. presidential commission that prominently reported in March 2005 on how the American intelligence community was “dead wrong” in its prewar assessment of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

NSA Works with Hungary, Pakistan, Ethiopia — and an Eager Czech Republic

In parallel with its efforts to share information with more U.S. government and intelligence agencies, the NSA also forged connections with foreign partners whose collaboration would have, in previous decades, seemed inconceivable.

In early 2005, the NSA entered into a partnership with Hungary’s Military Intelligence Office, inviting the spy agency to “work with NSA as part of our extended SIGINT enterprise,” according to SIDtoday, and “write SIGINT reports for dissemination through the NSA system to our intelligence community customers.” The partnership allowed the NSA to tap into the Hungarian agency’s “unique access to Serbian and Ukrainian military targets.”

A contemporaneous NSA visit to the Czech Republic, as described in SIDtoday, showed how such “third party” partnerships can come to fruition. The trip was conducted to establish whether the NSA should partner with the Czech External Intelligence Service, or ÚZSI, which wanted to tap NSA expertise “on many technical issues.” In order to win over the Americans, spy agency “personnel essentially opened the door to their SIGINT vault,” displaying an “exceptional degree of openness.” The NSA team came away impressed, judging ÚZSI “exceptionally good at analysis of material associated with Russian [counterintelligence] targets,” and impressed with the agency’s “very good analytic effort against Russian and Ukrainian HF networks” and “overall levels of sophistication, knowledge, practical experience, ingenuity and enthusiasm that allow them to overcome many financial and equipment shortfalls.” Perhaps best of all, ÚZSI “has not requested financial support from the NSA.” The Czech Republic eventually became a third-party partner.

A March 2005 SIDtoday article, summarizing a briefing from the NSA’s principal director for foreign affairs, alluded to agency “relationships” with Pakistan and Ethiopia, “work” with Iraq (discussed elsewhere in this article) and Afghanistan, and a “multinational collaboration in the Pacific.”

More generally, third parties became vital at this time simply for providing additional staffing and coverage. For instance, after the U.S. closed several bases, the NSA developed a reliance on third-party partners to participate in High Frequency Directional Finding networks for locating the origins of targeted radio signals. And the U.S. partnered with Hungary’s military intelligence organization in part because it “has been instrumental in providing intelligence that answers high-priority CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) requirements that NSA would otherwise not be able to answer due to manpower constraints.”

Intercept Backer Spoke at NSA Headquarters

Back in the U.S., the NSA’s post-9/11 “transformation,” initiated by Director Michael Hayden, promoted information sharing and collaboration to the traditionally closed community at Fort Meade. Invitations to participate at agency seminars and conferences were made not just to partners from the intelligence and military communities, but also to members of private industry and academia.

An announcement in SIDtoday for the third annual Analysis Conference from the NSA’s Analysis and Production division proclaimed the need to “keep communications open and leverage our partners’ insights.” Speakers at the May 2005 event, held at agency headquarters, included authors, U.S. senators, corporate executives, and journalists.

One “high-powered panel” at the conference on “human networking” featured eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who would go on to provide funding for The Intercept, which covers and is frequently critical of the NSA. A separate SIDtoday article touting the panel  indicated that corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly also participated and that panelists were recruited through the Global Business Network, a consulting firm specializing in scenario-based forecasting. The GBN had been asked to harness its network of experts, “most of whom have had no previous involvement with the intelligence community,” to apply strategies from “the competitive marketplace” to NSA challenges.

Omidyar told The Intercept that the GBN “asked me to participate in an unclassified meeting at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade on the topic of ‘open source’ intelligence. My recollection of the people I met there is that they were very smart and genuinely interested in bringing outside ideas into the agency. I stayed involved with the GBN for some time after that meeting but when they approached me many months later to participate in additional meetings with the NSA, I declined. The invitation was made after news broke in December 2005 about the agency’s ‘warrantless wiretapping’ — and those events were deeply concerning to me. In addition, I didn’t have anything else to add beyond what I had already shared. I was not asked to meet with the NSA again after declining that invitation.”

Omidyar said he was not paid for his appearance.

Advanced Word on Indian Nuclear Weapons

A series of nuclear weapons tests conducted by India in the spring of 1998 took the intelligence community by surprise, prompting an internal investigation into why these tests had not been foreseen; a subsequent report was harshly critical of the U.S. intelligence community. A similar lapse in data gathering would not happen again in 2005. An Australian NSA site, RAINFALL, isolated a signal it suspected was associated with an Indian nuclear facility, according to SIDtoday. Collaboration between RAINFALL and two NSA stations in Thailand (INDRA and LEMONWOOD) confirmed the source of the signals and allowed for the interception of information about several new Indian missile initiatives. Although these missile systems did not come to public attention for several more years (the Sagarika submarine-launched ballistic missile was first tested in 2008), the NSA’s access to these signals gave them foreknowledge of their Third Party SIGINT partner’s (see last image) actions.

Attacking VPNs

An NSA working group focused on virtual private networks, or VPNs, was established in November 2004 to “conduct systematic and thorough SIGINT Development of VPN communications (typically encrypted),” SIDtoday reported — meaning that the agency wanted to break into the networks. The group published regular “VPN Target Activity Reports” on a large number of countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Russia, and China, as well as “specific financial, governmental, communication service providers and international organizations.” These reports may help analysts “exploit targets’ VPNs more successfully.”

Women at the NSA

Sonia Kovalevsky Days take place at schools and colleges nationwide, with competitions and talks to encourage young women to pursue careers in mathematics. Although the events’ namesake was a radical socialist and pioneering female mathematician, members of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society participated as part of the agency’s effort to recruit more female mathematicians. The NSA believed itself to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, but between 1987 to 1993, only one of the 30 math Ph.D.s the agency hired identified as a woman, and only 26 percent of women hired into the agency’s mathematics community had an advanced degree, according to SIDtoday. After the Women in Mathematics Society was formed, from 1994 through 2005, about 38 percent of women mathematicians hired into NSA had a doctoral degree and 27 percent held a master’s degree.

Hold the Spam, Please

“Spam affects NSA by impeding our collection, processing and storage of [Digital Network Intelligence] traffic,” said the author of a February 2005 SIDtoday article. “Unfortunately, filtering out spam has proven to be an extremely difficult and cumbersome task.”According to the author, analysts developed technology that tagged “an average of 150,000 spam sessions a day,” which greatly reduced the amount of spam that shows up in “daily searches” of intercepted emails.

Correction: September 13, 2017, 9:15 p.m.
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story gave an incorrect year for the NSA’s third annual Analysis Conference; the event occurred in May 2005, not May 2015.

Top photo: In this May 1, 2003 file photo, President George W. Bush gives a “thumbs-up” sign after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast.

The post Sloppy U.S. Spies Misused a Covert Network for Personal Shopping — and Other Stories from Internal NSA Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

A small group of media representatives and non-governmental observers, family members of five people who died at the World Trade Center, and a survivor of the Ground Zero recovery cleanup were witnesses to the week-long proceedings, as prosecution and defense argued over procedural issues involving document declassification and weighty issues involving legality of the death penalty charges against the defendants, and the destruction, most likely between July 2014 and December 2015, of a CIA black site where at least one of the men was tortured.

That site, location unknown (to defense and observers, at least), was described as “crucial, exculpatory evidence” by the defense attorneys Friday — at a hearing the 9/11 defendants declined to attend — in arguments demanding that the military judge and prosecution be recused and the case abated (i.e. stopped).  The issue at hand was that the defense did not receive the notice of the impending destruction of the black site in time to argue against it, due to mishandling and confusion over the filing of the redacted order by the court in July 2014. While the defense continued to seek the judge’s order throughout 2015 while pursuing motions requesting access to the black site, they did not receive it until February 2016. Instead of a visit to the original site, the defense was given an edited version of a “video representation”  made of the site before its destruction.

David Nevin, attorney for Mohammed, said: “This substitution is pretty close to a joke. It gives us almost nothing of what we need to really present the impact of this crucial evidence,” in the death penalty case.

Nevin and James Connell, attorney for Baluchi, argued that the prosecution team realized the defense had not received the order and acted in bad faith. “I suggest the military commission made a mistake and the prosecution exploited that mistake,” Connell said.

Prosecutor Robert Swann responded that there was no basis for the judge’s recusal and that “nobody destroyed anything,” leading to more arguments from the defense and eventual move to a session closed to observers.

The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, maintained his cool throughout the presentation of the motion requesting his seat on the bench be vacated as a result of actions and mistakes made by his office.

But on Thursday, Pohl showed his irritation with one of the accused who defied the procedure set up to allow the defendants to waive their attendance in the courtroom. Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the detainee who in 2016 had surgery to repair rectal injuries inflicted during his torture in a black site, signed the waiver but then also sent a letter saying he wouldn’t attend because the escort drivers of his transport van drove too fast and jostled him on the trip, causing pain.  The judge halted the proceedings for two hours while the escorts were sent to fetch him. Pohl then scolded him from the bench. “If you look around this room, you see how many people are implicated in just getting these hearings conducted. At the request of the defense, I permitted you — I’m speaking to the accused here — the option to waive your presence after being advised of your rights. We have done this for years now.”

He continued, speaking directly to all the defendants: “If this scenario comes up again where a detainee signs a waiver form, and then in court finds out it really isn’t a voluntary waiver because of some other information, whether written or otherwise, that requires me to bring the detainee in here. Absent extraordinary circumstances, that individual detainee will no longer be given the option not to attend and will attend every time, no matter what he wants. I hope that is clear.”

