ArsTechnica has a new story up on the NSA documents released in this Intercept article. I will quote from both throughout.
According to newly published documents, the National Security Agency has built a “Google-like” search interface for its vast database of metadata, and the agency shares it with dozens of other American intelligence agencies. The new documents are part of the Snowden leaks and were first published on Monday by The Intercept.
The new search tool, called ICREACH, is described in an internal NSA presentation as a “large scale expansion of communications metadata shared with [intelligence community] partners.” That same presentation shows that ICREACH has been operational since the pilot launched in May 2007. Not only is data being shared to more agencies, but there are more types of such data being shared—ICREACH searches over 850 billion records.
Some of this additional information now being scanned is:
IMEI numbers (a unique identifier on each mobile handset), IMSI (another unique identifier for SIM cards), GPS coordinates, e-mail address, and chat handles, among others. Previously, such metadata was only limited to date, time, duration, called number, and calling number.
Included in the document dump is
this document which goes out of its way to praise the NSA success in helping with renditions. Which.. we all know were completely legal, never got the wrong guy, and definitely never targeted children.
It is safe to say that it has been a contribution to virtually every successful rendition of suspects and often, the deciding factor,” the memo states. “Hence the benefit to the intelligence and law enforcement communities of any [signals intelligence]-augmented inputs could be considerable, as [signals intelligence] has the potential to access a broad range of targets.”
... was used to track down “High Value Individuals” in the United States and Iraq, investigate front companies, and discover information about foreign government operatives. CRISSCROSS enabled major narcotics arrests and was integral to the CIA’s rendition program during the Bush Administration, which involved abducting terror suspects and flying them to secret “black site” prisons where they were brutally interrogated and sometimes tortured. One NSA document on the system, dated from July 2005, noted that the use of communications metadata “has been a contribution to virtually every successful rendition of suspects and often, the deciding factor.”
Those with some time on their hands many wish to read
this article written by a now 24 year old, who was renditioned to Libya at the age of 12, and then think of how that was somehow a 'benefit to intelligence'.
Two very different flights landed at Mitiga military airport in Libya just over a decade ago. The first was organized by the CIA and MI6. On board were a family of six surrounded by guards, the frightened children separated from their parents, the father chained to a seat in a rear compartment with a needle stuck in his arm. The second flight, only a couple of days later, carried Tony Blair in comfort, on his way to shake hands and do business with Colonel Gaddafi.
I know about the first flight, because I was one of the children. I know about the chains and the needle because Sami al-Saadi—a long-time political opponent of Colonel Gaddafi—is my father and I saw him in that state. I was 12 years old, and was trying to keep my younger brothers and my six year-old sister calm.
Great success NSA. Kudos.
Executive Order 12333 is once again being cited as allowing these programs, despite the lack of oversight and regulation the Order is placed under:
In a statement provided to Ars, Michael Halbig, an NSA spokesman, said that such data sharing is exactly what was recommended by the 9/11 and Weapons of Mass Destruction commissions.
Halbig noted that this practice of data sharing is governed by Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333), the 1981 document instituted by President Ronald Reagan as a way to strengthen the power of US intelligence agencies. Executive orders are rarely overturned unless subsequent presidents take action.
I have diaried EO 12333
here discussing how former State Department Section Chief on Internet Freedom warned that EO 12333 is a direct danger to democracy.
In my opinion, the biggest threat from these (useless for terrorism programs) is that they will be abused by a future Ted Cruz or Chris Christie administration. There is also this:
Other experts are worried because of the August 2013 revelation concerning the practice of “parallel construction” as used by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and perhaps other law enforcement agencies. The idea is that the origin of information obtained by the NSA and then handed off to the DEA and others is usually concealed from defense lawyers—and sometimes even prosecutors and judges. This essentially provides an end-run around the normal court procedures for a criminal defendant’s right to discovery.
"One assumes that the gathering of that intelligence is legal and within constitutional limits, then such surveillance is presumably permissible. However, the problem is that even if the surveillance gathering is appropriate, sharing it with other governmental agencies is not. The DEA or the FBI should not be able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by obtaining personal information about United States citizens or residents from the NSA. To allow otherwise would enable the DEA or FBI to spy on individuals that the Constitution would not allow."
With the increased militarization of police forces we are finally talking about daily on DKOS, everyone should be concerned about this. Especially with evidence some of these tactics were used to disrupt Occupy.
More from The Intercept:
The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.
The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.
ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing
Keith Alexander,
the million-dollar-a-month-mancan also be blamed on this:
The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.
The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.
However, the documents make clear that it is not only data about foreigners’ communications that are available on the system. Alexander’s memo states that “many millions of…minimized communications metadata records” would be available through ICREACH, a reference to the process of “minimization,” whereby identifying information—such as part of a phone number or email address—is removed so it is not visible to the analyst. NSA documents define minimization as “specific procedures to minimize the acquisition and retention [of] information concerning unconsenting U.S. persons”—making it a near certainty that ICREACH gives analysts access to millions of records about Americans. The “minimized” information can still be retained under NSA rules for up to five years and “unmasked” at any point during that period if it is ever deemed necessary for an investigation.
The Brennan Center’s Goitein said it appeared that with ICREACH, the government “drove a truck” through loopholes that allowed it to circumvent restrictions on retaining data about Americans. This raises a variety of legal and constitutional issues, according to Goitein, particularly if the data can be easily searched on a large scale by agencies like the FBI and DEA for their domestic investigations.