Our "Intelligence" Agencies at Work

If the potential consequences for our Constitutional rights and national security weren't so dire, the level of incompetence displayed by our government might actually be funny. But this is just pathetic. Wired's Ryan Singel reports on the latest slip-up from the FBI:

Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl-C keys -- and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all.

This time around, University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered that the Justice Department's Inspector General's office had failed to adequately obfuscate data in a March report (.pdf) about FBI payments to telecoms to make their legacy phone switches comply with 1995 wiretapping rules. That report detailed how the FBI had finished spending its allotted $500 million to help telephone companies retrofit their old switches to make them compliant with the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act or CALEA-- even as federal wiretaps target cell phones more than 90 percent of the time.

This isn't the first time the Justice Department has made such an error. In 2007, a U.S. attorney referred to THREAT LEVEL's own David Kravets (then at the AP) as a hacker for discovering similar hidden information in a BALCO steriod case filing. As far back as 2003, a report on minorities in the Justice Department was also vulnerable. The gaffes may seem humorous, but tell that to confidential informants, for whom such a slip-up could be fatal.

Blaze was attempting to copy a table from the PDFed report to send to a student by e-mail. A simple copy and paste of the table into his e-mail program revealed the supposedly redacted material. That's pretty high level security you got there, FBI. To make matters even more ridiculous, the information they were trying to keep secret was ridiculously unimportant.

The FBI paid Verizon $2500 a piece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom -- slightly more than $2.9 million dollars -- but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid....

Other nuggets? Hidden info in a blacked out screenshot of the FBI's wiretapping help line complaint management software reveals that even wiretappers have IT problems.

Cops in Montgomery County, Maryland had trouble right after Christmas in 2007 getting wiretap info delivered. Not far away in Baltimore (the honorary wiretap capital of the U.S.), cops had problems just before Christmas using the FBI's database of cell towers, which help cops figure out target's location and movements. Kenner, Louisiana cops just wanted a user name and password to chat in the Law Enforcement forum on ASKCalea.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, one is sure to see a crime wave across the country.

These are the people we're supposed to trust with our safety.

•  as far as I'm concerned

  if they're going to do it anyway, I'd rather they did it in stupid ways such as this.

  At least we know what they're up to, though I'd much prefer that 1) their methods actually made us safer, 2) didn't violate our privacy and liberties, and 3) were cost-effective.

  If wishes were fishes...

  by Isara on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:49:21 PM PDT

  •  We do live in a Kakistocracy.

    Where the incompetent rule everybody.

    by Intercaust on Sat May 17, 2008 at 05:04:56 PM PDT

•  Coffee with your oligarchy? n/t

  by LaughingPlanet on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:50:08 PM PDT

  •  How long will it take.......

    To root out the incompetent boobs and nincompoops this administration has placed in every facet of our national infrastructure. From FEC to SEC, from FEMA to NOAA we will spend 50 yrs finding and firing the graduates of Oral Roberts University and the like.

    by comeinpbrstreetgang on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:08:02 PM PDT

•  A while back I saw an article in the Guardian...

  ...about a guy in England who owned the dot-com that corresponded to a local US air baes's dot-gov domina - I think the air base was midland.gov, and he owned midland.com.  He had a catch-all email address at his site, and he regularly got mail intended for the air base, including top-secret stuff like flight plans for Air Force One, etc.  When he told the Air Force about the problem, they said he should just delete anything he gets at that address!  

  Makes you wonder if bin Laden has registered any other domain names...

  by AnotherMassachusettsLiberal on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:51:57 PM PDT

  •  I heard about that one too.

    Just chuckled and shook my head. What else can one do?
    And this story made me think about and google "government laptops missing", just for chuckles.
    While hundreds, perhaps thousands of State Dept. laptops were discovered missing on May 6 in February, and publically reported on May 6, hundreds were recovered on May 7, not to worry.

    A "significant deficiency" relating to laptops existed, Streufert said, according to a source who attended the meeting.........There was also a significant deficiency in the security of Internet technology systems existed, Streufert said.

    Well, duh.

    by emmasnacker on Sat May 17, 2008 at 07:11:47 PM PDT

•  A great book about the FBI...

  ...if you can find a copy, is Joseph l. Schott's No Left Turns.

  by willie horton on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:52:29 PM PDT

  •  typo

    The author's name is Joseph L. Schott.
    Sorry...

    by willie horton on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:53:15 PM PDT

•  Be afraid, very afraid.

  On one hand you have stupid incompetent shit like this going on, while on the other hand the Bush admin will classify ANYTHING it wants to or destroys it. Meanwhile anyone who wnats my info can buy it from my bank if they don't have a hacker good enough to steal it from the bank.
  Ugh.

  by Skid on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:53:19 PM PDT

•  Well, that's gummint for ya

  Enough socialized home security. Give it all to Blackwater.

  by archer070 on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:54:51 PM PDT

•  Operative sentence is:

  These are the people we're supposed to trust with our safety.