The hearings also involved a defense motion to suppress the distribution of a statement filed by the defendants in an earlier attempt at prosecuting the case that was halted by the Obama administration. The document, in which the defendants claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, is called “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” and was published in the New York Times in 2009. The prosecution gave out the inflammatory document to families of the 9/11 victims as a “confession” by the accused.

Prosecutor Ed Ryan argued that the document is valid and should be admitted as evidence.

The prosecution filed a proposed scheduling order that would set a January 7, 2019 date for jury selection prior to trial, but it did not seem likely that the judge would accept the proposal because of its accelerated deadlines for court filings.

Family members of 9/11 victims spoke to reporters after court adjourned on Friday. In an impassioned statement, Ellen Judd, a Canadian professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, spoke of the loss of her spouse, Christine Egan, and Christine’s brother, Michael Egan. On Sept. 11, Christine was visiting her brother, an AON insurance executive on the 105th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Then Judd addressed the death penalty issue.

“I felt inexpressibly deeply how terrible it is to take a human life for the last 16 years.  Before then I was opposed to the death penalty, but I’ve understood its totality and its unfixability much more strongly since I’ve been closer to the taking of life,” Judd said. “I am unwilling to be part of an act of killing or to endorse it in any way.

“The taking of these lives would not give Chris another moment of life and would not give me any relief,” the soft-spoken professor said. “May this be a time for turning grief into compassion.”

The next session — the 25th round of pretrial hearings — is scheduled to begin October 16.

Top photo: Detainees kneel during an early morning Islamic prayer at the U.S. military prison for “enemy combatants” on Oct. 28, 2009 in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The post At Guantánamo, Men Accused in 9/11 Attacks Faced Their 24th Round of Pretrial Hearings appeared first on The Intercept.

Three years after the 9/11 attacks, a frustrated NSA employee complained that Osama bin Laden was alive and well, and yet the surveillance agency still had no automated way to search the Arabic language PDFs it had intercepted.

This is just one of many complaints and observations included in SIDtoday, the internal newsletter of the NSA’s signals intelligence division. The Intercept today is publishing 251 articles from the newsletter, covering the second half of 2004 and the beginning of 2005.  The newsletters were part of a large collection of NSA documents provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden.

This latest batch of posts includes candid employee comments about over-classification, descriptions of tensions in the NSA-CIA relationship, and an intern’s enthusiastic appraisal of a stint in Pakistan.

Most revealing perhaps are insights into how NSA has operated domestically. The Intercept is publishing two stories on this topic, including one about NSA cooperation with law enforcement during American political conventions, and in a throwback to the movie “Bladerunner,” another article describes a spy balloon used over the United States.

Finally, The Intercept, in cooperation with the Japanese broadcaster NHK, is revealing the history of U.S. surveillance cooperation with Japan. Starting with the American occupation of Japan after World War II and reaching a standoff after the Soviet shoot-down of a South Korean aircraft, the long and sometimes tense relationship reveals how even close U.S. allies can find themselves targeted by the NSA.

NSA Targets North Korea’s Money

The NSA’s Follow-the-Money Branch (the actual name of the division) brings together “experts from across a spectrum of disciplines and organizations.” The division in 2004 created a North Korea CRASH Team, short for Combined Rapid Analysis and Synthesis Hit, after the State Department “issued a requirement for a new emphasis on regime finance and an increased emphasis on” North Korea’s financing of its nuclear proliferation. In response, the CRASH Team looked at North Korean transactions that went through foreign banks. In particular, the team “targeted leadership finance,” i.e. Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader who died in 2011, and traced sales of precious metals allegedly owned by him, weapons shipments, and relationships among regime leaders.

Unprepared for Another Korean War

The “6th rock drill on Korea” brought together NSA and officials from the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to rehearse the scenarios involving civilian evacuations in Seoul and Pyongyang during a hypothetical Korean War. Participants planned a response to a North Korean attack and “held a brainstorming session about signals intelligence operations” in a hypothetical newly unified Korea. In the discussions, “critical gaps” were found in communications with trusted Five Eyes countries, which did not have access to the computer networks for the “Korea Theater of Operations.” Twenty-two other nations committed to defending South Korea are not included in intelligence sharing either. So NSA will be “working through some of these problems, with the goal of exercising the resulting solutions sometime in early 2005.”

NSA Weather Reporting on the Soviet Union

Back in the late 1960s, Charlie Meals, the deputy director of SID, worked in the Soviet “weather shop.” The only way the U.S. could track weather in the Soviet Union was by listening to Soviet communications. The Soviets knew the U.S. was listening and so it encrypted the locations of weather reports. U.S. Strategic Air Command “needed to have weather reports in case bombers ever had to fly into Soviet air space,” and the weather reporting could also be an indicator of impending military action. For example, before the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets started including Czech weather reports in military broadcasts. (The intricacies of collecting weather data as intelligence is also described in this article by Jeffrey Richelson of National Security Archive.) The “weather effort” had at least 250 people at NSA and people at bases around the world. This desk was still in operation in 2004.

NSA’s FBI Relations

FBI field office staff made little use of signals intelligence and many didn’t know how to access the information for themselves on the Intelligence Community’s Intelink system, according to an NSA intern, describing assignments at the bureau. The FBI field offices had little or no Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space, which made it difficult to share the higher levels of intelligence between the agencies. The intern had higher regard for FBI headquarters. With data from the NSA, “FBI analysts can now immediately tell if an individual in the U.S. has any foreign terrorism-related contacts.”

Eavesdropping in Haiti After 2004 Coup

The NSA tracked “High Value Targets” in Haiti following the 2004 coup, according to an article classified “Top Secret.” An NSA staffer reports that a task force on HVTs traveled to the central highlands of Haiti where they met with rebel leaders. “During this trip they had collected several telephone numbers of these leaders and their associates,” the staffer wrote. Soon thereafter, the NSA “began to see multi-page reports of conversations between one important rebel leader and his wife which provided insight into his negotiating position and plans for control of the central highlands.” Those private conversations proved useful. “I received several emails from people who were incredulous that a conversation between an HVT target and his girlfriend was of any importance,” the staffer went on. “The truth is that a lot of SIGINT ‘leavings’ that never make it into normal SIGINT reporting are actually valuable intelligence items for tactical warfighters.”

NSA’s Setup in Pakistan

NSA interns see the sights, even in Pakistan. An intelligence analysis intern working in SID’s Pakistan branch was deployed to assignments in Islamabad and Lahore. At the embassy, the intern focused on signals intelligence related to the non-tribal “Settled Areas” and coordinated communications among NSA, CIA and the “local counterpart” i.e. Pakistani partners, in tracking and targeting terrorists. The Settled Areas Office along with their local counterparts was responsible for the arrests of more than 600 alleged terrorists from September 11, 2001 to 2004. Outside of working hours, the blonde American attracted a “constant stream of stares and curious looks” as she ventured out to tourist sites. Station Islamabad, which has been fictionalized in “Homeland” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” was to this staffer “one of the most exciting, challenging, and fast-paced locations to work in the world.”

SIGINT Travels Beyond the Intelligence Community

“Q: What do SIGINT and mad cows have in common?

A: Both are of critical interest to the U.S. Department of Agriculture”

SIGINT isn’t just for intelligence or military agencies. NSA’s two-person Washington Liaison Office responds to signals intelligence requests from Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, Export-Import Bank, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Reserve System, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. With such a wide range of subject matter and competing priorities, the liaison officers have to balance “topics from bovine spongiform encephalopathy to space launch vehicle capabilities; from narcotics interdiction techniques to wine labeling regulations; from toxin delivery technologies to secure communications options, and much, much more.”

NSA Couldn’t Search Arabic PDFs

Imagine if the NSA missed warning signs of an attack for no other reason than it couldn’t search Arabic words in PDF format. “If you were looking for Osama bin Laden,” wrote an NSA employee in SIDtoday, “and you had entered every Arabic word known to mankind in every possible encoding and Osama were doing nothing more than using PDF and writing in Arabic, you’d never get a hit. Quite reassuring, isn’t it?”

Near the end of 2004, SIDtoday began publishing a technical advice column written by an experienced Digital Network Intelligence analyst under the pseudonym “Raul.” One article describes a gaping intelligence hole that NSA had at the time, three years after the 9/11 attacks. Though analysts at NSA understood exactly how foreign-language PDFs were encoded, they lacked the technology to untangle them in real-time in order to search them for keywords.

Apparently, this article “hit a few nerves.” Raul’s subsequent column responded to a flood of complaints he had received. In the subsequent column, he outlined requirements for a hypothetical solution to the foreign-language PDF problem, and concluded with a bit of snark: “Bin Laden is still safe and we, to the best of my knowledge, still have no reasonable solution to the PDF problem.”

When NSA Agents Go Undercover

For some sensitive missions, NSA personnel need cover identities while working in the field. An article from October 2004 describes how agents “go about making NSA personnel look like they actually work for an entity other than NSA.” The Special Operational Support office is responsible for NSA’s “cover and sensitive personnel support programs.” In addition to ensuring that cover operations comply with Department of Defense regulations, SOS provides “logistics, transportation, personnel and medical support.” The office also provides undercover operatives with “DoD Common Access Cards (CAC), travel documents, state driver’s licenses, credit cards, post office boxes, social security cards, pocket litter and telecommunications.”

Finding Genetic Sequences in SIGINT

The NSA, it turns out, likes to stay on top of the latest scientific developments. Writing at the end of 2004, an NSA cryptanalyst described her experience working as an intern, and using her cryptography skills, on looking for information about genetic sequencing in the signals intelligence collected by the NSA. “The ultimate goals of this project are to gain general knowledge about genetic engineering research activity by foreign entities,” she wrote, “and to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research.”

NSA’s Contributions to the 9/11 Commission Report

Even though the 9/11 Commission report harshly criticized intelligence agencies’ failures to share information, the NSA touted its contribution to the July 22, 2004, report. “It goes without saying that NSA Cooperation was absolutely vital to this effort,” an article in SIDtoday says. SID staff aided in the declassification of material, turned over documents, and “patiently explained the intricacies of their work.” SID workers also scrubbed references to the NSA from the final report, rewording sections to avoid indications that certain pieces of intelligence derived from SIGINT. “You should all feel proud,” writes the post’s author.

Yet the report itself points to specific SIGINT that could have led to the discovery of the attackers’ conspiracy that remained unshared due to agencies’ fear of disclosing intelligence to inappropriate channels and a culture of secrecy in which “agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayer expense.”

A prior SIDtoday article touted the agency’s “extraordinary level of cooperation” and provision of “large volumes of SIGINT assessment reporting on terrorism, strategic business plans,” and a wide range of other topics.

NSA and CIA’s Uneasy Collaborations

Cooperation between the NSA and CIA runs deep, but it hasn’t always been smooth. An August 6 post, “CIA’s Directorates . . . Understanding More About Them,” talks about “‘turf wars’ due to real or perceived mission overlap,” particularly within the CIA’s technical division. Yet the Special Collection Service (SCS), which surveils foreign communications from U.S. embassies, is seen as a positive example of joint CIA-NSA work. SIDtoday cites the achievements of that highly classified organization, which came under scrutiny in 2013 for reports that its Berlin office had been intercepting Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone data. The August 18 post, “SCS and Executive Protection” details the interception of Philippine police communications about a bomb that had been placed on President Clinton’s motorcade route, which the police were trying to defuse without informing the Americans. SCS passed this information to the Secret Service, who re-routed the cars.

The NSA-CIA relationship was also the subject of two SIDtoday articles in 2003.

Does the NSA Share Enough Information With Congress?

Even the NSA acknowledges that it classifies too much. In an article, “Do We Overclassify? Are We Sharing Enough Information?” a senior SID leader echoes language from the 9/11 Commission report, specifically citing the need to go from “a climate of ‘need to know’ to one of ‘need to share.’” This interview shares the report’s concern that intelligence agencies err on the side of over-classification: “If we continue to insist on classifying information which has already become known to our adversaries or for which disclosure would cause little or no harm to national security, we risk losing control over the really sensitive stuff.” Tellingly, though, he fears that Congress itself will act to force the NSA to disclose more information.

NSA Supports the U.S. Marshals Service

Post-9/11, the NSA has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service. In February 2004, SID formalized a relationship with the Marshals and its Electronic Surveillance Unit, which “functions like an intelligence operations team,” as it both monitors fugitives and provides support and threat assessments to other agencies. The U.S. Marshals Service represents an ideal client for the NSA given its interest in “stay(ing) out of the public limelight and courthouses.”

Top photo: North Korean soldiers carry a portrait of late leader Kim Jong Il during a military parade to mark 100 years since the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang on April 15, 2012.

The post Why Soviet Weather Was Secret, a Critical Gap in Korea, and Other NSA Newsletter Tales appeared first on The Intercept.

The first military proceedings to take place at Guantánamo since Trump took office were as uneventful as they were symbolic. After more than four years of pre-trial proceedings in a stop-and-start schedule, the judge was considering yet another delay.

Hearings connected to the military prosecution of the five men charged with plotting the 9/11 attacks reconvened Wednesday, but an attorney for one of the men had been injured over the weekend. So the first issue up for discussion was whether hearings could proceed in her absence.

Former President Barack Obama had declared his intentions to “close Guantánamo,” but as Trump took office last week, 41 detainees remained, among them seven men in pre-trial proceedings. The five 9/11 defendants — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al Hawsawi — were arraigned in May 2012.

The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, told the 11 journalists waiting to attend the proceedings that under the new Trump administration, the prosecution is “just as determined as ever” to try this case “however long it takes.”

It was looking to take a while longer, however. Cheryl Bormann, Bin Attash’s attorney, had broken her arm in a fall. Her role as a “learned counsel” is required for defendants in death penalty cases, unless Bin Attash were to waive Bormann’s presence and Judge James L. Pohl were to rule that the case could go on without her.

Family members of six victims of the 2001 attacks and one first responder injured at the World Trade Center site had traveled to Guantánamo to view the hearings this week. One of them, Lee Hanson, is scheduled to be deposed as a witness to phone calls made to him by his son, Peter Hanson, who was traveling to California with his wife and 2-year-old daughter on United Airlines Flight 175 when it was hijacked and flown into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

If the injured attorney were absent, Bin Attash could argue he wasn’t given adequate representation.

This week’s hearing is in many words routine, but it also provides a small window into how complex and time consuming trying defendants on Guantánamo can be — an important lesson if Trump actually plans, as he has previously said, to expand the detention center with “some bad dudes.”

The prosecutor had proposed a trial schedule that opens voir dire questioning of a military jury in March 2018, but James Harrington, learned counsel for co-defendant Ramzi Binalshibh, told reporters that “2020 is a more realistic year to start.”

The prosecutor’s “ambitious schedule” was unworkable, Harrington argued.

Preparing for trial in the offshore naval base comes with myriad logistical difficulties, like dealing with classified evidence and the security clearances required to access it, and translating material to Arabic — not to mention the numerous motions that need to be filed and argued in court.

Since charges were first filed in 2011, the parties have presented more than 270 motions.

One of the more contentious issues is the defense’s lack of access to the 2014 Senate torture report in its 6,000-page entirety, as well as supporting documents, showing how the defendants and others were treated during their captures, interrogations, and years in the CIA’s secret “black prisons” around the world.

Although the judge ruled that the Defense Department must keep its copy of the report pending further motions for its release, the documents are not currently available to defense attorneys, even though they hold security clearances. Instead, the prosecution is selecting and summarizing information from the Senate investigation that it deems relevant to each defendant, and those summaries will be made available to the defense.

That hasn’t happened yet, however.

Bin Attash appeared before the court wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional white garments and head covering. “You said I could consult with the lawyers,” he said, speaking in English. “On the record I do not have an attorney that works with me. I have people that work against me.”

Judge Pohl ruled to delay proceedings until Bormann, the injured counsel, could attend. Bin Attash, who has previously argued that he wants Borman replaced, said again after the ruling that he wanted a new “learned counsel.” It’s a request that has already been denied.

By noon on Wednesday, the public sessions in the courtroom were adjourned until March. That meant the lawyers, media, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, and several family members of 9/11 victims who arrived on a Boeing 767 from Joint Air Base Andrews on Monday, would have to pack up and go home.

The post Guantánamo in the Trump Era Moves Ahead in Slow Motion appeared first on The Intercept.

Wednesday marks the 15^th anniversary of Guantánamo’s use as a detention facility for terrorism suspects. On Inauguration Day, the prison will pass to its third president, almost eight years after Obama ordered it closed within 12 months.

After a transfer of four Yemeni captives to Saudi Arabia last week, Guantánamo — which held nearly 780 people under President Bush — now holds 55 men. Nineteen have been approved for release to other countries, while 26 are held in indefinite detention: “forever prisoners” of the war on terror. Only 10 have been charged with a crime.

Source: Margot Williams, The Intercept
Last Updated: January 05, 2017

In interviews with The Intercept, several attorneys who represent Guantánamo detainees expressed deep uncertainty about the fates of their clients and the other detainees who will pass into Donald Trump’s custody.

“This is nothing new, this type of uncertainty,” said Gary Thompson, a lawyer at the law firm Reed Smith LLP who represents detainees on a pro bono basis. “But we’re at a point in time where there’s a window closing — fast — on the release of several dozen men who are fully cleared for release.”

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Guantánamo has been an object of Trump’s sensationalist rhetoric, but the president-elect has wavered on the question of whether he might actually release cleared detainees.

“As far as Guantánamo is concerned,” Trump told the Miami Herald in August, “I want to make sure, 100 percent sure, that if we’re going to release people, number one — they are going to be people that can be released, and it’s going to be safe to release them.”

But in response to recent detainee transfers, Trump seemed to close the door on that possibility, tweeting that there “should be no further releases from Gitmo,” because the detainees are “extremely dangerous people.”

There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

During his campaign, Trump promised to “load [Guantánamo] up with some bad dudes,” and even said he would be comfortable prosecuting American citizens for terrorism in Guantánamo’s military commissions — which is prohibited by the 2006 Congressional law that established them.

“You just can’t predict” Trump, said David Remes, a human rights attorney who has represented numerous Guantánamo detainees. “To some extent it depends on whether he’s in a good mood or bad mood, or magnanimous or vindictive, at any particular time.”

Martha Rayner, a law professor at Fordham University, said that there is nothing new about the detainees being subject to the whims of politics. “There has been vast uncertainty for the entire duration of Guantánamo. That’s what detention without trial — indefinite detention — is. It is the definition of uncertainty. These men have always been at the mercy of politics, and how politics have changed over the years.”

Obama’s Legacy

When Obama inherited Guantánamo Bay in 2009, he enjoyed bipartisan support for closing the prison. It was one of the campaign issues that he and his Republican opponent John McCain agreed on. Even President Bush, who had created the legal black hole, said “I very much would like to end Guantánamo; I very much would like to get people to a court.”

But when Obama started acting on his campaign promise to the close the facility, congressional Republicans quickly realized it was a way to attack the popular, charismatic president who had thrashed them at the polls.

In 2009, Obama tried to resettle two detainees in the United States. Both were ethnic Uighurs, or Chinese Muslims living in Afghanistan when the war started. Both had been ordered released by a federal judge and cleared of terrorist involvement by the Bush administration, and were going to be resettled in an community of Uighur immigrants in Northern Virginia and monitored. But after furious backlash from Republicans — which included Newt Gingrich trying to connect the two to the 9/11 attackers — Obama backed down.