  Yeah...as if we trusted this bunch to do much more than eat dinner and drive huge, polluting, gas-guzzling vehicles.

  by Youffraita on Sat May 17, 2008 at 03:56:09 PM PDT

•  Kevin James has their kind of "Intelligence"

  by organicdemocrat on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:00:45 PM PDT

•  Suspect

  there are those here (because of inexperience) who believe if we only put the right people in charge, everything will work out OK.

  Suggestion:  Dig into the Pearl Harbor attack.  Then the JFK assassination.  Then the MLK and RfK assassinations.

  Oh, sorry.  That stuff happened a long time ago.  It has no relevance to today.  Sorry.

  by jgtidd on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:02:10 PM PDT

•  Don't PDFs have good security?

  Surely a PDF can be secured to prevent this kind of breach. Were they not following proper security procedures or are they not even in place?

  by brenda on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:03:00 PM PDT

  •  When loyalty is more important than competence

    Then it's easy to see how they would think they secure, when in fact they don't have a clue what they are doing. And classifying that type of information is just plain stupid.

    by corwin on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:08:35 PM PDT

  •  A pdf's nothing but a picture of the document.

    They tried to blank the tables by placing a blank layer over the information in the tables.  The proper thing to do is to alter the original document, be it word or wordperfect, etc. and then reproduce the pdf.  Then it would be secure because the redacted information would be truly gone.
    They just tried to work with the pdf.
    Stupid.

    by WSComn on Sat May 17, 2008 at 05:43:06 PM PDT

    •  pdfs are most definitely not secure

      because anything less is woefully inadequate.

      Anyone who's got experience manipulating pdfs with perl can take one apart, parse the snot out of it and then put it back together again in less than an hour. Depending upon what kind of result you'd like, the reconstructed product doesn't necessarily have to say what the original did.

      That's why real document security isn't something for amateurs to implement, or, as I've begun to realize only recently, make policy on.

      by plembo on Sun May 18, 2008 at 03:30:17 PM PDT

•  "Bush Is Determined To Strike In U.S."

  FBI is intentionally trying to make us vulnerable.

  They have the money, the whiz-kid contractors and all the technology that they need to secretly keep themselves blind as bats.  

  Just like Bush ignoring the obvious "binLaden Determined To Strike In U.S." memo, we have not seen the end of terror within our borders. We SHOULD be afraid.

  by ezdidit on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:05:22 PM PDT

•  Under Bushco,

  intelligence has been useful only to the extent that it could be politicized, or made to support a pre-conceived ideological agenda.

  When the intelligence didn't fit, they made it up.

  This is not a matter of incompetence, or of stupidity.  It's a matter of malfeasance, of an Administration having the will, and using the means, to lie and manipulate.

  Stressing the accuracy, quality, or secrecy of said intelligence, without focusing on its politicized, corrupt, manipulative use, is to obfuscate the bad faith at the core of the Bushco project.

  Arguing for a more rigorous, competent Security State kinda misses the point.

  Corporate Values + governance = fascism

  by scotts on Sat May 17, 2008 at 04:36:15 PM PDT

•  My guess . . . .

  . . . the information about numbers of switches and cost per switch was blacked out not because it is classified, but because it is proprietary Verizon information.  They probably consider that sort of pricing information "competition sensitive."

  by treetop57 on Sat May 17, 2008 at 05:43:37 PM PDT

•  De-Bushification, Preventing Future Bushification

  Assuming that the Dems win the WH and comfortable majorities in Congress, amongst all the other important business will be De-Bushification of the Federal Bureaucracy. Additionally, they will have to institute safeguards to prevent future Bushifications (no more Liberty University grads running the DOJ.)

  These policies will be just as crucial as the war in Iraq and health care. One of the reasons why Bush has gotten away with it, was because of Bushification.  Not only must Congressional oversight be restored, it must be strengthened, so that future Presidents cannot engage in this kind of abuse.

  by xynz on Sat May 17, 2008 at 05:46:45 PM PDT

•  Not so unreasonable

  As someone who has worked with phone switches in a less than legal capacity(not for a while now mind you, all the statutes of limitation have run out) I must say that it does in fact make some sense to obscure that information.  Given said information it would be easy to determine exactly what kinds of switches were involved, if it isn't a part of the info already, and then determine how to access the line monitoring capabilities.  I know these aren't the same switches, but the ESS7 (7ESS) protocol switches had audio monitoring available.  One would assume that the FBI or the phone company changed the default passwords, but given their incompetence it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't change them.

  by AoT on Sat May 17, 2008 at 05:55:10 PM PDT

•  Need a new definition of intelligence

  We should maybe just call it what it is - a bunch of guyz trying to earn a living, keep their jobs, collect their paychecks, etc. In other words, stop trying to define what those idjits do as "intelligence" and start calling it just "work." It's certainly not overly intelligent, but they are doing something. I have no more idea of what they're doing than they do, but my oh my, they sure do look busy when the boss comes around...

  by SciMathGuy on Sat May 17, 2008 at 07:31:29 PM PDT