The damage was done: Obama’s treatment of war-on-terror captives was now a political vulnerability. Later that year, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Christmas-day “underwear bomber” — would smuggle a bomb on board a plane and try to detonate it over Detroit. The pace of transfers out of Guantánamo afterward would slow to a trickle.

Republican fear mongering had turned the Democrats against the president’s plan. In 2009, according to Gallup, a narrow majority of Democratic voters wanted the prison closed and the detainees resettled, but by 2014, more Democrats wanted to keep Guantánamo open than shut it.

Detainee hunger strikes led to increased public pressure to do something, and the Obama administration began accelerating the pace of Guantánamo transfers after 2013. In the last two years the number of detainees has shrunk from more than 120 to 55.

One of the 19 people Obama approved for transfer who will likely still be there when Trump takes over is Ravel Mingazov — a former ballet-dancer with the Russian Red Army, and a client of Thompson’s. Obama’s task force recommended he be prosecuted in 2009, but a federal judge in 2010 found no evidence to detain him, and ordered his release. The Obama administration appealed and fought the ruling, before approving him for transfer last July.

Thompson declined to comment on the status of his transfer, but described the process as a “legal black hole.”

“If we detain someone,” said Thompson, “we say why. We bring charges. There’s a process for reaching a conclusion or determination that justifies detention.”

Continuing Indefinite Detention

In addition to inheriting the prison and its captives, Trump will assume the troubling power that enables it to exist: the authority to hold terror suspects in military detention with a limited ability to challenge their own captivity.

Very early on in his presidency, Obama realized that he did not want to prosecute or release every detainee in Guantánamo — that he would indefinitely detain a small number that he could not prosecute, but that he nonetheless considered too dangerous to release.

As New York Times Reporter Charlie Savage points out in his book Power Wars, Obama’s initial executive order to shutter the facility gave the executive branch four options for its prisoners: releasing them, prosecuting them, transferring them to another country, or employing another “lawful means” of resolution — a euphemistic reference to indefinite detention.

Seven years later, when Obama presented his final blueprint for how to close Guantánamo, he proposed to transfer these “high-value” detainees to the mainland United States, but still without a trial or release date. The proposal reserves the option to detain them for decades further — estimating the cost of holding them out to 20 years.

“The Obama administration was no different than the Bush administration on this concept – that detention without trial is lawful,” said Rayner.

In the meantime, Obama weakened the due process protections for detainees. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees have a right to challenge their detention by filing petitions of habeas corpus in federal court. That ruling lead to a flood challenges in the D.C. District Court — most of which the Obama administration fought.

After losing most of its cases in lower courts, the Obama administration began appealing them to the conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, which reversed all of the favorable verdicts. The Appeals Court gradually imposed legal standards that made it nearly impossible for detainees to secure release, effectively hollowing out the ability of “forever prisoners” to challenge their continuing detention.

One of those prisoners is Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, one of Remes’s clients, and one of the 26 prisoners the Obama administration considers too dangerous for release. Paracha, who started import-export and broadcasting businesses in Pakistan, was lured to Thailand in 2003 by people posing as buyers, where the U.S. arrested him. He has been in Guantánamo since 2004.

At 69, Paracha is the oldest detainee currently in Guantánamo, and suffers from heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis. He has been hospitalized several times for chest pains, and is now allowed to keep nitroglycerin in his cell, according to Remes. Due to congressional transfer restrictions, he cannot be transferred to the United States for medical care.

Saifullah Paracha at 62.

In November, Remes learned that Paracha would get a second “full review,” to determine whether he could still be held in indefinite detention. In seven of the last eight cases when detainees got a second review, they were subsequently cleared for release. But according to Remes, Paracha’s review would not come until March — leaving his fate in the hands of Donald Trump’s appointees.

On learning that the hearing was set for March, Remes sent an email to Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for closing Guantánamo, urging that Paracha be released prior to the incoming administration. “It’s entirely conceivable,” Remes wrote, “that Mr. Paracha will die of a heart attack at Guantánamo if he is not released before the President leaves office.”

Trump Administration

Trump has stacked his cabinet with nominees who are deeply hostile to detainees’ due process rights.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., Trump’s nominee for CIA director, both vigorously opposed efforts to close the facility in Congress. Dan Coats, a former senator and Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, made preserving Guantánamo such a key issue of his time in office that he even ran advertising against his election opponents based on it.

Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security, personally oversaw the prison’s operations as head of U.S. Southern Command, and publicly disagreed with President Obama about his stated mission to close it. “They’re all bad boys,” Kelly told reporters last January. “We have dossiers on all of them. Some of them were more effective in being bad boys than others.”

But the Trump nominee with the most influence on the detention facility would be Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. Mattis will appoint the Defense Department’s policy director for detainee affairs, who has the power to stall the detainee review process indefinitely.

Mattis is pushing back on some of Trump’s proposed nominees, according to the Washington Post, but there’s no indication he would take such a stand for Guantánamo detainees. In 2015, Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that people who “sign up with this enemy” should be “taken prisoner” “until the war is over” – without explaining what that meant in the context of the war on terror.

When asked if he thought Paracha’s hearing would go forward, Remes responded, “It’s hard to predict. It’s possible that Mattis will just allow the process to continue on automatic pilot, initially at least. We hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

New Prisons

The same day Obama laid out his vision to close Guantánamo — his third day in office — he also closed the CIA’s network of international secret prisons, or “black sites.” But without any congressional prohibition on the CIA participating in detention or interrogation, many are worried that Trump could re-open them.

Obama even helped pave the way for him to do so by arguing that the military’s prisoners in prisons overseas — like Bagram in Afghanistan — did not have habeas corpus rights in American court.

With even more diminished rights overseas, rights activists are worried that Trump could create more Guantánamos.

“Guantánamo isn’t really so much a physical place,” said Thompson. “It’s the idea of there being a legal black hole, where the rule of law doesn’t apply. Whether you physically situate that in Guantánamo, Cuba, or you situate it at a black site somewhere else around the world, or you situate it within the borders of the continental United States, that’s the problem. The problem is the idea that there can be a legal black hole; there can be a place where the law doesn’t apply.”

Top photo: This photo, which has been reviewed by the U.S. Military prior to transmission, shows a prisoner walking to an outdoor area of the “Gitmo” maximum security detention center on Oct. 22, 2016, at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The post After 15 Years, Prisoners at Guantánamo Face More Uncertainty Than Ever appeared first on The Intercept.

By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online call records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough network analysts to effectively monitor all the systems it had hacked.

The signals intelligence collected by the agency was being used for critically important decisions even as NSA struggled to understand it. Some bombs in Iraq were being targeted based entirely on signals intelligence, a senior NSA official told staff at the time — with decisions being made in a matter of “minutes” with “less and less review.”

Information overload is just one of several themes running through 262 articles from the NSA’s internal news site, SIDtoday, which The Intercept is now releasing after careful review. The documents also detailed an incident in which the Reagan administration appears to have leaked classified intelligence to the press for political purposes, described in an accompanying article by reporter Jon Schwarz.

SIDtoday articles published today also describe how the NSA trained FBI agents, enabled U.S. intervention in Latin America, and, with the help of a gifted analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, learned the value of simply reading information that was already public. One document even suggests that NSA personnel routinely got dangerously chatty at restaurants near headquarters. These stories and more are described in the highlights reel below. The NSA declined to comment.

Dropping Bombs in Iraq “With Less and Less Review”

A top NSA official disclosed in a January 2004 SIDtoday column that U.S. forces were “dropping bombs” based entirely on signals intelligence, the type of intelligence collected by the agency. He then implied that the American officers involved risked prosecution for war crimes.

Charles Berlin, chief of staff in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, recounted an anecdote about a former commander of his who, in one session in the winter of 1995-96, personally reviewed more than 100 possible airstrike targets in the Balkans. The commander’s motivation, Berlin said, was to protect his underlings from being prosecuted for war crimes, and his actions “really brought home the concepts of responsibility and accountability.”

“For us today this lesson is especially important,” he added. “The planning cycle for dropping a bomb has compressed from a day to minutes and the criterion for the aiming point has less and less review.”

“As many of you know, our forces in Iraq are dropping bombs on the strength of SIGINT alone. We are proud of their confidence in us, but have you ever considered the enormous risk the commanders are assuming in this regard? Are you ready to share that risk?”

Inside the NSA’s Call-Logging Machine

Among the ways the NSA identified potential terrorists was through a practice known as “information chaining,” which uses communications metadata to draw a social graph. And there’s no question the agency had lots of metadata: As of 2004, the NSA had amassed a database of more than 85 billion metadata records related to phone calls, billing, and online calls — and was adding 125 million records a day, according to a January 2004 SIDtoday article titled “The Rewards of Metadata.”

The database, known as FASCIA II, would at some unspecified point in the future begin processing 205 million records a day and storing 10 years of data, the article added. One of the world’s largest Oracle databases at the time, FASCIA II held metadata records from telephone calls, wireless calls, billing, the use of media over the internet, and high-powered cordless phones, with plans to add email metadata in the future.

The article explained that metadata is used by the agency in the process of “information chaining,” in which analysts spy on relationships between people. It further claimed that two senior al Qaeda operatives had been captured with the help of such techniques. A March 2004 SIDtoday article said a chaining tool called MAINWAY helped a counterterrorism analyst uncover six new “terrorist-related numbers.”

Short on Linguists, NSA Struggled to Understand Targets

It’s one thing to collect phone calls, email messages, and other signals intelligence. It’s quite another to make sense of it. Several SIDtoday articles from the first half of 2004 made clear that the NSA was falling far short in its attempts to process communications conducted in languages other than English.

Only half of the agency’s more than 2,300 “language missions” worldwide had qualified personnel, according to a June 2004 SIDtoday article by an NSA “senior language authority.” The author declared that “this shortcoming must be rectified.” An NSA report to an oversight council, quoted in the article, said that the lack of qualified language analysts was particularly acute in the “Global War on Terrorism.”

Exacerbating the situation was the fact that captured communications require a high level of linguistic proficiency to understand. “The cryptologic language analyst must be able to read and listen ‘between the lines’ to unformatted, unpredictable discourse,” as the article put it. Only a quarter of military cryptologic linguists, who formed the vast majority of the workforce, could work at this level, known as “level 3” proficiency, while barely half of the civilian cryptologic linguists could, according to a follow-up SIDtoday article. The military’s language training institute offered “virtually no existing curriculum” above level 2.

NSA’s plan to address the problem included reforms to the training institute and on-site instruction to bring existing linguists up to higher levels. The agency planned to invest about $80 million per year in training over five years. Other efforts included an internal online language training tool, an evaluation of redundant Arabic machine translation projects underway in various government agencies, and the formation of a language technology team within the NSA.

How the NSA Over-Hacked

Sometimes metadata isn’t enough and the NSA decides it needs to compromise targets’ computers to collect much more data. The first half of 2004 saw a ramp-up of NSA’s hacking capabilities. In March, SIDtoday reported, the agency’s elite hacking team Tailored Access Operations approved Kunia Regional Security Operations Center in Hawaii — the same facility where Edward Snowden later worked — as the first NSA field office to conduct “advanced” Computer Network Exploitation. Other facilities conduct the first stage of hacking, “target mapping,” but the Kunia facility began doing “vulnerability scanning” all the way through to “sustained SIGINT collection.”

Another March SIDtoday article said that an advanced network analysis division used to help “exploit targets of interest” had “played an instrumental part” in capturing alleged al Qaeda operative Husam al-Yemeni, had developed a “more complete understanding of the Pakistani Army Defense Network (ADN) infrastructure,” and had assisted with the hacking of “an important digital network associated” with the leader of Venezuela at the time, referred to erroneously as “Victor Chavez.”

The NSA was so successful at hacking networks that the agency was overwhelmed with information. “We simply do not have enough network analysts to effectively monitor these targeted networks,” an NSA division chief wrote in an April 2004 SIDtoday article. To solve the problem, the agency began prototyping an automated monitoring system.

“Outstanding” Bookworm Spy Doesn’t Need to Really Spy

Even as the NSA made enormous efforts to collect vast quantities of private communications, a lone SIDtoday article extolled the value of publicly available data. The piece, from May 2004, gushed about a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who dug up leads by poring over Russian material that was “open source.” The DIA bookworm searched in newspapers, government documents, and “obscure websites” for information that aided the NSA in collecting intelligence, including names, telephone numbers, and addresses. The article, co-authored by an NSA director with responsibility for Russia, praised the analyst’s “outstanding language and research skills.” It turned out that “critical lead information” on Russian underground facilities, including a mysterious and widely discussed site at Yamantau Mountain in the Urals, was “often only available in open source literature, such as the Internet.”

Cuba’s President Raul Castro whispers in Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s ear during the South America and the Caribbean Summit in Sauipe, Brazil, on Dec. 16, 2008.

How the NSA Secures — and Routinely Puts at Risk — Sensitive Information

Knowing how much intelligence value could be reaped from openly circulated information, the NSA worked to encourage discretion among members of its workforce. NSA employees practiced poor operational security on a “monthly” basis by disclosing too much information in restaurants and other public settings near the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters, an agency security manager indicated in a tutorial on operational security that ran in SIDtoday in April 2004.

The article used a hypothetical scenario to explain why operational security, or OPSEC, was important for everyone. The author, OPSEC manager for the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, wrote: “You’re at a luncheon at a local restaurant to bid farewell to Sue, a co-worker who is moving on to a new office.” Your boss makes a toast to Sue, describing her contributions against organized crime and offering various details of her work. Sue then gives a toast thanking some of the gathered individuals.

“Sound familiar?” the OPSEC manager asked. “Then you’ve witnessed (or perhaps participated in) a demonstration of poor OPSEC. … Have you ever stopped to consider what your unclassified public discussions might be giving away? Take the scenario, for instance. This is a scene that is played out monthly in the Fort Meade area.” The article went on to list the pieces of information that an adversary, who could have been listening in from a nearby table, would have learned.

OPSEC turned out to be a recurring theme for SIDtoday — OPSEC training is, after all, mandatory for all NSA personnel. A January 2004 article, written by the author of the April 2004 piece, listed some tips to help personnel to apply OPSEC to their day-to-day activities: Identify your critical information, analyze the threat, identify vulnerabilities, assess risk, and apply countermeasures.

NSA employees aren’t the only ones trained to practice good OPSEC. A March 2005 article reported that the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba practiced OPSEC successfully. President Bush considered Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a “threat to democracy in the region and a threat to U.S. interests in particular.” But “from a SIGINT perspective, Venezuela poses a particularly difficult challenge. With Castro as his mentor, Chavez has learned the importance of communications security and has made sure that his subordinates understand this as well.”

Law & Order & the NSA

Various 2004 SIDtoday articles highlight the NSA’s behind-the-scenes work on behalf of federal law enforcement.

One detailed a two-week training course on “intelligence reporting” given by NSA staff to FBI officers working on terrorism cases. The course, which had a component dubbed “SIGINT Reporting 101,” aimed to provide “insight into the complexity and difficulty of our business” and to dispel “Hollywood myths about the NSA.”

Another SIDtoday article showed how the U.S. Coast Guard was able to interdict a boat carrying 3.2 metric tons of cocaine thanks to the NSA’s monitoring of VHF radio signals, which carried voice communications of narcotraffickers. An official Coast Guard history of the incident elides the NSA’s role. The same SIDtoday article also disclosed that the Colombian air force carried out a strike against a suspected trafficker aircraft after a tip-off from the NSA.

NSA vs. FARC

Colombian guerrillas holding American hostages evaded massive NSA surveillance, according to a February 2004 SIDtoday article.

One year after three American contractors, who had been on a surveillance mission for the U.S. military, were captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerilla group, the U.S. “has not been able to determine with high confidence the exact location and status of the hostages,” wrote an NSA account manager for the military’s Southern Command. This despite “hundreds” of U.S. government personnel having worked to gain their release. U.S. efforts were stymied when FARC’s leadership ordered that personnel cease mentioning hostage operations directly in their communications; the best the NSA could achieve at the time of the SIDtoday article was to monitor calls between two radio operators, “Paula and Adriana,” who in turn were connected to the FARC leaders “we strongly suspect are linked to the hostages.”

The author of the SIDtoday article added that the agency continued to try and get a fix on the location of the hostages. Yet their captors eluded the Americans for another four years. The three Americans were freed by Colombian commandos in July 2008.

A March 2004 SIDtoday article noted a success against FARC, bragging that the arrest of FARC financial leader Anayibe Rojas Valderrama, known as “Sonya,” and a number of her associates a month earlier “resulted from years of monitoring. … Accurate geolocational data as to where she was and when, allowed a vetted Colombian team to capture them by surprise and without any loss of life.” Valderrama was extradited to the United States where she was tried and convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2007.

Internal NSA Criticism of Political Groups and the News Media

A national intelligence officer gave a top-secret “issue seminar” to NSA staff on the question of “where political action fades into terrorism,” according to a seminar announcement published in June 2004. The announcement suggested that the line between “legitimate political activity” and “activity that is the precursor to, or supportive of, terrorism” is fuzzy. The course used the Vienna-based organization Anti-Imperialist Camp as a case study, describing it as “ostensibly a political organization” but noting that “its many ties to terrorist organizations — and its attempts to collaborate with Muslim extremists — raise questions about where political action fades into terrorism.” No further details were given to substantiate the alleged ties; the group’s website remains online. A spokesperson for the group, Wilhelm Langthaler, told The Intercept that the group was targeted for such accusations for political reasons, including its opposition to the war in Iraq and “our public support for the resistance against occupation which we have compared with the antifascist resistance against German occupation.”

Another seminar announcement said the news media helped stymie U.S. intelligence collection. “A day hasn’t gone by that our adversaries haven’t picked up a newspaper or gone on the Internet to learn something new about how the US intelligence gathering system operates and what its capabilities or limitations are,” the course overview explained. “And in response, a day hasn’t gone by that our adversaries haven’t modified their operations and activities to avoid being detected and collected against by the US intelligence gathering system.”

NSA’s Role in the Failed Iran Hostage Rescue Attempt

In an anecdote about signals intelligence during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, a SIGINT staffer recalled the night of April 24 of that year, when he was told he was monitoring the ongoing “Operation Ricebowl.” In a May 2004 SIDtoday article, the staffer wrote: “We knew the parameters of the Iranian Air Defense system because it was U.S. equipment and installed by U.S. contractors while the Shah of Iran was still in power. We knew exactly where the gaps in coverage were and we exploited it during the rescue attempt.” The author went on to describe his shock the next morning when he saw on TV news at home that the mission had ended with a disastrous helicopter crash.

Top photo: American soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry run through a smoke screen as they try to avoid sniper fire during an offensive operation on Aug. 16, 2004, in Najaf, Iraq.

The post Drowning in Information: NSA Revelations From 262 Spy Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

In a hearing Thursday of Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board, Hassan Ali Bin Attash, a Yemeni who is believed to be about 31 years old, said through representatives that he was working toward a high school GED diploma and hoped to join relatives in Saudi Arabia and find a job as a translator.

Attash’s exact birthdate is uncertain, but he was certainly a young teen in 1997, when the U.S. military alleges that he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and began working for senior al Qaeda figures doing everything from bomb-making to logistics. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and spent the next two years being moved between CIA black-site prisons and interrogations in Afghanistan and Jordan before landing in Guantánamo in September 2004. While in U.S. custody, according to his own and other prisoners’ accounts, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from a bar by his wrists, and threatened with dogs and electric shocks, among other forms of torture. He was also severely tortured by the Jordanians.

The military assessment filed for the board states that in Saudi Arabia, Attash could easily reconnect with terrorist actors, and that his family is also suspect. Attash’s older brother Walid bin Attash is one of the five men being tried before the Guantánamo military commission for the 9/11 attacks.

His lawyer, David Remes, countered that allegation, saying that he has never heard the younger Attash express anti-American or extremist views.

“Now a young man, with a mind of his own, he is no longer under the sway of others and can make independent decisions,” Remes told the board.

As with all hearings before the Periodic Review Board — a sort of parole process for Guantánamo detainees — the proceedings were piped by video from Cuba to media and other observers in a room at the Pentagon. Attash, who has previously been seen in photos in an orange jumpsuit with wild hair, appeared as a neatly groomed young man. Detainees are not allowed to speak during the open portion of the hearing.

Attash’s hearing marks the end of a three-year process in which the Obama administration has reconsidered the cases of many of the last men left at Guantánamo, with the aim of closing the prison before the president leaves office. As of today, all of the detainees who were eligible for a Periodic Review Board hearing have had one.

The final hearing provides an opportunity to look at the 61 men left in Guantánamo and what the administration proposes to do with them.

Nineteen fall into the intractable category of prisoners who have not been referred for prosecution, but whom officials believe they cannot safely release. The board recommended these men for “continued detention under the law of war” — in other words, slating them for indefinite detention.

“In the next few months, it will be interesting to see whether the administration uses all of its powers to release the many men left who are not yet cleared but who it has no intention of charging,” said Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees. “That will show whether the president is genuinely committed to closing the prison or just intends to leave his own unfinished promises for the next president to resolve.”

The administration’s effort to classify detainees has evolved over the years. After Obama’s year-one promise to close Guantánamo, he convened a task force to evaluate the cases of all the detainees there, recommending them for prosecution, continued detention, or transfer to another country.

Obama also established the Periodic Review Boards (known in Gitmo lingo as PRBs) to regularly evaluate the situation of each detainee the task force had recommended for detention or trial, in order to determine whether they still pose a threat to the United States or if they could be safely released. The board includes representatives from the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence. They don’t take up the legality of holding the prisoner. Instead, they consider the intelligence against the detainee, and whether it still holds up, as well as the detainee’s behavior and activities. They also consider what life after Guantánamo would look like — family and other support networks, job prospects, and the stability of their home country.

As such, the review boards offer a rare glimpse into life at the prison, with detainees often submitting personal details, reports from vocational or language classes, or even paintings. Remes, Attash’s lawyer, said that “when the prison still made such publications as the Washington Post and New York Times available to detainees, Hassan devoured them.” (A Guantánamo public affairs officer would not comment on whether those newspapers were allowed but said that the “intellectual stimulation program” for detainees “includes books, magazines and puzzles, newspapers, handheld electronic games, movies and satellite television.”)

The administration has been criticized for the slow start to the PRB process; the first hearing didn’t happen until 2013. This year, as the prison’s population dipped below 100 for the first time, the pace of the PRBs sped up.

When someone is cleared for transfer, the administration has to find a place to resettle him, which is particularly tricky when his home country isn’t an option (many of the remaining men are from Yemen, which is currently embroiled in a devastating war).

The prisoners slated for indefinite detention present a bigger conundrum. Each prisoner may have his PRB file reviewed every six months, and after three years (if the regime at Guantánamo continues) he’d be eligible for another hearing. One detainee is already scheduled for his second PRB hearing in October.

The Pentagon says that whatever the decision of the PRB, the administration can continue to evaluate “individualized disposition” options, including transfer, prosecution in the military commissions or by another country, or, should Congress lift the current ban on bringing Guantánamo inmates to the United States, imprisoning them or trying them domestically (recent court decisions have limited the types of charges the military tribunals can bring).

In other cases, the detainees are unlikely to be tried because the evidence against them is tainted by torture (already an issue in other military commissions proceedings) or because there simply isn’t much evidence against them at all, said Kadidal, of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Most of these men are in fact not people who are worthy of prosecution,” he said.

If the U.S. government continues to assert that it can hold them under the law of war, Kadidal said, “we can expect continued challenges” in federal court questioning whether the conflicts justifying the detentions are really still taking place.

“If not, continued detention is illegal,” he said.

Top Photo: A U.S. Army Military Police checks in on a detainee during morning prayer at Camp V in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on June 26, 2013.

The post Who’s Left at Guantánamo? Fates of Dozens of Prisoners Are Undecided appeared first on The Intercept.

Back then, Abu Zubaydah still had his left eye.

Representatives from the media, nongovernmental organizations, and academia were permitted to view the unclassified opening portion of the hearing from a conference room at the Pentagon, but the segment does not include any statement or comments from the detainee. It was the first glimpse outside observers got of Zubaydah since a photo of his face with an eye patch was published by Wikileaks in 2011; at one point he was touted as al Qaeda No. 3.

What observers saw Tuesday was a well-groomed, youthful 45-year-old dressed in white and wearing a black eye patch around his neck; he switched between two pairs of eyeglasses to follow documents being read out loud by a translator. He was accompanied by two military “personal representatives” who spoke on his behalf, but he did not have a private attorney.

Most notably perhaps, he was waterboarded 83 times.

“He spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet,” according to the Senate torture report. “The CIA interrogators told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box.”

The Tuesday review board hearing was first opportunity to make a case for his release. “Although he initially believed that he did not have any chance or hope to be released, because of the reputation that has been created through the use of his name, he has been willing to participate in the Periodic Review Process,” his military representative stated, “and he has come to believe that he might have a chance to leave Guantanamo through this process.”

The government opposes Abu Zubaydah’s release, and an unnamed official reading his detainee profile at the review alleged his participation in or knowledge of the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, and involvement in Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s plans to attack US and coalition forces after 9/11, among other plots.

Yet the official also stated he “has shown a high level of cooperation with the staff at Guantanamo Bay and has served as a cell block leader, assuming responsibility for communicating detainees’ messages and grievances to the staff and maintaining order among the detainees.”

That same cooperation is now being used to justify his continued detention. Abu Zubaydah, who has completed university coursework in computer programming, could be a threat because has used his time in Guantanamo to “hone his organizational skills, assess U.S. custodial and debriefing practices,” the official said, and that experience “would help him should he choose to reengage in terrorist activity.”

Abu Zubaydah’s chances of being approved for release are not good, and the future of the Guantanamo detainees who are designated for indefinite detention without trials is unclear.

Of the 61 detainees now held at Guantanamo, 20 are currently approved for repatriation or transfer to a third country. Seven men are in pre-trial proceedings and three have been sentenced. The review board has decided 18 require continued detention to protect against a continuing significant threat to the U.S. security. An additional 13 are awaiting review board decisions or an upcoming hearing.

The post A Rare Glimpse of Abu Zubaydah 14 Years After First CIA Torture Session appeared first on The Intercept.

Early in the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq, the National Security Agency was blindsided by enemy fighters’ frequent use of rudimentary wireless communications devices known as “high–powered cordless phones,” according to documents among 263 published today by The Intercept.

The documents, drawn from the agency’s internal news site, SIDtoday, and provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, date mostly to the latter half of 2003, and show the NSA was at the time rapidly expanding its internet monitoring. But even as its digital surveillance grew more sophisticated, the agency saw its targets increasingly adopting crude forms of communications like shortwave radio, SMS cellphone messaging and, most vexingly, high-powered cordless phones. The “poor man’s cell phones,” as the cordless devices were called, spread through Afghan borderlands and along Iraqi roadsides. Meanwhile, the NSA was scrambling to fill what one SIDtoday article referred to as an “intelligence gap” around the devices. The agency assembled more than 500 people at Fort Meade, including foreign intelligence partners and contractors, in order to understand, and plan how to crack into, a type of communication “increasing exponentially worldwide,” as an internal bulletin put it.

The NSA’s scramble to monitor cordless phones helps illustrate how the agency, despite its best efforts to predict the future, can end up blindsided. Just as the military after the Cold War continued to buy sophisticated weapons for use against conventional forces, leaving it poorly prepared for guerilla warfare, so too did the NSA’s state-of-the-art mass internet surveillance leave it unprepared for enemies in rural areas with crude radios.

The NSA documents about cordless phones are among many highlights from The Intercept’s second release of SIDtoday postings, made available for download starting today. As detailed in the roundup below, SIDtoday articles from the second half of 2003 also outline how the NSA obtained credit card information from the Secret Service, fed intelligence to the FBI, requested investigations of suspected leakers, spied on diplomats to advance the U.S. war in Iraq, exposed a purported terrorist computer as much less menacing than U.S. news media had reported, and cooperated extensively with the 9/11 Commission.

A SIDtoday article from the period also discloses that the NSA spied on non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, in order to collect information to feed into the U.S.’s extensive medical intelligence apparatus. Using this and other Snowden documents, Intercept reporter Jenna McLaughlin filed a story about the NSA’s “medical SIGINT” operation and other ways the U.S. collects so-called medical intelligence.

A new NSA data-collection center sits behind a neighborhood in Bluffdale, Utah in 2015.

Millions of Ordinary People Caught In NSA Internet Taps

A July 2003 SIDtoday article by the “deputy director for data acquisition” noted how, amid a rapid growth in digital networking, the NSA increasingly found itself sifting through the communications of ordinary people. The article said that “our targets are moving from fixed narrowband transmissions to shared, re-routable, extremely wideband, multiplexed, multi-formatted transmissions.”

Lots of other people were jumping onto the internet as well so “our targets communications are increasingly buried by millions of non-target communications.”

Another article explained the successes of FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW – codenames for NSA’s partnerships with AT&T and Verizon to conduct unconstitutional surveillance of internet traffic passing through America’s largest telecom providers. These programs, part of NSA’s “upstream” collection, were later used to feed unimaginable amounts of surveillance data into XKEYSCORE to be processed and searched by analysts. In September 2003, FAIRVIEW, the AT&T surveillance program, captured “several trillion metadata records – of which more than 400 billion were selected for downstream processing or storage.” That same month, the program launched a new collection capability, allowing it to collect “more than one million emails a day.”  (This document was published last year by the New York Times and ProPublica.)

As it monitored more and more internet traffic, the NSA also aimed to grow its own use of networks for collaboration. One SIDtoday article heralded a new tool called InfoWorkSpace, available to all Five Eyes intelligence agencies and boasting secure video and audio conferencing, text chat, whiteboards, and screen sharing —impressive, by 2003 standards. But using the cutting-edge the technology could be tricky. Three months after announcing InfoWorkSpace, SIDtoday reported that signals intelligence directors from each Five Eyes agency held their first virtual meeting using the system, but “GCHQ was unable to attend due to a computer failure.”

People who struggle to stay secure online can take comfort in the fact that even the digital spies at the NSA have trouble installing basic encryption, at least judging from two SIDtoday articles dating to July 2003. They described the NSA’s move to an internal online security system built around Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI. Such infrastructure comes into play every time you visit a website using the secure HTTPS protocol; it involves encryption keys that can be openly distributed in public as well as a system of certificates to help ensure the correct keys are distributed.

Within the NSA, nearly every employee was required to create their own PKI certificate, a process that was cumbersome and confusing. It involved 11 steps, including requiring employees to go to the nearest “kiosk room” for a machine to generate and print a password for them. “Just accept that this process might be a little confusing, a little frustrating, a little time-consuming,” an article consoled, “but just sit down, take a deep breath and do it! It really isn’t that bad!!!!”

Anther SIDtoday article announced SID’s new policy on “secure telecommuting,” for employees that needed to leave the Washington, D.C. area but wanted to continue their classified work. “Many of the skills resident among the workforce do not exactly grow on trees,” the author said, “and it is of critical importance that SID find a way to retain those skills.” All telecommuting must happen from a “suitable remote secure government facility” – working from home violates Defense Department policy, and “approval for telecommuting is given on a case-by-case basis.”

Simple, Rugged Technology Catches NSA Off Guard

Even as the NSA ramped up cutting-edge surveillance of the internet, it also grew its efforts to monitor the use of high-powered cordless phones, an unsophisticated wireless technology known as a “poor man’s cell phone,” as a September 2003 SIDtoday article put it. Such devices were common in remote areas with handsets that could range 50 miles from the radio base station.

The article said HPCPs were potentially in use by “Usama bin Laden and his associates. … Thousands of networks are operating along the [Afghanistan/Pakistan] border region, particularly in regions of known terrorist activity.”

But such devices represented an “intelligence gap” and their use by enemies could result in an analyst “missing some of your target’s communications.” Another SIDtoday article published at the same time said use of HPCPs was “increasing exponentially worldwide” and that the NSA still needed to work to “understand this technology,” in part to “provide force protection in Iraq.” In Iraq, high-powered cordless phone technology was frequently used to detonate roadside bombs, Wired reported in 2011.

In late 2003, NSA had so much to learn about HPCP technology that the agency hosted a top-secret “Worldwide HPCP Conference” at NSA’s campus. More than 500 people attended the event, including representatives from all Five Eyes spy agencies, all branches of the U.S. military, and private contractors. “Being able to collect [from] communication devices such as HPCP phones can literally spell the difference between life and death,” an assistant director for central intelligence said at the conference. “Life for us, death for would-be terrorists.”

The U.S. military eventually acquired a variety of devices capable of monitoring or locating HPCP communications, several of which were disclosed by The Intercept last year as part of the publication of secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of surveillance gear targeting wireless communications.

While it struggled with cordless phones, the NSA had more luck tapping into another primitive radio platform, the nearly 100-year-old technology known as high-frequency, or shortwave, radio. A SIDtoday article from July 2003 said that “the market for HF continues to grow. … HF requires no terrestrial or spaceborne infrastructure to communicate globally and is capable of surviving the effects of a nuclear blast.” The technology was also relatively cheap and the radios were “mobile, rugged, and require minimal manpower and training to operate” making them “ideal for use by terrorists and third-world military organizations.”

But those weren’t the NSA’s only targets using HF: Important participants in negotiations at the United Nations utilized shortwave, too. “As the United States was considering its options regarding a Security Council resolution on Iraq,” the July article explained, “intelligence derived from HF collection provided the position and voting intentions of several key players.”

Another simple communications medium the NSA found itself increasingly monitoring in 2003 was SMS, the text-messaging protocol built into even the most basic of cellphones. In the 18 months through July, SMS use spiked among Islamic extremists, according to an article in SIDtoday. “They believe that SMS is more secure than both voice calls and E-mail,” the piece stated. But the NSA was clearly able to access plenty of SMS messages, as the article described how the extremists used SMS “to arrange instant messaging or chat sessions … to warn of security problems, especially after raids… to coordinate financial transfers” and “to pass new E-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and passwords”

NSA Feeds Information To Domestic Law Enforcement

A series of 2003 SIDtoday articles described support to the NSA’s partners at various U.S. government agencies. The agency’s work is traditionally driven by these partners, which it frequently refers to as “customers.” As the examples below make clear, customers both request and supply information to the signals intelligence directorate, and some are kept at a further remove than others, whether for legal reasons or due to turf wars.

NSA and the Secret Service

An August 2003 SIDtoday article described the NSA’s relationship with the U.S. Secret Service, including the NSA’s work gathering signals intelligence to help protect the president and other executive branch members when they travel abroad.

In return, the article said, the Secret Service provided the agency access to, and a copy of, its financial crimes division database of credit card information, giving NSA analysts “the ability to do real-time, on-line pulls and determine if a particular credit card was issued by a foreign bank.”

NSA and the FBI

One SIDtoday article seemed to exaggerate the NSA’s role in identifying a group of Yemeni American men who eventually pleaded guilty to providing material support for al Qaeda, a group known as the Buffalo Six or Lackawanna Six. The newsletter says information from the NSA was used to identify members of the group, although this version of events contradicts other reports.

The initial lead in the case, which included the names of the men eventually arrested, has repeatedly been attributed to an anonymous tip to the FBI from a member of the local Muslim community. Additional evidence allegedly came from the interrogation of a jihadist at Guantánamo Bay, after which updates on the investigation became a regular part of President George W. Bush’s daily intelligence brief, the New York Times reported.

­

The SIDtoday article said the arrest of the Buffalo Six stemmed from a partnership between the FBI and an NSA signals-intelligence cell focused on counterterrorism. The two parties worked together to develop new communications sources from which to extract intelligence, a process referred to as “SIGDEV.” “The Cell has further expanded its existing SIGDEV partnerships throughout the community to help locate specific terrorist targets,” the article stated. “This increased collaboration resulted in the arrests of six individuals in Buffalo, New York — [signals intelligence] reporting provided key leads and valuable information which enabled FBI analysts to identify the terrorist cell and advance their investigative efforts.”

Although the FBI seems to have identified the six men prior to any wiretapping, contrary to the SIDtoday article, federal authorities did reportedly begin monitoring the communications of the Lackawanna men using a FISA warrant after the Guantánamo interrogation and after White House interest in the case. A cryptic email referring to a “big meal” led them to interrogate the member of the Lackawanna Six who eventually confessed that the men had trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Times has said.

NSA Helps Coast Guard Find $197 Million in Cocaine

The NSA’s signals intelligence directorate began supplying intelligence to the U.S. Coast Guard starting in approximately 1989, according to the directorate’s “Coast Guard Account Manager.” An August 2003 SIDtoday article by the manager said the Coast Guard used signals intelligence in “domestic and law enforcement missions,” including for missions related to “counterterrorism, alien smuggling, counternarcotics, maritime tracking of vessels and/or high-interest cargos and international civilian maritime activities.” For example, in June 2003, SID helped the Coast Guard and British intelligence agency GCHQ track a cargo ship off the Venezuelan coast. After it was seized by the UK vessel HMS Iron Duke, it was found to contain “3,930 kilos of pure cocaine with a New York City street value of $196,500,000.”

NSA and the CIA

SIDtoday articles from 2003 detailed the changing relationship between the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency. In a July post, NSA Signals Intelligence Director Richard Quirk described a new policy that, he wrote, “defines how we will provide NSA-collected, unminimized SIGINT to CIA for them to use in direct support of certain aspects of their mission.” Generally speaking, unminimized SIGINT is signals intelligence that may include the communications of American citizens and permanent residents, including inadvertently acquired communications not relevant to the authorized purposes of the collection.

An article from the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, declassified in 2014 as a result of a lawsuit from a former CIA employee, described a joint “Counterproliferation Fusion Cell,” located at CIA headquarters in Virginia but headed by an NSA officer, to “help focus SIGINT collection and reporting on high-priority proliferation targets.” A November 2003 SIDtoday article shed further light on this cell, saying that the team was focused on the nuclear proliferation network led by A. Q. Khan in Pakistan and was also intended to become the center for reporting on the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Intelligence for Air Force “Space Campaign Planning”

The NSA also was providing the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska with “intelligence on space control and surveillance operations, information operations, computer network operations, and space campaign planning,” according to another SIDtoday article. The command, whose traditional mission is to monitor missile deployments in Russia, China, and other countries, had recently expanded to also play a role in the global war on terrorism at the time the article was published, in August 2003.

NSA Official Suggests Bypassing Elected Officials for Military

In addition to sharing information within the U.S. government, the NSA also provides extensive signals intelligence to its allies.

The NSA’s closest foreign collaborators are known as “Second Party” partners or the “Five Eyes:” spy agencies from the world’s English-speaking nations, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. According to one SIDtoday article, the term “Five Eyes” was derived from the classification marking, “US/UK/CAN/AUS/NZ EYES ONLY.”

In Australia’s small capital city of Canberra, there was an office known as the Special U.S. Liaison Office Canberra with, as of October 2003, a staff of 16 Americans, according to a SIDtoday article. The office served as the hub for the NSA’s relationship with Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) (today known as the Australian Signals Directorate, or ASD), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

The article, first described in a 2014 New York Times story, outlined an NSA-DSD training effort: “NSA integrees mentor both cryptomathematicians and engineers while tackling the encrypted Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) network used by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, a goal mentioned in the DSD Director’s business plan.”

To help share NSA surveillance data between Second Party allies while keeping collection sources secret, NSA’s data acquisition team established the TICKETWINDOW information-sharing project in 1999. Initial coverage in SIDtoday did not make clear precisely what sort of system TICKETWINDOW was or what sort of technology powered it.

The NSA’s Third Party relationships differ from its Second Party relationships in that information sharing is confined to particular missions and, even within those missions, only certain types of information are shared, according to a SIDtoday article by Charlie Meals, the deputy director of the NSA signals intelligence directorate.

In the article, Meals made the case for ramping up NSA’s Third Party partnerships: “If we can’t deal with the civilian authorities in a certain country, can we establish a military-to-military agreement? Can we deal with countries that aren’t necessarily our close allies when it’s mutually advantageous to do so? … Let’s look into it!”

Another SIDtoday article described Third Party information sharing agreements with Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Jordan, saying that those partners were second only to certain European allies in the extent of sharing. It said the NSA shared information with Turkey and Japan on terrorism and with South Korea and Jordan on Iraq.

Computer Crack Exposes Sketchy Intelligence

A September 2003 SIDtoday article threw cold water on an October 2002 Time Magazine story. The Time story reported that photos of American trains were found on a hard drive recovered during a raid of a purported al Qaeda cell by Kuwaiti authorities. The article also said that the photos, along with statements of senior al Qaeda operatives under CIA and FBI interrogation, led counterterrorism officials to worry that terrorists might have been planning an attack against U.S. railroads. The NSA’s “SIGINT Forensics Lab,” which extracts data from seized computing devices, sometimes getting past encryption in the process, examined the photos and concluded that they were “taken from a 1980’s commercially produced clip art CD.”

NSA Staff Compare Sources To Traitors, Hunt Media Leaks

In the summer of 2003, in San Antonio, Texas, Jim Miklaszewski, Pentagon correspondent for NBC News, spoke to a class full of senior executives in the intelligence community about newsgathering. According to SIDtoday, Miklaszewski received some antagonistic questioning on the subject of leaks; one student even compared journalists to spies, asking how he “differentiated reporter recruitment of U.S. intelligence sources from recruitment of foreign Humint sources when the US sources are committing a felony by ‘leaking information’ to reporters who are accessories after the fact.”

Weeks later, SIDtoday published a two-part series of articles on media leaks – or “cryptologic insecurities,” as the NSA referred to them. The first article listed several examples of “damaging media leaks” from reports from CBS News and other media organizations and the “unfortunate consequences” of them, claiming that in two cases al Qaeda heightened its security and changed its tactics. Some leaks resulted in NSA requesting an FBI investigation.

The second article in the series briefly described the steps taken when a new leak is discovered, including potentially opening a Department of Justice investigation.

But “media leaks are rarely prosecuted,” the article said, often because “they are hard to prove, but in some cases officials are reluctant to prosecute for fear that the case will attract even more attention than the original disclosure.”

U.S. Army soldiers sweep into a house during an cordon-and-search operation in Fallujah, Iraq in October 2003.

Unexpected Iraq Insurgency Rallies NSA

As in the early part of 2003, summarized in The Intercept’s last SIDtoday roundup, the NSA found itself in the last half of the year on a wartime footing in Iraq as fighting there failed to die down as anticipated. In Baghdad, NSA signals intelligence provided “the majority of intelligence briefed to Ambassador [Paul] Bremer and the senior staff” of the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to an agency staffer deployed to the former presidential palace and writing in SIDtoday. NSA staff was also on the ground in support of special operations teams hunting “High Value Targets” and “Special Collection Service” teams.

Although “major hostilities” in Iraq officially ended on May 1, as SIDtoday put it, echoing the official administration position, and the U.S.’s “post-war reconstruction” had begun, a fierce insurgency was brewing. On August 6, the NSA signals intelligence director, Richard Quirk, put the “Iraq Issue Management Team” back in action, saying in SIDtoday that:

“Conditions in Iraq remain extremely dangerous. … It is essential that Signals Intelligence resurrect the support and level of effort that were so pronounced when bombs were falling.”

By mid-September, a dedicated group of 40 analysts at Fort Meade was formed as the “Iraq Terrorism Development Center” to perform target discovery against attacks by terrorists and former regime members.

In October, the United Nations Security Council was considering a draft, U.S.-authored resolution providing international participation and financial backing for military forces in Iraq and the reconstruction of the country. The stakes were high, and, as a SID national intelligence officer wrote in SIDtoday, Germany and France continued to “express their displeasure” and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan did not want to put U.N. personnel at risk unless the organization was in charge of reconstruction.

But on October 16, the resolution passed unanimously and “was at heart a triumph of SIGINT support” according to a SIDtoday article co-authored by the NSA’s representative to the U.S. Mission to the U.N.

“NSA played a key role in keeping U.S. policy makers in New York and Washington abreast (or ahead) of the many twists and turns in the marathon negotiations,” the SIDtoday article stated. “Reporting from across SID … provided a window into the planning and intentions of the principal players on the Council – and may have even provided … the key information needed to ensure the unanimous vote.”

Top photo: A helicopter view of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland earlier this year.

The post Iraqi Insurgents Stymied the NSA and Other Highlights from 263 Internal Agency Reports appeared first on The Intercept.

If freed, Slahi plans to return to life with his family and pursue a career as a writer, following on the success of his bestselling memoir, Guantánamo Diary, which tells of Slahi’s imprisonment and torture by the United States and its counterterrorism allies. Held secretly in Jordan and Afghanistan before being brought to Guantánamo, Slahi recounts in his book beatings, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, and a catalogue of other horrors, along with the close relationships he developed with various guards.

Slahi was not allowed to speak during the open portion of today’s hearing. Instead, statements were made on his behalf by his attorney and by military representatives. Slahi, a slender, clean-shaven 45-year-old Mauritanian, sat quietly behind a sign identifying him as “detainee,” dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and glasses, his arms folded on the table. A live video feed of the proceeding was shown at the Pentagon and watched by reporters, lawyers, and other members of the public.

The hearing was in front of a Periodic Review Board, or PRB, comprised of officials from various government agencies. Such boards evaluate prisoners at Guantánamo to determine whether they pose a threat to the United States and what their prospects are likely to be once released. PRBs are central to the Obama administration’s push to move as many people as possible out of Guantánamo before the end of this year. Of the 80 men remaining at the prison, 29 have been approved for release, 14 by PRBs.

Slahi’s hearing began with a reading of the military’s unclassified detainee profile for “MR-760,” as Slahi is called in the document. The profile recounts Slahi’s journey in the early 1990s from Germany to Afghanistan, where he fought with the mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government. It also states that in the 1990s Slahi recruited jihadists to fight in Bosnia and Chechnya, and even helped two future 9/11 hijackers travel to Chechnya. It adds that while Slahi once had “a broad network of terrorist contacts,” he has in Guantánamo interrogations repeatedly expressed “his intention to pursue a non-extremist life.” The document also asserts that Slahi  “probably would reunite with his family, take care of his sisters” and “travel internationally to promote his book” if released.

Later at the hearing, Slahi’s lawyer, Theresa Duncan, read a warm and supportive account of her relationship with Slahi over hundreds of hours meeting with him in Guantánamo and visiting his family in Mauritania. Duncan noted that a federal judge ruled in 2010 that Slahi was not a member of al Qaeda when he was arrested in 2001 and ordered him released (the government appealed that decision, and the case has stalled). She added that he has learned Spanish and Turkish inside Guantánamo, as well as computer programming. (Slahi also learned English as a detainee, as recounted in Guantánamo Diary.)

The military representatives described Slahi as “one of the most compliant detainees” and as “an advocate for peace” who “has pursued a new direction in life.”

“We are certain that Mohamedou’s intentions after Guantánamo are genuine, and that he possesses sound judgment, and that he is good for his word,” the representatives wrote in a joint statement. “We firmly believe he does not represent a continued significant threat to the United States.”

Slahi’s advocates also said at the hearing that he hopes to be released to Mauritania (two representatives from the Mauritanian Embassy attended the hearing) or to Germany, where his youngest brother lives. In either case, he has said he’d like to keep writing.

The members of the panel asked no questions during the open portion of the review. After the opening statements, the panel adjourned for a closed session.

The post “Guantánamo Diary” Detainee Makes the Case for His Release appeared first on The Intercept.